About 20 years ago I got it into my head to write a screenplay: an update of “When Worlds Collide,” based on the book from the 1930’s not the movie from 1951. When originally written, the question was “can we build a rocketship to fly to another planet?” My rewrite would set it a century later (mid/late 2030’s), when the question would be “how many rocketships can we build?” The arks would go not just to Bronson Beta but also to Mars, the Moon and asteroids, all of which would have already been visited by that point anyway. Nations, billionaires, corporations, organizations all slapping together ships of all sizes, to launch as many people, plants and critters as possible. The story would be otherwise much the same as the book.
The sequel, “After Worlds Collide” would remain possible. In the original, the Nazis and the Commies join forces to build their own ark and continue to be dicks on the new world. In my update, their place would be taken by, say, the ChiComs and the Jihadis… but again the story would be similar. One American ark lands on the new world, which they find to have once been populated, the original inhabitants having left a number of domed cities behind. The new world ends up in solar orbit, but an elliptical one… as far out as Mars, not quite as close in as Venus. So those domes cities will come in *damned* handy. But there are arks all over the place, with some working together, others working to take over.
Sadly, I never got around to writing the screenplay. News broke that Spielberg wanted to do a remake of his own and the idea of me writing a competing screenplay became monumentally stupid. Still, I’ve never forgotten the idea and I still think it has merit.
13 responses to “My “When Worlds Collide””
I’ve had a similar idea for years, with the added wrinkle that due to the dynamics and gravitational/tidal effects of the encounter there would be a location on Earth’s surface where objects would be flung off and encounter Bronson Beta, so from that spot “arks” could carry colonists to Beta without needing a lot of delta-v capability. (Landing the darned things could be a problem, though!) JPL would work furiously to identify just >where< that location would be, but of course the data and models wouldn't be good enough to give adequate precision … you'd sit and wait and hope. And there would be battles for possession of the spot …
An inbound jovian planet would be spotted decades before the encounter, since the binary planets would have to be moving slowly enough that Beta's orbital velocity around Alpha would allow it to be captured by the Sun.
I've read that the authors had planned to write a third novel in which the refugees find some of the original inhabitants — frozen in suspended animation, perhaps? "When Worlds Collude"?
Since Earth and Beta are basically the same, what happens to one happens to the other. If Earth gets torn apart by the close pass, so does Beta. And if Earth gets disrupted enough so that bits go flying into space, the whole planet becomes, at best, an ocean planet… an ocean of lava. Nobody left alive to flee.
Hiding the planets from detection is of course a serious issue, not one I have a good solution to. Best I’ve got is that they *have* been detected, but the government keeps a clamp on it, up to and including not only sabotaging scopes but whacking astronomers. The secret is kept as long as possible so that the US government has time to crank out as many arks in secret as possible so that the future belongs of America, fuck yeah.
When the discovery is inevitably made public, there’s immediate social collapse planet-wide. Those countries we don’t like don’t have the time or resources to put together a fleet of arks, while the US has them on standby. “Peace out, bitches!”
Since Earth and Beta are basically the same, what happens to one happens to the other. If Earth gets torn apart by the close pass, so does Beta.
No, what you’d have would be a five-body problem (Sun, Earth, Moon, Alpha, and Beta) with lots of parameters that could be adjusted to give the desired scenario. Earth could have a glancing collision with Alpha in which tidal effects and Earth’s rotation could yield non-intuitive results, including negative effective surface gravity on a small area of Earth opposite Alpha. Also, IIRC, Beta was in a very elliptical orbit around Alpha, and could escape. Also also, I don’t think Alpha’s mass was ever specified, so it might have been Neptune-sized instead of Jupiter-sized.
A “sweet spot” scenario would be much easier for the government to keep secret than simply suppressing knowledge of the incoming planets. Comet hunters all over the world would spot Alpha and Beta on their way in! Comet Kohoutek, a miserable little iceball two kilometers across, was spotted when it was 4 AUs out from Earth and took seven months to make perihelion passage. Bronson Alpha might well be discovered 100 or more AUs out.
“Earth could have a glancing collision with Alpha in which tidal effects and Earth’s rotation could yield non-intuitive results, including negative effective surface gravity on a small area of Earth opposite Alpha.”
Not unless you want to posit magic or wacky new physics. Perhaps a glancing blow by a primordial black hole could rip a bit of Earth off without utterly destroying the rest of the planet, but there’s no Earth+Earth interaction that could do so.
I think we have a disconnect here.
In my scenario, Earth gets creamed, and almost all of its mass ends up inside Alpha. Tiny pieces of it escape the collision/merger; tiny, tiny pieces from one specific spot on the Earth’s surface get flung toward Beta (or more precisely, where Beta will be at some time in the future). Some of those tiny pieces would be spaceships full of hopeful refugees. It would not be a particularly pleasant journey, and the chance of survival would be low. But the chance of survival would be zero anywhere else.
The rest of the scenario proceeds as Balmer and Wylie described.
Beta, in an elliptical orbit around Alpha, is nowhere near the collision, and it survives intact. It ends up orbiting the Sun.
Nothing would prevent the U.S. and other nations from trying to send refugees in spaceships to Beta, Mars, or various asteroids. In fact, until the “sweet spot” is discovered by simulations, that would be the only hope for survival of humanity. (The original B&W scenario takes out the Moon as well as Earth.)
Another thought: There should be no objection to launching entire fleets of big Orion nuclear-pulse spacecraft directly from Earth’s surface, since Earth will be destroyed anyway, But I’m sure someone would object for environmental protection reasons …
Lotsa possibilities here!
One thing which they simply ignored was the condition of Beta. The thing should be pretty near frozen solid due to its long journey through intersellar space. Sure, its core might be molten and all but it would have had eons of radiating heat away with no thermal input coming to its surface until it got snared by our Sun. And even then that would’ve been but a brief thing.
Perhaps it would’ve been enough to have at least started to melt the frozen crust that’d be across the entire planet. But the temperature differentials such heating would create would make absolutely horrendous weather conditions all across that new planet. Windstorms on a Jupiter level sorta thing.
So, even if – by no small miracle – the atmospheric composition was something we could breathe, the physical conditions on the planet’s surface would be lethal and stay that way for a long while before it stabilized enough to be survivable.
Kinda hard to run a “verdant new earth” tale in the face of that sorta thing.
As to the planetary destruction bit…
Make it so that we get lucky – astronomically lucky – in that it’s multiple large bodies coming at us. Thanks to whatever caused Beta to go a wandering through the galaxy also sent some other big bits of rock with it. Thus, it’s the whole mess that gets snagged by Sol’s gravitational pull. And instead of Beta smacking Earth into the Apocalypse it’s one or more of those other big rocks that were coorbiting with Beta.
And Beta just so happens to fall into an orbit just far enough away from Earth’s that there’s minimal to no destabilizing effects on either. Yeah, tall order that. But easier to imagine that the two actual planets actually collinding.
So, you’d still get Earth being rendered uninhabitable while also still getting a “new Earth” for those ark ships to voyage to.
A lot of the condition of Beta would depend on its long-term relationship with Alpha. If it was in a close orbit, tidal heating would keep the core alive and active; volcanoes might be active enough to keep the atmosphere actually gaseous. But safest to assume that the oxygen and nitrogen have been frozen out onto the surface for millions of years. Probably by the time it passed the orbit of Mars the atmosphere would be pretty well woken up.
Humans might not that the whole planet is one giant scorch mark. Assume Beta is just like Earth, but Alpha comes wandering in, passes close by and yoinks Alpha away from its such and off into the void. It gets a bunch of *really* bad quakes, but otherwise is not physically badly damaged by the process. As it leaves its sun, all the plants die, leaving dead vegetation covering the surface. The dead vegetation quickly freezes. But the freeze is fast enough that weather shuts down, so the whole planet isn’t covered in snow and ice… just frozen dead plants. The temps continue to drop. CO2 freezes out, then nitrogen and oxygen. A couple meters of N2/O2 mixed ice covers the world. Until along comes a small rock. Hits the planet and 30 km/sec, creates a local hot spot. But it’s a hot spot on oxygen ice, mixed in with hydrocarbons. instant conflagration that races outwards. Probably doesn’t cross oceans, but I could see it crossing whole continents. A few such impacts will eventually burn up all the surface vegetation. The atmosphere would quickly re0freeze, now with more frozen CO2.
Even if the vegetation didn’t burn up … think of the smell when it all thaws out!
Might not be much smell. If the bacteria and fungus responsible for decay *also* perma-died in the millions of years of near absolute zero, then it’d just be a wet mess of hydrocarbons until Terrestrial bugs sloooowly get to work at it.
Which brings up something about non-Earth planets I’ve been kicking ’round for quite the while.
Namely, bacteria.
I’ve read that the bacteria within the Earth’s crust outweighs all the life on our planet’s surface. That in the very pores of the stone there’s bacteria. So, you could sterilize the Earth’s surface of life but then that bacteria would ooze its way up to the surface and put paid to that sterilization attempt.
Same same then for any alien planet. It could very well have its own bacteria that occupied the same sort of ecological niche as our bacteria here on Earth. Okay, so all the alien biome on the surface did the hard freeze thing in deep space. But perhaps the planet’s core kept enough heat going to keep that freeze for getting frozen enough into the crust to kill off the bacteria there.
Thus it’d start coming to the planet’s surface once the planet’s orbit brought it ’round close enough.
And as a long time theme, that bacteria might be absolutely deadly to Earth life. I think it beyond optimistic to think that humanity would be able to simply waltz onto an alien planet without care of its endemic biological hostility.
So, okay, you got Beta thawing out with all that wet mess of hydrocarbons on the surface.
That may well have been so frozen – and then burnt – to be truly inert and sterile. But then up bubbles to original alien bacteria oozing from the very bedrock of the planet itself. That could render it permanently inhabitable.
For a grander science fiction theme – one well beyond this particular tale – I could see future terraforming requiring the “bake until sterilized” approach being done by the terraformers. This, to include enough baking that the very crust of the planet turns molten and thus utterly sterilizes even the planetary crust itself.
“Melt it from orbit! It’s the only way to be sure!”
So, it’d be an uninhabitable mess for decades – if not centuries – even after starting its orbit around our Sun.
Maybe. Might be well primed for terraforming. The native ecosystem would likely be permanently destroyed, but the chemical building blocks would be in place for the terrestrial followup to start all over fairly quickly.