Many aliens could prefer to live on planets that human beings would find to be miserable hell-holes.
Many point to the ecosystems at the Galapagos black smokers as proof that life is possible in underground oceans on, say, Europa. However, if this is true, the implication is that such life will be far more common than terrestrial life. After all, there are several such moons in our solar system, and only one Terra (Europa, Enceladus, Ganymede and Titan). If there are four such moons, then throughout the universe iceball life will outnumber liquid water life four to one, on average. Such life turns up in The Killing Star by Charles Pelligrino and George Zebrowski.
But most humans would rather not live in sub-zero water under kilometers of solid ice.
Life discovered in the ice-covered oceans of Europa. Image courtesy of NASA
However, if the aliens like to live on the same kinds of planets that Terrans do, the way to bet is that eventually there will be war. The only wild card is if one or both species like living in mobile asteroid habitats (Macrolife). Or if a species is a primitive civilization with the misfortune to live in an Elder God Galaxy, and has to keep a real low profile in order to survive.
As a side note, one can use the time between apes and angels for the "average lifespan of a technological civilization". Insert this into the Drake equation along with a few other guesses and you can calculate the average distance between alien civilization homeworlds. (and of course the distance between Terra and the closest aliens).
I say "homeworlds" because they might have colonized nearby stars to form an empire. In this case the homeworld will probably be in the center of the empire's sphere of influence. Therefore the closest aliens will be the average distance between minus the radius of their empire. Go to The Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy and read the entry "HOMEWORLD".
If you already have an idea of how close you want civilizations to be spaced, you work the Drake equation backwards. Keep altering the values until you get the spacing you want. But now you have to live with the consequences of those various values, and their implications.
It will be even worse if the average lifespan of a technological civilization is shorter than expected, due to premature death by nuclear holocaust or unexpected apotheosis by a VingianSingularity.
HOMEWORLD. This may have any of three related but distinct meanings.
1) Someone's native PLANET; where they were born, or at least their permanent residence address.
2) The capital Planet of an EMPIRE, especially if the Empire builders started out there.
3) The Planet where an intelligent race originated. In this sense, the Homeworld of all EARTH HUMANS is of course Earth, even if they have lived for generations on a COLONY.
Somewhat arbitrarily the "surface" of a gas giant (zero point for altitudes) is set when the pressure reaches 1 bar (average sea-level pressure on Terra). The vague "top" of Jupiter's atmosphere is roughly 5,000 kilometers above the surface. The "cloud-top" level of Jupiter's atmosphere is where the pressure is about 0.1 bar (50 km above surface). Confusingly astronomers decided the base of the atmosphere (base of the troposphere) is not at the "surface", it is below that where the pressure reaches 10 bar (90 km below surface). The atmosphere starts turning into a slushy gas at about 13 bar (95 km below surface). And it turns into a slushy liquid at about 5,000 bar (at 1,000 km below surface, and 1,700° C).
But long before you get to the slushly liquid state the pressure will grow high enough to make your spacecraft implode and the temperature will melt the ship. Presumably any native life form on such a planet will either perpetually float in the upper atmosphere, or be very crush-proof heat-resistant slush swimmers.
Jupiter's Atmosphere
Altitude from datum (km)
Pressure (bar)
Temp (K)
Temp (°C)
Notes
+5,000
Top: exosphere Atmosphere fades into interplanetary space
Values with question marks were calculated with linear interpolation.
Sinker
Floater
Hunter
Carl Sagan and E. E. Salpeter postulated floating organisms could exist in the temperate regions of Jupiter's atmosphere in a 1975 paper. An entire ecosystem, with aerial plankton grazed on by sky whales, who were preyed on in turn by flying sharks. This was later featured in Sagan's documentary series Cosmos.
In Sagan and Salpeter's paper, "sinkers" were aerial plants that were born in the upper troposphere and gradually fell to their death in the inferno of Jupiter's lower atmosphere. Along the way they grew by photosynthesis using blue light and abundant atmospheric methane, water, and ammonia. They also reproduced by emitting tiny spores, stimulated by moving from region of depleted resources into a region of abundant nutrients. The spores were carried up to the upper troposphere by atmospheric turbulence, where the cycle of life starts anew. The paper calculates that a sinker has a size of about 30μM (about the size of a small terrestrial protozoa) and will take about two months to fall from the birth altitude to the incineration altitude. Later Sagan upped the size estimate to up to the size of a toy balloon.
Alternatively sinkers can grow by becoming a colony creature. The component creatures reproduce and the colony grows. When it sinks too close to incineration depth, the colony disperses into individuals. These are small enough to rise to safe altitudes by atmospheric turbulence. Paper estimates a colony can contain about 10,000 if colony and individuals do not exceed max size.
"Floaters" are herbivores. They feed on the sinkers, and use the extra metabolic energy to maintain float bladders. This allows them to avoid falling to a fiery death. One way to float is to pump their bladder such that it contains close to pure hydrogen, instead of the hydrogen-helium mixture composing the Jovian atmosphere. The other is to use metabolic energy to heat the atmosphere inside the bladder (since hot hydrogen-helium is lighter than cool hydrogen-helium). Heating will require a larger bladder than pumping helium. The paper calculates that it is possible to have floaters with sizes measured in kilometers.
And where you find herbivores you generally also find carnivores preying upon them. The "hunters" kill and eat floaters, using the more concentrated food energy to allow stalking and chasing. Hunters are also after their prey's store of purified hydrogen inside their float bladders.
There is a second class of (thermoresistant) floaters called "scavengers", living just above the hot zone and eating the steady fall of incinerated sinkers, or the incinerated bodies of dead floaters and hunters.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke expanded upon this theme in "A Meeting With Medusa" and in 2010: Odyssey Two. These stories featured creatures that were sort of a cross between a titanic jellyfish and a zeppelin. A similar ecosystem is in Ben Bova's novel Jupiter. There are also "sky whales" appearing in Dr. Robert Forward's Saturn Rukh.
As a rule, species that inhabit terrestrial planets (such as our species) do not have much interaction with aliens who live on gas giants. In the general this is because we and they have little or no common frames of reference which makes communication difficult. In the specific it is because we and they do not covet each other's real estate so there is no reason to go to war. In Poul Anderson's galactic novels, the human galactic empire and several gasworlder empires interpenetrated each other and ignored each other.
There are exceptions, such as Kevin J. Anderson's Saga of Seven Suns series. In the first novel, the human empires are unaware of the existence of the Gasworlders ("Hydrogues"). This proves to be unfortunate. When the humans test a device which converts gas giants into blazing suns (including the Hydrogue inhabitants), the remaining Hydrogues in the Hydrogue Empire become very very angry. Hilarity ensues as the diamond-armored Hydrogue dreadnoughts start kicking the living snot out of the human planets.
Another exception is described by Hal Clement here, where humans and jovians interact exactly like they were engaged in a war, but they are not. Humans are scoop-mining Jupiter's atmosphere, and the Jovians become furious at hypersonic scoopships obliterating their orchards, gardens, and flocks; not to mention Jovian citizens. So the Jovians start attacking the human scoopships. Humans will retaliate, and the net result will be very hard to distinguish from actual warfare.
Alternatively, the Jovians might see the scoopships as valuable concentration of metals, and start harvesting the scoopships. In that case the Jovians might limit the number of scoopships they grab, or the humans might get fed up and stop sending them.
Phil Masters, in his article for the game Traveller about his gas giant dwelling Jgd-Ll-Jagd aliens, had this to say:
The
chief point to note in such systems is
that fuel-skimming a Jgd world is extremely
unwise; shock waves from the
pass will cause severe damage to the beings
and their environment, and their
response is certain to involve high-energy
weapons fire. For this reason,
Jgd systems are well-marked with
navigational beacons. (Traveller tramp merchant ships routinely skim gas giants for free fuel)
A MEETING WITH MEDUSA
Artwork by Paul Alexander
(ed note: Howard Falcon is the first man to explore the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, using the spacecraft Kon-Tiki supported by a huge fusion-powered hot-air balloon)
And then his concern changed to wonder—and to fear. What was developing in his line of flight was not a storm at all. Something enormous—something scores of miles across—was rising through the clouds. The reassuring thought that it, too, might be a cloud—a thunderhead boiling up from the lower levels of the atmosphere—lasted only a few seconds. No; this was solid. It shouldered its way through the pink-and-salmon overcast like an iceberg rising from the deeps. An iceberg floating on hydrogen? That was impossible, of course; but perhaps it was not too remote an analogy. As soon as he focused the telescope upon the enigma, Falcon saw that it was a whitish, crystalline mass, threaded with streaks of red and brown. It must be, he decided, the same stuff as the “snowflakes” falling around him—a mountain range of wax. And it was not, he soon realized, as solid as he had thought; around the edges it was continually crumbling and reforming… “I know what it is,” he radioed Mission Control, which for the last few minutes had been asking anxious questions. “It’s a mass of bubbles—some kind of foam. Hydrocarbon froth. Get the chemists working on … Just a minute!” The things moving up and down those waxen slopes were still too far away for Falcon to make out many details, and they must have been very large to be visible at all at such a distance. Almost black, and shaped like arrowheads, they maneuvered by slow undulations of their entire bodies, so that they looked rather like giant manta rays, swimming above some tropical reef. Perhaps they were sky-borne cattle, browsing on the cloud pastures of Jupiter, for they seemed to be feeding along the dark, red-brown streaks that ran like dried-up river beds down the flanks of the floating ctiffs. Occasionally, one of them would dive headlong into the mountain of foam and disappear completely from sight. Kon-Tiki was moving only slowly with respect to the cloud layer below; it would be at least three hours before she was above those ephemeral hills. She was in a race with the Sun. Falcon hoped that darkness would not fall before he could get a good view of the mantas, as he had christened them, as well as the fragile landscape over which they flapped their way. It was a long three hours. During the whole time, he kept the external microphones on full gain, wondering if here was the source of that booming in the night. The mantas were certainly large enough to have produced it; when he could get an accurate measurement, he discovered that they were almost a hundred yards across the wings. That was three times the length of the largest whale—though he doubted if they could weigh more than a few tons. “No,” said Falcon, answering Mission Control’s repeated questions about the mantas, “they’re still showing no reaction to me. I don’t think they’re intelligent—they look like harmless vegetarians. And even if they try to chase me, I’m sure they can’t reach my altitude. “ Yet he was a little disappointed when the mantas showed not the slightest interest in him as he sailed high above their feeding ground. Perhaps they had no way of detecting his presence. When he examined and photographed them through the telescope, he could see no signs of any sense organs. The creatures were simply huge black deltas, rippling over hills and valleys that, in reality, were little more substantial than the clouds of Earth. Though they looked solid, Falcon knew that anyone who stepped on those white mountains would go crashing through them as if they were made of tissue paper.
"A Meeting with Medusa"
Playboy Magazine, December 1971 artwork by Martin Hoffman
It was not easy to see, being only a little darker than the whirling wall of mist that formed its background. Not until he had been staring for several minutes did Falcon realize that he had met it once before. The first time it had been crawling across the drifting mountains of foam, and he had mistaken it for a giant, many-trunked tree. Now at last he could appreciate its real size and complexity and could give it a better name to fix its image in his mind. It did not resemble a tree at all, but a jellyfish—a medusa, such as might be met trailing its tentacles as it drifted along the warm eddies of the Gulf Stream. This medusa was more than a mile across and its scores of dangling tentacles were hundreds of feet long. They swayed slowly back and forth in perfect unison, taking more than a minute for each complete undulation—almost as if the creature was clumsily rowing itself through the sky. The other echoes were more distant medusae. Falcon focused the telescope on half a dozen and could see no variations in shape or size. They all seemed to be of the same species, and he wondered just why they were drifting lazily around in this six-hundred-mile orbit. Perhaps they were feeding upon the aerial plankton sucked in by the whirlpool, as Kon-Tiki itself had been. “Do you realize, Howard,” said Dr. Brenner, when he had recovered from his initial astonishment, “that this thing is about a hundred thousand times as large as the biggest whale? And even if it’s only a gasbag, it must still weigh a million tons! I can’t even guess at its metabolism. It must generate megawatts of heat to maintain its buoyancy.” “But if it’s just a gasbag, why is it such a damn good radar reflector?” “I haven’t the faintest idea. Can you get any closer?” For the next two hours Kon-Tiki drifted uneventfully in the gyre of the great whirlpool, while Falcon experimented with filters and camera contrast, trying to get a clear view of the medusa. He began to wonder if its elusive coloration was some kind of camouflage; perhaps, like many animals of Earth, it was trying to lose itself against its background. That was a trick used by both hunters and hunted. In which category was the medusa? That was a question he could hardly expect to have answered in the short time that was left to him. Yet just before noon, without the slightest warning, the answer came… Like a squadron of antique jet fighters, five mantas came sweeping through the wall of mist that formed the funnel of the vortex. They were flying in a V formation directly toward the pallid gray cloud of the medusa; and there was no doubt, in Falcon’s mind, that they were on the attack. He had been quite wrong to assume that they were harmless vegetarians. Yet everything happened at such a leisurely pace that it was like watching a slow-motion film. The mantas undulated along at perhaps thirty miles an hour; it seemed ages before they reached the medusa, which continued to paddle imperturbably along at an even slower speed. Huge though they were, the mantas looked tiny beside the monster they were approaching. When they flapped down on its back, they appeared about as large as birds landing on a whale. Could the medusa defend itself, Falcon wondered. He did not see how the attacking mantas could be in danger as long as they avoided those huge clumsy tentacles. And perhaps their host was not even aware of them; they could be insignificant parasites, tolerated as are fleas upon a dog. But now it was obvious that the medusa was in distress. With agonizing slowness, it began to tip over like a capsizing ship. After ten minutes it had tilted forty-five degrees; it was also rapidly losing altitude. It was impossible not to feel a sense of pity for the beleaguered monster, and to Falcon the sight brought bitter memories. In a grotesque way, the fall of the medusa was almost a parody of the dying Queen’s last moments (The Queen Elizabeth was the giant zeppelin Howard Falcon captained before the … accident). Yet he knew that his sympathies were on the wrong side. High intelligence could develop only among predators—not among the drifting browsers of either sea or air. The mantas were far closer to him than was this monstrous bag of gas. And anyway, who could really sympathize with a creature a hundred thousand times larger than a whale? Then he noticed that the medusa’s tactics seemed to be having some effect. The mantas had been disturbed by its slow roll and were flapping heavily away from its back—like gorged vultures interrupted at mealtime. But they did not move very far, continuing to hover a few yards from the still-capsizing monster.
artwork by Martin Hoffman
There was a sudden, blinding flash of light synchronized with a crash of static over the radio. One of the mantas, slowly twisting end over end, was plummeting straight downward. As it fell, a plume of black smoke trailed behind it. The resemblance to an aircraft going down in flames was quite uncanny. In unison, the remaining mantas dived steeply away from the medusa, gaining speed by losing altitude. They had, within minutes, vanished back into the wall of cloud from which they had emerged. And the medusa, no longer falling, began to roll back toward the horizontal. Soon it was sailing along once more on an even keel, as if nothing had happened. “Beautiful!” said Dr. Brenner, after a moment of stunned silence. “It’s developed electric defenses, like some of our eels and rays. But that must have been about a million volts! Can you see any organs that might produce the discharge? Anything looking like electrodes?” “No,” Falcon answered, after switching to the highest power of the telescope. “But here’s something odd. Do you see this pattern? Check back on the earlier images. I’m sure it wasn’t there before.” A broad, mottled band had appeared along the side of the medusa. It formed a startlingly regular checkerboard, each square of which was itself speckled in a complex sub-pattern of short horizontal lines. They were spaced at equal distances in a geometrically perfect array of rows and columns. “You’re right,” said Dr. Brenner, with something very much like awe in his voice. “That’s just appeared. And I’m afraid to tell you what I think it is.” “Well, I have no reputation to lose—at least as a biologist. Shall I give my guess?” “Go ahead.” “That’s a large meter-band radio array. The sort of thing they used back at the beginning of the twentieth century.” “I was afraid you’d say that. Now we know why it gave such a massive echo.” “But why has it just appeared?” “Probably an aftereffect of the discharge.” “I’ve just had another thought,” said Falcon, rather slowly. “Do you suppose it’s listening to us?” “On this frequency? I doubt it. Those are meter—no, decameter antennas—judging by their size. Hmm … that’s an idea!” Dr. Brenner fell silent, obviously contemplating some new line of thought. Presently he continued: “I bet they’re tuned to the radio outbursts! That’s something nature never got around to doing on Earth… We have animals with sonar and even electric senses, but nothing ever developed a radio sense. Why bother where there was so much light? “But it’s different here. Jupiter is drenched with radio energy. It’s worth while using it—maybe even tapping it. That thing could be a floating power plant!”
Falcon had a momentary glimpse of great tentacles whipping upward and away. He had just time to note that they were studded with large bladders or sacs, presumably to give them buoyancy, and that they ended in multitudes of thin feelers like the roots of a plant. He half expected a bolt of lightning—but nothing happened.
Even as he fell through the roaring heart of the Great Red Spot, with the lightning of its continent-wide thunderstorms detonating around him, he knew why it had persisted for centuries though it was made of gases far less substantial than those that formed the hurricanes of Earth. The thin scream of hydrogen wind faded as he sank into the calmer depths, and a sleet of waxen snowflakes - some already coalescing into barely palpable mountains of hydrocarbon foam - descended from the heights above. It was already warm enough for liquid water to exist, but there were no oceans there; that purely gaseous environment was too tenuous to support them. He descended through layer after layer of cloud, until he entered a region of such clarity that even human vision could have scanned an area more than a thousand kilometres across. It was only a minor eddy in the vaster gyre of the Great Red Spot; and it held a secret that men had long guessed, but never proved. Skirting the foothills of the drifting foam mountains were myriads of small, sharply-defined clouds, all about the same size and patterned with similar red and brown mottlings. They were small only as compared with the inhuman scale of their surroundings; the very least would have covered a fair-sized city. They were clearly alive, for they were moving with slow deliberation along the flanks of the aerial mountains, browsing off their slopes like colossal sheep. And they were calling to each other in the metre band, their radio voices faint but clear against the cracklings and concussions of Jupiter itself. Nothing less than living gasbags, they floated in the narrow zone between freezing heights and scorching depths. Narrow, yes — but a domain far larger than all the biosphere of Earth. They were not alone. Moving swiftly among them were other creatures so small that they could easily have been overlooked. Some of them bore an almost uncanny resemblance to terrestrial aircraft and were of about the same size. But they too were alive — perhaps predators, perhaps parasites, perhaps even herdsmen. A whole new chapter of evolution, as alien as that which he had glimpsed on Europa, was opening before him. There were jet-propelled torpedoes like the squids of the terrestrial oceans, hunting and devouring the huge gasbags. But the balloons were not defenceless; some of them fought backs with electric thunderbolts and with clawed tentacles like kilometre-long chainsaws. There were even stranger shapes, exploiting almost every possibility of geometry — bizarre, translucent kites, tetrahedra, spheres, polyhedra, tangles of twisted ribbons. The gigantic plankton of the Jovian atmosphere, they were designed to float like gossamer in the uprising currents, until they had lived long enough to reproduce; then they would be swept down into the depths to be carbonized and recycled in a new generation. He was searching a world more than a hundred times the area of Earth, and though he saw many wonders, nothing there hinted of intelligence. The radio voices of the great balloons carried only simple messages of warning or of fear. Even the hunters, who might have been expected to develop higher degrees of organization, were like the sharks in Earth’s oceans — mindless automata. And for all its breathtaking size and novelty, the biosphere of Jupiter was a fragile world, a place of mists and foam, of delicate silken threads and paper-thin tissues spun from the continual snowfall of petrochemicals formed by lightning in the upper atmosphere. Few of its constructs were more substantial than soap bubbles; its most terrifying predators could be torn to shreds by even the feeblest of terrestrial carnivores. Like Europa on a vastly grander scale, Jupiter was an evolutionary cul-de-sac. Consciousness would never emerge here; even if it did, it would be doomed to a stunted existence. A purely aerial culture might develop, but in an environment where fire was impossible, and solids scarcely existed, it could never even reach the Stone Age.
From 2010 ODYSSEY TWO by Arthur C. Clarke (1982)
JUPITER
Artwork by John Harris
Peering through the transparent glassteel of the observation bubble, Grant could see that Jupiter
was not merely immense, it was alive. They were in orbit around the planet now, and its giant curving bulk loomed so huge that he could
see nothing else, nothing but the bands and swirls of clouds that raced fiercely across Jupiter's
face. The clouds shifted and flowed before his eyes, spun into eddies the size of Asia, moved and
throbbed and pulsed like living creatures. Lightning flashed down there, sudden explosions of
light that flickered back and forth across the clouds, like signaling lamps. There was life beneath those clouds, Grant knew. Huge balloonlike creatures called Clarke's Medusas that drifted in the hurricane-force winds surging across the planet. Birds that have never
seen land, living out their entire lives aloft. Gossamer spider-kites that trapped microscopic
spores. Particles of long-chain carbon molecules that form in the clouds and sift downward, toward
the global ocean below. "The atmosphere/ocean system is like nothing we've seen before," Muzorawa said, his tone at last
brightening, losing its guarded edge, taking on some enthusiasm. "For one thing, there's no clear
demarkation between the gas phase and the liquid, no sharp boundary where the atmosphere ends and
the ocean begins." "There's no real surface to the ocean," Grant said, wanting to show the older man that he wasn't
totally ignorant. "No, not like on Earth. Jupiter's atmosphere gradually thickens, gets denser and denser, until
it's not a gas anymore but a liquid. It's … well, it's something else, let me tell you." Before Grant could respond, Muzorawa hunched closer in his chair and went on, "It's heated from
below, you see. The planet's internal heat is stronger than the solar influx on the tops of the
clouds. The pressure gradient is really steep: Jupiter's gravity field is the strongest in the
solar system." "Two point five four gees," Grant recited. "That's merely at the top of the cloud deck," Muzorawa said, waggling one hand in the air. "It
gets stronger as you go down into the atmosphere. Do you have any idea of what the pressures are
down there?" Grant shrugged. "Thousands of times normal atmospheric pressure." "Thousands of times the pressure at the bottom of the deepest ocean on Earth," Muzorawa corrected.
A smile was growing on his face, the happy, contented smile of a scientist talking about his
special field of study. "So the pressure squeezes the atmosphere and turns the gases into liquids." "Certainly! There's an ocean down there, an ocean ten times bigger than the whole Earth. Liquid
water, at least five thousand kilometers deep, perhaps more; we haven't been able to probe that
far down yet." Leviathan followed an upwelling current through the endless sea, smoothly grazing on the food that
spiraled down from the abyss above. Far from the Kin now, away from the others of its own kind,
Leviathan reveled in its freedom from the herd and their plodding cycle of feeding, dismemberment,
and rejoining. To human senses the boundless ocean would be impenetrably dark, devastatingly hot,
crushingly dense. Yet Leviathan moved through the surging deeps with ease, the flagella members of
its assemblage stroking steadily as its mouth parts slowly opened and closed, opened and closed,
in the ancient rhythm of ingestion. To human senses Leviathan would be staggeringly huge, dwarfing all the whales of Earth, larger
than whole pods of whales, larger even than a good-size city. Yet in the vast depths of the Jovian
sea Leviathan was merely one of many, slightly larger than some, considerably smaller than the
eldest of its kind. There were dangers in that dark, hot, deep sea. Glide too high on the soaring currents, toward the
source of the bountiful food, and the waters grew too thin and cold; Leviathan's members would
involuntarily disassemble, shed their cohesion, never to reunite again. Get trapped in a
treacherous downsurge and the heat welling up from the abyss below would kill the members before
they could break away and scatter. Best to cruise here in the abundant world provided by the Symmetry, between the abyss above and
the abyss below, where the food drifted down constantly from the cold wilderness on high and the
warmth from the depths below made life tolerable. Predators swarmed through Leviathan's ocean: swift voracious Darters that struck at Leviathan's
kind and devoured their outer members. There were even cases where the predators had penetrated to
the core of their prey, rupturing the central organs and forever destroying the poor creature's
unity. The Elders had warned Leviathan that the Darters attacked solitary members of the Kin when
they had broken away from their group for budding in solitude. Still Leviathan swam on alone,
intent on exploring new areas of the measureless sea. Leviathan remembered when the abyss above had erupted in giant flares of killing heat. Many of
Leviathan's kind had disassembled in the sudden violence of those concussions. Even the
everlasting rain of food had been disrupted, and Leviathan had known hunger for the first time in
its existence. But the explosions dissipated swiftly and life eventually returned to normal again.
The data file with what little was known about the H'rulka
scrolled down the screen. "Floaters!" Kane said, reading. “The presumption is that
they're intelligent gas bags that evolved in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant."
“Interesting, if true," Wilkerson said, reading. “I'd like to know how they
managed to develop a technology capable of building starships without access to
metals, fire, smelting, solid raw materials, or solid ground."
“What is it they're supposed to share with the Tushies, Chom?" Kane asked.
“It is difficult to express," Noam replied, "as are most Turusch concepts. It
appears, however, to be a philosophy based on the concept of depth."
"Yeah, yeah. They order things higher to lower, instead of the way we do it."
“It's no different than when we say something is second class," Wilkerson said,
"and mean it's not as important or as high—up as first class."
"It's still bass—ackward," Kane said.
"The three conscious minds of a Turusch are considered by the Turusch to range
from ‘high’ to 'here' to ‘low,' " Noam pointed out, "with ‘high‘ being the most
primitive, most basic state of intelligence, and ‘low’ the most advanced and
complex. For the Turusch, something called the Abyss represents depth, scope,
danger, and tremendous power. We think the Turusch evolved to live on high
plateaus or mountaintops on their world, with lower elevations representing
sources of wealth or power—maybe a food source—as well as deadly windstorms.
Abyssal Whirlwinds, they call them."
“So, if the H'rulka are Jovian-type floaters," Wilkerson mused, “they might
relate to the idea of the Abyss as the depths of a gas giant atmosphere. Hot,
stormy, high energy, and definitely dangerous. A point of cognitive contact or
understanding between them and the Turusch."
“Sounds far-fetched to me," Kane said. " Besides, intelligence couldn't develop
in a gas giant atmosphere. Absolutely impossible."
"I've learned in this business to mistrust the phrase ‘absolutely impossible,’
Doctor," Wilkerson said. “Why do you think that?"
“Because the vertical circulation of atmospheric cells in a gas giant atmosphere
would drag any life form in the relatively benign higher levels down into the
depths in short order," Kane replied. “They would be destroyed by crushing
pressures and searing high temperatures. There'd be no way to preserve culture…or develop it, for that matter. No way to preserve historical records…art…music…learning. And, as you just said, they wouldn‘t get far without
being able to smelt metals or build a technology from the ground up. " He smirked.
"No ground.”
“But we do have lots of examples of Jovian life," Wilkerson said.
“None of it intelligent, " Kane replied. “It can’t survive long enough.”
The H’rulka didn’t name their starships. A name suggested an individual
personality, and the concept of the individual was one only barely grasped by
H’rulka psychology. The H'rulka were, in fact, colony organisms; a very rough
terrestrial analogue would have been the Portuguese Man of War…though the
H’rulka were not marine creatures, and each was composed of several hundred
types of communal polyps, rather than just four. Even their name for themselves
—which came across in a hydrogen atmosphere as a shrill, high-pitched thunder
generated by gas bags beneath the primary flotation sac—meant something like
“All of Us,” and could refer either to a single colony, in the first person, or to the
race as a whole.
Individual H'rulka colonies took on temporary names, however, as dictated by
their responsibilities within the community. Ordered Ascent was the commander
of Warship 434, itself until recently a part of a larger vessel, Warship 432. The
species didn’t have a government as humans would have understood the term, and
even the captain of a starship was more of a principal decision maker than a
leader.
"It looks like home," the aggregate being called Swift Pouncer whispered over
the private radio link. H'rulka possessed two entirely separate means of speech,
two separate languages—one by means of vibrations in the atmosphere, the other
by means of biologically generated radio bursts. Their natural radio transceivers,
located just beneath the doughnut-shaped cluster of polyps forming their brains,
allowed them to interface directly with their machines.
“Similar," Ordered Ascent replied. “It appears to be inhabited."
“We are receiving speech from one of the debris-chunks orbiting the world,"
Swift Pouncer replied. “It may be a vermin-nest. And…we are receiving speech
from numerous sources much closer to the local star."
Ordered Ascent tuned in to the broadband scanners and saw the other signals.
Those members of Ordered Ascent capable of rational thought chided
themselves. No matter how long they served within the far-flung fleets of the
Sh‘daar, it was difficult to remember that vermin-nests frequently occurred, not
within the atmospheres of true planets (gas giants), but on the inhospitable solid surfaces of
debris (terrestrial planets).
It was an unsettling thought. For just a moment, Ordered Ascent allowed
themselves to pull back from the instrumentation feeds, to find steadiness and
reassurance in the sight of the Collective Globe.
The interior of the H'rulka warship was immense by human standards, but
cramped to the point of stark claustrophobia for the species called All of Us. The
area that served as the equivalent of the bridge on a human starship was well over
two kilometers across, a vast spherical space filled by twelve free-floating H'rulka
colonies in a dodecahedral array. Connected by radio to their ship, they used radio
commands to direct and maneuver the huge vessel, fire the weapons, and observe
their surroundings.
They lived in the high-pressure atmosphere of gas giants, breathing hydrogen
and metabolizing methane, ammonia, and drifting organic tidbits analogous to the
plankton of Terran oceans. Until one of the Sh'daar's client species had shown
them how to use solid materials to build spacecraft that defied both gravity and
hard vacuum, they'd never known the interior of anything, never known what it
was like to be enclosed, to be trapped inside. The interior of Warship 434 was
large enough—just—to avoid triggering a serious claustrophobic-panic reflex in
All of Us aggregates. Sometimes, they needed to see other aggregates adrift in the
sky simply in order to feel safe.
Data streamed down the radio link through Directed Ascent's consciousness.
The inhabitants of this system were indeed native to the system debris. Vermin…
The All of Us race was unaccustomed to dealing with other sentient species.
One of the primary reasons for this was, simply, their size; by almost any
standards, the H'rulka were giants.
An adult H'rulka consisted of a floatation gas bag measuring anywhere from
two to three hundred meters across, with brain, locomotion and feeding organs,
sensory apparatus and manipulators clustered at the bottom. Most other sentient
species with which they'd had direct experience possessed roughly the same size
and mass ratio to a H'rulka as an ant compared to a human.
When the H'rulka thought of other life forms as “vermin," the thought was less
insult than it was a statement of fact, at least as they perceived it. Within the
complex biosphere of the H'rulka homeworld, there were parasites living on each
All of Us colony that were some meters across. H'rulka simply found it difficult
to imagine creatures as intelligent that were almost literally beneath their notice in
terms of scale.
“Commence acceleration, " Ordered Ascent directed. "We will move into the
region of heavy radio transmission, and destroy targets of opportunity as they
present themselves. "
The H‘rulka warship, more than twenty kilometers across, began falling toward
Sol, the inner system, and Earth.
From CENTER OF GRAVITY by Ian Douglas aka William H. Keith, Jr. (2011)
IF THE STARS ARE GODS
I swim through clouds of sleeting hydrocarbons. No
free oxygen here. In the years before idiot robot probes
had reported this, before they tumbled helpless into the
heat deck below. Now I float through these low-energy
chemical agents wheregthel scientists are sure no animal
life can persist. Active creatures require higher-energy
reactions. So, too, do the voices from the Orb point out
that the wavelengths I have observed in the warbling
voices here are immense—hundreds of meters long. Far
too large for any animal. So they are natural
phenomena, and the Orb bids me to explore, measure.
perceive this interesting event.
In the soft waxen snowfall I navigate, and the sonic
ripplings come again. This time the magnetic pulse is
large, not a mere fluttering on top of the noise
spectrum. I follow it to the southeast, downward.
muting my fusion reactor to drop swiftly. In this misty
torrent infrared and opticals are blind, but the
microwaves bring back granulated pictures I can
perceive. Ahead small points flicker and dance. I
approach. They are below me but I do not know hon
far.
Corey emits a sharp spike of microwave energy and
waits for the rebounding echo. Range is only four
kilometers; she increases her fall. The steep descent
takes him through a froth of white hydrocarbons as
though she skis down alpine slopes. The gondola sways
and creaks. A jolting bump comes as she falls through a
pressure differential. The points below swell into grainy
blobs.
Suddenly the clouds disappear and Corey sees that
he has emerged from the face of a vast milky wall. A
vortex churns here, swirling the cloud banks in long
circular arcs a hundred kilometers in diameter. At the
center is a clear crystalline cylinder arcing up into
heaven, a floor below of misty red. The infrared
opticals swivel left, right, up—and Corey sees the
source of the warbling.
Below float things like ball bearings. They seem
motionless, suspended in the beautiful clear ammonia
They are small and give off a hot white sheen. An echo
burst shows their true dimensions; they are at a range
of nine kilometers and appear at least half a kilometer
in diameter.
Immense spheres. A consequence of the vortex? The
ribbed cloud banks on all sides churn slowly as Corey
sinks. The spheres have not moved. Then she notices a
small point: the spheres do not rotate with the majestic
cloud barrier around them. They are still. Humming,
Corey drops further toward them. As she approaches
their design breaks and they move in strangely
hyperbolic paths. They form a net. They are maneuvering to Corey’s stimulus. In this vast waxen tunnel they
maneuver. They are alive. Like Corey.
It begins to rain curling loops of hydrocarbons.
Dollops of paste fall past Corey. They billow whitely
around me in long filaments, as though spun from
spools. The gondola yaws as I take it down. We flip through
the gnawing winds and fall below the misty hydrocarbon snow. The cyclone vent tunnels deep below me and
the restless globes seem almost to float above the
distant floor. Thirteen kilometers away the clouds
revolve tirelessly. The ammonia cirrus is patchy,
translucent, and veins of darker blue form faint
tributaries beneath the skin. I send the signal Mara asked me to. The spheres
below reply; magnetic fields weave and shift. I study
them in the optical, the microwave. “You were right, Mara. There are long arcs across
their surfaces. Regular. Rectangular. Inside each band
is a pattern of pentagons. ” “That's how they broadcast. They form electrical
current distributions over their surfaces. Otherwise a
perfect sphere could not radiate anything.” “Their surfaces are antennas?" “They're linked into the magnetic field, Jupiter's
natural field, in that region. So when they ripple
currents on their surfaces, the field lines carry the signal
away." "Thus they speak to each other. And to me.” “That’s not all. Jupiter is rich in radio energy.
They’re linked into that. They probably feed off it, as
well as chewing up those waxy hydrocarbons you see.
They eat radio waves, the same way plants consume
light. ” “They are coming nearer.” "Together?" “Yes. There are six of them now. Average diameter
one point three six kilometers. No, one point four
one—they are expanding.” “Probably have sacs inside. They fill up with gas,
just like you, then heat it and rise. ” “—I’ve calculated the total oscillater strength from a
large number of spheres. It’s really impressive.” Mara
paused and Bradley bit his lip in concentration. Vance,
sittings beside him, seemed lost in his own private
calculations.
“So you don’t think those spherical creatures
communicate locally by rippling the magnetic field?”
Bradley said. “Well, it’s a possibility. The important point is that
the signals from Alpha Libra could be made that way.
We know Jupiter gives off huge radio bursts every once
in a while. We’ve been listening to those radio
thunderclaps for over a century now. The point is,
that’s just noise. But suppose some life form could tap
that source of energy. The same way a small transistor
modulates the output of a large power supply, say.
They could impress a signal on it, maybe even direct it
toward a particular spot in the sky.” “I suppose it’s possible…” Vance began. “It wouldn’t take many of those spherical creatures to
do it, if they were intelligent. I calculated the total
oscillator strength for a bunch of spheres, evenly spaced
around the planet. They could harness an immense
amount of radio energy and modulate it at will.” Mara
spoke quickly, precisely. “So there need not be any technology on a Jovian-type planet after all,” Bradley said. “It could simply be
use of a natural mechanism.” “That’s the idea. Those beings down there, or
whatever lives on a gas-giant planet in the Alpha Libra
system, don’t know beans about electronics. But they
sense electromagnetic forces as a part of the ebb and
flow of life. They know only fluxes of things. No
chemistry, no physics—but they're so big they don't
need to know.”
The Jgd-ll-Jagd are a gas-giant dwelling
intelligent species originating on a
world on the coreward edge of the imperium.
Although technically a minor
race, they possessed very advanced
technology even before they were first
contacted by Vilani explorers in about
-4200; in the period since, for obscure
reasons, they have never employed jump
drives, although their slower-than-light
ships have ventured several parsecs
from Jagd, and Jgdi colonies are spread
across three subsectors. Jgd have very
occasionally travelled further afield than
this in heavy life support units carried by
bulk transporters, and Jgd travellers
have even collaborated with humaniti (Traveller term for the human species) in
exploration and exploitation problems.
The Jgd are the most advanced gas-giant
dwellers in the Imperium.
BIOLOGY
The Jgd have roughly spherical
bodies, about 3m in diameter. dotted
with clusters of sensory cells, and with
three long manipulative tendrils
distributed regularly round the
"equator". The densest mass of sensory
organs, plus a large number of
manipulative "feelers" and feeding
structures, are sited on the lowest point
of the body. The species' internal structures
are based on a number of thin-walled compartments, one of which
(near the body center) houses the brain
(or at least the largest neural nexus), but
most of which are empty but for gases
secreted by the body chemistry. Control
of secretion rates and partially-directed
release of the gases (mostly hydrogen)
give the Jgd considerable control over
their atmospheric buoyancy and direction
of flight, but these "living balloons"
are still rather susceptible to atmospheric
currents; it is generally believed that accidental
population redistributions were
common in primitive Jgdi society,
leading to loosely-bonded communal
organization and exceptional homogeneity
in Jgdi culture.
In so far as such terms have meaning
in this context, the Jgd seem to spring
from omnivore/intermittent stock. There
is only one sex; genetic interchange is
achieved by air-borne spores, and
reproduction is achieved by a
sophisticated form of binary fission.
Senses are based on extreme awareness
of atmospheric vibration, plus very
limited response to a very wide range of
electromagnetic waves. Jgd can communicate
limited information over long
(20km +) distances, using pitch-modulated
ultrasonic "whistling", but
the primary form of "speech" involves
electrical impulses transmitted by direct
physical contact. It is thought that this
allows the transfer of very large quantities
of information at the semi-subconscious
as well as the conscious
level, further enhancing the homogeneity
of Jgd culture.
The Jgd live extremely long lives; apparently.
no condition of "old age" exists,
although eventually a fissioning Jgd
undergoes division of the parent brain,
rather than generating a new "child"
cerebrum. Average life of an identifiable
Jgd individual, barring accident, is approximately
630 plus standard Imperial
years.
Artwork by Roy Guzzio
SOCIETY
The Jgd developed a mechanistic
civilization when they learned to
manipulate crystalline matter from the
Jagd "icebergs"; thus crystallography is
as central to their technological history
as metallurgy is to mankind's. They
developed activities akin to farming
rather late, but their social systems are
immensely refined, and spring from the
need to organize for food-gathering and
hunting. The basic social unit is termed
the "hunt" by human sociologists, and
consists of a cooperative body formed
for a specific purpose — not always
anything as short-lived as a hunt for
food. Many "hunts" are millennia old,
but even disregarding natural mortality.
the membership is extremely flexible,
with individuals leaving and joining quite
frequently in most cases. Hunts to some
extent resemble human businesses,
trusts, or colleges, or Hiver nests, but
each hunt actually holds a rather deeper
role in Jgdi culture than this implies, in
a way that only the Jgd themselves really
comprehend. The crew of a short-range
spaceship will usually comprise
one hunt, while an interstellar craft will
have three or four 'active' hunts aboard,
plus the social nucleus of several more
that become active when the ship
establishes a colony or base on a new
world. The system is remarkably flexible
but robust.
The other key element in Jgdi
psychology is an obsession with balanced
exchanges, apparently running at
least as deep as human curiosity, Aslan
land-hunger, or Newt orderliness. A Jgd
is literally incapable of "unilateral
behavior". For example, the Jgd never
initiate exploration for its own sake, but
only send ships where there is a very
high probability of finding exploitable
resources, or of establishing a colony
that might eventually send vessels back
to Jagd. This obsession, apparently
linked to the inherently bilateral nature
of Jgdi conversation, has resulted in
almost all contact between Jgd and
other races taking the form of trade . It
also causes the Jgd to operate a peculiar
(and slightly brutal-seeming) legal
system; theft is always punished by
fines, violence by violence, and so on (in
short, "an eye for an eye"). It is even
hypothesized that the Jgd commenced
interstellar travel when and only when
they were first contacted by humaniti
because only then was a degree of symmetry
implied by the activity.
The homogeneity of Jgdi culture is a
major factor in Jgd society, but it must
not be overstated. Jgd are discrete and
independent individuals, with distinct
personalities and powerful personal
drives; they have an idea of private property;
they have personal violence, if not
wars. Nonetheless, it is important to
note that education — in the sense of a
transmittal of data — is extremely easy
for them; hence almost any Jgd can
employ almost any Jgdi device or technique
with at least minimal competence.
This does not imply that the race lacks
individuals specializing in particular fields
of competence, merely that total incompetence
in any field is rare.
JGD IN INTERSTElLAR SOCIETY
Jgdi thought is alien to all other races'
intelligence; hence communication is a
persistent problem. The obvlous difficulty
of simply conversing is generally
solved by use of powerful human or Jgdi
computer translators, but even these
tend to struggle with many concepts;
nor is pronunciation of synthesized
phonemes always easy (the race name
is a human corruption of something produced
by an early Jgdi machine). In
general, relations with humaniti and
other races are restricted to trade and informational
exchanges.
The Imperium classifies the Jgd as a
friendly associate species with
autonomous government; actually, no
formal pacts exist, although relations are
in a state of stable equilibrium. Jgd-inhabited
systems will always be
"patrolled" by a number of large and
powerful vessels; these rarely
take much interest in human affairs
unless Jgdi interests are threatened. The
chief point to note in such systems is
that fuel-skimming a Jgd world is extremely
unwise; shock waves from the
pass will cause severe damage to the beings
and their environment, and their
response is certain to involve high-energy
weapons fire. For this reason,
Jgd systems are well-marked with
navigational beacons.(Traveller tramp merchant ships routinely skim gas giants for free fuel)
Other races get on with the Jgd even
less well than does humaniti (although
there are Jgd colonies in the Centaur empire);
mankind at least has long experience
with the race. and the Jgdi
exchange-obsession corresponds effectively
to the human tradition of mercantile economics. There are no records of
the Jgd hiring alien mercenaries for any
but short-term jobs, or of small Jgd
groups or individuals settling for long
with other races save out of necessity.
The Jgd failure to construct jump
drives is a mystery (the task could easily
be performed by Jgd technology). One
theory is that the race actually refuses
to do so because it is impossible to enter
into an exchange relationship with
hyperspace, making the subject
anathema to them. More plausible
theories hold that jump travel is
dangerous to them. Certainly, the Jgd
travel units occasionally loaded onto
human jump ships carry extremely heavy
insulation.
By the time I arrived in Los Angeles on February 13, 1979 to join the team of Cosmos Artists and work on the production of the visual effects, I had completed many dozens of preliminary concept drawings of the basic design of the HFS cloudscape environment, along with about a hundred conceptual designs for a variety of species of the three principle types which constituted the hypothetical biosphere and its ecological system: Hunters, Floaters and Sinkers — creatures with diverse shapes and anatomies, aerodynamic and buoyancy properties, propulsion mechanisms, feeding modes, social and navigation or migratory behaviors, communication, reproductive and defense and even stealth strategies, and more, that would not only fit them for life within a global atmospheric habitat, depending on conditions at various altitudes and within clouds of various composition, as well as the other dynamic aspects of weather, but also provide the basis for local or close-range interaction with other individuals of the same or different species, either in encountering those of their own kind (for reproductive purposes, or to maintain mutual proximity in gregarious social collections, for example), in encountering potential prey (Floaters grazed on diminutive but abundant Sinkers, while Hunters ambushed Sinkers for their stores of purified hydrogen as well as for nutrition), or encountered potential predators (both Floaters and Hunters could evolve elaborate defense strategies against attack by other Hunters). Carl's early speculations on Jovian atmosphere life in the 1960s had evolved and he eventually worked out the basic hunters, floaters and sinkers ecosystem which he described in a paper with Ed Salpeter: "Particles, Environments, and Possible Ecologies in the Jovian Atmosphere", which appeared in The Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series in late 1975. Meanwhile I had been exploring the wide range of potential planetary habitats and designing a great many life-forms in the fleshed-out detail necessary for illustration, that could conceivably evolve and flourish within habitable environments, including Jovian-type atmospheres.