Tag Archives: Rogue planets

There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy…

Hamlet, Act I, Scene V

Of course, in context the quote is Hamlet saying to Horatio “Yes, there are ghosts, wow, who’dathunk?” but the broader application is the stunning, amazing truth that the universe is not

On a rogue planet it will always be night but, oh, the stars will shine so bright

only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we are capable of imagining, because it’s just way too massive and complex to wrap our puny little, mortal minds around it.

We go through life putting one foot in front of the other, focusing on not walking in front of a bus, learning what to say to who in which situations, maybe how to ride a bicycle and cook  a halfway decent omelette  if we are lucky, but we really don’t have the time to investigate the mysteries of the universe, or the intellect to comprehend them if we did.

Yet, we live in an age of wonders and science marches forward with revelations that redefine the universe we live in at a pace of once a month or so.  Here’s the latest:  outside of our solar system, in what we used to think was the vast emptiness between our star and other stars, there are rogue planets.  Like, billions and billions of the little sons of bitches.

The mind boggles.

First, could this blow the dark matter theories out of the water?  If there are enough of them, and they are big enough and dense enough, wouldn’t that make the numbers add up?

Second, could any of them contain life?  Well, if they do they would have to have a self-contained energy source.  We’ve got the sun and they don’t have one of those.  So, it’s hard to imagine “life as we know it” on these orphaned rocks but, as every reader of science fiction knows, there is plenty of life that is not as we know it (see Shakespeare quote, above).

Third, it means there might be planets outside of our solar system that we could travel to in less than a thousand years or so.  The Star Trek universe just got a little bit closer, we now have a series of stepping stones to the stars.  Of course, I’m getting a bit ahead of ourselves here, we’re still probably a generation or two away from even colonizing Neptune, but it doesn’t cost anything to speculate.

But here’s the trippy little idea that’s floating through my mind:  if they are not gravitationally bound to a sun as we are (like a dog tied to a pole, we can only move within a set circumference), but instead are just out there, bobbing along like a cork on the ocean, it would probably take almost no energy at all to move them  in one direction or another, then aren’t they like spaceships just waiting to be used, and big enough to sustain a serious human population?

Yes, I’m happy to live in a time when scientific discoveries are redefining our universe every month or so, but in a couple of centuries life will be even more amazing.  I’m really excited about that.