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Dance of the Planets

My friend Padi Boyd is an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center. She’s also a  singer, songwriter, and founding member of The Chromatics, an A Capella group who sing about, among other things, astronomy. So I was happy to hear their latest number, Dance of the Planets, got made into a nice little video. Check it out:

Dance of the Planets by The Chromatics

It’s a lovely song and a reminder of how much of our perception has  changed in such a short amount of time. Just 25 years ago, there was not a single known exoplanet – instead, we could only speculate about them and take a guess as to how what percentage of stars have planets, their number, and whether or not any of them might even have potentially habitable worlds.

Today, it’s a completely different story. We now know of more than 1800 worlds orbiting other stars, with thousands more waiting to be confirmed. We can confidently state that every star, regardless of its type, likely has at least one planet orbiting it.  The Kepler Space Telescope showed us that planets do in fact orbit other suns in their host star’s habitable zone, can have stable orbits in binary star systems, and come in a variety of sizes around stars very different than our Sun. The upcoming Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite will identify even more interesting targets for future telescopes, and get us started down the path of understanding what their atmospheres are made of.

It’s an exciting time to be discovering new worlds beyond our solar system, and Padi sums it up best with these lyrics:

At the dawn of the twenty-first century,
The dream has become a reality
We’re not quite as alone as we used to be,
There are planets around the stars

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Wanderers

Many of us look at images of the planets of our solar system and see magnificent landscapes and stunning views of other worlds. But filmmaker Erik Wernquist sees humans living there. Go to full screen, HD, and turn up the sound:

Wanderers – a short film by Erik Wernquist from Erik Wernquist

I’ve watched this film about a dozen times now and I still cannot get over how incredibly amazingly cool this is! Wernquist takes us on a journey through time from nomads wandering the desert 10,000 BCE (underneath a sky filled with planets, no less) to future humans hiking on Europa, receiving shipments on Mars, to domed cities on Iapetus, and finally to clouds lit by ringshine as seen from a dirigible in Saturn’s upper atmosphere. All set to a heart jumping soundtrack, and narrated by Carl Sagan reading from Pale Blue Dot.

Just…wow.

Best of all, the imagery Wernquist chooses are not only sourced from actual NASA and ESA spacecraft, but he accurately imagines the realities of living elsewhere in the solar system. For example, with a surface gravity of just 0.14g, you would be light enough on Titan to strap on some wings and fly through the methane atmosphere. And sure enough, that’s exactly what we see:

Flying over Legia Mare, Titan. Credit: Erik Wernquist

Or how about base jumping off the tallest cliffs in the solar system, which happen to be  on Uranus’ moon Miranda? With a surface gravity of just 0.018g, you’d have plenty of time to enjoy the view and could safely land on your feet with some simple retro rockets.

Base jumping off Verona Rupes, Miranda with Uranus in the background. Credit: Erik Werrnquist

Or just enjoying a pleasant day inside a pressurized rotating asteroid lit by an artificial sun.

A hollowed out asteroid is pressurized with air and filled with water to create lakes. It rotates about its long axis to create 1g acceleration via centripetal force. Credit: Erik Wernquist

Wernquist takes us on a journey that, for now, exists only in our dreams and speculations. But he manages to make these scenes seem so real that maybe, one day, they will be. Nothing that is depicted in this film is outright impossible, we only have to have the will to make this happen.

Update: I was initially going to offer a scene-by-scene breakdown to help explain what’s being depicted in each scene, but Erik has already done that here so by all means check it out!