Mother of Demons by Eric Flint

It reminds me of J. B. S. Haldane’s quip, when he was asked what his life’s study of biology indicated about God. “He has an inordinate fondness for beetles.”

No, not the arthropods. They’ve always been evolution’s biggest winners. And winners don’t evolve, in any major way. Losers do.

Still, it’s odd that I haven’t seen any signs of an arthropod equivalent on Ishtar. It’s certainly not because of any lack of life! Ishtar’s biomass is as big as Earth’s. Bigger, probably, than today’s Earth. About the same, I would guess, as the Earth during the Mesozoic. The climate’s right—semi-tropical, no seasons worth talking about. Whereas the modern Earth is in an unusually frigid period of its existence. Has been for millions of years.

Indira smiled again. The words in the notebook brought back the first conversation she’d ever had with Julius. It had taken place shortly after the Magellan had left Earth orbit, on the start of the first leg of its voyage. It had taken three months to build up the ship’s velocity to its maximum 13% of light-speed. During those months, the adults had remained conscious, getting to know each other in order to lay the basis for forging an effective team once they arrived at Tau Ceti. After the Magellan had reached its maximum velocity, and the crew was satisfied that the huge vessel was performing properly, all the adults had joined the children in coldsleep, there to spend the long years of the voyage in blissful unconsciousness. Weeks before that time came, she and Julius had become lovers.

But, she remembered fondly, we began with an argument.

Entering the large equatorial lounge, she had heard a man pontificating loudly on the stupidity of “ecofreaks” in general and their wails about global warming in particular. Mildly curious, and with nothing else to do, she had joined the small group listening to him.

“The idiots have no sense of the real history of life on earth,” the man had been saying, as she took a seat on the armchair opposite him. “The average temperature on earth today is as low as it’s ever been—at least since the Cambrian explosion. Probably lower. It’s because of the modern configuration of the continents. It’s not been unusual to have one ice-cap in our history. A continent often gets pushed over one of the poles by plate tectonics, just like Antarctica is today. But there’s never been two ice-caps before. So far as we can tell, anyway.”

Another man sitting around the circle of chairs (Vladimir Koresz, she later learned, one of the colony’s doctors) had spoken up.

“But, Julius, there’s no continent today under the north pole.”

Julius had leaned forward, gesticulating with great animation (one of his characteristics, she learned over time).

“I know—that’s the beauty of the whole thing! Instead, tectonics has encircled the north pole with most of the great continents. The flow of warm water which would normally keep the pole from freezing has been strangled. The result? The formation of a floating ice-cap. Do you have any idea of the odds against that happening?”

He drank from a cup of coffee sitting on the table before him.

“And that’s my whole point. The Earth’s climate today is a freak. It’s not `normal’—just the opposite. We live in a freezer. For almost the entire Phanerozoic Eon—”

“The what?” asked Koresz.

“Sorry. That’s just jargon for the last 700 million years, since the evolution of multi-cellular life. Anyway, throughout that entire period—700 million years, folks—when life spread over the entire planet and evolved into all its wonderful permutations, the average temperature on Earth was much higher than it is today—ten or fifteen degrees, on the average. That’s the normal temperature for the planet—and it’s the optimum temperature for terrestrial life.”

He set down his cup and spread his arms wide.

“You see? The real problem life has on earth today isn’t global warming. It’s just the opposite! The place is too damned cold. If we really cared about life, we’d go back to using fossil fuels. Crank up the greenhouse effect! It’d be great! It’s not just that the temperature would be better, either. What’s just as important is that the oceans would rise. That’s another problem we have on Earth today. There aren’t enough shallow seas and continental shelves, which are always the best environments for life to flourish. Raise the sea level a few hundred feet and we’d double or triple the area where life thrives the best.”