Oh dear. Ula's in some serious hot water now! That creepy red hologram face in the last panel is Ethel, the ship's AI. She's appeared briefly on a few pages, but you'd be forgiven for not remembering her. Also, it looks like the old girl isn't quite herself at the moment…
A quick look at Bitsy the Robot's character design: You'll note that Bitsy doesn't have legs; instead there's a third limb with a claw at the end. That's because Bitsy is a space robot. They never intended it to walk on solid ground, so for clambering about inside the zero-g interior of a slowly spinning spacecraft, it's better to have a third hand than two legs.
Of course, it would be even nicer to have four hands… If you look really closely at Avram, you may have noticed that his “feet” have fingers and opposable thumbs.
More bad news in the search for extraterrestrial life. It's been the hip thing in astrobiology circles to speculate on what kind of life may evolve around red dwarf stars. And there's good reason to hope that red dwarfs can sustain life. Proxima Centauri b, the nearest exoplanet to our solar system, is in orbit around a red dwarf. Red dwarfs make up 75 percent of the stars in our galaxy, and they live for a lot longer than big massive stars like our sun. Whereas the lifespan of our sun can be measured in a few billion years, the life of a typical red dwarf can stretch into trillions of years. So if life can evolve around a red dwarf, then that dramatically increases the likelihood of finding life out there, and that life should have a stable home for thousands of times over the natural lifespan of our solar system.
Unfortunately, the prospects for life developing around red dwarfs took a major blow earlier this year, when NASA researchers discovered that habitable zones around these stars is not a healthy place for planets to form. Specifically, it's not a place where planets can hold onto an atmosphere very long. As it turns out, red dwarfs are extremely active stars and emit tens of times more dangerous X ray and ultraviolet radiation than our sun. They also produce massive stellar ejections and so-called “superflares” on a frighteningly regular basis. In some cases, superflare events which happen on our sun maybe once every 200 years, have been observed happening every 2 hours on red dwarfs. Considering that the habitable zone for one of these stars is 20 times closer in than in our own solar system, this is bad news for any developing atmosphere. Even with a magnetosphere to blunt some of the effects, it's expected that an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere like ours would last at most 10 to 20 million years under these conditions.
So what does all that mean? In a nutshell, it means exoplanets in orbit around red dwarfs are very poor candidates for developing intelligent life. Basked in sterilizing radiation, tidally locked, and with their atmospheres stripped away by superflares, these could only be nurseries for the most hardy of microbial extremophiles. However, it does not rule out red dwarfs as a possible place to colonize in some very distant future. Looking for a more permanent home and no longer bound to living on heavy planets with their burdensome gravity wells, a technologically advanced civilization could set up shop in the neighborhood around a cold red dwarf and live in relative tranquility for trillions of years, long after our sun becomes a burnt out stellar husk.
We're coming up on the last week to vote for your favorite comics in this year's Drunk Duck Awards. If you haven't voted yet, please take the time to visit the Drunk Duck Awards ballot and let your voice be heard! The voting totals are usually far from astronomical, so nominations very often come down to just one or two votes. So if you know a comic that deserves some special recognition, this is your opportunity to show their creators some appreciation and possibly win them some (virtual) bling in the process! Voting ends on July 29.
And of course, this comic is hoping to snag a nomination or two, so please consider Transneptunian for these following and any other categories you think it's worthy of.
Also, if you have the time to spare, the Drunk Duck Awards are looking for volunteers to help with the judging process and to make presentations. If you're interested, please stop by the Volunteer Thread.
I'll see you all next week, hopefully after you've voted!
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