Chaosbutterfly

This thought has been poking around in my mind since a little rant I had heard about Russel T. Davies not having many Doctor Who stories on alien planets because he didn’t want to go to that overly used and clichéd quarry somewhere in Wales. You can’t really blame him for wanting to keep the show flashy and wanting to escape the cheesy stigma of the old classic series of Doctor Who. But if you really think about it, that quarry wasn’t far off from what we know of the real thing. In fact, I think the Doctor Who quarry of the old days probably had a better rendition of an alien landscape than Star Trek or even today’s new Battlestar Galactica and Stargate SG1. Even SG1 goes to an alien planet every week and what does it look like? It looks like Southern California, just like old Star Trek. Today’s Fans, the glitzy CG heavy TV low attention span generation, love it.

Lets take a look at a real alien landscape. Here’s a picture of Mars from the Opportunity Rover taken on the edge of Victoria crater:

Now, does that look like Southern California? Or suspiciously like a quarry in Wales? You could say it looks a little bit like both actually.

There is a reason for this. You see, both Earth and Mars are largely made of the same stuff, Silicates. Nice hard sandy rocks. The only real difference between a Martian landscape and a desert on Earth is the fact that you don’t see on Mars the occasional lizard crawling around or tuft of weeds growing somewhere out of the rocks. But, never the less, they are rocks just like the rocks here at home.

Now here’s a few rocks that are not much like the ones we have at home. You want an alien landscape, it’s hard to get much more alien than Titan. However, I will say that Titan still has what we would fundamentally call rocks.

Rocks on Titan:

Now the main difference between these rocks and Earth or Mars rocks is what they are made of. These rocks are not made of silicates like they are on the Earth or Mars or even Venus or Mercury, they are made of ice. In our star system, we only have rocky that is planets made of silicates out to Mars, all the worlds outside of the asteroid belt are made of gas and their moons, the only things we could stand on, are not really made of all that much silicate like this far in, they are made of ice. Ice at the temperatures around Saturn is as hard as any hard silicate rock here on Earth and due to the fact that methane is liquid there on Titan just like water is here on Earth, Titan has weather and so this scene is not Brighton Beach, but sure could pass for it.

Other alien landscapes: One of my favorites is the Jovian moon, Callisto. Of the alien worlds we know of, it is one of the most alien. It is considered a “half baked” moon that hasn’t changed much since it was formed some 4 billion years ago. The surface in fact was discovered by the Galileo space probe to be the oldest in the Solar System. It is heavily cratered and hasn’t changed much since. What do you bet we find down there? Rocks.

Looks a bit like the moon, I bet it would look just like a quarry down there. What do you think?

One more planet that is totally alien. Venus. It is so hot on Venus that even at the highest of mountains theres isn’t any chance for water in any form. In fact, it is thought through the various probes we have sent there that it may snow lead. Yes, imagine lead snowballs. However, even under such amazingly hostile and alien conditions, you still find what we find here on Earth. Rocks.
I bet Venus looks just like a quarry too.

So far, we have yet to find a planet that is remotely like Earth. We are getting close to being able to see rocky planets like ours with our telescopes but we have yet to do so. We simply don’t have the capability, yet. However, space telescopes are being designed and more exosolar planets are being discovered all the time. Currently, we have discovered well over a hundred planets outside the Solar system. Here’s a list on Space.com of planets for further scrutiny.

What a real habitable planet with real alien life forms would look like is up to our imaginations. However, I would think that given the fossil record of Earth, and the fact that most alien planets probably are going to be rocky, like ours and with weather, just like ours to some extent, it probably will not look to different than life has over the eons here on Earth. Oh, they may have a different leg count, maybe they will have plant like forms that come in different colors than green. But I bet they have tree like forms, animal like forms and probably rocks, just like Earth. I would say that yea, we as Sci-fi fans are hard to please, but in truth, Doctor Who and other Sci-Fi shows are probably not as far off as we seem to be afraid they could be. Relax and enjoy the show. It may look like Southern California or a quarry, but so does just about every other planet. Really.

Sci-Fi shows could however still, in my opinion, really benefit from just on occasion talking to a real astronomer. Just call the local science museum. I am sure they would be thrilled to give Russel T. Davies advice on what a black hole would look like. You would be surprised that most have spectacular jets that don’t show up well in Hubble shots. You don’t know how much it really bothers fans who happen to be Astronomy geeks like me who know that M87 is actually in the Virgo Cluster and 67 Million light years away, a bit far for the people of Earth to build a new civilization when there are probably plenty of habitable planets within our own Milky Way less than 10,000 light years from us.