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(SCRIPT) What If You Lived on TRAPPIST-1e?

Episode Working Title: The Future Home of Humanity

Themes: Space Exploration, Culture Shock

Writer/researcher: Trenton McNulty

Pitch:

Science fiction often depicts settlers traveling to strange new worlds. But the people born on those worlds won’t see them as strange. What would your childhood be like, if you grew up on another planet? What would your bedtime stories, camping trips, and school days look like on a world where the sun never sets? And what would it mean, then, to return to Earth—to the home you’ve never called home?

Script:

Like most children, you go to bed early. At evening, no later. As your mother tucks you into bed, you see the warm glow of sunset upon the ceiling. The soft reds and pinks of twilight, playing upon your bedroom walls.

And then your mother closes the thick black curtains, plunging you into sudden silky darkness.

When you awake several hours later, calm and refreshed, you throw open the window. Naturally, it’s just as dim as it was before. You see the twilight glow, the morning dawn. Only, it’s not dawn. The sun still hangs in the west, on the horizon, exactly where it was before.

You run outside to find your mother in the front yard, as you’ve never had a backyard. And she’s in the same clothes she wore yesterday. She pulls jet-black weeds from the garden. And above her you see it.

Not one, not two, but six crescent moons strewn across the sky.

This doesn’t seem right, does it? Like something out of fantasy. Fiction. But it’s not.

This is TRAPPIST-1, and it really exists. A mere forty light-years from Earth there is a dim, red star that hosts seven rocky planets. Only they’ve been pulled together so tightly that they no longer rotate. No longer experience days or nights as we know them. TRAPPIST-1e is effectively split in half.

One side is a bleached, molten desert. It swelters under the heat of an endless high noon and thick storm-clouds that offer shade, but never water.

The other side is a land of blistering arctic cold. Here, the stars reign eternally over mile-high glaciers that crush the continents beneath them.

On this world of extremes, the only place life may thrive is in the space between them. The terminator, the goldilocks zone, the thin line between darkness and light. A land where the sun never sets.

Despite how different it might seem from the world we know, TRAPPIST-1e may be humanity’s best and closest bet for life beyond our Sun.

One of the first missions of the newly-launched James Webb Space Telescope is to investigate 1e and its siblings. We know they’re as dense as our rocky Earth, but are they as wet, warm and cloudy as we believe? If so, it’s very possible that one day our great-great-great grandchildren might call TRAPPIST-1 home.

The future home of humanity.

And really, it’s more similar to home than you might think.

The phenomenon that causes TRAPPIST-1’s strange division between light and dark is called ‘tidal-locking,’ and it’s the reason why we only ever see one side of the Moon. Over eons, the Earth’s gravity slowed the Moon’s rotation until finally, from the Earth’s perspective, it stopped turning at all.

This should be disturbing to us. We see the moon arc across the sky every night, yet no matter its phase, its face never changes. Until the APOLLO missions, no human being had ever seen the other side.

But of course it’s not disturbing. Things have always been this way, and so the absence occurs to us only as a passing thought, a note of trivia, a Google search.

To the denizens of TRAPPIST-1e, the unchanging horizon of their planet will be of as much note as the unchanging face of our moon.

What would that be like? To see the novelty and wonder of Earth’s popular science as something completely mundane? To experience an alien world not as a stunned explorer but as a child born to it, molded by it?

[YOUR INFANCY]

Your mother is pregnant when she first leaves for TRAPPIST-1e.

Alongside parenting books, she spends the waking hours of her journey reading about the midnight sun on Earth. How in arctic regions, the planet’s axial tilt makes it so the sun never sets for months on end, just as it is on TRAPPIST.

Only she’s surprised to learn of the toll an endless day can exact upon the human mind. How your body falters without the movement of the sun to tell you when to rise and when to rest.

She begins to feel it herself, trapped in the cramped, fluorescent quarters of the ship, and she worries for you. She doesn’t know if you’ll be able to grow up without ever knowing the tranquility of night.

When she finally arrives, the settlement’s doctors give her a solution: gene therapy.

Your circadian rhythms control ten to fifteen percent of your genes, they say. By altering those genes, your child might stave off insomnia, heart disease and cancer growth in the same way that polar animals do. Reindeer, for example, deactivate their circadian rhythms through the summer sun, and reactivate them in autumn.

While genetic engineering is normally illegal, in this case there's a legitimate medical cause.

And so you are born a true child of TRAPPIST. At first it’s hard to tell whether the changes took, given how erratic a baby’s sleep cycle can be. But as you age, that cycle never changes. You never have an eight-hour long sleep, preferring naps instead.

While your mother takes care each afternoon to draw the curtains and dim the lights, you stomp around in the front yard for as long as you can. When sleep finally comes, your mother reluctantly leaves your bedroom window open, and you bask in TRAPPIST’s warm glow like a cat in a sunbeam.

[YOUR CHILDHOOD]

On your very first camping trip, your mother takes you and some friends high into the mountains. There are few shadows up here save the ones you cast, and it’s easy going. Your mother’s walked this path before, but even if you strayed from it, you’ll need no compass. The sun is your universal reference point, your guiding star.

Before pitching your pitch-black tents, you all huddle around the fire, feeling cold for the first time in a long time. You’ve never been this close to the dark side of the planet before. In the distance, where the sky turns blue, you make out the faintest hint of light. A single pale dot.

You ask your mother what it’s called. At school they had you memorize the names of all the TRAPPIST worlds, but not that one. And she sighs.

It’s a star. Like our own red sun, but a million miles away.

You know this, intellectually. But it’s hard to care much about something so small, so abstract. Seeing your blank face, your mother seizes the opportunity to tell a story over the campfire. This was why she brought you out here, of course. To give you a little piece of world she once knew.

So she starts. When she was your age, more than a lifetime ago, your grandfather took her kicking and screaming on a trip much like this one. Reluctantly she went, far from the noise and glow of the city, far into the farm fields of the midwest. And there she saw what most people on Earth will never see.

The Milky Way, in all its clarity of light. The galaxy stretched out above her, consuming her.

[beat]

In that brief moment of awe, your mother’s imagination stirred with waking dreams of new worlds and new kinds of life. She knew then that she would leave the Earth. That’s why she sacrificed everything she ever knew to come here, to TRAPPIST. To see the stars.

But you’ve stopped listening. Instead you pick up a stick and draw shapes in the sand.

It’s like this on Earth, now. More than one third of humanity can no longer see the galaxy at night. In 1994, an earthquake knocked out power across Los Angeles, and dozens of anxious residents called emergency lines to report a “giant, silvery cloud” in the sky. We’re losing our connection to the stars, and with them our most easily accessible source of awe: an emotion clinically proven to stir creativity, generosity and goodwill.

Despite living on an alien world, the children of TRAPPIST might grow up with a diminished capacity for wonder, looking inward rather than out.

[YOUR ADOLESCENCE]

At school, you practice emergency drills. Not lockdowns, or even fire drills, but storm drills.

In Pacific zones on Earth, typhoons and other tropical storms are so common that they necessitate practice like this.

You huddle under your desk as the teacher shuts the storm guards and watches his clock. For a few moments, everyone holds themselves still. Silent.

You don’t live anywhere near the coast, the deep, glacier-fed ocean that stretches around the world. But it doesn’t matter. On TRAPPIST, the storms don’t come from the ocean. They come from the desert.

As the sun boils the dayside air, atmospheric currents carry it up and into the twilight zone, funneling heat towards the cold side of the planet. This minimizes the differences in temperature between the two halves, making TRAPPIST-1e far more temperate than it would be otherwise. This is what allows complex ecosystems to exist.

Unfortunately, the changes in pressure caused by the rapid cooling of hot air are precisely what cause storms. As a result, gale-force winds, tornadoes and hurricanes relentlessly hound the habitable areas of TRAPPIST. Essentially, the same thing that makes life possible on the planet is also life’s most enduring threat.

Later that semester, you’re forced to put your practice to the test. The alarm blares and everyone ducks and covers. Yet you stare out the window, confused. The sun’s clear upon the horizon, the same brilliant red. It’s a perfectly lovely eternal evening.

But as your teacher heads for the shutters, you see it. The aurora.

This is a TRAPPIST storm, but of a different kind entirely.

Red dwarf stars like TRAPPIST are incredibly volatile, unleashing solar flares greater in frequency and intensity than that of Earth’s sun. The stellar radiation emitted can narrow your arteries and even hinder your body’s ability to generate new cells.

It’s why the International Space Station is coated with polyethylene plating, to absorb and reflect the solar wind.

For life to exist on TRAPPIST-1e, both the ozone layer and magnetosphere will need to be exponentially thicker than Earth’s. But even if they are, humans won’t be adapted to the worst storms in the way that TRAPPIST’s local plants and animals will be.

Thankfully, solar plasma moves at less than 1% of light speed. Extremely fast, but not so fast that orbiting satellites wouldn’t be able to send out a warning signal, giving scientists, civilians and school children a few minutes to respond.

As you watch the brilliant green of the aurora glimmer above the red sky, you feel awe for the first time, and you wonder how something so beautiful could be so terrible.

Why does your mother love the stars that seem so desperate to kill you?

[YOUR TEENAGE YEARS]

In high school, your ask your mother for a job in the community gardens. You want to better understand her work in xenobotany, but as a teenager you can’t risk showing a genuine interest in something. So of course you use your requisite volunteer hours as an excuse.

As she leads you up through the gardens, she says that on Earth most farming took place on the plains. Long, flat expanses of land. Of course, that wouldn’t work here. A horizontal plain, set against the low angle of the sun, would leave all but the first row of plants in shadow.

For inspiration they looked at the mythical Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the many-tiered rice farms of East Asia. Water is funnelled up through aqueducts, and then set to spill over the terraces.

At the highest tier of the gardens, monumental tomato plants tower over you, nearly six meters tall. While TRAPPIST emits only a fraction of our Sun’s light, that growth is never halted by night or destroyed altogether by the cold of winter. Even smaller plants can grow indefinitely, like trees, branching to incredible heights.

Your job is to trim and water them TRAPPIST-style so they grow thicker at bottom rather than outward in thin tendrils. It’s tedious work, but rewarding.

While your mother helps you sometimes, she finds the perennial nature of TRAPPIST farming a little too easy. On Earth, she says, plants are more vulnerable. There's a challenge in producing a whole year’s worth of food in the span of a few months, enough to last through the winter. But here, even a blight doesn’t spell disaster. You can just plant more tomorrow.

And besides, you know she’s needed in the far more important task of cataloging the native flora of TRAPPIST-1e, which evolved to be entirely black so as to attract as much light as possible. If she can adapt their alien chemistry for human use, the potential benefits are immeasurable: an entirely new biosphere’s worth of potential cures that could help not just people on TRAPPIST, but all of humanity.

You come to wish you could join her in that work. But trimming tomatoes is okay for now.

[YOUR ADULTHOOD]

In your last year of high school, you receive a full-ride scholarship to study botany at university. However, the university is on Earth. The shock of leaving home and living on your own for the first time is compounded by the shock of moving: not just to a foreign country, but to a foreign world, entirely alien to you.

Once there, you feel existential dread looking up at the night sky, realizing for the first time the vastness of the universe.

You wear thick sunglasses and sunscreen to protect yourself from the light of a bright, yellow star, which you find blinding compared to the dim light of your red sun.

You often get lost, disoriented and disquieted at a sky which is constantly changing: the sun, stars, and moon no longer serve as a stable reference point, limiting your sense of direction.

You lie awake at night, jet-lagged, marvelling at the uncanny silence: the white noise of storms and wind which once comforted you are gone.

Thankfully, the other students come from faraway worlds as well: water worlds, verdant moons, places far stranger than your temperate home. And so you adapt to the strangeness of Earth together.

As you learn to be an adult, you learn to build a home in the first place we ever called home.

Resources:

NASA’s Webb Will Seek Atmospheres around Potentially Habitable Exoplanets

The nature of the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets

Atmospheric reconnaissance of the habitable-zone Earth-sized planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1

Modeling climate diversity, tidal dynamics and the fate of volatiles on TRAPPIST-1 planets

Surface and Oceanic Habitability of Trappist-1 Planets under the Impact of Flares

Black Plants and Twilight Zones: New Evidence Prompts Rethinking of Extraterrestrial Life

Planetary mass, vegetation height and climate

Stabilizing Cloud Feedback Dramatically Expands the Habitable Zone of Tidally Locked Planets

Strong Dependence of the Inner Edge of the Habitable Zone on Planetary Rotation Rate

Influence of Arctic light conditions on crop production and quality