0263 - 2025.11 Green planet 2

Having settled after the surprise, we now needed to deal with the reality.

Get closer, take what measurements we could, maybe some manual star sightings I suggested but the navigator just laughed at me.

In the blackness of space finding your favourite star is not as easy as a dark night on Earth with an atmosphere removing 95% of the fainter stars. Once I’d realised my stupidity he didn’t need to mention the small portholes and lack of suitable instruments.

Instead we concentrated on the flight plan as we floated towards the green planet. With no traffic to avoid the three of us were heads down on the display re-running the flight parameters.

With a million lines of code, more perhaps, we could not read each one. Instead we concentrated on each chunk, using the onboard AI to recompile, recompute, re-anything that may give us a clue.

There were not that many steps.

Launch, depart Earth. Final position fix, open worm hole…. Definitely we were in the solar system.

Depart worm hole, arrive Proxima…. Everything measured right. Inertial navigation put us there, our visual sightings put us there, the spectrometry matched, the automated star sightings put us there.

Star sightings? The ship does star sightings? The navigator smiled at me. That’s not what you asked before.

Nit picker! I thought.

Well?

They were OK when we emerged, he said, but I’ll run them again.

Back to the flight plan. Re enter worm hole, position correct, exit back in solar system position correct.

How correct? Asked the Captain. We had to fly a little longer than I expected to get back to Earth, and we came around the dark side of the Moon rather than the sunny side.

Five nines, replied the navigator. The Moon and Earth were dots ahead, I didn’t check to ten decimals.

So we’re not at Uranus, or some methane planet? I asked semi seriously.

No, said the navigator, here’s the star position again. He pointed to the readouts. He was right, five nines. But not six nines. I was getting a bad feeling.

What is causing the difference? I asked. If we were at Earth we should be at ten nines or better.

While the navigator checked I looked ahead, the Sun was at an oblique angle because of our approach. The planet was definitely green, but wispy at the edges.

Aurora? I said aloud. Has there been a giant solar flare while we were away?

I don’t think so. The Captain was looking more than doubtful. There’s no radio noise on any channel, even if a mammoth EMS took out the satellites there would still be some residual radio chatter. We’re close enough now to see sunlight reflections from satellites, but I see none. And the atmospheric edge, it’s too diffuse. We’re in the right place but it looks like the wrong planet.

I can’t believe we’ve discovered a parallel universe. I said, aloud, wondering if this was in fact the case. Despite all the calculations and peer reviews and unmanned testing, had we inadvertently worm jumped into another bubble universe. The greatest discovery of all time, Nobel prizes for everyone, if we get back with proof.

I picked up the camera and took a picture. A bit fuzzy, the angle out the porthole wasn’t the best.

Best I can tell, said the navigator, is that we have two inputs that are out.

Two?

Yes. Some stars are marginally out of position, and Earth’s gravity is, well, not strong enough. Like 99%. We’re drifting off course.

So the evidence is in, I said. It’s not our Earth, but it’s roughly where Earth should be, and even has the same moon.

Actually, said the Captain, that was bothering me. We came around the back of the Moon, but it was the wrong phase. I let my eyes convince me the flight path must have been wrong. Plus, there seemed not to be enough craters.

Why do you say that?

I used to fly the Moon shuttle when I started. Five years worth of trips. Never paid much attention to the geography at the time, but you get a feeling for it. This time it seemed, well, sparser.

Almost the Earth and Moon. Almost the right place.

Relatively close, so to speak, which got me thinking. Time and space. We’d been in a worm hole, until now a theoretical construct, a science fiction. The only way to go faster than light, faster than time, without achieving infinite mass.

An old thought came back to me. Early Earth did not have blue oceans, water was different then, heavy water cascading from space in cometary arrivals. Darker, greener.

So this was a younger Earth with a younger Moon.

So the dilemma was simple. Either we had gone back in time, perhaps half a billion years, or we had slipped into a parallel universe.

Or possibly it was a trilemma - a new word I’d just invented - we had done both, a third possibility.

I realised now that when we visited Proxima we may or may not have already slipped off at a tangent, as we were seeing it for the first time. If we saw it yesterday or tomorrow we would not have known the difference.

I remembered our testing. In the lab, small objects, small distances. We calculated to 200 decimal places; perhaps that wasn’t accurate enough. The first trips to Mars, never there and back again. Always a stop over, checking the ship before the return. Why Mars? Because there was equipment there, and a place to stay, if something needed attention. Four light minutes distant, not four light years. Half a million times as long, enough for an error to compound to something measurable.

How much life support do we have?

A week, ten days st a pinch.

Better get started then. We need to undo what we don’t know we’ve done.

Technique: #digital
Theme: #abstract
Highlight colour: #green #black

Series: #space #mini-sci-fi