Our planet Earth, Gaia in Greek, considered as a living being, regularly corresponds with another planet in the universe, Aurora Kepler 452 B in the constellation of the Swan. Gilles Voydeville makes us discover this magnificent interstellar correspondence.
Month of the gushing springs, on Kepler
Month of June 2021 on Gaia
My dear Gaia
Ah my sister ! How can I not thank you for your last letter? Because the descriptions you give me of your Charming’s discoveries will allow me to be one step ahead and perhaps to manage problems of overpopulation to come on my earth. These adorable viral creatures are very elegant means of regulating the species.
Merging the elements
Here on Kepler, my Ovoids are becoming more and more interested in astronomy. I don’t know if it’s in view of a massive teleportation to another planet to save themselves from my mood swings. Regardless of this fear, my Ovoids have just realized that my star the Great Swan is deadly. They discover little by little the origin of its brightness: thermonuclear reactions. They now know that once its reserve of nuclear fuel is exhausted, the fusion of its heavy elements will take place.
My star will then expand and expel its mantle to surround itself with a sumptuous nebula, diaphanous, aerial but depriving my earth little by little of the necessary heat.
Then, as the temperature drops, the fusion will dry up and the core of my star will contract. Thus its transformation into a white Dwarf will make of our star not a swan with the downy plumage palming in the wake of its mother on the edges of your rivers, but an old stunted and stunted swan, dragging itself on a dead arm while waiting for his.
This sad end has the merit of being gentle. Because if our stars are more massive, because of the enormous temperatures and pressures, the end is violent. When fusion reaches the stage of iron, it is too stable for the nuclear combustion chain to continue to transform it into a heavier element. And the pressure which resulted from the reactions disappears to no longer oppose gravity. Thus the star collapses on itself. The atoms are so close that a new force is born: the strong interaction. The heart of the star becomes composed of matter of an unheard of density, a neutron star. And if the star is even bigger, gravity overcomes the strong interaction and the neutron star collapses again to form that famous black hole you are so afraid of.
X-rays and gamma rays
When their core collapses, whether to make a neutron star or a black hole, these stars eject a monstrous energy into space that lights up the universe with a light greater than that of an entire galaxy: they are called Supernovas. I know that your Charming Ones have been observing these phenomena for a long time: in your year 1572, the Dane Tycho Brahe noted in the constellation of Cassiopeia the appearance of a star brighter than your sister Venus. So bright that he was dazzled, amazed and intrigued by the rapid decline in its brightness.
In some cases, the light is brighter and the explosion is accompanied by an intense magnetic field that emits X-rays and gamma rays of very high energy : we call this neutron star a magnetar. It can then release a jet of burning plasma at the same time as the gamma radiation. The star implodes under the jet and becomes a Supernova called Ic-BL, ten times more energetic than an ordinary Supernova. In this case, it emits a light a thousand times brighter but a hundred times more ephemeral. To spot an extremely distant Supernova, my astronomers understood that it was necessary to detect gamma rays to orient the telescopes and see the light at the end of the star. This technique allows us to target light variations that would otherwise have gone unnoticed and see a phenomenon that may have occurred far, far away, a long, long time ago.
The last gamma-ray burst observation allowed us to detect a transient emission linked to the explosion of a star 11.4 billion light years away…
This immensity impresses me every time I am confronted with it. I always try to avoid thinking about it. But the reality is this and to understand my life, my past and my future, I must accept to go through it. The nausea that these abysmal distances give me is somewhat compensated by the fact that you seem closer. But still far if we consider the slowness of your spaceships. I hope that my ICL scientists will soon find a way to bend our space-time to create adorable little wormholes in which our inhabitants will crawl like worms in a soft wood to embrace and enrich each other’s experiences.
Eternity is an illusion
When we study the death of the stars, strangely enough we think about our future. Because you and I could feel eternal. It is true that if we compare the length of our life to that of a butterfly of your summer nights or to that of one of my chronophagous caterpillars, we are. The more I learn, the more I realize that eternity is an illusion. Not so reassuring, because eternity has something frightening about it. Never being able to finish with time. To undergo the future without escape. Knowing that you will still be here tomorrow while the suffering continues. I don’t understand how your Charmings have been infatuated with an eternal life for a long time. It must be from a time when life was so short that they did not have the leisure to exhaust its benefits. Even a pleasure, if it is too often renewed and identical, by its repetition and lack of innovation becomes tiresome.
I am almost happy to know that when my star dies, I will disappear. After a long life of serving the Universe and our creatures, I will have the right to a total, definitive rest, without recall.
In the sidereal peace, I will not know myself anymore, I will not worry anymore, I will not taste my rest, I will be the rest. Well, enough daydreaming, I am not there yet.
A species mentality
My tender Gaia, I do not lead the carefree life of my creatures. My Ovoids lead a life without much anguish. As they are not obliged to work to feed themselves – each Ovoid having a pouloid for this purpose – many are idle. I have the impression that they are bored. This probably explains their indifference to going through a beater, which, as soon as they are injured or old, will recycle them into plasma to fertilize the soil and grow grass to feed the pouloids. My Ovoids lack individual ambition when compared to your Charmings. Their ego is undersized. They have a species mentality. A behavior that is similar to that of your ants.
The individual is the anthill, the ant is just one cell.
Or like your periodical cicadas of America which come out of the ground every thirteen or seventeen years to reproduce: they all come out at the same time which satiates the predators and allows a certain number of them to survive in sufficient numbers to perpetuate the race. The sacrifice of some parts to save the whole. If one is supposed to be without conscience, one must be programmed. But programmed by what? By a desire to live that selects the individuals suitable for sacrifice. It is paradoxical and not easy to imagine how it works. We can call this pre-cognitive intelligence. It is at the base of the development of the most elementary species to the most sophisticated, including our little viruses, and the source of the perpetuation of these species. Why do some species end up disappearing? The species having protected themselves from their predators by various means including satiation, it is first of all environmental factors such as climate change that are often the cause of disappearances. Your Charming is another one. His power is such that he can make species disappear to feed himself – bluefin tuna – by hunting them for their value – rhinos and elephants – by administering antibiotics to eradicate bacilli such as the plague, or by immunizing himself by vaccination and thus making smallpox disappear.
A life of bliss in the Kingdom of Heaven
In your superior beings, the Charmings who have the consciousness of being, the first reflex is to survive individually rather than to save the species. Your Charming one will only sacrifice himself if he hopes for a divine reward. During your crusades, you told me a few centuries ago, that some Crusaders accepted to die so that their body could fill the ditches in front of St John of Acre. And thus facilitated, in a small way, the capture of this stronghold that would open the way to Jerusalem. But in their creed, (which comes from “kredh” in Sanskrit which means to give one’s heart and life force in the hope of a return. Religious belief and economic credit have the same origin), these Crusaders manifested a hope of return on the sacrificial investment, that of an eternal life of bliss in the kingdom of heaven.
Whereas these insects I have mentioned are not supposed to have beliefs. They don’t need to believe. Their collective behavior has selected individual sacrifice for global survival.
Carpe diem
I know that on your earth, my Gaia, this behavior scares your Charming Democrats. For they see in the promotion of individual sacrifice only a manipulation for the benefit of an oligarchy. As many other species are governed by the sacrifice of a part for the survival of the whole, your democrats do not admit it yet, but in the long run, they cannot exclude the possible supremacy of a dictatorship sacrificing a part of the people for the survival of the charming race. Your democrat is an individualist who ignores himself. He has allowed the taking of power of your charming individuals over the group. But as you have already informed me, it is to be feared that it is the group that will take back the power, and this, in the form of an autocrat or even a tyrant.
Let’s forget about it. Carpe diem. Oh, how beautiful!
In this evening on my northern hemisphere, my high wild grasses undulate under the zephyrs which descend from the Anatheic Mountains. They shiver in the winds like the mane of a unicorn. They dance like a bouquet of ballerinas bewitched by music. They scent like a jasmine at nightfall. Their colors shimmer under the oblique grapes of my star at sunset. They are the youth of my earth and heal its ulcers. A life of grass, of wild grasses, of bewitching grasses. I wait for each vesper to intoxicate myself with their game.
Here is my sweet Gaia. I am done with my stories.
Nothing is true, everything is possible.
Only the way matters to me.
The beautiful tales make the good people.
I embrace you with waves and light.
Your Dawn