Dragons Made Me Do It: Season 2, Episode #1: Make It Make Sense, part 1

Lleu: And welcome to Season 2 of Dragons Made Me Do It, one of potentially many podcasts about media related in some way, however distant, to Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series — but still the only one by us.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m Tequila Mockingbird, and I took one astronomy class and one epidemiology/history of medicine class in undergrad.

Lleu: I’m Lleu, and I took four astronomy classes, so I’m basically an astronomer, whereas Tequila, before we were recording, accidentally referred to the astronomy class as an astrology class.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, what you’re saying is you’re basically an astrologer? [laughter] And today we’re joined by two friends of the podcast for a discussion of the science, or lack thereof, on Pern.

Roxie: Hello! I’m Roxie. My scientific credentials are that I completed an entire half of a physics degree ten years ago but have continued to do an unrelated career in STEM. My Pern credentials…Pern is not a part of my childhood, but I do have great nostalgia for my friends telling me about things that I haven’t read. So I have enjoyed every episode of Dragons Made Me Do It, except for the one that they posted the day before we recorded this, and I have read, in preparation for this podcast, 0.7% of Dragonflight, which is to say, the introduction, which is the only part that’s important.

Nazh: And I’m Nazh. My Pern credentials are that, as a kid, I had the quote-unquote “original trilogy,” if it can be called a trilogy, and the Harper Hall trilogy, of which I read Dragonflight and the two Menolly books religiously, most of the rest of them occasionally. I liked The White Dragon more than I think it merited in retrospect, and I’m not entirely sure why. Mostly I was a Harper Hall kid. My scientific credentials are that I got an ecology and evolutionary biology degree, which I took one step into turning into being an actual ornithologist and then crashed out. So now I scratch that itch by just wildly reinterpreting science fiction and fantasy ecology, and I’m very excited to do so today.

Tequila Mockingbird: Exactly! What a weird coincidence! That’s what we want you to do today!

Lleu: Yeah. The goal of this episode is to have some people with much stronger science credentials than we have make the science make sense. And, by this, we mean: of course, all of the information that we’re going to provide you is not wild speculation. It’s the only explanation; it just wasn’t relevant to the plot, so McCaffrey chose not to include it.

Tequila Mockingbird: We are going to be doing our best to remain canon-compliant, and when we are not, we will signpost that. So, unless otherwise noted, nothing here contradicts what we get in the McCaffrey books only. Do not ask about the Todd books; we don’t read those.

Roxie: I’d love to start us with space — I do have a question, before we get really into it, which is: staying canon compliant with Anne McCaffrey’s writing. Are we allowing her to change her mind?

Roxie: Because here’s just a few things that she says in Dragonflight. She specifically says that

Roxie: “Rukbat [...] was a golden G-type star. It had five planets, and one stray it had attracted and held in recent millennia.”

Roxie: So we have the Red Star, specifically called out as a recent inhabitant of this system — “recent millennia,” specifically — and then we have, quote, “a wildly erratic elliptical orbit.” I’m still fine with all of this. One kind-of problem is that she does specifically say, “The indigenous life of the wanderer sought to bridge the space gap” to “the more temperate and hospitable planet” —

Lleu: I think absolutely not. She 100% changed her mind on that one, and I think we have to go with the changed mind, because that’s the only way that any of the later plot in the series makes any sense.

Nazh: I guess the only thing I can think of is if it were somehow actually indigenous to the Red Star and the Red Star’s comet tail, and that from there, it spread to this Oort cloud and possibly a lot of other Oort clouds.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I think there’s also the question of, when are we getting information that is word-of-god and when are we getting information that is within the point of view of a specific character? My call on that would be, yeah, she retconned the fuck out of that; let’s just decide that this is in the voice of the original colonists who didn’t know and assumed.

Lleu: There’s also another key problem with this intro, which is that Rukbat is literally not a golden G-type star. It’s just not. That’s not correct.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, Lleu, that’s a big assumption that this is the same Rukbat that we know —

Roxie: Oh, my god — Lleu, you don’t understand, I was running numbers today, and I kept being like, “Well, it might work if this was some kind of supermassive, giant star.”

Roxie: It’s a smaller star. Okay. Don’t worry; don’t worry. Look, I’m here. I’m a professional.

Lleu: I think the takeaway from this is that, actually, maybe Pern is fantasy —

Lleu: — but this is the strongest case for it. It cannot possibly be set in the primary universe.

Tequila Mockingbird: Wait, wait, wait — don’t stars change, though? Isn’t this set in the space future?

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, what if it’s a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, when Rukbat was a golden G-type star?

Nazh: So you’re saying the original colonizers’ notes from eight million years ago?

Tequila Mockingbird: And we’re just in a Battlestar Galactica kind of a situation.

Roxie: I want to gently reintroduce us to all of our undergraduate astronomy and/or astrology courses. The basic way to conceptualize orbital mechanics is that, because of gravity, you are falling towards the thing you are orbiting, but you are also moving fast enough that you shoot past the horizon, and you keep falling, sort of, in a circle around it. Does that make sense?

Tequila Mockingbird: So Douglas Adams was right? You can fly by throwing yourself at the ground and missing.

Roxie: That is, in fact, how you orbit. And in a circular orbit — which is “eccentricity 0” — that is a constant speed. All of the acceleration from gravity is turning your direction. It’s not speeding you up or slowing you down. In an elliptical orbit, like a comet or the Red Star would have, you are falling faster and faster and faster as you come into the system, whipping around the sun, and heading back out to the far reaches, where you basically have gravity dragging behind you, slowing down, slowing down, slowing down, until you eventually curve back. Any elliptical orbit has an eccentricity between 0 and 1. At 1 it becomes a parabolic or hyperbolic orbit, and it’s gone forever. If you remember your x-squared graph — that doesn’t come back.

Tequila Mockingbird: Is it fair to say that what AIVAS gets them to do in All the Weyrs of Pern is changing an elliptical orbit into a parabolic or hyperbolic orbit?

Nazh: It sounded more like they were keeping it elliptical but not close to Pern.

Lleu: I think what is actually described is that they’re shifting its orbit such that now it’s gonna pass closer to one of the other planets in the system.

Tequila Mockingbird: Ah, so it’s a “Woe! Thread be upon ye!” kind of a solution.

Lleu: Yeah, but it’s the fourth planet now, instead? I can’t remember exactly. But I definitely got the impression that it is staying in the system. They are not sending the Red Star shooting off into space forever.

Nazh: For our listeners at home, Roxie’s face every time we say an additional piece of information is a true work of art.

Roxie: Truly, everything — every word of explanation — Anne adds to this —

Lleu: Well, it’s because you don’t have 2,500 years to sit by yourself with nothing to do, doing calculations to figure this out, so…

Lleu: Also, to be fair, in terms of size, Rukbat is a class B dwarf-star, but it’s a blue dwarf, so Rukbat is three times the size of the sun — it’s just not supermassive.

Roxie: There are orbital maneuvers — you gun the engines, either in the direction you’re going, to speed up, or in the opposite direction, at a specific point. So you can move from a narrow orbit to a larger orbit by firing at the perihelion, the point closest to the sun. You’re raising the eccentricity of your orbit — you’re going from a circle to an ellipse — and then, when you’re out at the outside edge of the ellipse, you fire again to speed up so you’re now going the right speed for a circular orbit farther out. So I think they might have been firing it into a farther out ellipse? Some of those charges would probably want to be timed to happen, like, a hundred years after?

Nazh: Sure. Question from me, who has not read the later books — when they are blasting things at the Red Star, are they doing it from Pern’s surface?

Tequila Mockingbird: No, the dragons have teleported into space. So, hypothetically, the dragons could teleport at any point along the Red Star’s orbit —

Nazh: This does have horrifying implications for just how far between reaches.

Tequila Mockingbird: We do get a very firm canonical “the limit of dragon abilities is what dragons think the limit of their abilities is.” So…

Roxie: Okay, so they don’t know how far the Oort cloud is, and that allows them to teleport out there.

Roxie: Which is great, because Anne McCaffrey also doesn’t know how far the Oort cloud is. So, let’s think now about astronomical units — the distance from Earth to the Sun.

Roxie: Yup. Love to have a self-centered unit of measure. Pluto, with its 250-year orbit, is operating around 30 to 50 AUs. So it’s way far out there. Some comets I looked up for reference — and shout out to the JPL Small Body Database, my best friend, and also some Wikipedia tables, which I will be correcting, the Comet C/2016 A8 has a 207-year orbit, which makes it a great reference point for the Red Star.

Roxie: It makes it all the way out to 68 AU. So that’s a ways beyond Pluto. The Oort cloud starts at 2,000 AU.

Nazh: Question: I barely know what an Oort cloud is. Can you have a close Oort cloud? Is that possible?

Roxie: I did first look up to see, what could we do to get the Red Star all the way out there. In order to make it out there in half of its period, it would have to be moving at an average of 95,000 meters per second. For reference, that’s about twice as fast as Mercury goes in its very famously very fast orbit. And that’s average.

Roxie: So it’s going much faster than that when it comes through the middle of the system.

Roxie: And the problem with that velocity is that I’m pretty sure it’s an escape velocity.

Roxie: I think if it’s going that fast it’s escaping Rukbat’s orbit and going away forever. So, I did put it into a calculator — and this is with the sun as the orbital body, so it’s probably a little better than this — but if I put in the sort of closest and farthest points, it needs to come within 1 AU-ish so that its tail intersects Pern, and it needs to go out 2,000 to the Oort cloud.[1]

Tequila Mockingbird: — you get a new one, and you can’t tell the difference, because it’s exactly on the same orbit.

Lleu: Listen. The colonists hypothesize — and “The Survey: P.E.R.N.(c)” further raises the possibility, and “Rescue Run,” again, throws us in this direction, and we get no follow-through on it — that the Red Star and Thread, or at least that Thread, is a Nathi bioweapon. Maybe the Nathi literally have just been shooting rogue planets at this system every couple hundred years.

Roxie: So it’s never the same Red Star. It’s always just a new cannonball.

Nazh: And it’s not that it’s lined up because of an astronomical period, or whatever, it’s just that the Nathi have it hooked up to an automated canon that is set to — some Nathi programmer just picked an interval, and they chose 200 years.

Roxie: Right, and it seems to us like the Long Interval was caused by them time-traveling and setting off bombs, but actually the Long Interval was caused by a Nathi space cannon malfunction, and they only went back and set off those bombs, because that’s what they thought would create the effect that they had already observed.

Lleu: Well, I mean, the upside is that, by that point, dragons will probably be able to move the Red Star on their own, without needing the engines, so they’ll probably be fine.

Tequila Mockingbird: So instead of fighting thread, the dragons, every 250 years, will just gather together, go up into space, and deflect the oncoming Red Star like a ping-pong ball, and then we’re chill for another 250 years.

Roxie: This does seem to be the conclusion. I have a second possibility, if you want to hear it, but I like this one.

Nazh: I would like one that doesn’t require that, but I am entertained by this option.

Lleu: This would explain why the colonists found the Red Star so confusing. We’re told in Dragonsdawn that this doesn’t make sense…

Tequila Mockingbird: And we have several people who get some kind of information about the Red Star and try to convey it with “That — but that’s wrong” or “But that’s not possible” or “But it doesn’t make sense” and then instantly die. So I think we’re gonna call this Theory 1: The Nathi Ping-Pong Ball.

Roxie: Okay, the Nathi Bowling Ball, yeah. Given what you just said about what happens to people who say “this doesn’t make sense,” I might not put forward my second theory.

Tequila Mockingbird: No, it’s fine; don’t worry — you’re not an ontologically evil person.

Lleu: You’re also not on a spaceship exploring the Red Star from close up, so… Or from space in general, I guess.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I think not being an ontologically evil person is more important to McCaffrey.

Lleu: Because she wasn’t evil. If she’d been evil, the probe would have worked and they’d have gotten that information.

Roxie: From a safe distance, and knowing that I’m ontologically good, I will speculate that the Red Star is not gonna make it to the Oort cloud if the Oort cloud is at the distance of ours.

Roxie: The Kuiper belt is where all the dwarf planets hang out — Pluto —

Roxie: — is there. A bunch of debris in general. The dwarf planets, because they’re not regular planets, are not “clearing” their orbital path. So, a regular planet is grabbing everything in its pat —

Roxie: — either into the planet as it forms or into rotation around it as a moon. The Kuiper belt has a lot of junk.

Tequila Mockingbird: Thank you. Its mother might be listening to this podcast.

Roxie: Rukbat’s Kuiper belt equivalent could, in fact, be much bigger, because we don’t know that it has any gas giants. So there’s a whole section of the system that is not being cleared by a Jupiter or a Neptune, which — because they’re so much more massive, they’re clearing a much larger area than the inner system planets. So that’s my running theory, is that they just have their own cloud, that’s not perfectly equivalent to what we have, but that is where we would say Thread is evolving, and that actually gives us a perfectly achievable distance and speed for the Red Star. Halley’s Comet does that; many others.

Lleu: I will say that one of the pieces of information that we get in the series is that Oort clouds, at least of the kind that the Rukbat system is said to have, are very rare, and there’s only, like, a handful of them out there, and all of them have had dead planets in their systems. When I say only a handful, I mean they give a number, and it’s four or something like that. So it’s possible that we can reconcile these data points by saying that what they’re calling an “Oort cloud” is not the region of space that Jan Oort hypothesized existed in the 1950s.

Roxie: And I’m very okay with that, because the Oort cloud is, in fact, still quite hypothetical, as far as we know.

Roxie: The estimates for where it starts are 2,000 to 5,000 AU. We’ve already been over what an incredible amount of space that is. And then we’re like, “Where does it end? Uh. 10,000 to 100,000 AU? Could be literally anywhere. We don’t know; it’s outside the heliosphere. It’s not our business” — except that we’re trying to make it that in 300 years, when Voyager gets there.

Nazh: Also, to start foreshadowing a little bit, as the ecological representative here, I love to hear a big, messy area of space with a bunch of random junk in it, because random junk is exactly what life likes.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, so we’re gonna go with Theory 2: Rukbat Doesn’t Keep Its Room Clean.

Roxie: The Messy Room Theory. And what I will transition us into is — this one’s gonna need an ecological explanation, because you kindly forwarded me News from Bree’s analysis of the Threadfall map.

Tequila Mockingbird: And with thanks again to tumblr user threadfall for sharing that with us way back in Season 1!

Nazh: Oh, yes — thank you for reminding me as well that there is a peak, that it starts slow, it gets faster, and it tapers off.

Lleu: Yeah. At the beginning it’s, like, once every couple of days, which is the only reason at the beginning of Dragonflight that they think it’s at all possible that they’re gonna be able to do this with one Weyr.

Roxie: Okay. So, we remember the elliptical orbit, speeding into this inner system, running a wheelie around the sun, and peacing out. If it has a tail, which the Red Star has picked up from all this space junk, it’s full of junk; it’s full of Thread. That tail whips behind it, like a trailer, if you’re doing donuts in a parking lot.

Roxie: Not, for legal reasons, that I have ever driven a car in my life. Threadfall — which is in this case, like, exactly analogous to a meteor shower — is going to happen as the planet moves through the remnants of the tail. This debris that is left there, in this case Thread, is pulled down into the atmosphere, and you get a meteor shower or a Threadfall. The thing is, meteor showers — and this does happen; the Leonids, very famous meteor shower, are the result of Comet Temple-Tuttle, a great name for a comet.

Roxie: It’s really good! And they happen annually. Because that’s how long it takes the planet to come back around and go through the comet’s tail again.

Roxie: Pern is not zooming along because we know that a Pern year is 300-and-something Pern days!

Roxie: You don’t want me to start talking about what it would do to your weather patterns to be rotating at that speed.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay. Okay. Now, hang on — hang on. We do know that Thread has some ability to move around while in space. It’s not entirely being pulled by gravity, right?

Roxie: Yeah, and presumably, if it was somehow organizing itself into spaced-out ropes or something while it’s following the Red Star, that might account for some of the patterns of fall?

Tequila Mockingbird: And we know that it’s magnetically affected. So, it’s possible that there’s some kind of magnetic push-pull that results in Thread grouping itself in space in a weird way.

Lleu: So, here’s a couple of other pieces of information, some of which I’ve just remembered and some of which I was going to say anyway.

Tequila Mockingbird: Lleu, the séance and conjure the ghost of Anne McCaffrey here for us.

Lleu: Alright, so here’s what Anne McCaffrey has to say. First: we do know that Threadfall is affected by the other planets in the Rukbat system, because we’re told in The White Dragon that that is the reason for the irregular Threadfalls that they start having in Dragonquest, is because of the effects of other planets — I forget which ones — in the Rukbat. System. We also are told in the prologue to Dragonflight that Threadfall happens when the conjunction of planets in the system is correct, which could imply that the Red Star, in fact, has a shorter than 250-year orbit but only sometimes does its orbit happen in the right way to intersect with Pern’s in such a way that Threadfall happens.

Roxie: Lleu, I did so much work to get this orbit down to a reasonable distance and period, and now you want me to make the period at least half as long? Possibly shorter?

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, so I will say, what we get canonically in The White Dragon is:

Tequila Mockingbird: “Then came an interval of two hundred Turns of the planet Pern around its primary—when the Red Star was at the other end of its erratic orbit, a frozen, lonely captive, [and] no Thread fell on Pern.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “Then the Threads fell again when the wandering planet returned for another orbit around Pern, bringing fifty years of attack from the skies.

Tequila Mockingbird: All of this would have been solved if she had just copy-and-pasted the same introduction slash prologue, but she seemed to rewrite it from scratch for each of the first, like, five or six books, and it’s just simply not the same every time.

Nazh: It’s like how in The Wheel of Time they use the same format, but rewrite, like, half of it. It’s art, actually.

Roxie: Having listened to the entire podcast, I could accuse Anne McCaffrey of many things, but keeping notes is not one of them.

Roxie: “The desperate path the wanderer pursued brought it close to its stepsister every two hundred (Terran) years at perihelion.

Roxie: “When the aspects were harmonious and the conjunction with its sister planet close enough, as it often was, the indigenous life of the wanderer sought to bridge the space gap to the more temperate and hospitable planet.”

Roxie: So, again, calling Thread indigenous to the Red Star, which would be ecologically insane, because, as far as we know, humans are the only species wild enough to think that flinging themselves into space is a good survival strategy — but I digress. If it comes into the system, its tail crosses Pern’s orbit —

Lleu: Could it be at a weird angle? It is a recently acquired rogue planet. No, I can’t see how it could be.

Tequila Mockingbird: What if the Red Star comes in more often but the Thread doesn’t always fall? What if sometimes there isn’t enough velocity for the Thread to breach, basically, into the atmosphere, or get yoinked into Pern’s gravity? So there’s just Thread orbiting Pern all the time, and then, at some regular interval, it for some reason gets bumped into, or drifts too close, or whatever, and then falls in a regular pattern, and 50 years is when all of that Thread that’s just been chilling in orbit has finally run out, which is why it’s so irregular.

Nazh: That is what I was leaning towards. You get one load of Thread dumped into the atmosphere when it passes through, or once a year for 50 years. The total amount of Thread in the comet tail is steadily degrading over time — or maybe not steadily; maybe it has some sort of nonlinear pattern — so you are, for the first few years, getting a little bit more Thread each year, upping and upping and upping, until you hit that middle point, and then the amount of Thread in the comet tail has degraded enough that you’re no longer replacing it to the same degree, and it starts trailing off.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t think we’ve in any way answered why Thread would do that, or what would cause it to then fall in 14-hour servings —

Nazh: I’m personally willing to leave a lot to the explanation of, Thread is a biological organism that evolved for a different ecosystem, so you can get all sorts of weird survival responses. Maybe when it’s coming out of its spore phase, it tries to group up to evade predators — whatever. Who knows!

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, no, they don’t have legs; they’re sort of ovoid.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then, it’s kind of — I don’t know if it’s a tentacle situation or just a sort of amoebic blob —

Roxie: Which is to say that the Red Star comes through trailing its tail. It would actually make its pass and depart quite early in the Thread Pass, and I really don’t know what to say to any attestations that it’s visible with the naked eye at any other times, because it isn’t; sorry. But…

Tequila Mockingbird: Again, entirely possible there’s just some other random star that happens to sit in the Eye Rock.

Tequila Mockingbird: They have no actual certainty that this dot in the sky is the right Red Star by the time we get to the Ninth Pass.

Lleu: On further consideration, I’m not sure that they are actually specifically calculating the forward-in-time jumps in Dragonflight by the Red star. I think they’re calculating it by the stars in general, and the Red Star is what inspires this. Because Lessa’s thinking about the Eye Rock and so is thinking about using astronomy to calculate the passage of time.

Lleu: I don’t remember if they say that they’re actually using the Red Star, specifically. I think they’re probably using it some of the time. But they might not be using it the whole time. They do have to sit down and do a bunch of calculations, which is also funny because they don’t invite the actual astronomers? So…

Lleu: They do, but none of them are at the meeting in Dragonflight; it’s literally just Lessa and the Weyrleaders —

Lleu: — sitting around doing math with whatever math they learned as children.

Roxie: See, actually you’re mistranslating. A Starsmith is not an astronomer; it’s an astrologer.

Tequila Mockingbird: But they don’t have Starsmiths in the Eight Pass; that’s a new Craft in the Ninth Pass, isn’t it? Wansor’s the first.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think they say, like, they invented a new Craft for him.

Lleu: I don’t think Wansor’s actually a separate craft. I think “Starsmith” is a description of his specialty within the Smithcraft.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I don’t insist upon there have been trained astronomers during the Eighth Pass.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m not saying that we know that there aren’t any, but, similarly, I don’t think we know that they’re kicking around and the Weyrs just don’t want to tell them anything.

Lleu: It’s frankly a miracle that they made it to the Ninth Pass. I’ll just say that.

Roxie: Did I miss it, or did you just say that astronomy is a subset of smithing?

Nazh: Honestly, that one doesn’t bother me, in the realm of naming conventions.

Nazh: Look, for a long time, we were all philosophy, you know? Don’t worry about it, man.

Roxie: I’m happy with saying that the Red Star comes through and drops a bunch of its comet tail full of Thread into the inner system. After it’s gone, the Thread that’s left behind organizes itself in some weird way based on, say, the magnetic field of the star, and that that puts it into the pattern that lets it fall. And maybe it just needs to be in a big enough cluster to be able to fall without burning up in atmosphere?

Lleu: Well. Mm. The problem is, we do see what Threadfall looks like from space, and it’s basically what Threadfall looks like on the ground, except that they’re little pods instead of being little strands. It’s just a bunch of Thread ovoids shooting by the spaceships.

Nazh: But again, I’m here with the wide, wide world of biology to say that life is weird as hell, and it could be that Thread simply decides not to fall unless it has a certain population density in that spot.

Lleu: I mean, if Thread’s a bioweapon, that would make sense, right? You want your bioweapon to be effective and not shooting a couple random bullets down onto the surface.

Nazh: There we go. And even if it’s not a bioweapon, maybe it’s just an organism that wants to think that it’s established enough of a colony in space here before it tries to reproduce and send more offshoots down to the surface. Or something. We haven’t gotten to the Thread biology yet.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, so, to Lleu’s point, when we see that, we’re seeing that from a stable orbit, so as long as where a Thread is hanging out is above a stable orbit, or further away, then it’s not implausible that what they see from the Yokohama is basically the same as what they see from the surface of the planet.

Nazh: It might be clustered in some sort of way above them that they don’t see.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah — the drop-off point just has to be further away than whatever stable orbit, I’m assuming a Lagrange point, that the Yokohama is at.[3]

Nazh: So we’re free to assume the Thread is doing whatever weird aggregation stuff we want it to be doing.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t think it’s more of a reach than anything else we’ve been reaching.

Nazh: You had that point about the other planets somehow affecting whether Threadfall happens or not, question mark, or the pattern of it?

Nazh: What I want to say is, maybe some of the Thread got pulled off to one of the other planets first. Now, this doesn’t work if we’re just saying that the comet tail has a consistent amount of Thread scattered all throughout it, so I’m trying to work out a way for that to be cool.

Lleu: Well, I’m also refraining from sharing another piece of information that I’ve just remembered —

Lleu: — I’m pretty sure that in Dragonquest, we’re told that the Red Star’s perigee, if you will, is eight years into the Pass and not actually at the beginning of the Pass. I don’t think that can make any sense, orbital mechanics-wise, so we can disregard that information. Part of it is that that’s when they discover a telescope that’s lasted for 2,000 years, but also that’s when the Red Star is close enough that it’s also geologically active as a result of its proximity to Pern. One of the things that we learn later on in All the Weyrs of Pern is that the reason that when F’nor went to the Red Star he got fucked up by all of the heat and whatnot is because it was close enough that the surface was geologically active, and 20 years later, it’s far enough away that it’s calmed down.

Nazh: I’m sorry, you are telling me that that scene I vividly remember of F’nor teleporting the Red Star and getting completely sandblasted to hell was not that the Red Star is just perpetually a maelstrom of fire and sand and blistering winds, as I have seen vividly since age 12? You’re saying that he just happened to teleport into an active volcano.

Lleu: Not into an active volcano, but into an active whatever minimal atmosphere it has, has been —

Lleu: — fucked up by volcanic eruptions and whatnot. Yes, that is what happens.

Lleu: Because when they go back to it in All the Weyrs of Pern it’s chill and dead. Big Mars vibes.

Nazh: I was wondering how the heck they didn’t just die on the Red Star, given that we tried that once and it went real bad.

Roxie: Speaking of geologic activity, I will shout out, thank you so much to Anne for making it a dwarf planet, which — I did check the mass — probably not big enough that we need to worry about it violently throwing off Pern’s orbit or causing complete tectonic devastation. So, I think we’re in the clear as far as the mass impacts go.

Nazh: We get so little of it here; it’s really important to cherish it when we get it.

Tequila Mockingbird: Alright. Are we ready to move on to Thread as a bio-organism?

Nazh: I don’t feel like I’ve managed to answer the “why do the other planets matter?” question. My only thought was that maybe Thread travels along the Red Star’s path? But I simply don’t wish that to be the answer.

Lleu: If — as is sometimes vaguely hinted — if Thread is sentient, maybe Thread’s really into astrology, and it’s waiting until the planets are in the right conjunction before it falls.

Roxie: Yeah. Maybe Thread got a bad horoscope that told it fall on Planet 2 instead, this time.

Roxie: I’m sorry, but the fact that the Pernese solution was “Let’s dump thread on Planet 4 instead” is so culturally consistent. I love that for them.

Nazh: We need a second entire book series that is about the random little snail creatures on Rukbat 4.

Roxie: So, Nazh. Is Thread a bioweapon? Because I’m having trouble with the evolutionary strategy of “I am an organism that emerges in the Oort cloud, aka the Kuiper belt, and I tag along a comet. I get to an inner-system planet. I fall through the atmosphere. I voraciously consume everything and am then immediately starving myself out.” It’s not viable.

Nazh: Fantastic question, Roxie. I prefer it not to be a bioweapon, personally, because I think it is so much less interesting to be able to explain behavior with “because someone programmed it that way,” especially when it’s so far beyond something we can design that we can’t speculate as to how someone would do that. I think it’s way more fun to try to explain it with just actual ecology. And I also don’t really have a problem with this, because one of the glorious things about evolutionary biology is that it’s extremely nearsighted and likes to stick with what it’s already doing. Basically, you are very correct that Pern is an entirely dead end for Thread, as far as we have ever seen. As soon as it makes it down to the surface, that Thread and any of its whatever genetic descendants, if it reproduces that way, are completely doomed. They do not reproduce; they are not evolutionarily favorable. But: you know what also does that? Um, viruses that cross a species barrier. Any virus that makes the jump to an organism that then can’t pass it on in any meaningful way does the exact same thing. They’re not doing it intelligently; they’re doing it because some accident happened and now they’re in a place where they can make a big buck really quickly. So they do that, and then it very abruptly stops working, and they die, and they are never heard from again. So, that’s basically my pet theory for what Thread is doing, is that it is completely against its will, getting dragged along in a comet tail, and then those poor little individual Thread organisms are seeing that Pern pings as vaguely like home, for whatever reason and then getting really excited when it gets down to the surface, because it can grow a whole lot, really fast, and then it all dies. And that Thread is removed from the gene pool. So, you know, given enough time, maybe Thread will actually stop falling on Pern naturally, but given that this is an evolutionary event that only happens once every 200 years, I’m not terribly optimistic.

Roxie: And that certainly implies that there’s no way for it to report back. It’s not like we’re talking about a scheming hive mind.

Nazh: Just because we never see behavior from it really, any change in strategy.

Roxie: And the starving out makes a lot of sense, because it probably can’t move under gravity the way it is used to moving.

Lleu: Yeah. If Pern pings as home, that maybe suggests that Thread’s natural habitat is various, maybe, dwarf planets or trans-Neptunian objects in a system that doesn’t have a Neptune out in the Kuiper belt. And it’s like, “Ah, this is like one of those planetoids; that’s probably fine.” And then it’s not a trans-Neptunian object, for some reason.

Nazh: Yeah, back to me saying I love having a bunch of junk in this Kuiper belt, partially this is probably just because I’m not an astronomer, but I generally think that we need some chemical building blocks of life for there to be a space ecosystem out there, so I’m inclined to think that the space ecosystem is mining all of that space junk for its chemical components, and then maybe parts of the ecosystem exist in the space between them, but they are very much all dependent on and interacting with the stuff.

Roxie: It just hangs out in space, and Perm will run into it. What it has to do is arrange itself into a specific pattern that causes the planet to run into it in these 14-hour patterns.

Tequila Mockingbird: So not to be difficult, because you know I don’t like to be difficult.

Tequila Mockingbird: But does this mean that there is, then, organic — what we would think of as organic life in space that Thread is normally eating?

Tequila Mockingbird: Because what we see it do is try to consume anything carbon-based, but it cannot derive any nutrients or anything from water or rock or metals. And that’s kind of what I think of as existing in space.

Nazh: So, I am very much saying, the necessary building block for this hypothetical space ecosystem that I’m imagining is that there is a source of carbon available in that Kuiper Belt and the existence of a broader ecosystem, because there’s plenty of energy in space. There’s a crap-ton of solar radiation —

Nazh: — so I’m perfectly happy to hypothesize a space autotroph — meaning an animal that makes its own food; most of ours are plants — that uses all that solar radiation, or any other chemical energy it can get and somehow gets carbon out of those asteroid. I will note, I’m not a chemist, so I specifically avoid biochemistry.

Roxie: Nazh, you’re so lucky — Nazh, you’re so lucky that I moved the Oort cloud into the Kuiper belt, because the Oort cloud is outside the heliosphere, which means it does not receive solar radiation from the star.

Nazh: Thank you for solving my astronomy problems before I know they exist. Yeah, you will note in all of my explanations, I very cheerfully ignore biochemistry writ large —

Tequila Mockingbird: So you’re excellently qualified to be a biochemist for the planetary survey.

Nazh: — I am not a chemist and have no wish to be, so I just say, “Hey, you could probably make an animal that eats sunlight and makes carbon products.”

Lleu: The other thing I was gonna say is that we do know that there are at least two life forms in Thread’s native ecosystem.

Lleu: One is Thread, and the other is the little parasite that they find on Thread ovoids —

Lleu: — that they genetically engineer to sterilize Thread en masse, basically, as part of “Project Overkill.”

Nazh: And this is what makes me so happy to assume that there’s a full ecosystem out there, because, okay, one creature — maybe a sole colonizer from somewhere else, or maybe a bioweapon, or whatever. A creature and a parasite of it — uh, could still have come from somewhere else, but it sure does imply that there are multiple lineages of space creature out there. And once you have that, I really don’t see any reason not to assume that there’s not a whole cheerful space ecosystem happening. It’s sci-fi; have some fun with it.

Roxie: In terms of digesting materials out in space, I also wonder if the Thread that we see in the atmosphere is in some sort of hypergrowth mode —

Roxie: — where it is eating much faster, it is burning itself out, whereas possibly out in space it is able to break down materials. We do see Thread scores on various surfaces, right?

Lleu: No. Anything carbon-based, including plastics, it will eventually get through, but stone and metal, it does not — as far as we see, anyway.

Tequila Mockingbird: But we do have contradictory or unclear information from “Survey” that there have been multiple other planets that have what look like maybe meteorite impacts, or Threadscore, the circular dots where all of the carbonate matter has been [slurping sound]. And so it is implied, maybe Thread has been falling on other planets, too, more successfully than it ends up falling on Pern. Because, basically, these planets are completely lifeless. So, Thread was perhaps successful, where it wasn’t on Pern, and managed to consume all of the carbon-based life on the planet until it no longer produced any, where on Pern, either there’s some innate factor about Pern or Pernese ecology or biology that prevents it from doing that, or it’s much earlier in Pern’s interactions with Thread, and so it has not yet had a chance to do that when the survey shows up and the dragons eventually prevent it from doing that.

Lleu: We’re told explicitly in the Dragonflight preface that the Red Star is a planet that “Rukbat” has captured “in recent millennia,” so my pet theory is that First Pass in Dragonsdawn is not the first pass of the Red Star, but is maybe only the, like, third or fourth pass of the Red Star.

Nazh: I will provide an option C, which is just that Thread is a major, biosphere-level disruptor. For some biospheres, that might kill everything. For some, it might not.

Nazh: It’s possible for Thread to become a long-term, persistent evolutionary pressure that things adapt to. It’s also possible that Thread kills off some critical keystone species that tips off an Ice Age. To be fair, it would be fairly difficult for that to lead to all life being gone, but, within the realm of talking about sci-fi, I would feel okay with making that claim.

Lleu: So, I would say two other mitigating factors. One is that Thread drowns in water —

Lleu: — right? So aquatic life on Pern is not only unaffected but actively benefited by Thread, because it eats Thread.

Lleu: Yeah, I can’t wait. Point two is that there is at least one organism on Pern that is not the Tubberman grubs, that eats Thread on land, which is the Igen sandworms. They seem to be basically exclusively present in Igen?

Lleu: My assumption is that Tubberman, when he made the grubs, used the sandworms as a base, but they are apparently separate.

Tequila Mockingbird: I will also say, extradiegetically, from a narrative standpoint, because I was an English major, it feels more correct for McCaffrey to have decided that Pern is just special.

Roxie: I was gonna say that, yeah; I think Pern is the specialest planet and the most wonderful place.

Tequila Mockingbird: In the kind of internal logic of the universe, it makes more sense to me that Thread is capable of completely decimating planets and usually completely decimates planets, but, for some reason, something about Pern, either the atmospheric composition or the presence of the Igen sandworms, or something —

Tequila Mockingbird: — or the presence of the fire lizards, who we do see are fighting Thread even without human intervention —

Tequila Mockingbird: — means that Pern, even without human intervention and the dragonriders, would have lasted longer or been in some way better able to resist the incursion of Thread.

Nazh: Yes. Benden is the specialest Weyr, Ruatha is the specialest Hold, Pern is the specialest planet. These follow one from the other.

Tequila Mockingbird: Indeed. I think the question this leaves us with is, does this mean that the planet Pern is ontologically more Irish than all of the other planets in the Rukbat system?

Nazh: Yes, by definition. The question is whether it has somehow become more Irish than old Earth was.

Nazh: Tighter debate, I’m sure, but I think there will be a lot to discuss here before we can really make a decision.

Lleu: I was gonna say also that knowing that the fire lizards fight Thread and also that Pern used to have other large land animals that are now extinct, or at least no longer in evidence when the survey comes by, maybe suggests that a bunch of large land animals did die out when Thread hit —

Lleu: — but fire lizards and maybe other land-dwelling animals developed defense mechanisms that allowed them to survive and mitigate Thread’s impact on the planet as a whole after the initial disruption.

Roxie: So this is exactly our next topic, Pernese ecology and the effects of Thread thereon.

Tequila Mockingbird: But we don’t have quite enough time to tackle that in this episode, so stay tuned for part 2 of “Make It Make Sense”: evolutionary biology edition.

Lleu: So, my recommendation to go with this, since it’s Season 2 and all bets are off, is Sofia Samatar’s short story “Honey Bear,” if we’re thinking about alien life-forms using planets to host their reproduction in weird and destructive ways. It’s not really that much like Thread, but it is a fun and really fucked-up story.

Nazh: I would like to recommend Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” another short story, which is not really related to all of the space stuff we’ve been discussing today, but I’m going to choose to link it instead to the broader Pern context of, uh, making contact with aliens and thinking about time in interesting ways. It is the basis of the big Hollywood movie Arrival, which unsurprisingly which was pretty Hollywoodized.

Nazh: The short story is one of the best sci-fi short stories I’ve ever read.

Nazh: Well, what’s funny is, it’s very different, but not that different in the actual events of the story?

Nazh: Yeah. They added a dramatic plot element in the movie, but, yes, the vibes are extremely different, and the short story has some very hard sci-fi — like, there are diagrams in this story and details of how you establish linguistic first contact with a different culture, and it’s delightful and messes with narration in interesting ways, so I cheerfully recommend it to everybody.

Roxie: I’m definitely gonna read that, and I’m going to recommend Ball Lightning, by Liu Cixin, author of The Three-Body Problem, more famously. This is sci-fi for science nerds. It’s starting with this weird concept, this unsolved mystery — what is ball lightning and how does it behave — and then we follow the characters as they are gradually uncovering more and more things about it, following their obsessions, testing theories, discarding them, collapsing in despair, having a new idea, etc., etc. Without spoilers, it ends up somewhere really weird and cool. I did find it kind of one-note on the characters; they mostly exist as vehicles for their obsession with this scientific endeavor. But I got through it and I’m often pretty picky about that, so if that sounds up you’re alley — you know who you are — absolutely read it.

Tequila Mockingbird: And my recommendation is going to be some pop-science nonfiction. I have really been enjoying Fermat’s Last Theorem, by Simon Singh,[4] which is a history of attempts to figure out the proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem, as well as the history of the theorem itself, and a focus on Andrew Wiles, the mathematician who did eventually come up with the proof. Don’t worry: it’s very friendly to those who are intimidated by math, and there are appendixes at the back with all of the mathematical proofs, if that kind of thing is your jam.

Lleu: Thanks for listening to this episode of Dragons Made Me Do It. If you enjoyed it and want to hear more, you can follow us on tumblr at dmmdipodcast dot tumblr dot com for updates, or to send us questions or comments, and you can find our archive of episodes along with transcripts, recommendations, funny memes, and more at dmmdipodcast dot neocities — N E O cities — dot org.

[1] Lleu observes, belatedly, that we don’t technically know that Pern’s orbit is at 1 AU, and if we regard McCaffrey’s identification of Rukbat as a class G star as an error, with Rukbat actually being a class B blue dwarf (larger than the sun), it’s likely that Pern would orbit further out, since the real Rukbat is approximately 170 times more luminous than the sun. The fandom wiki suggests the rationalization that the star Pern orbits is a class G star near actual/current Rukbat to which the name has been transferred on the grounds that it has habitable planets while actual/current Rukbat does not.

[2] The Dragonquest prelude says the following:

Occasionally, the conjunction of Rukbat’s natural five satellites would prevent the Red Star from passing close enough to Pern to drop its fearful spores. Sometimes, though, as siblings will, Pern’s sister planets seemed to draw the Red Star closer still and Thread rained relentlessly on the unfortunate victim.

It seems likely that at this point (in 1971) McCaffrey simply conceptualized the Long Intervals as natural phenomena produced by the gravitational interactions between Rukbat’s satellites, but if we were to try to make it compliant with the end of the series we would need to allow the possibility that the Red Star passes through the center of the Rukbat system more than once per 250 years.

[3] The colony ships are actually in a geosynchronous orbit over Landing, for communication link purposes, rather than at a Lagrange point.