The Chill of Discovery

by Randal Keith Jackson

It's a wonderful, crazy time to be alive. The current state of scientific knowledge is advancing almost as fast as the universe is expanding. On any given day, just read the science newswires and you'll find something that might have made Isaac Newton's head spin.

But for me, within the daily parade of science epiphanies, there is also … a dark side. Some of the new stuff we're learning about our world and universe kind of freaks me out. To wit:

The multiverse theory. If theoreticians are right, our universe is just one of an infinite number of universes. And in that infinite set of alternate universes, every conceivable variation is being played out (as long as it obeys the laws of physics).

For just one example, among those many universes, there is one with no extra period at the end of this sentence..

Everything else in that alternate universe is exactly the same, except that tiny period simply isn't there. And there is also another universe where there's a semicolon instead. And yet another one where this blog doesn't exist because I was hit by a bus on the way to work. And so on. Creepy, isn't it?

Slime with memory. When food is plentiful, a slime exists as a single-celled organism. But when food is scarce, they congregate and hit the road. The tribe crawls along, amoeba-like, at the rate of about an inch per day, in search of chow.

These lovelies may resemble vomit and have no brains, but incredibly, new research shows that they have memories, of a sort. Slime molds secrete a viscous, translucent substance as they move, which they use like a breadcrumb trail to remember where they've been. This information helps them negotiate obstacles and find things. In an experiment, researchers hid a sugary meal inside a simple maze, and a slime mold found it by using its trail to figure out where it had already been. Thus, it was able to find the food faster.

These molds might not be able to solve Fermat's Last Theorem, but I'm pretty sure they could find their cars in a mall parking garage faster than I can.

Rogue planets. Have you heard about the nomad planets? Planets without stars that just wander aimlessly through the universe?

I'm not making this up. In 2011, a group of astronomers reported the discovery of 10 such planets roaming our galaxy, apparently unhitched to any star. But the finding was not surprising; computer simulations of planetary dynamics show that interactions between planets within a solar system are likely to fling planets out into interstellar space on a regular basis. It may have even happened during the formative stages of our own solar system.

And astrobiologists tell us there's no reason to assume such planets couldn't support life; an Earth-like rogue planet could have liquid oceans if the water were heated from below by the planet’s core and insulated from above by a thick layer of ice. Even if Earth were suddenly tossed into interstellar space, it would be able to sustain some of its microbial life because of the heat that comes from inside the planet.

But here's the most unnerving part of all: These eerie drifters are probably common. Astronomers think there are billions of them in our galaxy. In fact, free-floating planets may outnumber what we think of as "normal planets." Gaaaa!

In the next few months, I'm planning to write at least one short story based on these unsettling prompts. How about you? Have you come across a scientific discovery lately that completely freaks you out?

Find out more about Multiverse theory, slime memory, and rogue planets.

In some universe, Randal Keith Jackson is an Icelandic haddock fisherman. But in this one, he's Internet manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

His first published short story, "All the Devils," appears in the October 2013 issue of Penumbra.

On the Cusp of Science Fact and Fiction

by Randal Keith Jackson

Like most writers these days, I have a day job. And as a writer of speculative fiction, I could do a lot worse: I work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

It's like camping out on the fuzzy border between science fact and science fiction. I mean, this is a place where SF story ideas lie strewn on the ground like gold nuggets, waiting to be picked up and smelted into narrative. Here's a small sampling of the mind-bending discoveries in which JPL has played a role in recent years:

• More than eight-hundred new planets have been found beyond our solar system, some of them weirder than anything dreamed up by the creators of Star Trek.

• Interplanetary probes have returned pictures of vast methane lakes on Saturn's exotic moon Titan.

• Satellites have revealed mysterious, tantalizing cave openings on the surface of Mars.

• Spacecraft have photographed cryovolcanoes on the Saturn's moon Enceladus that spew fountains of ice hundreds of miles into space.

• Scientists have found mounting evidence that a vast, salty ocean swirls just below the ice crust of Jupiter's moon Europa.

With such rich fodder to draw upon, you'd think I'd write some science fiction, right? Well, for some reason, when I sit down at the computer after-hours to tell a story, my imagination always seems to turn in a different direction. I write about what makes people tick; the riddles, mysteries, and occasional ghastliness of human behavior. My muse wants to explore inner worlds. So I write psychological thrillers and horror.

But it's tricky; I have to be very careful that I keep the two worlds separate. Day job: robots, planets, and space. Night job: Psychopaths, monsters, and ghosts.

I mean, we can't have a story about sociopaths living in a haunted Victorian mansion that overlooks the icy fountains of Enceladus, can we?

Then again … that actually sounds kind of cool. I'll have to think about that one.

Randal Keith Jackson is an Internet Manager at NASA and a produced playwright. He's originally from Georgia and now lives with his wife and son in Santa Barbara, California. He has been known to rescue neighbors from snakes and build elaborate Halloween experiences in the garage. His first published short story, "All the Devils," will appear in the October issue of Penumbra.