13.01.2078

                                                                        Planet LHS-1140b

Dear Earthlings,

Congratulations! Accept my sincere greetings on being successful at engineering a scale-amenable, sub-protonic collider, from nucleo-synthesis of Dark Matter.

The day is not far when some of you’d visit me! I, who escaped on the inter-celestial vehicle, powered by the ultra high energy cosmic neutrinos at shattering speed fifty years ago! You’re welcome on the Exoplanet LHS1140b, twice as big as Earth, much marooned—about nine-tenths covered by a global ocean. I’d love to see more of my kind here. Fear not! People are anatomical just like us, not green-skinned or hairy-tailed! No bulging eyes either.  The Mother star is a dwarf—a slow burning candle—probably will shine much longer than our Sun. Skies are forever bathed in salmon-colored light; winds distribute the heat around the planet. Plants have wider leaves; they need to capture all the light. Hardly any quadruped animals though, only birds and fishes; perhaps Darwinian experts back home could explain that. Its water evaporates, is zapped by the star’s ultraviolet emission, the hydrogen and oxygen molecules split into an air thick with oxygen—oxygen-rich air is like a forever youth spring—I am, biologically, a hundred and ten!

Yet, Earthlings, how did I get here? Entangled Mass-energy was integral to my escapade and I’m tempted to tell you how it happened.

 Ah! It was the night after Christmas.…. The vessel had merely wobbled a bit when the supercollider took effect…winds, bone chilling; the harbor glistened with twinkling lights from moored fishing trawlers. In preparation, I had launched pilot balloons with transient meteorological antenna and galactic particle storm detectors. When the conditions were satisfactory, I waited for the latent energy to power me from the tiny boxes underneath the vessel. I was crammed, ensconced in a thick Kevlar blanket for protection from tiny fast moving particles. Was I nervous? Not particularly so, leaving as I was to the greatest secret adventure of my life and the largest audacity of mankind fathomable.

Earlier that year, the glow of the Silicon-Boron doped Gallium Arsenide crystals in my laboratory (which was a Steel Chamber, 2420 feet under the Earth’s crust, minimizing all interferences including Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, in a mine on an Island, mid-western Indian Ocean), had announced the trapping of the matter that makes for 85% of the total mass of our universe—the elusive Dark Matter!

We had little clue, although it was omnipresent—passing through the earth, streaming in the air and through our Byronic bodies! This sub-protonic particle had remained undetected because it was understood (somewhat erroneously as it later turned out) to interact with Normal Matter only through Gravity. The home-built apparatus detected low energy recoil of nuclei by interactions with Dark Matter causing Normal Matter to split, manifesting as a phonon, and causing a feeble luminescence on the crystal. 

Possibilities! Even empty space has ceaseless latent complexity. Everything’s fluid, metamorphic, changing into the recognizable or the unidentifiable. Space and time, supposedly foundations of all theories, are not static; Nature’s seldom balancing, stable or static. The Big Bang, from which came all matter, would’ve no matter left for Creation if matter and antimatter, proton and antiproton, electron and positron, being equal, annihilated each other.  Unpredictability and imbalance bred life.

You may or may not have heard of the Astrophysicist who decoded Dark Matter, and I don’t blame you! Of all people, it had to be ME! Vagaries of the Cosmos, I suppose! Working alone….on a decrepit fishermen’s island!

The finding of Dark Matter appeared in the Journal of Inter-University Astrophysics. Known theories broke down. It was reported that Dark Matter was half-proton, half-photon particle, appearing interchangeably; both mass and radiation entangled. Entangled like Physics and Philosophy. Entangled like Earthlings of different color and beliefs.

As far as I know, the discovery was left to further corroboration.

But Space-time didn’t end there; physics carried on. The crystal continued glowing; Dark Matter was still smashing into ordinary matter.

The great shock came when a cargo plane flying over the Island suddenly disappeared. Vanished! Undetected on the Radar; debris never recovered. That day, down in the steel chamber, I noticed that the Gallium Arsenide crystal did not glow. With the decoupling of the proton and photon in the nucleus of Dark Matter, a Primordial Energy had been born—a very slow process, slower than the decay of matter, slower than the decay of radiation, but stronger than gravity nevertheless! It had remained trapped near the ‘mother matter’ as a fossil of the reaction, until gathering sufficient density within the apparatus, had released itself into a mass-less high-energy carrier of anti-gravity forces! The evaporation of hundreds-of-ton weighing aircraft was accounting for it!

De-entanglement of Dark Matter and Energy was theoretically possible even in 2016; I knew from works of ‘Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA)’ Mission—a balloon-borne observatory that detected upward pointing cosmic rays in Antarctica. In the gravity field of two entangled galaxies, spaceships could escape through—instantaneously—using this energy!

I was delirious. I didn’t do anything with my inferences except deciding to—escape!

My fisherman friend Byron helped design the vessel LRV-13 efficient enough to ride the waves of that Energy, built entirely of Arovex, reducing the structural weight along with maneuvering efficiency with shock absorbers, active stabilizer and navigational gyroscope.

 That’s how I came here. LRV-13 continues to be moored at Northport, in a long line of other inter-planetary-crafts, now dissolved in darkness, squirming in the chilly winds. Tiny pretty stars are winking at me…..

I’ll direct this note through waves to be delivered inconspicuously to the Media there. Hope this spurs you on to newer adventures like mine!

There’s so much to explore. See you all soon!                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Yours truly, Wandering Astrophysicist

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