Science in Fiction (#12): Beyond the Red by Ava Jae

Welcome to this month's Science in Fiction feature! Science in Fiction is a meme I created to showcase the wonderful aspects of science in Young Adult fiction novels. For more information and previous feature, check out the "Science in Fiction" tag!

This month, I'm featuring Beyond the Red by Ava Jae!

Beyond the Red review

Beyond the Red didn't really work for me, but I did find the world of the book to be very intriguing. Kora, the female protagonist, is Sepharon, which is an alien race. The planet inhabited is not Earth, and in the story, Earth is something like history. This planet is dominated by aliens, and humans are enslaved or in hiding. 

So today, I'm going to talk about extraterrestrial life!

There is a lot of speculation and research and general lack of knowledge when it comes to alien life. Have aliens ever existed? Do they exist? There are 100 billion worlds that could be inhabited, and space is something we seem to know little about, even with all the cool gadgets and technology that sends back gorgeous pictures.

I'm going to present some recent articles on extraterrestrial life. 

Scans have been sent out into space for radio signals, but none have ever turned up. Maybe life never existed? But evidence of amino acids (i.e. the building blocks of life) have been found on steroids. And we know that Mars and Venus had liquid on their surfaces at some point. According to this article from Forbes, perhaps life existed on some of those 100 billion planets, but it couldn't sustain itself for billions of years. It's possible that the planets did not form a livable atmosphere, like the Earth has. The phenomena of life existing but snuffing out because it cannot sustain itself is known as Gaian bottleneck.

Another article, from the Daily Mail, supports the Forbes article. If life existed on other planets, it's likely that it did not last for long, because of the wrong climate and atmospheric conditions on those other planets.

The Gaian bottleneck theory is fully expanded in a paper written by Chopra and Lineweaver, The Case for a Gaian Bottleneck: The Biology of Habitability Astrobiology. This scientific paper can be found HERE.

Science Daily featured an article involving a different set of evidence and theories. Scientists have been looking for signs of microbial life in a part of Antarctica, which has conditions similar to Mars. But no life has been detected in the numerous samples taken. This research cannot necessarily prove that life never existed on Mars, but it supports the theory that the climate conditions of Mars - both past and present - would have made it difficult for life to sustain itself.


So we're nowhere closer to discovering life in the great big void that is space! I think it would rather exciting to find life outside of Earth, but the life we might find probably wouldn't be little green Martians, or the Sepharon in Beyond the Red, or Wookies from Star Wars. Right? 

What are your opinions on aliens, of any form?