Proxima B Musings
A Social VR Experience
Proxima B is a planet, like Earth is a planet. It is also a world in VR, where a group can gather on a little surface that feels like a magic carpet and fly slowly over the landscape below.
With our eyes half open we lose ourselves in a long gaze. Calming down, until the imagining begins, as a guided meditation.
First, seeing ourselves orbiting Proxima B as it orbits Proxima Centauri, a Red Dwarf that does not burn as brightly as the Earth’s Sun.
Proxima Centauri is the closest star to us — about 4 light years away, or 25 trillion miles.
Proxima B is like Earth in some ways, about the same size, maybe a little bigger. There’s a lot we don’t know for sure about its density and composition, but probably gravity is a bigger deal. You wouldn’t to fall.
We think it’s in a zone around its Proxima Centauri that could support liquid water.
But there’s problem. Solar flares.
Our Sun shoots out flares. We see the big ones if we’re in the right place and call them Aurora Borealis.
Proxima Centauri also shoots out solar flares— except they’re 2000 times more intense than ours. Sounds bad, but magnetic fields in the right place could deflect them.
Magnetic fields handle energy like it’s water off a duck’s back.
Life on Proxima B might need to be ultra sensitive to the protection afforded by magnetic fields because it could be quick-fried at any time without it.
Lots of life on Earth read magnetic fields. It’s part of how migrating birds navigate. Magneto-sense isn’t a super power. It’s an obvious candidate for dashboard if needed.
It’s not on our dashboard but life here might see the flares not as a threat but as an opportunity to grab free energy forever. Sure a 2000X wave would wipe us out but Proxima B people could have millions of miles of underground superconductor material to absorb and disperse the shocks.
Let’s imagine what could be just beneath the surface of the planet, a gigantic capillary system for managing energy.
Let’s imagine Proxima B people live inside the system, shielded from flares with access to unlimited power, away from dangers of surface gravity. An integrated living chamber, defense, and power plant.
Could be a nice situation for life, but there’s another factor.
We have a Sun. Proxima B people have three.
The Red Dwarf Proxima Centauri is number one.
Over the planet’s horizon in the picture above is a bright light. It’s two stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, so bright they look like one. They make up a binary star system orbiting around each other, with our friend Proxima B orbiting both of them.
Three-body calculations are one of the most difficult problems in celestial mechanics. We do not have the information needed for reliable simulations of the overall Alpha Centauri multi-star system.
But we can imagine.
We can imagine a world of Proxima B people living safely and sustainably, tucked into their planet. And imagine the people gradually learning about their star and its larger siblings. Understanding that their own way of being was threatened not by how they were treating their home planet, but by how their home planet was about to be treated by others.
Alpha Centauri A and B are big. At the right confluence of orbits, the binary system will predictably rip Proxima B from its home in the habitable zone of a Red Dwarf and into some new position, impossible to see with certainty, around or within the binary system.
That’s a Change!
Wildfires and hurricanes feel like a minor nuisance compared to being wrenched out of a cosmic parking place you thought was permanent.
And then when signals appeared to be coming from the Alpha Centauri system back in 2020, it felt even more relevant to speculate.
Now that the signals have been identified as echoes of ourselves, there is no reason to stop imagining.
Living on a planet is living on a spaceship. Are we bound as crew members to the dynamics set in motion billions ofyears ago?
Imagine there’s a way to fly a planet. Maybe the people of Proxima B would have the resources and the motivation to do it.
Maybe the people of Earth would some day.
Tom Nickel is a Top Writer on VR for Medium, https://tomnickel.medium.com/
