NET RESULTS:Childhood hopes that other celestial bodies may support life are gradually being realised, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON
MY CHILDHOOD was haunted with scary pictures that arrived regularly at our house and provided a repulsive thrill that I found impossible to ignore. Many arrived by post – on the cover and inside contents of my father’s medical journals. His specialty was respiratory diseases, and the relevant publications provided moderately grotesque images of infected lungs and X-rays.
Far more satisfying was the more prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, which was more likely to contain fascinatingly repellent images of skin diseases, fleshy dissections or surgical procedures. Of such journals are future Stephen King novels born, I am sure.
Even more interesting to me were my dad’s science fiction novels and short story collections. Whether in cheap paperback form or as temporarily resident library hardbacks, those books all had cataclysmic cover images full of excitement in that era.
There were flaming planets under bombardment, bizarre spacecraft dodging shards of asteroids, artists’ interpretations of nebulae, and barren moons. There were images meant to portray the surfaces of alien planets, which always seem to have yellow or orange skies, vegetation straight out of Dr Seuss, and reptilian life forms.
As this was the height of the US space programme and the Nasa moon missions, all of these interpretations seemed portents of our intergalactic future – the kinds of places I might visit myself in the unthinkably distant year of, say, 2010.
When older I found I liked those stories of distant worlds and technologically sophisticated futures as much as my father did. By high school, I was spending some of my babysitting money on paperbacks with those same strange covers. I recalled those books this week after attending a wonderful Astronomy Ireland lecture in Dublin by Limerick native Dr Caitríona Jackman, a physicist and specialist in planetary physics at London’s Imperial College. She works on the team analysing magnetic data coming back from Saturn and its many moons, via the bus-sized Cassini-Huygens space probe.
She showed the audience images of Saturn and its moons, including extraordinary pictures of Saturn’s aurora, a neon swirl around one of the planet’s poles similar to our North and South Pole auroras on Earth.
Her lecture enhanced what I’d learned from the recent BBC series with Prof Brian Cox, where he also showed many astonishing images of our solar system.
Seeing such images again during the lecture reminded me of the amazement I felt watching Cox’s show, when I wondered whether the pictures – especially the brilliant sequence taken by the probe descending to the surface of Saturn’s moon, Titan – could possibly be real. I couldn’t understand how I had failed to hear about these wonderful discoveries around our planetary cousins. After all, I read science and technology magazines and websites, and regularly scan for tech articles in newspapers.
I do remember reading a bit about the Cassini mission and the results coming back, but I didn’t remember this richness, this wealth of images. I know from talking to other people who watched Cox’s series that these interplanetary discoveries were startling to them as well. Moons covered with ice? Liquid methane lakes? Deep icy seas lying beneath ice sheets? Planets scarred by volcanic activity? How did we miss all of this before?
Compared to how we clung to every image of the moon landings, the more meagre awareness of these amazing contemporary images seems surprising. And much of what has been seen and understood now, thanks to these missions and to the Hubble telescope, makes some of those mawkish science fiction covers seem tame.
But that doesn't answer why the awareness or perhaps interest in these discoveries remains relatively low. I wonder whether it is connected to development of ever-more sophisticated computer-enabled animation? Television and film can now create vivid, lifelike alien worlds and images of space – far more realistic than those old Space 1999episodes or 1960s Star Trektribbles. Maybe technology has provided us with such realistic imaginary worlds that we find the real thing less compelling.
Or perhaps, it’s just the computer-generated worlds compete more successfully for attention – even though it would appear many of these imagined artistic visions of worlds beyond our own are being confirmed as scientific possibility by the real images coming back from the space probes and telescopes.
For example, we now know there are moons with an atmosphere, planets with a double sunrise, and oceans and air made of elements in which we or other Earth creatures could not breathe, but in which other life forms possibly could.
We don’t have the interplanetary travel that seemed possible when I was a child. But this week I thought it thrilling to find that galactic reality matches what some of those cover illustrators and science fiction writers imagined in space, setting aside the aliens . . . but who knows what we will learn next?
klillington@irishtimes.com
