The Two-Body Plus Foolishness Problem (Or, How to Lose a Star System On Some Garbage)

Sometimes, as in the case of the glancing kilonova that scattered neutron-star fragments across a 20-light-year radius, things are out of place and gravity isn't working right and humans listen to those already living among the stars. And sometimes …

“And sometimes you want to kick a bunch of your fellow humans into the nearest black hole and be done with it!” Commodore Wilhelm Allemande said. “Spaghettification would save the consortium the price of serving these people spaghetti in prison for the next several decades!”

He lost his English after that, returning to the colorful resources of his native German. The wincing of his cousin, my first officer Helmut Allemande, told me I didn't even need to ask and to keep the universal translator off.

I also didn't need to ask what had whipped the 95-year-old commodore into this rage befitting the ignition of nuclear fission in a "new" brown dwarf's core. Myself and my uncle, Admiral Benjamin Banneker-Jackson, were just calmer in temperament, but everyone on the Amanirenas was well and truly ticked off. We were too close for comfort when the people in danger of being spaghettified either by a black hole or the wrath of Cdre. Allemande had forgotten the oldest and most dangerous math problem in space for 90 years too long: the three-body problem.

“Two-body plus 2 Jupiter masses of straight foolishness, actually,” my uncle coldly corrected the head of Minrod Mining when the reality of the situation finally pierced that head's skull.“We are rescuing the people in the settlement, but we're not rescuing your company. Prepare to wind that down, and get your personal affairs in order.”

In short, when you are a mining company, and the star system you are mining has inhabitants that insist you leave no waste, and there is a star system next door that humans found empty and have settled, you can just chuck your trash next door out of sight. Certainly not on the Earth-sized M-class planet humans are terraforming, but maybe the big pretty gas giants could work. Pick the nearest and biggest one, and out of sight, out of mind, right?

For 90 years, sure.

What nobody at Minrod realized was that the biggest gas giant was already 12.8 times the mass of Jupiter, and at around 13 masses of Jupiter, a gas giant will become a brown dwarf, fusing deuterium in its core and generating its own heat and light. The planet was already close enough … may have already been fusing a bit of deuterium here and there … but nothing to cause it to transition until...

Not only that. The smaller of the two gas giants was a modest 5.6 Jupiter masses, and was doing fine in its synchronized in its orbit with the larger giant … so, just for variety, it too was occasionally used as a garbage dump, slowly de-syncing the delicate balance in the planets' orbits … Meanwhile, things were slowly getting weird on the M-class planet as the decades went on, but people were studying the star of the system to try to understand what was happening because who could even imagine that the mass of the two gas giants, and thus the stability of the system, were being manually adjusted by human activity?

Nobody was ready – and I mean nobody – when the bigger gas giant ignited at 14.2 Jupiter masses and broke orbit, and then the second gas giant also broke its stable orbit around the system's sun as the two broke synchronization.

The Amanirenas had finally gotten the call because things had gotten beyond the settlement's ability to make sense of the temperature increase and the increase in tectonic activity that was going on just before the real fun started – so that left us flying in on the day gravity no longer worked as predicted in the system and the system had a second clear source of heat and light. So long as the two gas giants had stayed aligned, they and the sun acted more like a binary system – but once the synchronization had been broken, the three-body problem's problems went into full effect.

Did I mention the system had three asteroid belts, and all of those belts dissolved, just that quick, sending asteroids toward the ruling star by the billions, and thus bound to set up the M-class planet and all ships visiting it with heavy bombardment?

The little M-class planet caught in the middle? Doomed for human habitation, its orbit ripped to shreds and about to be in a shooting gallery of space rocks in addition to the heat from the new brown dwarf tipping the ecological balance away from Earth-like conditions.

(I will mention here that Ensign Pushkin had nerves of steel – if on Earth you need a man to get you safely through a minefield and 150-car wreck scene driving backwards uphill in a 20-century stick-shift purely by real-time sensor data because the navigational computer has flipped out, now-Cmdr. Alexander Pushkin is the man you want. He was only 20 then, and Cdre. Allemande said to him, “Boy, I would have messed my pants if I were your age and had to deal with that! I'm putting you up for commendation – that was brilliant!” Ensign Pushkin answered, “Sir, I was just trying not to die!”)

The Amanirenas's navigational computer was not programmed to ever face this level of human foolishness – so we backed out far enough to do a warp jump above the plane of the system and drop in from above the doomed planet's North Pole instead of attempting to cut through the chaos. Thus began a month of comparing notes and scanning the system for neutron star fragments that weren't there while also packing up 1,552 people and all their broken hopes and shattered dreams.

At some point in there, Cmdr. Allemande remembered.

“Of course our navigational computer crashed – it was looking for confirmation of two gas giants and a rocky planet. Zelthar 3 was just below the mass limit to start fusing deuterium, at 12.8 Jupiter masses – so how are the sensors reading it as a deuterium-burning brown dwarf?”

Answer: in 90 years, Minrod Mining had dumped 1.5 Jupiter masses – the equivalent of all the planets in the Solar System – into Zelthar 3, and just a modest half-Jupiter mass into Zelthar 2. We scanned their cores, and sure enough, there were the trace elements of beryllium and silicates from the system's rocky worlds next door.

“We literally threw away a star system on some garbage,” Lt. Jorge Almuz said at comms when Cmdr. Allemande announced to me what the scans had confirmed.

“That does appear to be the case, Lieutenant,” I said. “We are mighty enough as a species to terraform a planet, but we can't fix a busted star system even though apparently, given long enough without supervision, we can bust said star system.”

That rested heavily on the bridge all day.

I informed Cdre. Allemande and Adm. Banneker-Jackson of the discovery, and the two old professionals stayed professional, for the admiral was the ranking officer and had to report to the fleet admiral and the consortium regional governor and get the evacuation plan together, and the other would be doing the legwork on the entire history of Minrod Mining to give to the ranking officer for recommendations to the regional governor about how to work with the natives in the star system next door who had been lied to for 90 years.

Only later, after getting to know the people whose lives had been uprooted, after listening to the excuses and ultimately ineffective but copious legal wrangling of Minrod Mining, did Wilhelm Allemande finally have his fit of rage. Although styles of expression differed, we could not disagree with the substance of why he was upset. As Lt. Almuz had said, humanity had thrown away a whole star system, and the hopes and dreams of a lot of fellow humans, on some garbage.

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My Process as Author and Artist

I recently discovered that the barycenter of Jupiter and the sun is not the center of the sun but some kilometers outside the sun, and so instead of actually orbiting the sun, Jupiter orbits the common barycenter it has with the sun. This fact directly inspired last week's story with the glancing kilonova, but carried over here because the discovery reminded me of the three-body problem, and why although the Solar System has eight planets (sorry, Pluto -- I miss you!), the three-body problem doesn't happen because the combined mass of everything else in the Solar System beside Jupiter is too small -- we basically are a two-body system between Jupiter and the sun, and so everything stays stable because of their stability. OBVIOUSLY, this is delicate, but, it works, and our pale blue dot stays habitable.

But I was thinking about the pale blue dot image that was captured by NASA of our own Earth, and how much life and opportunity we basically waste on garbage -- pollution, obviously, but there are so many other kinds -- and if we mess up our pale blue dot, there is no other. So, this golden, lovely fractal here, representing the sun of a different system ...

... and the two big spheres seen as if we were on approach into the system, is actually all a frame for the Pale Blue Dot, represented in this story as the M-Class planet and seen in the middle of the art. Wilhelm Allemande as a character shares my deep frustration with how we treat each other and our planet sometimes ... I just write stories and spare my voice all the yelling!