Dava Sobel - The Planets

THE

PLANETS

DAVA SOBEL

H A R P E R P E R E N N I A L

London, New York, Toronto Sydney

Dedicated with worldfuls of love to my big brothers,

Michael V. Sobel, MD,

who named our family cat Captain Marvel,

and Stephen Sobel, DDS,

who bunked with me at Space Camp.

At night I lie awake

in the ruthless Unspoken,

knowing that planets

come to life, bloom,

and die away,

like day-lilies opening

one after another

in every nook and cranny

of the Universe …

—Diane Ackerman,

from The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral

In all the history of mankind, there will be only one generation that will be first to explore the Solar System, one generation for which, in childhood, the planets are distant and indistinct discs moving through the night sky, and for which, in old age, the planets are places, diverse new worlds in the course of exploration.

—Carl Sagan, from The Cosmic Connection: An Extra-terrestrial Perspective

Cover

Title Page THE PLANETS DAVA SOBEL H A R P E R P E R E N N I A L London, New York, Toronto Sydney

Epigraph At night I lie awake in the ruthless Unspoken, knowing that planets come to life, bloom, and die away, like day-lilies opening one after another in every nook and cranny of the Universe … —Diane Ackerman, from The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral In all the history of mankind, there will be only one generation that will be first to explore the Solar System, one generation for which, in childhood, the planets are distant and indistinct discs moving through the night sky, and for which, in old age, the planets are places, diverse new worlds in the course of exploration. —Carl Sagan, from The Cosmic Connection: An Extra-terrestrial Perspective

1. Model Worlds ( Overview )

2. Genesis ( The Sun )

3. Mythology ( Mercury )

4. Beauty ( Venus )

5. Geography ( Earth )

6. Lunacy ( The Moon )

7. Sci-Fi ( Mars )

8. Astrology ( Jupiter )

9. Music of the Spheres ( Saturn )

10. Discovery ( Uranus and Neptune )

11. UFO ( Pluto )

12. Planeteers ( Conclusion )

Acknowledgments

Glossary

Details ( Notes )

Bibliography

Praise

By the same author

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

My planet fetish began, as best I can recall, in third grade, at age eight – right around the time I learned that Earth had siblings in space, just as I had older brothers in high school and college. The presence of the neighbouring worlds was a revelation at once specific and mysterious in 1955, for although each planet bore a name and held a place in the Sun’s family, very little was known about any of them. Pluto and Mercury, like Paris and Moscow, only better, beckoned a childish imagination to ultra-exotic utopias.

The few sure facts about the planets suggested fantastic aberrations, ranging from unbearable extremes of temperature to the warping of time. Since Mercury, for example, could circle the Sun in only eighty-eight days, compared to Earth’s 365, then a year on Mercury would whiz by in barely three months, much the way ‘dog years’ packed seven years of animal experience into the dog owner’s one, and thereby accounted for the regrettably short lives of pets.

Every planet opened its own realm of possibility, its own version of reality. Venus purportedly hid lush swamps under its perpetual cloud cover, where oceans of oil, or possibly soda water, bathed rain forests filled with yellow and orange plant life. And these opinions issued from serious scientists, not comic books or sensational fiction.

The limitless strangeness of the planets contrasted sharply with their small census. In fact, their nine-ness helped define them as a group. Ordinary entities came in pairs or dozens, or quantities ending in a five or a zero, but planets numbered nine and nine only. Nine, odd as outer space itself, could nevertheless be counted on the fingers. Compared to the chore of memorizing forty-eight state capitals or significant dates in the history of New York City, the planets promised mastery in an evening. Any child who committed the planets’ names to memory with the help of an appealing nonsense-sentence mnemonic – ‘My very educated mother just served us nine pies’ – simultaneously gained their proper progression outward from the Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.

The manageable sum of planets made them seem collectable, and motivated me to arrange them in a shoe-box diorama for the science fair. I gathered marbles, jacks balls, ping-pong balls, and the pink rubber Spaldeens we girls bounced for hours on the sidewalk, then I painted them with tempera, and hung them on pipe cleaners and string. My model (more like a doll’s house than a scientific demonstration) failed to give any real sense of the planets’ relative sizes or the enormous distances between them. By rights I should have used a basketball for Jupiter, to show how it dwarfed all the others, and I should have mounted everything in a giant carton from a washing machine or a refrigerator, the better to approximate the Solar System’s grandiose dimensions.

Fortunately my crude diorama, produced with a complete lack of artistic skill, did not kill my beautiful visions of Saturn suspended in the perfect symmetry of its spinning rings, or the mutating patterns on the Martian landscape, which were attributed, in scientific reports of the 1950s, to seasonal cycles of vegetation.

After the science fair, my class staged a planets play. I got the part of ‘Lonely Star’ because the script called for that character to wear a red cape, and I had one, left over from a Hallowe’en costume. As Lonely Star, I soliloquized the Sun’s wish for companionship, which the planet-actors granted by joining up with me, each in a speech admitting his own peculiarities. The play’s most memorable performances were delivered by ‘Saturn’, who twirled two hula-hoops while reciting her lines, and ‘The Earth’, plump and self-conscious, yet forced to announce matter-of-factly, ‘I am twenty-four thousand miles around my middle.’ Thus was the statistic of the earth’s circumference indelibly impressed upon me. (Note that we always said ‘the earth’, in those days. ‘The earth’ did not become ‘Earth’ until after I came of age and the Moon changed from a nightlight to a destination.)