Hey guys,

Music to write by: “Big Bang Baby“ by The Stone Temple Pilots

First of all, I went back to the old theme temporarily. There were some technical difficulties with “Simply Green”.

There’s been a lot of excitement in astronomy recently. A new planet has been located around the red dwarf star “Gliese 581″. There is much awesomeness in the Gliese system. The star is a mere 20 light years away which means it’s conceivable that an astronaut could reach the planet and return within a human lifetime. Further, it’s not a gas giant like nearly all previously discovered planets. It’s a rocky planet, like Earth, and its orbit is within the “Goldilocks” zone where it’s not too hot or too cold for life as we know it to exist.

Nothing fires the imagination like the discovery of a planet that could support life, so I thought I might toss this out there. What do you think life would look like on this planet?

The planet is twice as large as the Earth, and five times as massive, so that means a large iron (or possbily uranium) core. Think intense magnetic field. Because the planet is far larger than the Earth, gravity would be five times as intense, which means no tall creatures like giraffe, elephants, or even us humans. Think snakes or iguanas. Blood is a problem. Your heart would have to be incredibly strong to pump blood to the head, even in a relatively flat creature like a snake. Spongy flesh like our brain is probably impossible, so maybe a flat brain spread over much of their bodies would have to be the norm. Algae would flourish in this kind of environment.

The system is also home to a “super Jupiter” that orbits so close to the sun that the planet loses tens of millions of tons of gas a year to its hungry parent. This would periodically bake our rocky planet in vast doses of reflected radiation. The only way for life to survive this would be if our planet had a “super-ozone”, or, more likely, is covered in a vast ocean. So think underwater life. This might explain the lack of radio waves (SETI has checked the system twice).

Since the sun is a red dwarf it is much smaller than our own Sun. Our newfound planet is therefore able to orbit much closer in without getting cooked. Its “year” is only 13 days, and we’re not sure if it “wobbles”, which is the source of our seasons. But they’d probably have weather. In fact, it would be intense. Remeber that “Super-Jupiter” we mentioned earlier? Well, it might generate massive tides on our ocean world. It might even set up a kind of “standing wave” that passes with regularity over the surface of the planet. Wouldn’t that be cool?

Well, those are a few thoughts about life would look like on Gliese’s planet. What do you think life would look like? Got a picture in your head? GOOD! Now go out and write a story about it!