(Be forewarned that this post is rather long. I’m quite verbose.)
I’m writing a science fiction story about aliens visiting Earth who are from a tidally locked planet. Most of these aliens have been living in sunlight their whole lives, both as individuals and as a species. The exceptions are a few tribes that migrated to the dark side thousands (perhaps tens of thousands or millions, I haven’t decided) of years ago, and those living in tropical substellar regions where the sun is mostly blocked out by a thick canopy of plants.
I thought I might make the “day-dwellers” (the ones who are in the sun all the time) primally afraid of darkness — significantly more so than human children are. It’s unnatural to them because it’s something they don’t experience, ever. They evolved for life in the sun, and darkness is an utterly alien thing to them, and therefore terrifying, in the same way an “eldritch abomination” like Cthulhu would be for humans. By the time they started building shelters that had the potential to block out light, their brains were already hard-wired in this way, so they either built their shelters in ways that let light filter in, or they used whatever artificial light they could find or make. That’s how much they fear the dark. The type of fear depends on the kind of darkness, though; being in a small, dark room would just cause claustrophobia and anxiety, while travelling to the dark side of the planet and finding yourself entirely surrounded by darkness, gazing at a vast expanse of barren terrain (or ice), with millions of stars overhead, would have a pretty good chance of causing something akin to an existential crisis (i.e. it’s so majestic and alien and traumatizing at the same time that it causes an intense psychological reaction similar to a spiritual experience).
I also thought it would be pretty reasonable that my aliens, and all the other organisms on their planet, don’t sleep. There’s no particular reason why they should have to become unconscious whenever they got tired the way Earth animals do. They can just rest. Plus, it’s still not entirely understood why we need to sleep anyway, so I figure it’s not unrealistic that my aliens simply don’t have whatever needs sleep fulfills in Earth organisms, or that they’re able to fulfill said needs in other ways.
What do you think of these ideas? (To recap, the ideas are that my aliens are terrified of the dark, and that they don’t sleep.)
Next question: On a planet that doesn’t have day-night cycles or seasonal cycles, or any obvious zeitgebers that I can think of, how in the hell would all the organisms keep time, biologically and psychologically? I thought that perhaps they’d use the planet’s sidereal year (which is approximately 37 Earth days), but they can’t see the stars on the day side to keep track of this (unless red dwarf stars are “dark” enough that you can see stars during the day. Are they? I don’t know). Even if they could see the stars, chances are not all the organisms would be able to keep track of them instinctively (after all, not all Earth organisms can). Then I thought perhaps they keep time by a comet that passes by periodically, but again, there’s the problem with seeing it past the sun, and then what happens when the comet breaks up? And the planet doesn’t have a moon, so that’s out, too.
Really, they could use anything they wanted, because without days or seasons, things like years are essentially meaningless and could have any value. But the way they kept time would have to start out as an external cue, and it would have to be relatively consistent, not just some random occurrence like a solar flare. Any ideas as to what I can use that would be fairly consistent (like, about as consistent as our astronomically-based zeitgebers) and wouldn’t take hundreds or thousands of years to occur (geomagnetic reversals are out for this reason and others). I’m seriously drawing a blank. If anyone has any blinding insights, they would be majorly appreciated.
Another question: How big can a spaceship be and still enter Earth and land safely? I don’t know much about spaceships. I was originally going to have 150 aliens on the crew, because Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale, which is something I’m really trying to avoid. Some cursory research has revealed to me that the record for the largest simultaneous crew on a human spacecraft is 8 people. Considering how big a spaceship has to be just to accommodate that many people, I’m starting to seriously wonder just how enormous a spaceship would have to be to accommodate 150 aliens, and whether this would be realistic for safely entering the Earth’s atmosphere and, importantly, landing safely and without attracting immediate notice from the government (or whoever). Does anyone know enough about space travel to tell me how realistic this would be? For help in visualizing how much space the aliens would take up on a ship: In my current conception, the aliens are quadrupedal and about the size of a large dog, but about twice as wide and not quite as tall (they look kind of like giant beetles, with bodies very short and low to the ground and their legs being more so horizontal and therefore hardly adding anything to their height). Individually they don’t need much space for personal accommodations. Also, as far as fuel goes, they’re travelling here from approximately 20 lightyears away, and also have fuel stored for the trip back, and fuel for other things like powering the equipment, and feeding people and all that other stuff that fuel is directly or indirectly used for. (Wow, this spaceship is gonna be frackin’ HUGE… Assume for a moment that they’re in suspension for most of the trip and therefore only need food for departure and arrival… :P)
Ignoring, for a moment, the problem its enormous size might pose (I can make it smaller), if the ship were to enter and land in a very remote area, would there be even the slightest chance of it going unnoticed and/or unrecognized by the government or NASA or whoever the hell’s looking at the sky and space, as well as the humans near the landing sight? (Remember that it’s a remote area, so the humans aren’t close by.) And if, hypothetically, they managed to deposit some kind of satellite in Earth’s orbit before landing, without attracting notice, and then landed, what’s the longest amount of time that could pass before the satellite was noticed? (The satellite is so they can map the Earth’s surface and make coordinates, and I want to know if I can realistically include this.)
Basically, the beginning of the story so far depends on the aliens going for a fairly long while without being noticed by the general public. (They do very quickly encounter some humans, but the humans don’t go running to the press/government/police/whatever right away.) But I’ve always thought, in the back of my head, “Seriously, how realistic is that? Wouldn’t people notice a ball of fire entering the atmosphere? Wouldn’t government satellites and/or telescopes or whatever they use to monitor stuff up there see it? This doesn’t sound very realistic.” And it’s been bugging me more and more over the past few days/weeks, so I’m looking for some feedback, from people who know more about this stuff than I do.
If not and the axis is fixed, you could use the seasonal movement of the sun northward and southward in the sky as your obvious external cycle, even if there aren’t apparent seasonal changes in weather/climate.
