Everything in the novel is real science except one thing. This guide explains what’s real, what’s fictional, and why it matters.
Every piece of technology and every alien organism in the novel is built on real, published science — except one:
The VASIMR-X engine’s superconducting magnetic nozzle.
That’s it. One fictional upgrade to a real engine. Everything else — the aliens, the oceans, the ice, the mining, the habitats — is extrapolated from actual research. Here’s how.
VASIMR stands for Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket. It’s a real engine, developed by a company called Ad Astra Rocket Company, founded by former astronaut Franklin Chang-Díaz. A prototype has already been tested. Here’s how it works:
The advantage over conventional rockets: VASIMR uses its fuel much more efficiently. Instead of burning huge amounts of propellant in a few minutes (like a chemical rocket), it uses a tiny amount of gas very efficiently over days or weeks.
The limitation: the real VASIMR is slow. It produces gentle acceleration — great for cargo ships, not great for getting humans to Mars before they go stir-crazy.
The novel’s VASIMR-X solves the speed problem by cranking up the power. Way up. It uses a compact fusion reactor (the real kind being developed at MIT) to dump 40 megawatts of electrical power into the plasma heating system. The fictional part is a superconducting magnetic nozzle that can handle plasma at fusion temperatures — roughly 100 million degrees — without melting.
Real magnetic nozzles can’t do this yet. The superconducting materials we have today would be destroyed by the neutron radiation from a fusion plasma. The novel posits an advance in neutron-resistant superconductors that makes this possible. It’s plausible — researchers are working on it — but it hasn’t been achieved.
What this gives the story: Mars transit in 47 days instead of 7–9 months. Europa transit in 6 months instead of years. Fast enough to make interplanetary colonialism practical — which is, of course, the point.
Even with the fictional engine, space travel in the novel is brutal: - Radiation: Beyond Earth’s magnetic field, cosmic rays slowly damage your DNA. The characters accumulate radiation dose every day. - Gravity: The ships spin to create artificial gravity (0.4g — less than Earth, more than nothing). But during engine burns, the spin stops and you’re in freefall or under linear acceleration. - Heat: The engines produce enormous waste heat. Most of the ships’ external surface is covered in radiator panels glowing cherry-red. This is real thermodynamics — you can’t get rid of heat in space except by radiating it.
Mars has water. Not flowing on the surface (too cold, too thin an atmosphere), but: - Polar ice caps (water and CO2 ice) - Subsurface ice deposits (detected by radar from orbit) - Probably liquid water deep underground (where it’s warm enough from geothermal heat)
Mars also has the chemical ingredients for life: carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, and energy sources (iron minerals, sulfide compounds). The question isn’t whether life could exist on Mars — it’s whether it does.
The lithotrophs are not little green men. They’re not humanoid. They’re not even individual organisms. They’re a network.
Think of a vast underground web of crystalline filaments — like a root system, but made of silicon carbide (an extremely hard mineral that actually exists in Martian meteorites). These filaments grow through the Martian soil, branching and connecting, forming a network that spans hundreds of kilometers.
The filaments conduct electrical signals — like neurons in a brain, but spread across an area the size of a small country. The network processes information. It responds to stimuli. It adapts. It communicates with itself.
Is this scientifically plausible? More than you’d think:
Chemolithotrophs are real. On Earth, there are bacteria that live deep underground, feeding on chemical energy from rocks instead of sunlight. Desulforudis audaxviator lives 2.8 km underground in a South African gold mine, surviving on energy from radioactive decay in the surrounding rock. It’s been isolated from the surface for millions of years.
Silicon carbide is found in Martian meteorites and is plausible in Martian regolith. It’s a semiconductor — it can conduct electricity under the right conditions.
Distributed intelligence exists on Earth. Slime molds (Physarum polycephalum) have no brain, no nervous system — yet they solve mazes, find shortest paths between food sources, and replicate the layout of the Tokyo rail network. Mycelium (fungal root networks) transfer nutrients and chemical signals across forests. The “Wood Wide Web” is real science.
Bioelectrical signaling in non-neural organisms is an active research field. Plants transmit electrical signals. Bacterial biofilms show coordinated electrical activity.
The novel takes these real phenomena and extrapolates: what if a silicon-carbide crystal network in Martian soil developed these properties over thousands of years? What if the network became complex enough to think?
It’s speculative. But it’s speculative in a direction that real science is pointing.
The novel’s central legal mechanism — classifying the lithotrophs as “geological formations” instead of life — mirrors a real problem in astrobiology: how do you define life when it doesn’t look like Earth life? How do you define intelligence when it doesn’t have a brain?
There is no agreed-upon definition of intelligence that would reliably identify a distributed crystal network as sentient. The classification committee in the novel isn’t stupid — they’re exploiting a genuine gap in the science. The lithotrophs don’t have individual organisms, brains, nervous systems, or any of the things we associate with intelligence. They have a network that behaves intelligently. Is that enough?
Mark says yes. The committee says no. Both can cite scientific literature to support their positions. The difference is that one side has a trillion-dollar mining operation riding on the answer.
Europa is one of Jupiter’s four large moons. It’s roughly the size of Earth’s Moon, covered in a shell of ice — and beneath that ice is an ocean of liquid water. We know this because:
The ocean is probably 60–100 km deep (deeper than any ocean on Earth), with a rocky seafloor and hydrothermal vents similar to those on Earth’s ocean floors.
On Earth, the discovery of hydrothermal vent ecosystems in 1977 revolutionized biology. Scientists found thriving communities of giant tube worms, clams, shrimp, and bacteria living in total darkness at crushing pressures, sustained entirely by chemical energy from the vents.
This proved that life doesn’t need sunlight. It needs energy and chemistry — and Europa’s ocean floor has both.
The Europans are cephalopoids — imagine something like an octopus or cuttlefish, but larger (2–3 meters), adapted to deep, cold, pressurized water, and evolved over tens of thousands of years.
Why cephalopods? Because on Earth, cephalopods are the best example of intelligence evolving independently from vertebrates. Octopuses solve puzzles, use tools, recognize individual humans, and escape from supposedly secure aquariums. They evolved intelligence along a completely separate path from mammals — their last common ancestor with humans was a worm-like creature over 500 million years ago.
If intelligence can evolve independently in Earth’s oceans, it can evolve independently in Europa’s.
Communication: The Europans communicate in two ways: 1. Bioluminescent displays — patterns of light across their mantles, like cuttlefish on Earth but far more complex. This carries emotional and social information. 2. Sonar clicks — precise, symbolic, grammatical. A true language.
Both channels have real-world analogs. Cuttlefish communicate through chromatophore displays. Dolphins use click trains with complex structure. The novel combines these into a dual-channel communication system.
Civilization: The Europans build structures from silicate minerals and chitin (tube-worm shell material). They cultivate food (managed algae and worm farms near hydrothermal vents). They have social hierarchy, kinship bonds, oral history performed as group chromatic displays, and conflict resolution through competitive displays.
They don’t have metallurgy (you can’t smelt metal underwater — no fire). They don’t have writing (their histories are performed, not inscribed). Their technology level is roughly equivalent to the Neolithic — but their cultural sophistication is ancient.
Europa’s ice shell is 15–25 km thick. To reach the ocean, you need to drill through it. This is an engineering challenge of staggering scale — the deepest borehole on Earth (the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia) reached only 12.2 km, and that was through rock, not ice.
Thermal drilling is the leading concept: a heated probe (called a cryobot) melts its way down through the ice, trailing a communication cable behind it. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been designing cryobot concepts for decades.
In the novel, KAIC uses an industrial-scale version: a 2-meter-diameter bore hole maintained by ring heaters every 500 meters, with an elevator system for personnel and equipment. This is an extrapolation of real cryobot technology, scaled up for colonial operations.
At the bottom of Europa’s ice shell, the pressure from the ice above is roughly 30 atmospheres. At the ocean floor (60–100 km below the ice), hydrostatic pressure reaches 1,300 atmospheres — comparable to the deepest trenches on Earth.
The characters’ pressure suits and submersibles must withstand these forces. This is real deep-sea engineering, applied to an alien ocean. The novel’s submersibles use magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) drives — real technology that propels conducting fluid through a magnetic field, with no moving parts and near-silence. Perfect for an ocean where noise is devastating to sonar-dependent life.
Mars: Rare-earth elements (cerium, neodymium, praseodymium, lanthanum). On Earth, these elements are essential for electronics, electric motors, wind turbines, and batteries. China controls roughly 60% of global rare-earth production. Access to Martian rare earths would reshape global supply chains.
Mars’s basaltic composition and weathering processes would concentrate rare-earth elements in regolith deposits, particularly in impact basins like Hellas where geological processing has occurred over billions of years.
Europa: Platinum-group metals (platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium). These are among the rarest and most valuable elements on Earth, essential for catalytic converters, fuel cells, medical devices, and high-performance electronics. Hydrothermal vents on Europa’s ocean floor would concentrate PGMs in seafloor sediments at concentrations far exceeding terrestrial sources.
Is interplanetary mining economically plausible? The novel says yes, but only barely, and only because: 1. Fusion-powered VASIMR-X makes transit affordable (you’re not burning billions of dollars of rocket fuel) 2. The mineral concentrations are orders of magnitude higher than terrestrial deposits 3. Climate change and resource depletion have raised terrestrial extraction costs
This is extrapolated from real economic models of asteroid mining — an active field of research and investment.
| Element | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| VASIMR engine | Real | Prototyped, tested. Lower performance than novel. |
| VASIMR-X (30,000s Isp) | Fictional | The superconducting magnetic nozzle at fusion temperatures does not exist. |
| Compact fusion reactors | Real (in development) | MIT’s SPARC, Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Not yet producing net power. |
| Europa’s subsurface ocean | Real | Confirmed by multiple lines of evidence. |
| Hydrothermal vents on Europa | Probable | Consistent with tidal heating models, not yet directly observed. |
| Mars subsurface water | Real | Detected by radar. |
| Chemolithotrophic life | Real (on Earth) | Unknown on Mars or Europa. |
| Silicon carbide on Mars | Real | Found in Martian meteorites. |
| Distributed biological intelligence | Real (on Earth) | Slime molds, mycelial networks. Not at the novel’s scale. |
| Cephalopod intelligence | Real | Octopuses, cuttlefish. Well-documented. |
| Bioluminescent communication | Real | Cuttlefish chromatophores. Less complex than novel. |
| Cryobot ice drilling | Real (conceptual) | NASA JPL has designs. Not yet deployed. |
| MHD submersible drives | Real | Prototyped for terrestrial submarines. |
| Platinum-group metals in ocean sediments | Real (on Earth) | Hydrothermal enrichment is well-documented. |
| Rare-earth elements on Mars | Plausible | Consistent with Martian basaltic composition. |
| Europan cephalopoid civilization | Fictional | Consistent with physics and biology, but wholly speculative. |
| Martian lithotroph networks | Fictional | Plausible extrapolation from real extremophile biology. |
The novel’s most important scientific argument is not about engines or aliens. It’s about classification.
How do we define life? How do we define intelligence? How do we define sentience? These are not settled questions in science. There is no universally accepted test for sentience — not even for terrestrial organisms. We assume dogs are sentient and bacteria are not, but the line between them is blurry and contested.
The novel takes this real scientific uncertainty and shows how it can be weaponized. The lithotrophs might be sentient. The Europans almost certainly are. But “might” and “almost certainly” are not legal categories. The DSRC requires a binary classification — sentient or not — and the classification is made by the people who profit from the answer.
This is not science fiction. This is the history of colonial law, applied to organisms that don’t fit terrestrial categories. The Doctrine of Discovery — the legal framework used to justify European colonization of the Americas — operated on exactly the same principle: define the inhabitants as non-persons, then take what you want.
The science in the novel is real. The legal mechanism is historical. The combination is the story.
For the full technical treatment with peer-reviewed citations, see the companion document: 03_science_deep_dive.md.