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What is Proxima B?
Big Lizard lives on Proxima B.
It's a real exoplanet that orbits a star called Proxima Centauri, which is the closest star to our very own Sun.
It's also 4.24 light-years away!! That means, if you could travel at the speed of light you'd reach Proxima B in 4.24 years...
Voyager 1, the fastest human-made spacecraft, travels about 38,000 miles-per-hour. At that speed it'd take us 78,000 years to reach Proxima B!
Of course we don't really know what Proxima B is like because it's so very far away, but it sits in what's called the habitable zone of it's star, Proxima Centauri, and that means liquid water could exist on its surface. This is very exciting for scientists because where there's water, there's a chance of life...
So we imagined Proxima B to be a bit like Earth!
to reach
Proxima B!
78,000 years
It'd take us
We loved the idea of Cosima and Dad landing on Proxima B and not only finding life, but finding it at a stage of evolution way way way back in history - or, in prehistory, to be exact. A time before dinosaurs, when creatures were still pretty big and quite unusual. We imagined animals on Proxima B are similar to ones found on Earth in the Palaeozoic Era period.
The Palaeozoic Era period is a bit of time long, long ago (between 250 and 540 million years!) that can be identified as different from other periods because of its animals and geology (rocks, landscape). It welcomed the first fish into the waters of planet Earth, one of which grew legs and stepped onto dry land!
So let's take a look at some of the creatures Cosima meets on Proxima:
Rex the trilobite
A giant crab
Pondskaters
A bee and a dragonfly
glowbugs
A giant beetle
Ammon the ammonite
Twigs babies
Twig the giant millipede
Dunk the dunkleosteus
A butterfly
A giant slug
1/1
Who is Big Lizard?
Well, Big Lizard is based on the idea that at some point in the Palaeozoic Era a certain fish grew legs (and other limbs!) and actually walked itself out of the ocean and on to dry land!
It won't really have looked like our Big Lizard, but certainly fish evolved to become land-dwelling animals. They eventually evolved into tetrapods (which means four-limbed animals), and that lead to every land-living animal you can think of.
Big Lizard is based on an acanthostega, which is one of the first vertebrates with limbs (arms and legs) that had digits, or fingers. In fact, just like Big Lizard, acanthostega had 8 fingers! That's really unusual for any creature, and so it's believed it was an early experiment in evolution from sea to land-dwelling animals.
Just what is a dunkleosteus?
One of Cosima's friends is called Dunk, because he's a dunkleosteus. These massive creatures lived in the oceans of prehistoric Palaeozoic Era Earth, and had armoured plates made of bone over their bodies.
They would have been a formidable predator, but luckily our Dunk is very kind and loves nothing more than playing with Cosima and Big Lizard.
Scientists think they could have grown to be up to 10 metres long, and weighed up to 4 tons!
Fossils of dunkleosteus have been found in North America, Europe and Morocco, but only its head because its body doesn't actually fossilize well.
And what's an ammonite?
Another of Cosima's friends is Ammon, the ammonite.
Ammonites also lived in the sea at the same time as dunkleosteus, but the exciting thing is their fossils can be found all over the world, including along what's called the Jurassic Coast in southern England.
If you're lucky you could find one yourself!
Ammonites are related to our own squid, octopus, cuttlefish, and nautilus. Naughty-what?! Nautilus live in the Indo-Pacific region of Earth and haven't changed much in 500 million years, so they're knows as living fossils!
Meanwhile, back in the Palaeozoic Era, ammonites were everywhere, and had a strong spiral shell (like a snail) that helps them to float around underwater. They could be anything up to 2 metres across, and had tentacles just like octopus.
in length!
2
metres
Up to
Scientists think they went extinct because of a change in the sea environment, possibly due to an asteroid hitting the Earth!
And a trilobite?
Cosima loves Rex. He's a trilobite and looks a lot like a giant woodlouse.
Trilobites are arthropods (a group of animals that don't have a backbone) who have an exoskeleton which protects them (a hard structure on the outside of a creature - whilst we humans have one inside us) but also allows them to roll up into a ball, just like a woodlouse.
Rex is quite big but ancient trilobites could be as small as a few millimetres, or as big as 70 centimetres.
SPECIAL FACT: Trilobite means three-lobed which comes from the idea they have a central lobe and two side lobes. No, not three earlobes! Just that its body was divided into three parts along its length.
Digital
Online
Robotic
Intelligence
System
Who is D.O.R.I.S.?
D.O.R.I.S. stands for Digital Online Robotic Intelligence System. She is the world's most powerful supercomputer. Or she will be once she's invented and sent on a mission to Proxima B!
She is able to communicate with everyone through wristComs and devices, like the buggy.
At the moment (2024) the most powerful computer we have on Earth is called Frontier, and its based in the USA. It's known as an exascale supercomputer and is capable of performing over 1.2 exaFLOPS...
No, that's not a crazy gymnastics move...
ExaFLOPS stands for Exa Floating Point Operations Per Second, where Exa means 1 quintillion. One what?!! One quintillion is a way of saying 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. Instead of writing all of that (it'd take days!) you can also write 10^18, or ten to the power of eighteen, which is like multiplying 10 by itself 18 times. Count the zeros in the big number above - there are eighteen!
Systeme
OPtimal
d'Hyper
Informatique
Embarqué
So 1.2 exaFLOPS is an awful lot of maths in a very short space of time. What a clever computer! Scientists and other smart people use Frontier to help with research about cancer treatment, how our climate works, and modelling the stars!
D.O.R.I.S. is way way cleverer than Frontier. But unfortunately she hasn't actually been invented yet...
DID YOU KNOW? In French D.O.R.I.S. is actually called S.O.P.H.I.E.
It stands for Systeme OPtimal d'Hyper Informatique Embarqué
(which translates as Optimal Embedded Hypercomputing System).
AND DID YOU KNOW? In ancient Greece Sophie means wisdom!
σοφία (sophía)
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