August 27, 2026 • 46 mins
In this series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe turn their attention to the innermost hellworld of our solar system: Mercury. Join them as they discuss the planetary science, exploration history, mythology and sci-fi of Earth’s smallest sibling.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
And I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're back with part
two in our series on the planet Mercury. Mercury is,
of course, the innermost planet in our solar system, also
the smallest and the fastest moving, hence its association with
a wing-footed messenger. In the previous episode, we talked about
some basic physical aspects of Mercury, its density, its moonlessness,
(00:39):
its extremely thin exosphere, the extremes of heat and cold
across its day and night. And we also talked about
the rather surprising fact that under certain imaging conditions, Mercury
has a tail like a comet. Bet you hadn't heard that.
After that, we talked at length about the god Mercury
from Roman mythology and his many jobs. Fleet-footed messenger, patron
(01:04):
of trade and commerce, thievery. You can throw some greasy
wrestling in there.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Shining wrestling, wasn't it?
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Gleaming, yeah. The he of gleaming wrestling. And we got
into some of the thematic associations between Mercury and, of course,
the Greek Hermes, a very similar god covering some similar territory,
and the planet itself. We're back today to talk about more.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
That's right. And by the time we're done with this series,
I think you should know whether or not you want
to go there. I think you'll have your mind made up.
So before we jump into what I think is a
really cool angle about the surface of Mercury— I thought
it might be helpful to provide just a short overview
of our exploration of Mercury in the modern era with
(01:52):
a focus on the probes and also a look at
why it is difficult to get to Mercury.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Absolutely. This is something people might not appreciate, but traveling
to Mercury is not easy, and not just in the
sense that traveling anywhere in space is not easy. Of course,
it takes a lot of planning and technology and science
and math to get anywhere in the solar system and
line up your trajectories right and actually achieve, you know,
(02:19):
orbit around another body in the solar system. But getting
to Mercury is especially hard, even though Mercury is relatively
close to Earth. And when I say getting there is
especially hard, I mean, if you're talking about actually entering
orbit or landing on the planet. So if you're talking
about like going to Mercury and staying there. That is
(02:40):
especially hard. It's arguably the hardest planet in our solar
system to get to. Now, why would that be, even
though it's relatively close to us? The answer is, once again,
the Sun. Mercury lies within the reach of that dreadful
sword of the Sun, gravitationally speaking. And so as a
(03:01):
spacecraft travels closer to the Sun to reach the orbit
of Mercury, it it is accelerated by the sun's gravity.
And it also begins with the orbital energy of its
origin point of earth, you know, earth traveling around in
this higher orbit around the sun. So a craft traveling
to sort of match speed with Mercury to intersect with
(03:23):
it and go into orbit around it needs to find
a way to shed a lot of orbital energy on
the way. And that's not easy to do. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Now, I know from our notes here, Joe, that you're
about to refer to some content that has to do
with the Beppe Colombo mission. This is a current mission
to Mercury, a joint mission between the European Space Agency
and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, consisting of, I believe,
two different orbiters, launched in 2018. It's set to arrive
(03:56):
this November, 2026, after, I believe, an eight-year journey and
nine planetary gravity assists. And after orbital insertion, it's going
to study the planet's magnetic sphere, among other things.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Yeah, I was going to mention BepiColombo because their web
presence has a very good mission explainer article called Why
Does It Take So Long to Get to Mercury? So
to quote from this, talking a bit about the physics involved, quote,
the laws of physics dictate that the spacecraft's total orbital
energy will stay the same unless we find a way
(04:29):
to shed some. Reducing the part of orbital energy related
to the distance from the sun automatically increases the part
related to speed by the same amount. Consequently, as the
spacecraft gets closer to the sun, it begins to speed
up like a car driving downhill. So, yeah, you've got
(04:49):
this problem. As a spacecraft leaves Earth, it comes from Earth,
so it inherits Earth's orbital energy going around in this
higher orbit. And then if it wants to go into
a lower orbit around the sun, it will be accelerated
as it does so. So if you just make a
beeline straight for Mercury, by the time you get there,
your spacecraft will be going way, way too fast to
(05:13):
be captured by Mercury's gravity and enter orbit. So spacecraft
that want to get to Mercury and stay there, get
there at a more manageable speed, have to find some
way to perform massive braking maneuvers to counteract the incredible
acceleration that occurs on the way to Mercury's orbit. So
they have to slow down a lot. Now, you might
(05:35):
think this would be easy. Just fire the retro rockets, right?
Just put the retro rockets firing now. But unfortunately, the
amount of chemical rocket fuel that would be required to
slow down enough to gently enter orbit around Mercury is
would probably be prohibitive. It would be hard to leave
(05:56):
Earth with the amount of fuel, the weight in the
fuel that you would need to retro-rocket that much. So
missions that actually want to inter-orbit around Mercury, or hypothetically
in the future, land safely, missions like MESSENGER and BepiColombo,
which we'll talk more about in a minute, they typically
have to perform a complicated series of gravity maneuvers, gravity
(06:19):
assists from planets. So they have to go around the
Sun multiple times over the course of many years using
planets like Earth, Venus, and Mercury itself to iteratively step
down their velocity multiple times until they are finally going
slow enough to slide into orbit around Mercury. But Mariner
(06:39):
10 didn't have to do this because it didn't go
into orbit around the planet. It stayed in orbit around
the Sun, just imaging Mercury during rapid flybys.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah, the Mariner 10 flybys would have been 74 and 75,
NASA mission. This was the first spacecraft to, I guess
you could say, visit Mercury, with, again, the caveat that
it's kind of staying next door. And then this mission
mapped some 45% of the planet's surface and made some
key discoveries about its magnetic field. Prior to that, I
(07:10):
should mention that we did have some pre-probe breakthroughs in
sort of the modern observational era. The transit of Mercury
was first observed by telescope in 1631. And Earth-based radar
was used in 1965 to map the planet's rotation.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
And there have been modern discoveries about Mercury made from
Earth-based imaging as well, right? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Like another one is 1991. Another Earth-based radar breakthrough came
in the form of revealing that there was highly reflective
areas to be found inside shadowed craters on Mercury. They
provided strong evidence of water ice. And then we get
to the era of MESSENGER. So we have a couple
(07:51):
of phases of this. So first of all, MESSENGER launches
August 3rd, 2004, and it ends up conducting three flybys
of Mercury between 2008 and 2009 before it finally achieves
orbital insertion. This would have been, and then the orbital
mission is 2011 through 2015. Once inserted in orbit, MESSENGER
(08:12):
completes the imaging of the planet's surface that Mariner 10 started.
It also confirms the presence of water ice, as well
as the planet's iron core nature, along with other revelations.
We'll probably get into some of these as we proceed.
Researchers end up squeezing as much as possible.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Out of the orbiter.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
The full story of the orbiter is pretty amazing. When
you hear about people, you know, leagues upon leagues away,
you know, cosmic distances away, And they're still making minor
adjustments to how these things are functioning and what resources
they're using up. They squeeze all they can get out
of this before crashing the orbiter into the surface of
the planet, April 30th, 2015.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
And the messenger probe got a lot more juice than
was originally bargained for. Like, uh, I think, I don't
remember the term of the original mission. I think it
was like a year or something, you know, expecting to
get a year of observations out of it. And it
was many years actually. So so it turned out to
be very successful. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Anytime I hear these stories about people on Earth squeezing
more out of these probes, I mean, it almost makes
you want to ask, like, is there an elf aboard?
Is there some sort of like a little guy that
they're communicating with to get like because they're amazing that
they're able to do such amazing things, you know, despite
the distance and despite like the the aging nature of
(09:32):
a lot of this technology?
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Yeah, totally. Sometimes you wonder, do they have inverse gremlins? Yeah.
Though other stories kind of make you think that the
bad gremlins are at work.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Another interesting thing regarding the dreadful sword of the sun,
last time we were talking about the extreme thermal environment
of Mercury, which is, when we talk about the burning
heat of Mercury, it is true that the surface of
Mercury is burning but it's weird to imagine because it
is not a kind of heat that we are used
(10:05):
to on earth all the heat that we're used to
experiencing is heat within a fluid medium like heat within
a liquid or gas medium like hot air or hot
water uh so of course, Mercury is without a significant atmosphere.
So there's nothing, you know, there's no hot air to
touch your skin. Instead, the sources of heat on the
(10:27):
surface of Mercury are direct radiation from the sun above,
which is extreme, and also radiation back from the hot ground.
And of course, I guess, conduction from the hot ground,
if you're touching it, the surface of the planet is
a frying pan. So this comes actually back into the
design of the The probe had to have, for one thing,
(10:50):
a ceramic cloth sunshade to protect it directly from the
sun's rays. So the sun-facing side of it has this
shade that's protecting its instruments. But also, the spacecraft had
to protect itself from radiation coming off of the rocky
surface of the planet itself. And it did this with
(11:11):
a clever tactic, which was a highly elliptical orbit. So
instead of orbiting in like a near circle, MESSENGER went
around Mercury in a very long oval shape so that
it could get close and study the planet in one
part of its orbit. But then another big part of
its orbit would be getting way farther away and getting
(11:34):
distance from the pan so it could cool off. Oh, wow.
I think that was not the only reason. Like, I
think it was also just convenient for how it was
orbitally inserted that it would have this long elliptical orbit.
But that was useful because it would allow this cooling
off period, getting away from the heat element.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Yeah, it's crazy all the different tactics that have to
be employed. I mean, really, to get a craft or
a probe anywhere. But Mercury brings with it special problems.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
It would say. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
So these are the missions that have actually flown. There
have been various proposed missions over time. Landers have also
been proposed by both NASA and the Russian Space Agency.
The NASA proposed lander is, I think, unnamed. It's just
kind of out there as an idea. And then Mercury
P is the mission that is proposed within the Russian
(12:29):
Space Agency. And I think that one's been delayed a bit,
but is, I think, more imminent based on current planning.
But nothing has come to fruition in these projects, if
realized at all. are at least years away, if not,
in some cases, decades away from actually happening. And, you know,
the lander challenge is a tantalizing one, not only because
(12:51):
of the additional scientific data to potentially be obtained via
direct contact with the surface of the planet, but it's
also the only one of the rocky inner planets that
we haven't put a lander on. Not counting Earth, of course.
You know, we're already here. We don't have to. It
would be ridiculous to send up a lander and then
land it right back on the Earth.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
But we have actually landed on Venus. That's the thing
you can forget sometimes. We haven't put a rover on Venus. Right.
And we haven't put anything on Venus that's survived very long.
But yeah, we have put landers down on Venus and
they've sent back some very eerie, haunting looking pictures of
just ground and rocks and a creepy horizon. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
Yeah. So given all of this, it should also come
as no surprise that the idea of manned missions to
Mercury have largely been the stuff of science fiction. And
I'll be coming back to that science fiction later on
(13:52):
in our discussion of Mercury. There's at least one, however
frequently cited NASA paper from the 60s that mentions the
possibility of manned travel. But this is not a paper,
I was looking at it earlier today, and it's not
a paper concerned with the biological nuts and bolts of this. Um, and, uh,
you know, the title of the paper is minimal energy
(14:13):
ballistic trajectories for manned and unmanned missions. So, um, it's,
it very much sticks to that title. It's concerned with, uh,
with sort of the, the math and the energy economy
of getting things to and from, uh, Mercury. It's not,
not really about like all the other problems that you
would have to figure out if you were going to
actually bring people there.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
So it basically, it's a difficult to reach world and
a very hostile one, um, Far more effort has gone
into considering possible manned missions to, of course, Mars and
even Venus, as we've discussed before. Again, you'd have to
take into account extreme velocity, the heat, the radiation, and
for what. You know, it's ultimately a much better job
(14:53):
for a probe, and we're still figuring out the best
way to get a probe. I mean, we're still figuring
out the best way to get a lander there. We
know how to get a probe, and, you know, we've
only sent a few of those to Mercury. But if
we were to land on the innermost planet, what might
we check out? You have a pretty fascinating example of,
you know, I don't know if it's like top of
(15:14):
the list for any kind of like surface exploration, but
I was pretty taken aback by the images.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Well, yeah, the images from above are amazing. It's one
of those things where I don't know if it would
look as amazing on the ground as it does from above.
From the ground, it might just be a bunch of,
you know, weird deep valleys and ditches. But I'll explain.
So I actually got interested in talking about Mercury in
the first place because of a bizarre looking surface feature
(15:43):
that I came across a picture of. It's actually not
just one feature, sort of multiple features combined into one.
If you'd like to look it up yourself while we're
talking about it, you can do an image search for
the spider of Mercury, or you can look up the
term Pantheon Fossi. So this would be spelled like the
word Pantheon and then F-O-S-S-A-E. For those who can't look
(16:04):
it up, I'm going to describe it. And then, Rob,
I'm going to start us kind of zoomed out and
then walk us down closer and closer. You can look
at the images I have in the outline. So imagine
you are looking down from orbit at the gray-brown surface
of Mercury. And in one of Mercury's hemispheres, there is
an enormous, roughly circular depression. This is known as the
(16:27):
Caloris Basin, the hot bowl. The Caloris Basin is a
huge impact crater, one of the biggest in the solar system.
Not the biggest, but one of the biggest. It is
more than 1,500 kilometers in diameter. It's something like the
distance from New York to North Florida. Yikes. And a
lot of the basin's interior, if you look at it,
(16:48):
it's relatively smooth compared to the rest of the planet's surface,
in part because it seems the basin was flooded with
volcanic lava before. after it formed, and this kind of
paved over some pre-existing texture. But you can also see
smaller craters within the bigger crater, which have been made
since the lava flood. However, if you look near the
(17:12):
middle of the hot bowl, not in exactly the middle,
but kind of near the middle of it, there is
a really weird and amazing looking texture that a giant
network of converging lines. These are troughs or big ditches
or valleys in the planet's surface, which extend out in
(17:33):
every direction from a central point. So imagine like an asterisk,
but with many more lines running parallel. It's not just
one middle and then lines radiating straight from the middle.
It's got a sort of series of parallel lines going
out from this generally middle area.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Yeah, kind of like spokes on a wheel, right? Or
some sort of like a crazy Art Deco Christmas star.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Yeah, totally. So you imagine many shallow canyons running out
parallel from a central area, like wrinkles converging or like
a spider's web. And then almost but not exactly at
the center of this converging network of troughs, there is
another crater about, this is a little more than 40
kilometers wide in reality, with a mountainous peak rising at
(18:23):
its center. So it's just a very cool-looking feature. This
was captured for the first time by the Mercury Dual
Imaging System of the MESSENGER mission during a flyby in
January 2008. And the science team initially named the network
of troughs The Spider, but later it got an official name.
(18:45):
You can argue about whether this is an upgrade or
a downgrade in terms of a name. It was later
named the Pantheon Fossi. So the word Fossi comes from
the Latin word for trench. It means like a ditch
or a trench. And the Pantheon part comes from its
visual similarity to the dome of the Pantheon in Rome.
(19:07):
I didn't know this, but if you actually look down
from above, get a drone up in the air or something,
and you look down at the dome of the Pantheon
There is, of course, a circular opening in the center.
You can see that from inside, but then you can
see from above that there are troughs that radiate outward
from the aperture in the middle of the dome. And Rob,
(19:29):
I've put pictures side by side of the Pantheon Fosse
with the crater and then the roof of the Pantheon
in Rome. Yeah, I'd say I see it. I see
what they're going for there.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Though, of course, the crater is a little bit off-center. Yeah. So, accordingly,
the crater at the middle of the feature is now
called the Apollodorus Crater, named after the architect Apollodorus of Damascus,
who was traditionally credited with designing the temple, with designing
the pantheon. I don't know how historically true that is considered, but,
(20:03):
you know, somebody given credit in sort of in tradition. Now,
a really interesting question is, What makes a land look
like that? How did we get this massive star of
trenches converging on a central point within this giant basin?
And why is there a younger crater near the hub
(20:24):
of the wheel? Initially, apparently scientists did wonder, does the crater,
does the Apollodorus crater have something to do with this
star of trenches, or is it just a coincidence? Is it,
you know, just a lucky impact that happened to hit
near the middle of this weird formation?
Speaker 1 (20:42):
It can be kind of frustrating to look at because
you want to move it to the center of the
spider web. You just want to nudge it a little bit.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Totally. You want to scooch it a little bit over.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
But now it's just off center. It seems that later observations,
I think, have ruled out the involvement of the Apollodorus impact.
So it probably was just a coincidence. As far as
I can tell, the question of the cause of the
formation is maybe not entirely settled, though I did find
(21:14):
one paper making a judgment about which explanation was the
best one. So I'm going to talk about that paper.
I can't tell how much active work is still going
on to address this question. Most of the papers exploring
it are from within a few years after the discovery
of the Pantheon Fosse from like 2008 to 2010. Seems
like that's when this was a big deal. So generally
(21:37):
it seems that these troughs or grobbins, to use the
scientific term, are some kind of extensional faults. Extensional faults
are places where there has been stretching of the planet's
crust and causing areas of the surface to collapse down
along fault lines and form long ditches or valleys or depressions.
(22:00):
For a very large analogy on Earth, you can think
of the East African rift. If you've seen pictures of
these valleys, of course, that's a more complex kind of
system of valleys and things. But a similar principle is
at work. Valleys caused by sinking of the top surface
along the fault where the tectonic plates are pulling apart.
(22:21):
So when you read extensional stress in these sources, you
can just shorthand it by thinking stretching, stretching of the surface,
causing things to drop down at the faults. So I
found a paper from 2010 evaluating several of the main
hypotheses about the origin of the radial graubens. It's called
Evaluation of the Origin Hypotheses of Pantheon Fossey, Central Caloris
(22:46):
Basin Mercury. This is by Christian Klimchak. Richard Schultz and
Amanda Naum published in the journal Icarus in 2010. They
look at three main ideas about what could have caused this.
One is, quote, an origin associated with the Apollodorus impact
into a previously domed Caloris Basin floor. They end up
(23:07):
pretty much ruling that out. They say, no, we don't
think it's the impact that formed the Apollodorus crater. It's
just a coincidence.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Hmm.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
They also explore the idea of, quote, graben formation as
surface expressions of dike intrusions. I was trying to understand this.
This was geologically technical, but basically I think this is
referring to magmatic dikes, which are formed when magma flows
into vertically oriented cracks in the rock and they kind
(23:36):
of cut across rock layers. So was that involved in
creating these expressions at the surface above? And then the
third idea they look at is, quote, basin interior uplift alone.
This is what you might also call the doming hypothesis.
And the idea would be that a region on the
(23:56):
inside of the basin was somehow lifted up and created
a sort of dome, you know, raised dome in the
floor of the basin itself. which caused stretching on the
ground on top of the doming area. And you can
think of that kind of like when you blow up
a balloon, you know, you're creating this expansion of a
curved area and that stretches the balloon itself. So it
(24:19):
would be stretching the surface in the same way on
top of the dome here. So the authors analyzed these
different mechanisms. They looked at imagery from, I think, the
Messenger missions, they, or the messenger mission, they compared this
to other radial graben structures on Earth and Venus. They
did some mechanical simulations. And in the end, they conclude,
(24:42):
they basically rule out the Apollodorus impact. They say, no,
that doesn't explain it. And then of the other two explanations,
they say that the doming alone was the better predictor
of the pattern seen in the graben. So they think
it was that Something caused the floor of the crater
to uplift, to stretch up and form a domed area.
(25:02):
And this caused stretching in the surface, which ends up
manifesting as this radial wheel-shaped pattern of kind of spiderweb lines.
It is kind of crazy, though, just because apparently there
are other radial lines. graben formations on Earth and on Venus. So,
(25:23):
you know, they do exist elsewhere, but I feel like
this is the only time I've ever seen something that
actually looked like this.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Yeah, yeah. And it is, again, you have to look
up images of this. It's quite impressive.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
So that's the Pantheon Fosse. You can keep calling it
the spider if you want. I think that's not the
official name, but I bet it'll still answer to spider.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
All right. I want to go to an area that
I think has probably crossed everyone's mind already, and that
is the question of life on Mercury. Could there be
life on Mercury? We've discussed this question regarding various other
planets and moons in our solar system, but you look
(26:13):
at the main information about it, certainly going off the
the publicly available NASA information about Mercury. And this place
is just too hostile for life as we know it.
And that just seems to be a largely agreed upon reality.
You know, much like, you know, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn.
But even with those worlds, there are sometimes interesting ideas,
(26:34):
as we've discussed, regarding what might theoretically live within at
least the upper portions of the atmosphere. Mercury, of course,
does not have an atmosphere. It's certainly not a traditional atmosphere,
and therefore we can't even really entertain notions like that here.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Yeah. So as we talked about in the last episode,
explorations of the idea of life on Mercury, all the
ones I've seen are not like, this is a good
place to look for life. Instead, they're like, what if?
You know, what could work potentially, or what could have
worked at some point in the past? There's They're looking
for interesting ways to play with exceptions to the general
(27:14):
terrain and sort of hostility of the environment there.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Yeah, about the most optimistic, you know, straight up scientific
thing that I've read about life on Mercury or the
potential for life on Mercury comes from the chaotic terrains
of Mercury reveal a history of planetary volatile retention and
loss in the innermost solar system by Rodriguez et al.
published 2020 in Scientific Reports. I'm just going to read
(27:38):
the quote from it here that gets into this aspect
of it. It goes as follows, quote, our results indicate
that the early crust of Mercury could have contained mixtures
of hydrated phases, organics, and ices, which have been driven away, dehydrated,
or chemically altered by magmatic and solar heating, except for
(27:59):
in permanent shadows of polar craters. This going back, we
mentioned about water ice being discovered in some of these craters,
the bottoms of which are sometimes just in internal darkness or,
you know, greatly shielded.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Right.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Metastable and potentially habitable conditions might have developed episodically or
transiently within these crustal materials, thus extending the habitable zone
as far inward towards the sun as Mercury and in
similar places in other solar systems.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
So this is not, to be clear, this is not
arguing that life ever existed on Mercury, but rather that
the planet's ancient subsurface might have briefly possessed the right
conditions to support prebiotic chemistry or simple, you know, microscopic life,
that sort of thing. So a theoretically possible lost habitable
(28:53):
zone on Mercury.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
OK. But it's presented here, you know, as much as
something to take with us in considering exoplanets as anything else.
It's just again, they're not saying we think there was
life on Mercury or there is life on Mercury. Far
from it. They're just saying, technically speaking, the conditions might
have briefly been right for something to have started cooking
before it got cooked.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
If we look at certain extreme possibilities, habitable zones could
be wider than we usually think.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Yeah. Given certain conditions. you're saying there's a chance.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
Yeah. And so at this point, I do want to
turn back to science fiction. And I guess broadly, when
you're looking at science fiction about Mercury, be it concerning
the possibility of alien life or humans going there and
having any kind of presence on Mercury, you do kind
of see this division, and it kind of lines up
with our exploratory history and the history of our understanding
(29:51):
of Mercury. But you go back into sort of like
the pulp fiction, weird fiction, golden age of science fiction era,
and you're going to find a lot more ideas concerning
creatures that live there and people going there and working
or staying there, you know, long term. Whereas once you
get close, you know, more recent decades, certainly, you're going
(30:11):
to see more and more of this idea of Mercury
either being lifeless, it being maybe sparsely inhabited, and what
are the inhabitants are, it's, you know, you're going to
have some sort of like a grim mining colony kind
of environment. It's not going to be presented as as
a happy place, it's going to be like a very
extreme and desperate place in most of these science fiction visions.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
It's the spice mines of Kessel, but transported into our realm.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Yeah. The kind of place that, you know, one Riddick
might have run around on, I guess.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Yeah, totally. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
So I want to roll through a few of these
because they are interesting. It's interesting to sort of like
place them within this timeline. So the first, this one's
definitely going to be an earlier, you know, weird fiction example.
And this is just a brief mention in The Shadow
Out of Time from H.P.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Lovecraft.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
I'm going to read a quote here. This is a
story that's been a long time since I read this one.
As best I can recall, this is one that mostly
deals with a bunch of crazy cosmic horror ideas about
other species and inhuman species that have lived before man
and will live long after, that sort of thing. So
(31:25):
here's a quote. After man, there would be the mighty
beetle civilization, the bodies of whose members the cream of
the great race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook
the elder world. Later, as the Earth's span closed, the
transferred minds would again migrate through time and space to
another stopping place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable
(31:47):
entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them,
clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its
horror-filled core before the utter end. Cute. So, you know, yeah,
lots of cosmic horror in there. But then in the middle,
bulbous vegetables on Mercury. So I don't think we ever
get any other idea, but you can, you know, again,
(32:09):
this would definitely be, I think, a much, you know,
earlier idea of like, okay, you have vegetables on Mercury.
Surely it's possible.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Wait, could this possibly have inspired the Roger Corman movie, the...
What's it called? It Conquered the World. I just had
to look at the poster of It Conquered the World
on my wall to remember what the movie is called.
Bulbous vegetable creatures.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
Were they from Mercury or were they Venusians?
Speaker 2 (32:35):
I think Venus, I think. But I do think they
came from interplanet at least. But it's a bulbous vegetable
that attacks Earth from one of the interplanets. So, I
don't know. Could have been inspired by this story. It's
an artichoke.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Possibly, possibly. Let's see, if you turn to Kurt Vonnegut's
The Sirens of Titan, there are the harmoniums. These are
kite-like organisms that are said to live in the lightless
caves of Mercury. Limited in their intelligence and their sensibility,
but still, I think they're able to say two different
things to humans. And they're presented very much in Vonnegut's
(33:14):
style here. But I guess Vonnegut, to be clear, his work,
even his later work, sometimes kept a foot in the
golden era of science fiction, sort of pursuing different literary ends,
but still engaging with some of those concepts. Let's see,
if you look to the work of Isaac Asimov, one
of his earlier, often referred to as his juvenile novels,
(33:37):
you have Lucky Star and The Big Son of Mercury.
And that one concerns just straight up energy beings living,
non-corporeal energy beings made of force fields and light. This,
of course, is a, is a pretty classic concept in
sci-fi by this point used all the time in Star Trek.
And it's especially helpful if you're trying to position some
(33:57):
sort of life form somewhere where life as we know
it cannot thrive. Well, then you just put life as
we don't know it, some sort of energy thing.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
Sure. Yeah. Um, let's see.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
Oh, this one is, this one's fun. Um, I've ended
up turning to Clark Ashton Smith. I figured surely Clark
Ashton Smith did something on Mercury. This is not a
story I think I'd ever read, but there's one, um,
that concerns two different species living on Mercury, some lizards
and also some subsurface immortals. This is from the story
The Immortals of Mercury. And it basically involves a human
(34:30):
explorer on the planet getting separated from his team. He
gets taken by surface-dwelling reptilians, quote, the huge, ugly, salamander-like
reptiles who seem to roam at will from the Twilight
Zone to the scalding deserts beneath an eternal sky, an
eternal day, rather. And then they end up taking him
to a subterranean race of immortals that live underneath Mercury.
(34:54):
And they're described as, quote, white naked immortals whose serpentine
locks flow behind them on the air. And also described
as an alien extra human race equipped, it would seem,
with scientific knowledge and power to which humanity had not
yet attained.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
But they are naked.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Well, they are. They don't need clothes anymore. They've got the.
They've got extra human intelligence and technology. Which, this one,
I like this example because Clark Ashton Smith seems to
be sort of playing in both directions. Like, go ahead
and have reptiles running around on the surface. But then,
in order to imagine life here, you have to imagine something,
you know, far more advanced than we are. Something that
(35:34):
would be able to have some sort of, like, high
technology civilization still thriving beneath the surface of such a world.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Hmm. You know, I just thought of this, but do
stories like this ever deal with the fact that creatures
that evolved on a world with less gravity than us
would probably be way weaker than us and we could
beat them up? Not necessarily, Adam, but you'd think so.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Well, you know, it does remind me of the Expanse novels.
You have the people that live, I forget their faction
name off the top of my head.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
The Belters?
Speaker 1 (36:08):
The Belters, yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
The Belters. In the books.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
And then I think very early on in the series,
it's more explored that they, um, you know, they have different,
different physiology at this point because they are, they're living
in a, in a, you know, low gravity, zero gravity environment.
And therefore, uh, you know, we're just going to be
crushed if they come down onto a world with gravity.
So sometimes it's explored.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
But it's like gravity torture if they're brought to earth. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
Yeah. Just being brought to earth is this torment, that
sort of thing. So, you know, like everything in science fiction,
Sometimes when it doesn't get in the way of the plot,
it can be explored.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Though I guess interesting that the immortals in the Clark
Ashton Smith thing, it also mentions their locks flowing behind
them in the air. I guess he is imagining there's
air there, but that this was like their hair doesn't fall.
It kind of floats behind them. Is that a gravity
related thing or it's more kind of magic?
Speaker 1 (37:04):
I mean, it may just be language based because I
think a lot of Clark Ashton Smith stuff, it's like,
It's as much about the picture that he's painting with words.
So if it's more beautiful to describe them, their hair
is floating, then that's where he's going to put the attention.
But speaking of The Expanse, The Expanse being a great,
(37:26):
more recent series that deals with a more or less
realistic look at what life beyond Earth might consist of,
even it, I think, only gives passing reference to Mercury.
It's a world in which humans have spread to Mars
and to various other locations of the solar system and
then ultimately beyond our solar system. But I think there's
(37:48):
just like slight mention of Mercury where there may or
may not be some sort of a manned or unmanned
scientific presence, probably orbital. And I think none of the
series action really takes place there. However, you look at
other like sci-fi visions of what human life could be
(38:08):
like on Mercury. And there's some, we also see this division,
the sort of the golden age of sci-fi when people
are like, yeah, we could be there walking around on
the surface. And then more recently, it's more like the
expanse where it's like, well, probably not. Mars, yes. Mercury,
probably a pass. So I have a few examples of
this to mention as well. Let's see. In the work
(38:29):
of Arthur C. Clarke from Rendezvous with Rama, actually, this
has human colonists on Mercury rather. known as the Hermians,
so leading into the Hermes side of things. And they
end up playing a major role in the plot, I'm
to understand. I have a copy of it, but I
never have read it. But they come into the book,
(38:51):
I think, late as a major plot element. And let's see,
we have, there are other sci-fi stories of note that
I'm going to mention here. Let's see, Clifford D. Simmock's
1932 short story, Mutiny on Mercury, has humans living in
domed cities along a twilight strip between night and day
on the planet. Though this will probably cause some alarms
(39:16):
to go off in your head, yes, this one would
rely on a now outdated understanding of the planet's movements
and rotations.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
So this would imply that the planet was tidally locked
with the sun, right? So it would have a perpetual
sort of terminator twilight zone.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
And a tidally locked world, as we discussed on the show,
I think long ago, there are some other great sci-fi
visions of what that might consist of. But yeah, this
one would definitely involve a tidally locked world.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
To be clear, Mercury is not. It does have a
rotating day and night, though its day-night cycle... And its
relationship to its orbit around the sun is very strange
from our point of view in that its solar day
is longer than its year. Not though its solar day
is also different than the amount of time it takes
the planet to rotate. So the time it takes to
(40:04):
go from like noon to noon on Mercury is longer
than it takes for the planet to go around the sun.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Right, right. So now here's coming back to Isaac Asimov's
Lucky Star and the Big Sun of Mercury. This one
seems to entail an idea that tracks more with our
current understanding of Mercury. And this one involves basically like
cities or habitats on something like train tracks that sort
of continually move to stay out of the heat blast
(40:33):
on Mercury to stay out of the daylight. Interesting. That one,
of course, raises all sorts of technical questions. But still,
it's kind of like, OK, this is something we can
kind of imagine, right?
Speaker 2 (40:44):
I guess you really don't want that to break down. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Yeah, I don't know how you work on it if
you have a breakdown during the heat, but I don't know.
It's an interesting concept. Other sci-fi visions have, of course,
gone the Clark Ashton Smith way and said, well, they
just live underground. They'll be safe underground. Let's see, I
already mentioned the Expanse books. Yeah, I would say, yeah,
once more, in general, inhabited visions of Mercury tend to
(41:08):
be more from the golden age of sci-fi and the
pulps and Sci-fi for more recent decades is going to
be more in line with our current understanding and it's
going to see it as a hellish industrial mining world.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Now, coming back to what we said earlier about water,
ice and craters and some of these deep craters on Mercury,
there are craters near the poles that never receive sunlight
all the way to the bottom. And it's apparently stable there.
Night to day, it's going to be darkness, eternal darkness,
if you will. And some futurists have looked to these
as possible places, like, OK, if you had to have
(41:41):
human colonies on Mercury for some reason, this might be
the kind of place where you could situate them. And
then in line with some of our, you know, futurist
ideas about what could happen on, say, the moon, Earth's moon,
like where could you situate things? And sometimes craters offer,
you know, strong possibilities because either they're sheltered, sheltered from
(42:05):
one threat or the other.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
At least they're more stable, like there's less variability. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Others have looked to subterranean spaces such as lava tubes
or even the model from the Lucky Star novel with
some sort of mobile operation that's going to move to
stay on the dark side of the planet. Though I
was not able to find any like hard consideration of
what that might consist of, you know, even in terms
of like, well, how fast would it have to move?
(42:33):
How far would it have to move? What kind of terrain?
How many, you know, how much? How many train tracks
are we having to lay down? Are we going to
have to transport to Mercury or build out of Mercury
in order to make this happen? So none of these options, again,
highly hypothetical and futurist in their nature. None of them
make all the other challenges of Mercury disappear. But they arguably,
(42:55):
I guess, could be sort of the starting place for
other measures and other considerations that would be necessary to
shield the occupants of these colonies from these other threats
of the innermost planet.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
So you're saying we should go?
Speaker 1 (43:08):
I mean, we're, you know, as human beings, we can't
help but imagine going to these places. We feel that
weird sense of manifest destiny, I guess, right? Where, you know,
even today, we can't help but imagine life there. You know,
one way or the other, either something we find or,
(43:30):
of course, something we bring and establish. But again, yeah,
I don't... There are There are a couple of tantalizing
ideas as to why we might feel compelled to go
to Mercury. And I think I'm going to come back
to at least one of those in our next episode
on the innermost planet. But otherwise, yeah, people are not
(43:52):
really lining up to make this. Certainly this is not
going to be a first on the list of places
we want to establish a human presence in our solar
system beyond Earth.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
The memory vacation place from total recall is not selling
a mercury package.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
I mean, we can very little demand. We can dream,
I guess I did. I briefly looked into Warhammer 40,000
fiction because of course, Warhammer 40,000, you got the magic
and the sci-fi nothing's really out of reach for that
kind of a, of a sci-fi world. So I'm like,
they got to have stuff happening on mercury. And sure enough, there's,
there's both plenty and nothing happening on mercury. Like, It
(44:29):
seems like there's a lot of action there, but it's
also not the center of any sort of activity. So
I don't know. With that example, or with really any
of these other sci-fi ideas we've discussed, I would love
to hear from folks out there. I know we have
a lot of sci-fi readers and viewers. There may be
some other really compelling examples of the concepts we mentioned,
(44:49):
or perhaps something entirely different, some entirely different vision of
what life on Mercury could be like, given our current understanding.
or just something like really weird and pulpy from yesteryear,
or some other like sort of crazy futurist idea of
how we could make it work. I'd love to hear those.
Love it if you sent those in.
Speaker 2 (45:08):
Okay, does that do it for part two?
Speaker 1 (45:11):
I think it does. But we're going to be back
with at least one more Mercury episode. We have a
few more angles we want to zero in on and
get even more into the nitty gritty. So there's much
more to discover here. In the meantime, we'd just like
to remind everybody that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays, a short forum episode on Wednesdays, and
(45:33):
on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just
talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple
Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
And I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're back with part
two in our series on the planet Mercury. Mercury is,
of course, the innermost planet in our solar system, also
the smallest and the fastest moving, hence its association with
a wing-footed messenger. In the previous episode, we talked about
some basic physical aspects of Mercury, its density, its moonlessness,
(00:39):
its extremely thin exosphere, the extremes of heat and cold
across its day and night. And we also talked about
the rather surprising fact that under certain imaging conditions, Mercury
has a tail like a comet. Bet you hadn't heard that.
After that, we talked at length about the god Mercury
from Roman mythology and his many jobs. Fleet-footed messenger, patron
(01:04):
of trade and commerce, thievery. You can throw some greasy
wrestling in there.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Shining wrestling, wasn't it?
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Gleaming, yeah. The he of gleaming wrestling. And we got
into some of the thematic associations between Mercury and, of course,
the Greek Hermes, a very similar god covering some similar territory,
and the planet itself. We're back today to talk about more.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
That's right. And by the time we're done with this series,
I think you should know whether or not you want
to go there. I think you'll have your mind made up.
So before we jump into what I think is a
really cool angle about the surface of Mercury— I thought
it might be helpful to provide just a short overview
of our exploration of Mercury in the modern era with
(01:52):
a focus on the probes and also a look at
why it is difficult to get to Mercury.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Absolutely. This is something people might not appreciate, but traveling
to Mercury is not easy, and not just in the
sense that traveling anywhere in space is not easy. Of course,
it takes a lot of planning and technology and science
and math to get anywhere in the solar system and
line up your trajectories right and actually achieve, you know,
(02:19):
orbit around another body in the solar system. But getting
to Mercury is especially hard, even though Mercury is relatively
close to Earth. And when I say getting there is
especially hard, I mean, if you're talking about actually entering
orbit or landing on the planet. So if you're talking
about like going to Mercury and staying there. That is
(02:40):
especially hard. It's arguably the hardest planet in our solar
system to get to. Now, why would that be, even
though it's relatively close to us? The answer is, once again,
the Sun. Mercury lies within the reach of that dreadful
sword of the Sun, gravitationally speaking. And so as a
(03:01):
spacecraft travels closer to the Sun to reach the orbit
of Mercury, it it is accelerated by the sun's gravity.
And it also begins with the orbital energy of its
origin point of earth, you know, earth traveling around in
this higher orbit around the sun. So a craft traveling
to sort of match speed with Mercury to intersect with
(03:23):
it and go into orbit around it needs to find
a way to shed a lot of orbital energy on
the way. And that's not easy to do. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Now, I know from our notes here, Joe, that you're
about to refer to some content that has to do
with the Beppe Colombo mission. This is a current mission
to Mercury, a joint mission between the European Space Agency
and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, consisting of, I believe,
two different orbiters, launched in 2018. It's set to arrive
(03:56):
this November, 2026, after, I believe, an eight-year journey and
nine planetary gravity assists. And after orbital insertion, it's going
to study the planet's magnetic sphere, among other things.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Yeah, I was going to mention BepiColombo because their web
presence has a very good mission explainer article called Why
Does It Take So Long to Get to Mercury? So
to quote from this, talking a bit about the physics involved, quote,
the laws of physics dictate that the spacecraft's total orbital
energy will stay the same unless we find a way
(04:29):
to shed some. Reducing the part of orbital energy related
to the distance from the sun automatically increases the part
related to speed by the same amount. Consequently, as the
spacecraft gets closer to the sun, it begins to speed
up like a car driving downhill. So, yeah, you've got
(04:49):
this problem. As a spacecraft leaves Earth, it comes from Earth,
so it inherits Earth's orbital energy going around in this
higher orbit. And then if it wants to go into
a lower orbit around the sun, it will be accelerated
as it does so. So if you just make a
beeline straight for Mercury, by the time you get there,
your spacecraft will be going way, way too fast to
(05:13):
be captured by Mercury's gravity and enter orbit. So spacecraft
that want to get to Mercury and stay there, get
there at a more manageable speed, have to find some
way to perform massive braking maneuvers to counteract the incredible
acceleration that occurs on the way to Mercury's orbit. So
they have to slow down a lot. Now, you might
(05:35):
think this would be easy. Just fire the retro rockets, right?
Just put the retro rockets firing now. But unfortunately, the
amount of chemical rocket fuel that would be required to
slow down enough to gently enter orbit around Mercury is
would probably be prohibitive. It would be hard to leave
(05:56):
Earth with the amount of fuel, the weight in the
fuel that you would need to retro-rocket that much. So
missions that actually want to inter-orbit around Mercury, or hypothetically
in the future, land safely, missions like MESSENGER and BepiColombo,
which we'll talk more about in a minute, they typically
have to perform a complicated series of gravity maneuvers, gravity
(06:19):
assists from planets. So they have to go around the
Sun multiple times over the course of many years using
planets like Earth, Venus, and Mercury itself to iteratively step
down their velocity multiple times until they are finally going
slow enough to slide into orbit around Mercury. But Mariner
(06:39):
10 didn't have to do this because it didn't go
into orbit around the planet. It stayed in orbit around
the Sun, just imaging Mercury during rapid flybys.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah, the Mariner 10 flybys would have been 74 and 75,
NASA mission. This was the first spacecraft to, I guess
you could say, visit Mercury, with, again, the caveat that
it's kind of staying next door. And then this mission
mapped some 45% of the planet's surface and made some
key discoveries about its magnetic field. Prior to that, I
(07:10):
should mention that we did have some pre-probe breakthroughs in
sort of the modern observational era. The transit of Mercury
was first observed by telescope in 1631. And Earth-based radar
was used in 1965 to map the planet's rotation.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
And there have been modern discoveries about Mercury made from
Earth-based imaging as well, right? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Like another one is 1991. Another Earth-based radar breakthrough came
in the form of revealing that there was highly reflective
areas to be found inside shadowed craters on Mercury. They
provided strong evidence of water ice. And then we get
to the era of MESSENGER. So we have a couple
(07:51):
of phases of this. So first of all, MESSENGER launches
August 3rd, 2004, and it ends up conducting three flybys
of Mercury between 2008 and 2009 before it finally achieves
orbital insertion. This would have been, and then the orbital
mission is 2011 through 2015. Once inserted in orbit, MESSENGER
(08:12):
completes the imaging of the planet's surface that Mariner 10 started.
It also confirms the presence of water ice, as well
as the planet's iron core nature, along with other revelations.
We'll probably get into some of these as we proceed.
Researchers end up squeezing as much as possible.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Out of the orbiter.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
The full story of the orbiter is pretty amazing. When
you hear about people, you know, leagues upon leagues away,
you know, cosmic distances away, And they're still making minor
adjustments to how these things are functioning and what resources
they're using up. They squeeze all they can get out
of this before crashing the orbiter into the surface of
the planet, April 30th, 2015.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
And the messenger probe got a lot more juice than
was originally bargained for. Like, uh, I think, I don't
remember the term of the original mission. I think it
was like a year or something, you know, expecting to
get a year of observations out of it. And it
was many years actually. So so it turned out to
be very successful. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Anytime I hear these stories about people on Earth squeezing
more out of these probes, I mean, it almost makes
you want to ask, like, is there an elf aboard?
Is there some sort of like a little guy that
they're communicating with to get like because they're amazing that
they're able to do such amazing things, you know, despite
the distance and despite like the the aging nature of
(09:32):
a lot of this technology?
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Yeah, totally. Sometimes you wonder, do they have inverse gremlins? Yeah.
Though other stories kind of make you think that the
bad gremlins are at work.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Another interesting thing regarding the dreadful sword of the sun,
last time we were talking about the extreme thermal environment
of Mercury, which is, when we talk about the burning
heat of Mercury, it is true that the surface of
Mercury is burning but it's weird to imagine because it
is not a kind of heat that we are used
(10:05):
to on earth all the heat that we're used to
experiencing is heat within a fluid medium like heat within
a liquid or gas medium like hot air or hot
water uh so of course, Mercury is without a significant atmosphere.
So there's nothing, you know, there's no hot air to
touch your skin. Instead, the sources of heat on the
(10:27):
surface of Mercury are direct radiation from the sun above,
which is extreme, and also radiation back from the hot ground.
And of course, I guess, conduction from the hot ground,
if you're touching it, the surface of the planet is
a frying pan. So this comes actually back into the
design of the The probe had to have, for one thing,
(10:50):
a ceramic cloth sunshade to protect it directly from the
sun's rays. So the sun-facing side of it has this
shade that's protecting its instruments. But also, the spacecraft had
to protect itself from radiation coming off of the rocky
surface of the planet itself. And it did this with
(11:11):
a clever tactic, which was a highly elliptical orbit. So
instead of orbiting in like a near circle, MESSENGER went
around Mercury in a very long oval shape so that
it could get close and study the planet in one
part of its orbit. But then another big part of
its orbit would be getting way farther away and getting
(11:34):
distance from the pan so it could cool off. Oh, wow.
I think that was not the only reason. Like, I
think it was also just convenient for how it was
orbitally inserted that it would have this long elliptical orbit.
But that was useful because it would allow this cooling
off period, getting away from the heat element.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Yeah, it's crazy all the different tactics that have to
be employed. I mean, really, to get a craft or
a probe anywhere. But Mercury brings with it special problems.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
It would say. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
So these are the missions that have actually flown. There
have been various proposed missions over time. Landers have also
been proposed by both NASA and the Russian Space Agency.
The NASA proposed lander is, I think, unnamed. It's just
kind of out there as an idea. And then Mercury
P is the mission that is proposed within the Russian
(12:29):
Space Agency. And I think that one's been delayed a bit,
but is, I think, more imminent based on current planning.
But nothing has come to fruition in these projects, if
realized at all. are at least years away, if not,
in some cases, decades away from actually happening. And, you know,
the lander challenge is a tantalizing one, not only because
(12:51):
of the additional scientific data to potentially be obtained via
direct contact with the surface of the planet, but it's
also the only one of the rocky inner planets that
we haven't put a lander on. Not counting Earth, of course.
You know, we're already here. We don't have to. It
would be ridiculous to send up a lander and then
land it right back on the Earth.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
But we have actually landed on Venus. That's the thing
you can forget sometimes. We haven't put a rover on Venus. Right.
And we haven't put anything on Venus that's survived very long.
But yeah, we have put landers down on Venus and
they've sent back some very eerie, haunting looking pictures of
just ground and rocks and a creepy horizon. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
Yeah. So given all of this, it should also come
as no surprise that the idea of manned missions to
Mercury have largely been the stuff of science fiction. And
I'll be coming back to that science fiction later on
(13:52):
in our discussion of Mercury. There's at least one, however
frequently cited NASA paper from the 60s that mentions the
possibility of manned travel. But this is not a paper,
I was looking at it earlier today, and it's not
a paper concerned with the biological nuts and bolts of this. Um, and, uh,
you know, the title of the paper is minimal energy
(14:13):
ballistic trajectories for manned and unmanned missions. So, um, it's,
it very much sticks to that title. It's concerned with, uh,
with sort of the, the math and the energy economy
of getting things to and from, uh, Mercury. It's not,
not really about like all the other problems that you
would have to figure out if you were going to
actually bring people there.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
So it basically, it's a difficult to reach world and
a very hostile one, um, Far more effort has gone
into considering possible manned missions to, of course, Mars and
even Venus, as we've discussed before. Again, you'd have to
take into account extreme velocity, the heat, the radiation, and
for what. You know, it's ultimately a much better job
(14:53):
for a probe, and we're still figuring out the best
way to get a probe. I mean, we're still figuring
out the best way to get a lander there. We
know how to get a probe, and, you know, we've
only sent a few of those to Mercury. But if
we were to land on the innermost planet, what might
we check out? You have a pretty fascinating example of,
you know, I don't know if it's like top of
(15:14):
the list for any kind of like surface exploration, but
I was pretty taken aback by the images.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Well, yeah, the images from above are amazing. It's one
of those things where I don't know if it would
look as amazing on the ground as it does from above.
From the ground, it might just be a bunch of,
you know, weird deep valleys and ditches. But I'll explain.
So I actually got interested in talking about Mercury in
the first place because of a bizarre looking surface feature
(15:43):
that I came across a picture of. It's actually not
just one feature, sort of multiple features combined into one.
If you'd like to look it up yourself while we're
talking about it, you can do an image search for
the spider of Mercury, or you can look up the
term Pantheon Fossi. So this would be spelled like the
word Pantheon and then F-O-S-S-A-E. For those who can't look
(16:04):
it up, I'm going to describe it. And then, Rob,
I'm going to start us kind of zoomed out and
then walk us down closer and closer. You can look
at the images I have in the outline. So imagine
you are looking down from orbit at the gray-brown surface
of Mercury. And in one of Mercury's hemispheres, there is
an enormous, roughly circular depression. This is known as the
(16:27):
Caloris Basin, the hot bowl. The Caloris Basin is a
huge impact crater, one of the biggest in the solar system.
Not the biggest, but one of the biggest. It is
more than 1,500 kilometers in diameter. It's something like the
distance from New York to North Florida. Yikes. And a
lot of the basin's interior, if you look at it,
(16:48):
it's relatively smooth compared to the rest of the planet's surface,
in part because it seems the basin was flooded with
volcanic lava before. after it formed, and this kind of
paved over some pre-existing texture. But you can also see
smaller craters within the bigger crater, which have been made
since the lava flood. However, if you look near the
(17:12):
middle of the hot bowl, not in exactly the middle,
but kind of near the middle of it, there is
a really weird and amazing looking texture that a giant
network of converging lines. These are troughs or big ditches
or valleys in the planet's surface, which extend out in
(17:33):
every direction from a central point. So imagine like an asterisk,
but with many more lines running parallel. It's not just
one middle and then lines radiating straight from the middle.
It's got a sort of series of parallel lines going
out from this generally middle area.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Yeah, kind of like spokes on a wheel, right? Or
some sort of like a crazy Art Deco Christmas star.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Yeah, totally. So you imagine many shallow canyons running out
parallel from a central area, like wrinkles converging or like
a spider's web. And then almost but not exactly at
the center of this converging network of troughs, there is
another crater about, this is a little more than 40
kilometers wide in reality, with a mountainous peak rising at
(18:23):
its center. So it's just a very cool-looking feature. This
was captured for the first time by the Mercury Dual
Imaging System of the MESSENGER mission during a flyby in
January 2008. And the science team initially named the network
of troughs The Spider, but later it got an official name.
(18:45):
You can argue about whether this is an upgrade or
a downgrade in terms of a name. It was later
named the Pantheon Fossi. So the word Fossi comes from
the Latin word for trench. It means like a ditch
or a trench. And the Pantheon part comes from its
visual similarity to the dome of the Pantheon in Rome.
(19:07):
I didn't know this, but if you actually look down
from above, get a drone up in the air or something,
and you look down at the dome of the Pantheon
There is, of course, a circular opening in the center.
You can see that from inside, but then you can
see from above that there are troughs that radiate outward
from the aperture in the middle of the dome. And Rob,
(19:29):
I've put pictures side by side of the Pantheon Fosse
with the crater and then the roof of the Pantheon
in Rome. Yeah, I'd say I see it. I see
what they're going for there.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Though, of course, the crater is a little bit off-center. Yeah. So, accordingly,
the crater at the middle of the feature is now
called the Apollodorus Crater, named after the architect Apollodorus of Damascus,
who was traditionally credited with designing the temple, with designing
the pantheon. I don't know how historically true that is considered, but,
(20:03):
you know, somebody given credit in sort of in tradition. Now,
a really interesting question is, What makes a land look
like that? How did we get this massive star of
trenches converging on a central point within this giant basin?
And why is there a younger crater near the hub
(20:24):
of the wheel? Initially, apparently scientists did wonder, does the crater,
does the Apollodorus crater have something to do with this
star of trenches, or is it just a coincidence? Is it,
you know, just a lucky impact that happened to hit
near the middle of this weird formation?
Speaker 1 (20:42):
It can be kind of frustrating to look at because
you want to move it to the center of the
spider web. You just want to nudge it a little bit.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Totally. You want to scooch it a little bit over.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
But now it's just off center. It seems that later observations,
I think, have ruled out the involvement of the Apollodorus impact.
So it probably was just a coincidence. As far as
I can tell, the question of the cause of the
formation is maybe not entirely settled, though I did find
(21:14):
one paper making a judgment about which explanation was the
best one. So I'm going to talk about that paper.
I can't tell how much active work is still going
on to address this question. Most of the papers exploring
it are from within a few years after the discovery
of the Pantheon Fosse from like 2008 to 2010. Seems
like that's when this was a big deal. So generally
(21:37):
it seems that these troughs or grobbins, to use the
scientific term, are some kind of extensional faults. Extensional faults
are places where there has been stretching of the planet's
crust and causing areas of the surface to collapse down
along fault lines and form long ditches or valleys or depressions.
(22:00):
For a very large analogy on Earth, you can think
of the East African rift. If you've seen pictures of
these valleys, of course, that's a more complex kind of
system of valleys and things. But a similar principle is
at work. Valleys caused by sinking of the top surface
along the fault where the tectonic plates are pulling apart.
(22:21):
So when you read extensional stress in these sources, you
can just shorthand it by thinking stretching, stretching of the surface,
causing things to drop down at the faults. So I
found a paper from 2010 evaluating several of the main
hypotheses about the origin of the radial graubens. It's called
Evaluation of the Origin Hypotheses of Pantheon Fossey, Central Caloris
(22:46):
Basin Mercury. This is by Christian Klimchak. Richard Schultz and
Amanda Naum published in the journal Icarus in 2010. They
look at three main ideas about what could have caused this.
One is, quote, an origin associated with the Apollodorus impact
into a previously domed Caloris Basin floor. They end up
(23:07):
pretty much ruling that out. They say, no, we don't
think it's the impact that formed the Apollodorus crater. It's
just a coincidence.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Hmm.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
They also explore the idea of, quote, graben formation as
surface expressions of dike intrusions. I was trying to understand this.
This was geologically technical, but basically I think this is
referring to magmatic dikes, which are formed when magma flows
into vertically oriented cracks in the rock and they kind
(23:36):
of cut across rock layers. So was that involved in
creating these expressions at the surface above? And then the
third idea they look at is, quote, basin interior uplift alone.
This is what you might also call the doming hypothesis.
And the idea would be that a region on the
(23:56):
inside of the basin was somehow lifted up and created
a sort of dome, you know, raised dome in the
floor of the basin itself. which caused stretching on the
ground on top of the doming area. And you can
think of that kind of like when you blow up
a balloon, you know, you're creating this expansion of a
curved area and that stretches the balloon itself. So it
(24:19):
would be stretching the surface in the same way on
top of the dome here. So the authors analyzed these
different mechanisms. They looked at imagery from, I think, the
Messenger missions, they, or the messenger mission, they compared this
to other radial graben structures on Earth and Venus. They
did some mechanical simulations. And in the end, they conclude,
(24:42):
they basically rule out the Apollodorus impact. They say, no,
that doesn't explain it. And then of the other two explanations,
they say that the doming alone was the better predictor
of the pattern seen in the graben. So they think
it was that Something caused the floor of the crater
to uplift, to stretch up and form a domed area.
(25:02):
And this caused stretching in the surface, which ends up
manifesting as this radial wheel-shaped pattern of kind of spiderweb lines.
It is kind of crazy, though, just because apparently there
are other radial lines. graben formations on Earth and on Venus. So,
(25:23):
you know, they do exist elsewhere, but I feel like
this is the only time I've ever seen something that
actually looked like this.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Yeah, yeah. And it is, again, you have to look
up images of this. It's quite impressive.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
So that's the Pantheon Fosse. You can keep calling it
the spider if you want. I think that's not the
official name, but I bet it'll still answer to spider.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
All right. I want to go to an area that
I think has probably crossed everyone's mind already, and that
is the question of life on Mercury. Could there be
life on Mercury? We've discussed this question regarding various other
planets and moons in our solar system, but you look
(26:13):
at the main information about it, certainly going off the
the publicly available NASA information about Mercury. And this place
is just too hostile for life as we know it.
And that just seems to be a largely agreed upon reality.
You know, much like, you know, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn.
But even with those worlds, there are sometimes interesting ideas,
(26:34):
as we've discussed, regarding what might theoretically live within at
least the upper portions of the atmosphere. Mercury, of course,
does not have an atmosphere. It's certainly not a traditional atmosphere,
and therefore we can't even really entertain notions like that here.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Yeah. So as we talked about in the last episode,
explorations of the idea of life on Mercury, all the
ones I've seen are not like, this is a good
place to look for life. Instead, they're like, what if?
You know, what could work potentially, or what could have
worked at some point in the past? There's They're looking
for interesting ways to play with exceptions to the general
(27:14):
terrain and sort of hostility of the environment there.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Yeah, about the most optimistic, you know, straight up scientific
thing that I've read about life on Mercury or the
potential for life on Mercury comes from the chaotic terrains
of Mercury reveal a history of planetary volatile retention and
loss in the innermost solar system by Rodriguez et al.
published 2020 in Scientific Reports. I'm just going to read
(27:38):
the quote from it here that gets into this aspect
of it. It goes as follows, quote, our results indicate
that the early crust of Mercury could have contained mixtures
of hydrated phases, organics, and ices, which have been driven away, dehydrated,
or chemically altered by magmatic and solar heating, except for
(27:59):
in permanent shadows of polar craters. This going back, we
mentioned about water ice being discovered in some of these craters,
the bottoms of which are sometimes just in internal darkness or,
you know, greatly shielded.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Right.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Metastable and potentially habitable conditions might have developed episodically or
transiently within these crustal materials, thus extending the habitable zone
as far inward towards the sun as Mercury and in
similar places in other solar systems.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
So this is not, to be clear, this is not
arguing that life ever existed on Mercury, but rather that
the planet's ancient subsurface might have briefly possessed the right
conditions to support prebiotic chemistry or simple, you know, microscopic life,
that sort of thing. So a theoretically possible lost habitable
(28:53):
zone on Mercury.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
OK. But it's presented here, you know, as much as
something to take with us in considering exoplanets as anything else.
It's just again, they're not saying we think there was
life on Mercury or there is life on Mercury. Far
from it. They're just saying, technically speaking, the conditions might
have briefly been right for something to have started cooking
before it got cooked.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
If we look at certain extreme possibilities, habitable zones could
be wider than we usually think.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Yeah. Given certain conditions. you're saying there's a chance.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
Yeah. And so at this point, I do want to
turn back to science fiction. And I guess broadly, when
you're looking at science fiction about Mercury, be it concerning
the possibility of alien life or humans going there and
having any kind of presence on Mercury, you do kind
of see this division, and it kind of lines up
with our exploratory history and the history of our understanding
(29:51):
of Mercury. But you go back into sort of like
the pulp fiction, weird fiction, golden age of science fiction era,
and you're going to find a lot more ideas concerning
creatures that live there and people going there and working
or staying there, you know, long term. Whereas once you
get close, you know, more recent decades, certainly, you're going
(30:11):
to see more and more of this idea of Mercury
either being lifeless, it being maybe sparsely inhabited, and what
are the inhabitants are, it's, you know, you're going to
have some sort of like a grim mining colony kind
of environment. It's not going to be presented as as
a happy place, it's going to be like a very
extreme and desperate place in most of these science fiction visions.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
It's the spice mines of Kessel, but transported into our realm.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Yeah. The kind of place that, you know, one Riddick
might have run around on, I guess.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Yeah, totally. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
So I want to roll through a few of these
because they are interesting. It's interesting to sort of like
place them within this timeline. So the first, this one's
definitely going to be an earlier, you know, weird fiction example.
And this is just a brief mention in The Shadow
Out of Time from H.P.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Lovecraft.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
I'm going to read a quote here. This is a
story that's been a long time since I read this one.
As best I can recall, this is one that mostly
deals with a bunch of crazy cosmic horror ideas about
other species and inhuman species that have lived before man
and will live long after, that sort of thing. So
(31:25):
here's a quote. After man, there would be the mighty
beetle civilization, the bodies of whose members the cream of
the great race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook
the elder world. Later, as the Earth's span closed, the
transferred minds would again migrate through time and space to
another stopping place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable
(31:47):
entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them,
clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its
horror-filled core before the utter end. Cute. So, you know, yeah,
lots of cosmic horror in there. But then in the middle,
bulbous vegetables on Mercury. So I don't think we ever
get any other idea, but you can, you know, again,
(32:09):
this would definitely be, I think, a much, you know,
earlier idea of like, okay, you have vegetables on Mercury.
Surely it's possible.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Wait, could this possibly have inspired the Roger Corman movie, the...
What's it called? It Conquered the World. I just had
to look at the poster of It Conquered the World
on my wall to remember what the movie is called.
Bulbous vegetable creatures.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
Were they from Mercury or were they Venusians?
Speaker 2 (32:35):
I think Venus, I think. But I do think they
came from interplanet at least. But it's a bulbous vegetable
that attacks Earth from one of the interplanets. So, I
don't know. Could have been inspired by this story. It's
an artichoke.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Possibly, possibly. Let's see, if you turn to Kurt Vonnegut's
The Sirens of Titan, there are the harmoniums. These are
kite-like organisms that are said to live in the lightless
caves of Mercury. Limited in their intelligence and their sensibility,
but still, I think they're able to say two different
things to humans. And they're presented very much in Vonnegut's
(33:14):
style here. But I guess Vonnegut, to be clear, his work,
even his later work, sometimes kept a foot in the
golden era of science fiction, sort of pursuing different literary ends,
but still engaging with some of those concepts. Let's see,
if you look to the work of Isaac Asimov, one
of his earlier, often referred to as his juvenile novels,
(33:37):
you have Lucky Star and The Big Son of Mercury.
And that one concerns just straight up energy beings living,
non-corporeal energy beings made of force fields and light. This,
of course, is a, is a pretty classic concept in
sci-fi by this point used all the time in Star Trek.
And it's especially helpful if you're trying to position some
(33:57):
sort of life form somewhere where life as we know
it cannot thrive. Well, then you just put life as
we don't know it, some sort of energy thing.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
Sure. Yeah. Um, let's see.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
Oh, this one is, this one's fun. Um, I've ended
up turning to Clark Ashton Smith. I figured surely Clark
Ashton Smith did something on Mercury. This is not a
story I think I'd ever read, but there's one, um,
that concerns two different species living on Mercury, some lizards
and also some subsurface immortals. This is from the story
The Immortals of Mercury. And it basically involves a human
(34:30):
explorer on the planet getting separated from his team. He
gets taken by surface-dwelling reptilians, quote, the huge, ugly, salamander-like
reptiles who seem to roam at will from the Twilight
Zone to the scalding deserts beneath an eternal sky, an
eternal day, rather. And then they end up taking him
to a subterranean race of immortals that live underneath Mercury.
(34:54):
And they're described as, quote, white naked immortals whose serpentine
locks flow behind them on the air. And also described
as an alien extra human race equipped, it would seem,
with scientific knowledge and power to which humanity had not
yet attained.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
But they are naked.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Well, they are. They don't need clothes anymore. They've got the.
They've got extra human intelligence and technology. Which, this one,
I like this example because Clark Ashton Smith seems to
be sort of playing in both directions. Like, go ahead
and have reptiles running around on the surface. But then,
in order to imagine life here, you have to imagine something,
you know, far more advanced than we are. Something that
(35:34):
would be able to have some sort of, like, high
technology civilization still thriving beneath the surface of such a world.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Hmm. You know, I just thought of this, but do
stories like this ever deal with the fact that creatures
that evolved on a world with less gravity than us
would probably be way weaker than us and we could
beat them up? Not necessarily, Adam, but you'd think so.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Well, you know, it does remind me of the Expanse novels.
You have the people that live, I forget their faction
name off the top of my head.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
The Belters?
Speaker 1 (36:08):
The Belters, yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
The Belters. In the books.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
And then I think very early on in the series,
it's more explored that they, um, you know, they have different,
different physiology at this point because they are, they're living
in a, in a, you know, low gravity, zero gravity environment.
And therefore, uh, you know, we're just going to be
crushed if they come down onto a world with gravity.
So sometimes it's explored.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
But it's like gravity torture if they're brought to earth. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
Yeah. Just being brought to earth is this torment, that
sort of thing. So, you know, like everything in science fiction,
Sometimes when it doesn't get in the way of the plot,
it can be explored.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Though I guess interesting that the immortals in the Clark
Ashton Smith thing, it also mentions their locks flowing behind
them in the air. I guess he is imagining there's
air there, but that this was like their hair doesn't fall.
It kind of floats behind them. Is that a gravity
related thing or it's more kind of magic?
Speaker 1 (37:04):
I mean, it may just be language based because I
think a lot of Clark Ashton Smith stuff, it's like,
It's as much about the picture that he's painting with words.
So if it's more beautiful to describe them, their hair
is floating, then that's where he's going to put the attention.
But speaking of The Expanse, The Expanse being a great,
(37:26):
more recent series that deals with a more or less
realistic look at what life beyond Earth might consist of,
even it, I think, only gives passing reference to Mercury.
It's a world in which humans have spread to Mars
and to various other locations of the solar system and
then ultimately beyond our solar system. But I think there's
(37:48):
just like slight mention of Mercury where there may or
may not be some sort of a manned or unmanned
scientific presence, probably orbital. And I think none of the
series action really takes place there. However, you look at
other like sci-fi visions of what human life could be
(38:08):
like on Mercury. And there's some, we also see this division,
the sort of the golden age of sci-fi when people
are like, yeah, we could be there walking around on
the surface. And then more recently, it's more like the
expanse where it's like, well, probably not. Mars, yes. Mercury,
probably a pass. So I have a few examples of
this to mention as well. Let's see. In the work
(38:29):
of Arthur C. Clarke from Rendezvous with Rama, actually, this
has human colonists on Mercury rather. known as the Hermians,
so leading into the Hermes side of things. And they
end up playing a major role in the plot, I'm
to understand. I have a copy of it, but I
never have read it. But they come into the book,
(38:51):
I think, late as a major plot element. And let's see,
we have, there are other sci-fi stories of note that
I'm going to mention here. Let's see, Clifford D. Simmock's
1932 short story, Mutiny on Mercury, has humans living in
domed cities along a twilight strip between night and day
on the planet. Though this will probably cause some alarms
(39:16):
to go off in your head, yes, this one would
rely on a now outdated understanding of the planet's movements
and rotations.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
So this would imply that the planet was tidally locked
with the sun, right? So it would have a perpetual
sort of terminator twilight zone.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
And a tidally locked world, as we discussed on the show,
I think long ago, there are some other great sci-fi
visions of what that might consist of. But yeah, this
one would definitely involve a tidally locked world.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
To be clear, Mercury is not. It does have a
rotating day and night, though its day-night cycle... And its
relationship to its orbit around the sun is very strange
from our point of view in that its solar day
is longer than its year. Not though its solar day
is also different than the amount of time it takes
the planet to rotate. So the time it takes to
(40:04):
go from like noon to noon on Mercury is longer
than it takes for the planet to go around the sun.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Right, right. So now here's coming back to Isaac Asimov's
Lucky Star and the Big Sun of Mercury. This one
seems to entail an idea that tracks more with our
current understanding of Mercury. And this one involves basically like
cities or habitats on something like train tracks that sort
of continually move to stay out of the heat blast
(40:33):
on Mercury to stay out of the daylight. Interesting. That one,
of course, raises all sorts of technical questions. But still,
it's kind of like, OK, this is something we can
kind of imagine, right?
Speaker 2 (40:44):
I guess you really don't want that to break down. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Yeah, I don't know how you work on it if
you have a breakdown during the heat, but I don't know.
It's an interesting concept. Other sci-fi visions have, of course,
gone the Clark Ashton Smith way and said, well, they
just live underground. They'll be safe underground. Let's see, I
already mentioned the Expanse books. Yeah, I would say, yeah,
once more, in general, inhabited visions of Mercury tend to
(41:08):
be more from the golden age of sci-fi and the
pulps and Sci-fi for more recent decades is going to
be more in line with our current understanding and it's
going to see it as a hellish industrial mining world.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Now, coming back to what we said earlier about water,
ice and craters and some of these deep craters on Mercury,
there are craters near the poles that never receive sunlight
all the way to the bottom. And it's apparently stable there.
Night to day, it's going to be darkness, eternal darkness,
if you will. And some futurists have looked to these
as possible places, like, OK, if you had to have
(41:41):
human colonies on Mercury for some reason, this might be
the kind of place where you could situate them. And
then in line with some of our, you know, futurist
ideas about what could happen on, say, the moon, Earth's moon,
like where could you situate things? And sometimes craters offer,
you know, strong possibilities because either they're sheltered, sheltered from
(42:05):
one threat or the other.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
At least they're more stable, like there's less variability. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Others have looked to subterranean spaces such as lava tubes
or even the model from the Lucky Star novel with
some sort of mobile operation that's going to move to
stay on the dark side of the planet. Though I
was not able to find any like hard consideration of
what that might consist of, you know, even in terms
of like, well, how fast would it have to move?
(42:33):
How far would it have to move? What kind of terrain?
How many, you know, how much? How many train tracks
are we having to lay down? Are we going to
have to transport to Mercury or build out of Mercury
in order to make this happen? So none of these options, again,
highly hypothetical and futurist in their nature. None of them
make all the other challenges of Mercury disappear. But they arguably,
(42:55):
I guess, could be sort of the starting place for
other measures and other considerations that would be necessary to
shield the occupants of these colonies from these other threats
of the innermost planet.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
So you're saying we should go?
Speaker 1 (43:08):
I mean, we're, you know, as human beings, we can't
help but imagine going to these places. We feel that
weird sense of manifest destiny, I guess, right? Where, you know,
even today, we can't help but imagine life there. You know,
one way or the other, either something we find or,
(43:30):
of course, something we bring and establish. But again, yeah,
I don't... There are There are a couple of tantalizing
ideas as to why we might feel compelled to go
to Mercury. And I think I'm going to come back
to at least one of those in our next episode
on the innermost planet. But otherwise, yeah, people are not
(43:52):
really lining up to make this. Certainly this is not
going to be a first on the list of places
we want to establish a human presence in our solar
system beyond Earth.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
The memory vacation place from total recall is not selling
a mercury package.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
I mean, we can very little demand. We can dream,
I guess I did. I briefly looked into Warhammer 40,000
fiction because of course, Warhammer 40,000, you got the magic
and the sci-fi nothing's really out of reach for that
kind of a, of a sci-fi world. So I'm like,
they got to have stuff happening on mercury. And sure enough, there's,
there's both plenty and nothing happening on mercury. Like, It
(44:29):
seems like there's a lot of action there, but it's
also not the center of any sort of activity. So
I don't know. With that example, or with really any
of these other sci-fi ideas we've discussed, I would love
to hear from folks out there. I know we have
a lot of sci-fi readers and viewers. There may be
some other really compelling examples of the concepts we mentioned,
(44:49):
or perhaps something entirely different, some entirely different vision of
what life on Mercury could be like, given our current understanding.
or just something like really weird and pulpy from yesteryear,
or some other like sort of crazy futurist idea of
how we could make it work. I'd love to hear those.
Love it if you sent those in.
Speaker 2 (45:08):
Okay, does that do it for part two?
Speaker 1 (45:11):
I think it does. But we're going to be back
with at least one more Mercury episode. We have a
few more angles we want to zero in on and
get even more into the nitty gritty. So there's much
more to discover here. In the meantime, we'd just like
to remind everybody that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays, a short forum episode on Wednesdays, and
(45:33):
on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just
talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple
Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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