Songs of Distant Earth
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Songs of Distant Earth is the common title of several science fiction works by Arthur C. Clarke. A science fiction short story, a short movie synopsis, and a 1986 soft science fiction novel all bear the same title. The rest of this article deals with the novel.
The story is centred on a rendezvous between human beings far in the future, after the destruction of the Earth, on the oceanic planet of Thalassa.
Unlike Clarke's other works, this piece focuses on characterisation and emotional development, instead of technological change. In some sense, it was written as a response to critics who attacked his writings as cold and impersonal.
In the story, humans respond to the prospect of unavoidable doom by launching a series of robot colony ships into space, to continue Earth life after the destruction of the homeworld (caused by the Sun becoming a nova). Thalassa is colonised by one such ship, but loses contact due to a natural disaster. Meanwhile, just as the predicted time of cataclysm is due to elapse, vacuum energy technology is invented to allow the construction of one near-light-speed vessel, the Magellan, which is launched to build the last colony of mankind. (Previous colony ships involved frozen embryos, or various forms of DNA synthesis. In Magellan, a living crew is transported in cryogenic stasis.)
En route to their target, Planet Sagan, the Magellan makes a planned stop at planet Thalassa to replenish their worn down asteroid shield, which has been steadily chipped away by interstellar debris. A small crew is awakened to perform the repair work on the ship's ice shield. Because Thalassa hasn't maintained their interstellar communications antenna, they are unaware of the coming of the Magellan until its entry into the atmosphere. The novel continues by tackling the impact of this reunion, documenting the efforts of the Magellan crew to repair their ship, and most poignantly, the possibility of love amidst the barriers of distance and time.
Scientific aspects
Neither cryogenic stasis nor "induced hibernation" have yet been proven feasible for human beings. However, recent tests (2005) have shown the possibility of inducing a short term hibernation-like state on mice. [1] (http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=31&art_id=qw1114245362991U252)
Vacuum energy is a complex topic of modern physics, and the concept has repeatedly been hijacked by pseudoscientific theories. It is impossible to tell whether Clarke actually considered a vacuum-energy engine a scientific possibility.
The logistics of space travel at near-light speeds is also explored in the novel with some detail.
The starting point of the plot, i. e. the destruction of Earth, has been shown to be an impossibility. In the novel, Clarke mentions the solar neutrino problem (the fact that the Sun seems to emit a lot less neutrinos than it should), and then the scientists in the future Earth are said to discover that the problem lies in an instability of the Sun, which will lead to its explosion into a nova. However, barring fundamental mistakes in our current theories of star evolution, the Sun is not going to become a nova. As for the "missing" neutrinos, it was later shown that these particles shift from one type to another en route from the Sun, so detectors looking for a particular type of neutrinos missed a large part (one third to one half).
The Songs of Distant Earth is also an album by Mike Oldfield.