The Age Of Lifeless Planets

When they opened the aperture of the historic lens, they discovered a lifeless majesty of planets as diverse and inconsolate as the hearts that spent years searching them out. It was an age of discovery of lifeless planets, Ursula Sea Breeze, Upper and Lower Escher, and Lawrence's World among many others.

The planets themselves were so much richer in complex elements and more varied in terrain than anyone ever imagined exo planets would be. Once Ursula Sea Breeze opened before the lens -- an endless expanse of rolling green hills and shallow dioxide seas -- they felt that the discovery of life was inevitable.

And so it was during the first five years, first ten, first 15, and still no life was found. Steve the space agency podium man with the familiar over enthusiastic affirmations and the sense of hygenic, non-sexual integrity, grew progressively more and more somber until finally the era was deemed by one and all, 'The Age Of The Discovery Of Lifeless Planets." The name, of course, was taken from a popular ludite documentary, but it only really stuck when Steve himself called it that in a moment of exhausted emotional candor.

"This age," he said, fiddling with his glasses, letting a foreign note of petulant irritation creep into his usually round, congenial voice. "This age of the discovery of lifeless planets..." He did not field any more questions from the press corps that afternoon.

Gradually, and incrementally more and more experts postulated a moribund universe of insensate phenomena. This may just be how the universe is after all, they said: the earth an anomaly in an otherwise sea of deadness. Philosophers suggested a sort of hubris in taking the dubious quantum building blocks as gospel macro truths and thereby creating grand, species-wide delusions, even hallucinations. Theologians were satisfied.

But for nearly a generation, it was a period of great optimism: the conflicts of the earth took second seat to the constant wave of photographs published night and day: beautiful, earth-like landscapes that weren't the earth. Valleys of grass that that wasn't grass at all, but a kind of emerald crystal that fed off the light of Ursula Sea Breeze's two suns, Pythagoras and Albion. The paper thin crystals even swayed ever so slightly in wind that was really scorching cyanide vapors blasting obdurate landscapes indefatigable and devastating like an ideal dream face.

The sea of Ursula Sea Breeze was perfectly clear, perhaps like the Aegean, although its chemical content precluded life. Scientists said it was as hot as molten led, as harmful as battery acid. But it looked beautiful, and its concept captivated and calmed. Whereas the lakes of the Escher planets, orbiting each other like tangoistas, were cobalt like Baikal in the spring after a hard rain. While Lawrence's world was a symphony of stone and ice, like a primordial ice-age earth but without the ceaseless change of species and climate.

The viewing apparatus itself was an electric lens, papery thin, unfurling at a snail's pace, extending itself into a kind of celestial larva as big as a sky scraper, powered by light, made to peer beneath the distant atmospheres, gather the light, and assemble the resultant data. They called it The Worm due to its resemblance to a huge, white meal worm.

After 15 years or so, most news agencies continued to broadcast 'news from the worm' as it was called, although funding ran low. The worlds were beautiful, yes, but this was beauty like chintzy airbrush fantasies, like half creations from out of cheesy science fiction. They were beautiful and boring. As much as people sought a purpose in their continual illumination, they were too far away to confirm with a touch. And their surfaces were too perfect suggesting their falsity: that they were conspiratorial lies designed from the start to shield mankind from a universe brimming over with life.

After 27 years, the worm's repairs were put on hold. After 35 years, a solar flare caused its orbit to degrade sharply, sending it hurtling into the atmosphere above Micronesia. Thus, the gigantic telescope became an oddity of technology, like the lunar missions, like the immortal monuments of history: imminently reproducible but for insurmountable practical and philosophical reasons. Then the Age of the Discovery of Lifeless Planets ended, and a new age that had no name began.