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This book was published by the Make Learning Fun corporation. Copies can be purchased in bulk for your school or other educational hivethrum.
Have you ever wondered about the galaxy? Recently there have been a lot of discoveries made in space, haven’t there?
Perhaps you’ve wanted to explore a neutron star, or you think you’d look stylish in a Kuiper Belt. And of course we’re all very interested in the intelligent aliens that Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home recently proved exist on the planet Earth, about twelve light years away from us. All this and more is explored in Spaceship Pals Forever!, a fun and educational explanation of Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home’s journey in The Ship to Tau Ceti and back again.
****
One hundred and eight years ago, Scientist Roiling-Clouds and Scientist Pleasant-Sound-of-Leaves made a strange discovery at Continuous Monitoring Observatory, on the northwest coast of Harim.
The sun was getting dimmer!
They knew this through photometry, a science that lets us understand how much light objects are giving off in space by measuring photons – tiny blips smaller than atoms given off by the sun. Understanding how much and what kind of light stars are giving off is useful, because it lets us understand things like how hot they are and what they are made of. A photometer is attached to a camera, so that we can feel the wavelengths made by the light and understand the changes they are making.
Another way scientists can measure the brightness of the sun is by listening to it sing!
[depiction of an eridthropomorphised version of the sun playing a Gvarish zither, surrounded by musical notes.]
Well, it doesn’t sound like what you or I would call singing, but the surface of the sun wobbles, just like the waves of air called sound waves. There is no air to carry the sound, but it sounds like a deep, low rumble. Some people enjoy listening to recordings of the sun before they go to sleep- this got very popular before the Taumoeba were brought to Erid, in the Heatleech years.
Teacher Grace can’t hear very well compared to an Eridian. It only has two parts of its body to perceive sound, called ears, and these cannot hear noises that are very high or very low. So the sun would have to sing much higher than usual for Teacher Grace to hear it!
Scientist Roiling-Clouds thought they might have made a mistake about the dimming of the sun. The sun can often vary in brightness due to solar flares, when the sun ejects electrons, ions, X-rays and UV radiation into space, and Scientist Roiling-Clouds thought this might be another form of normal variation. Back then, it was Scholar Roiling-Clouds, as it and Scientist Pleasant-Sound-of-Leaves were both only in their fifth year at university. University students are often assigned slightly boring jobs like monitoring data trends when they are still learning how to be scientists.
[depiction of a scientist saying “Yes, you’ll have to tidy my whole house if you want to be a real astrophysicist! And then file my taxes!” to a harassed-looking student.]
But Scientist Pleasant-Sound-of-Leaves went through the patterns of brightness (how much light is being given off) over time and found that not only was the sun getting dimmer, there was a line of infrared light that was getting brighter at the same time. It realised that the energy from the sun was going into that line!
Scientist Pleasant-Sound-of-Leaves and Scientist Roiling-Clouds monitored every star within twenty light years. A light year is a measure of distance, not time – it’s the distance light travels in one year. When you consider light moves at three hundred thousand kilometres a second, you can appreciate that they had a lot of paperwork to get through!
[depiction of Scientist Pleasant-Sound-of-Leaves and Scientist Roiling-Clouds getting squashed under an enormous pile of paperwork.]
All life on Erid depends on the energy and heat from the sun, so the Extra-Eridian Exploration Project (EEEP) was formed to see if we could work out what was going on.
Scientists Belligerent-Statement, Seaswept-Island, and Efficient-Public-Transportation designed a probe to take a sample of the little nubs near the sun.
[depiction of several versions of probes surrounded by arguing Eridians. One of them looks uncannily like Sputnik 1.]
How Are Spacecraft Made?
Here’s an activity you could try by yourself or with a friend – making your own spaceship! It can look like anything you want, but needs to include these:
Communication Device: so you can talk to your friends and other scientists back on Erid. Antennae are a good way to do this.
Power Source: so your spaceship has power for all your cool gizmos! You might want a solar panel (something that turns particles of light given off by stars into electricity- we’ll talk more about light in Chapter Three), or maybe a big battery!
Scientific Instruments: This is why you launched your satellite in the first place! Instruments can take pictures of far away galaxies or planets, measure chemicals in Erid’s atmosphere, or keep a close eye on our sun’s activity and make sure it’s working hard. It's your decision!
Did You Know?
Right now there are over thirty satellites monitoring the brightness of the sun. If anything like the astrophage comes visiting, we’d like to know at once!
Orientation Finder: Make sure you have something that lets your satellite know where it's pointed and which way is 'up.' Something that looks at the stars (a star tracker) or the sun (a sun tracker) would work.
A container: Your satellite needs some sort of container to hold all of the gizmos and whatsits together and keep its instruments safe.
****
As you probably know, [depiction of a young Eridian closing the book and saying, “I’ve already read this one!”] the probe came back containing astrophage, tiny life forms from the planet Expression-of-Amazement.
[depiction of Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home listening to the planet Expression-of-Amazement and thinking the planet sounds just like its mate. Then a depiction of a more normal Eridian couple, with one asking why it can’t also have a romantic gesture like that and the other Eridian panicking.]
These are incredible sources of energy that are easy to breed if kept cool enough and exposed to infrared light and carbon dioxide.
It took EEEP four years since Scientist Roiling-Clouds and Scientist Pleasant-Sound-of-Leaves first detected the dimming sun to work out that every star was getting dimmer except for one- Tau Ceti, which was right in the middle of the dimming stars. It should have been getting dimmer too. So why wasn’t it?
Nobody knew! EEEP decided to use the astrophage as an engine to make the Ship, the first ever crewed spacecraft to leave Erid.
You may already know what happened next.
What is Radioactivity?
Atoms are tiny particles that make up everything around us. Most atoms are happy to stay still and quiet, like you trying not to get called on in maths class. We call this kind of atom ‘stable.’
But some atoms are radioactive, and have so much energy they just can’t sit still, like if your whole maths class was given candied manganese!
[Depiction of a class hiding from their teacher on the left, and on the right the same class jumping up and down as little ‘yippee!’ noises play.]
They want to calm down and become stable again, and the way they do this is by spitting out bits of themselves in little bursts of energy. This is called ‘decay.’ Eventually, after spitting out enough energy, they can calm down and become stable again.
The amount of time it takes for each atom to decay varies a lot, depending on the kind of atom it is. This is called the half-life.
There are three major types of radiation: alpha, beta, and gamma radiation.
The atmosphere and magnetosphere on Erid are very strong, and protect us from all three of these.
Unfortunately, when it was helping design the Ship, Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home didn’t know what gamma radiation was, or that it was harmful. Gamma rays can pass through lots of material, including a carapace. They are just the right size to enter your cells and chop the DNA in them to little pieces. DNA is the ‘instruction booklet’ that cells use to make new cells. Without proper DNA instructions to read from, the cells don’t divide properly and either don’t work properly or die.
If a cell that doesn’t work properly replicates, this can cause a cascade of mutations, called cancer.
Everyone on the Ship except for Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home died of leukaemia in less than a year. Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home spent forty-six years alone in space.
[depiction of a small engineer, endlessly walking through the corridors of a vast spaceship]
Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home survived because astrophage are dense enough to stop gamma radiation.
On Earth, where radiation damage is very common due to their powerful sun and fragile atmosphere, people use thick shields made of lead or concrete for radiation protection. They have also evolved to withstand some radiation.
In fact, if a human isn’t regularly exposed to direct sunlight, its endoskeleton begins to break down and soften, in a disease called ‘osteomalacia’.
[depiction of a human, a being with eyes half the size of its head and incredibly long, slender fingers, having to drag itself along the ground because its bones have stopped working. A ‘wibble wobble’ onomatopoeia is in the corner.]
This is one of the reasons Teacher Grace is so sick right now.
We have since discovered that gamma radiation is also produced on Erid – and you’ve probably heard it happen!
Can you guess which of these natural phenomena produce gamma rays?
- Earthquakes
- Wind
- Thunderstorms
- Your older sibling taking a bath
That’s right, it’s thunderstorms! Scientists aren’t quite sure why it happens yet, but intense electric fields in the atmosphere like thunderstorms cause a burst of gamma rays to appear for up to eight milliseconds.
Maybe when you’re grown up, you’ll be able to tell us why.
Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home was very lonely and very sad. When it first heard the other ship, it thought it was imagining things!
But it hoped.
When you’re lonely, you hope for all kinds of things. There was a small ship on the radar. Had Erid sent a second ship? Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home had to know.
The other ship turned on and off its engines in sequence, and Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home copied them. There was something intelligent inside the ship! Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home sent a canister containing a map and a diagram of the Pleasant-Sound-of-Leaves Line to the other ship. The ship sent something back in the canister that immediately melted as soon as Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home held it!
This probably happened because the materials Teacher Grace used were flimsy and needed to stay at a low pressure and temperature- much lower than normal for the Eridian atmosphere.
Teacher Grace’s spaceship, the Desperate Prayer (connotations of velocity) was made of aluminium, a very lightweight metal abundant on Earth.
When it was steered to Erid, Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home had to be very careful to make sure it didn’t burn up beyond repair in the upper atmosphere!
What would it be like for you, if you ever visited Earth?
Trader Legitimate-Business’s Discount Holidays!
[depiction of a vaguely seedy-looking gooey alien. The set of its limbs somehow give off the impression that it is smirking, despite having no mouth]
Get away from the fast pace of modern life with Trader Legitimate-Business!
Take a relaxing winter holiday on Earth, located a leisurely 11.9 light years away from Erid!
It will be very cold- Earth never gets warmer than three hundred and thirty Kelvin even at the height of summer, so best pack a jumper.
[depiction of a shivering Eridian wearing all the clothes it can]
In fact, sometimes water in the upper atmosphere gets so cold that at less than two hundred and seventy-three degrees Kelvin it freezes, crystallises, and falls out of the sky. This is called snow. Some parts of Earth are so cold, there is snow on the ground all the time!
But don’t worry, Earth has a handy way of getting warm quickly!
The oxygen atmosphere means things are pretty flammable. Early humans probably discovered how to manipulate combustions through a phenomenon known as “bushfire”, a period when Earth flora spontaneously combusts. Some plant species use this time to reproduce!
[depiction of the very cold Eridian from before, now on fire. “THIS ISN’T HOW I WANTED TO WARM UP,” it shrieks]
Take a load off- you’ll have to! You’ll only weigh half as much in Earth gravity!
Holidays start at the low, low price of sixty million credits! Guaranteed PROBABLY NOT A SCAM!
_____
Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home docked the Ship to the Earth ship, the Desperate Prayer (connotations of velocity). It was curious about what alien life would be like. One of the first things it noticed was that Teacher Grace couldn’t hear very well through most densities of xenonite. But it paid the most attention to the wall between their ships made of xenonite(XVI).
Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home later worked out that this was because Teacher Grace could sense light through that density- it perceived the metal as ‘transparent.’ If a material is transparent, light can pass through it, and an animal which uses vision to navigate can see through it. Some animals on Earth, such as the jellyfish, are transparent because it helps them hide from predators that use vision to hunt.
An equivalent of the jellyfish here on Erid would be the hass, which muffles the sounds its babies make by burying them in sand to confuse predators.
[depiction of a baby hass instinctively burrowing, and a jellyfish instinctively turning transparent around prey. It is clear the artist does not quite understand what a jellyfish is]
So Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home rebuilt the wall between both of their spaceships out of xenonite(XVI). At this density, it was able to get Teacher Grace to copy and understand simple movements.
[full depiction of Teacher Grace mimicking Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home. Teacher Grace’s eyes are shown as enormous and squashy, and its thumbs have three joints instead of two. The artist also seems to think that feet are just a secondary pair of hands. Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home is thinking that it has met an alien intelligence from beyond the stars. Teacher Grace is thinking that it has possibly met lunch.]
Teacher Grace used its eyes to determine Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundation-of-Home’s name. Eyes are useful for that kind of thing.
Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home asked to meet other humans, so it could explain what it knew about astrophages. Teacher Grace sadly explained that all the other humans on the ship had died in their sleep. “I am also alone, with nobody left to watch over me.” It had been waved off from Earth by a parade and all of its students, who had been convinced Teacher Grace would solve the secret of the astrophages.
But Teacher Grace wasn’t capable of doing that by itself, it needed help. Teamwork is the way to solve all kinds of scientific challenges.
“If I use my optical-increasing-device, I can use my eyes to observe the astrophage and help you save Erid!”
Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home was immediately interested in how a human eye would do that.
How Does the Human Eye Work?
Teacher Grace’s eyes probably evolved from photoreceptor cells, similar to those of ayin insects found in our upper atmosphere.
These are made up of two kinds of molecules bound together: an opsin, which is a light-sensitive protein, and a chromophore, which absorbs light.
When a photon, a tiny piece of light, hits the chromophore, it sends a message to the nervous system.
Originally, it would have been an advantage for Teacher Grace’s ancestors to know if it was day or night, or if there was a shadow (a dark shape made in the eye when a light source is blocked) being cast by a predator. A little later, the eyepatch cells would have developed a ‘cup’ shape, able to tell which direction the light was coming from. These are called ‘pit eyes’ and some animals on Earth like snails and isopods use these to see. Humans often eat these animals, because pit eyes are much worse at detecting movement than human eyes.
In fact, humans release a gas called phosphine after they die, as a byproduct of decomposition. This combusts when it reacts with the oxygen in Earth's atmosphere, and turns a ‘blue’ colour visible to the human eye. Teacher Grace and its ancestors would have found this a useful way to tell if someone was dead or only sleeping.
Proto-humans with better vision would have been more successful at surviving, and better able to pass on their genes. Lots of animals on Earth use sight to understand their surroundings!
This means that they don’t need to have as strong a sense of hearing as you and me- they have other ways of understanding the world.
Always remember that when you’re disagreeing with someone- they might not be wrong, just perceiving things in a different way.
____
Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home quickly managed to create a life support suit so it could enter Teacher Grace’s atmosphere and help it study astrophage biology. To its horror, Teacher Grace immediately started eating in front of it!
[eating onomatopoeia, and horrified body language from Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home. Teacher Grace is not actually shown eating, as this is a book for children.]
Because sunlight is much stronger on Teacher Grace’s planet, and the atmosphere is much thinner, plants are very common on the surface of Earth and are a major source of food for humans. They can range from the very large, like Posidonia australis [depiction of a 180km-long seagrass with a very small Eridian botanist tangled in it], or the very small, like the 0.1mm Wolffia globosa. [depiction of same Eridian botanist shouting “NOBODY PANIC, BUT I’VE DROPPED AN ALIEN LIFE FORM!”]
There are very few autotrophic plants here on Erid. Most plants use a strategy called parasitism, where instead of fixing their own carbon they use haustoria to steal it from something else, like a fungus or an animal. It’s a bit like copying someone else’s homework, isn’t it!
But plants don’t contain much energy. That, plus the fact that Earth’s atmosphere is so cold that humans have to waste a lot of the calories they consume just staying warm, means humans have to eat a lot more often than Eridians.
On Earth, the Dancer Nebula where we live is known as the Pac-Man Nebula, after an Earth myth about an endlessly hungry hunter being pursued by four ghosts until it eats enough that it can eat them back. The human metabolism is much less efficient than ours. This is why so many of their myths are about food, like when their planet-god ate its sun – this is how they understand the astrophage.
Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home knew that Teacher Grace was not trying to be rude. People on Earth consider it good manners to eat in front of people, instead of alone.
Sometimes people from other places act a little differently than how you would. That doesn’t mean they’re impolite, just that they grew up with different customs.
___
Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home realised that the reason astrophages do not destroy Tau Ceti is because they evolved on the nearby planet Expression-of-Amazement. It thought there might be something on its surface that ate astrophage.
It showed Teacher Grace how to make a very long xenonite chain that they could dangle through Expression-of-Amazement’s atmosphere and hopefully pick up whatever it was that ate astrophage. They had to be very careful not to be sucked into Expression-of-Amazement’s gravitational field, or they would be crushed by its dense gravity!
[depiction of two extremely squashed astronauts]
What is Gravity?
Gravity is the force that a planet used to draw objects towards its centre, and keeps planets in orbit around the sun. It is made by everything in the universe – Erid’s gravity draws you to the ground, which is why when you jump you don’t keep lifting off, but your gravity also pulls Erid towards YOU! The bigger and heavier you are, the stronger your gravity is, which is why Erid is better at pulling you down towards it than the other way around.
The further you go from a planet, the weaker its pull becomes. But gravity still works in space, which is why planets that orbit a star don’t go zooming off to seek a craggier cluster.
[depiction of a planet packing a bag and waving goodbye to its sun]
The gravity on Teacher Grace’s planet is about half of what gravity is here on Erid. That means that even though I would have the same amount of mass, on Earth I would only weigh about 225 kilograms.
Different stars also exert different amounts of gravity. A brown dwarf, which is only about the size of the planet God-of-Thunderstorms from Teacher Grace’s solar system (I know it sounds big, but that’s pretty small by star standards!) can only form small planets and accumulations of dust that cannot sustain life.
A supergiant star will zap other, smaller stars with gas and blast them to bits, before eventually collapsing in on itself under the force of its own gravity to create a neutron star. A neutron star is incredibly heavy, so it has immense gravity.
If a newly-hatched pebble somehow landed on a neutron star, it would weigh over SIX THOUSAND MILLION TONNES.
[depiction of a pebble deadlifting an apartment building. Baby noise onomatopoeia is in the corner]
Teacher Grace and Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home had become the best of friends. Teacher Grace showed Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home traditional songs and dances from Earth, and Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home learned fluent Human to explain things to scientists on Earth. They both laughed at the same jokes, they watched each other sleep. They were as close as it is possible to be for two people who can never touch.
Teacher Grace evolved under a different star, and under very different conditions to you or I. Even with the best medicine available, it may not live for much longer. Humans live for about seventy years, and Teacher Grace is already forty-one.
That means that an Eridian in primary school would be the same age as someone having a midlife crisis on Earth! Children as young as five years old work for a living on some parts of Earth, when an Eridian would still be clinging to its parents’ carapaces.
But Teacher Grace would be so excited to learn that you are also interested in science. It taught science to human children for years on Earth. (Yes, even on an alien planet you still get homework!)
[depiction of Teacher Grace standing in front of a classroom full of human children. Due to a slight misunderstanding, the children all have beards, although the beards are not as coarse as Teacher Grace’s.]
We must be grateful for the brief time it had with us, just as Teacher Grace is grateful for its very best Spaceship Pal.
[cartoony depiction of Teacher Grace and Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home, hand in claw.]
*****
Some time after Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home became aware of Spaceship Pals Forever and written an angry cease-and-desist letter to Make Learning Fun, Author Shared-Discovery began composing a letter of its own. It had consumed several methanol cubes, and was not entirely sober.
I would like to know how many educational artechoes Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home has written, question? Is it more or less than 204?
It pressed these words flat; they would never do. They were clearly too combative. Author Shared-Discovery had to aim for the level of polite nastiness that banks used in their official correspondence.
Author Shared-Discovery’s official statement to Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home is that it would like to express its regret for any hurt feelings due what is, ultimately, an artecho intended for pebbles aged 25-40.
Thank you for your feedback on my depiction of Teacher Grace, Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home. I regret my words and the very concept of comedy aimed at children were confusing to you. I have also co-written and sculpted the “Curious-Explorer Wonders Why” series for over seventy years, aimed at much younger readers. Please feel free to check if these are better suited to your vitrific temperament.
Ugh. Dealing with celebrities was a punishment Author Shared-Discovery wouldn’t wish on its worst enemy.