I saw Lars von Trier’s movie Melancholia this past weekend. It’s beautiful, epic, and tragic. To sum it up, sublime, in the Romantic sense of the word. It’s like a big dumb object science fiction book but with a much greater focus on human emotion than those kinds of novels typically have.
Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke, one of the most well-known big dumb object sf books. Cover artist not credited. Via the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
Whether it’s Melancholia, Rama, the Stone, or Jupiter, we keenly feel the insignificance of our place in the cosmos when we contemplate enormous and mysterious objects of great power.
A still from Melancholia, via a review on The Wolfman Cometh blog. The reflected light from the Moon and Melancholia casts two shadows.
But after watching Melancholia, my mind is full of more than sublimity and sorrow – I’m also left wondering, “Is that even possible?” Melancholia appears to be a rogue planet, a planet that has been ejected by its original solar system and doomed to wander the galaxy, its path subject to the gravity wells of any random mass it encounters. When a paper was published this past May that calculated that there may be more rogue planets lost in the Milky Way than stars in the sky, rational skeptic Phil Plait posted about the likelihood of one hitting Earth on the Bad Astronomy blog. His conclusion was that, while there’s a chance that a a rogue planet could pass closer to our solar system than the nearest star, it’s extremely unlikely that one would hit Earth. This makes intuitive sense to me – our planet is a tiny blue dot in the cold, black vastness of space.
Eon by Greg Bear, my favorite big dumb object sf book. Cover by Ron Miller. I scanned this from my personal library. Some of the imagery in this book actually inspired parts of my comic VORTEX.
But let’s say a rogue planet did come barreling through our solar system. Even then, the scenario wouldn’t necessarily play out the same as it does in the movie. According to a thread on the Stack Exchange forum for “active researchers, academics and students of physics”, what results from the interaction of three different masses in three different positions traveling at three different speeds (in this case, Melancholia, the Earth, and the Moon, eliding the also relevant influence of the Sun and other planets) is a notoriously troublesome outcome to calculate (it’s called the three-body problem), so who’s the say what exactly would happen if Melancholia passed by the Earth.
Das Eismeer / Die verunglückte Nordpolexpedition, Die verunglückte Hoffnung (1823-1824) by Caspar David Friedrich, a Romantic painter of the sublime. Via Sights Within.
One possibility, more likely than destruction, is that the gravitation influence of another, much larger planet would fling Earth out of the solar system. Rather than a fiery cataclysm, it would be a slow decline. The Sun would grow more distant each day. Global cooling would replace global warming. The oceans would slumber under a thick crust of ice. Carbon dioxide would fall from the sky like snow. Once the atmosphere froze to the surface, the stars would harden to unblinking knives of light. The remaining energy of the earth’s molten core would feed small pockets of microbial life in a subsurface ocean but it would be a lonely, cold existence soaring through the eternal night.
