The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber’d and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
Another frightening, actual creature in the sea is the goblin shark. It is thought that these sharks can trace their lineage back 125 million years and are sometimes called “living fossils.” These sharks got their name from a translation of its old Japanese name tenguzame. A tengu is a Japanese mythical creature often depicted with a long nose and red face. They may not be pretty but since they live so deep in the ocean, it’s very uncommon for humans to have interactions with them.
The black swallower sounds like it was created for a horror movie but is indeed real. It grows to be about ten inches long, but don’t let its small size fool you. This fish is known for its ability to swallow fish larger than itself. Black swallowers have been found to have eaten fish so big that they can’t be digested faster than they’re decomposing.
When imagining a creature called the “vampire squid” it seems natural that it would be a blood sucker. Thankfully, it’s not. The squid got its name from its cloak-like webbing, dark color, and red eyes. Like vampires, they prefer the dark. They live in the deep sea and when disturbed are able to release a bioluminescent mucus to stun predators.
Giant oarfish may be responsible for many sea serpent legends. These large fish are shaped like ribbons and considered to be the world’s longest bony fish. Sightings have been reported measuring them as long as fifty-six feet and a confirmed weight of six hundred pounds. Even though giant oarfish have been around for centuries, the first reliable footage of one in its natural habitat wasn’t captured until 2010. No need to worry about this fish taking a bite out of you because it has no teeth.
Japanese spider crabs have the longest leg span of any arthropod. Arthropods are characterized by their jointed limbs and these crabs can reach eighteen feet from claw to claw. They can weigh up to forty-two pounds and are considered a delicacy to eat. They can live up to one hundred years and even though no human attacks have been reported, they have definitely haunted some dreams.
Whether it be through classic horror movies like Jaws or new ones like 47 Meters Down (2017) the public remains enthralled with sharks and shark attacks. The threat may be unlikely to happen to us but it is real and that makes it all the more terrifying.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
ALIEN
Year of Release: 1979
Director: Ridley Scott
Writer: Dan O’Bannon
Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt
Budget: $9 million
Box Office: $104.9 million
Alien is set in the year 2122. The writer, Dan O’Bannon, found inspiration from many other classic horror and science-fiction movies including The Thing from Another World (1951) and Planet of the Vampires (1965) while writing the script. The film was pitched as “Jaws in space” and was also described as “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre of science fiction.” That was a lot to live up to! Did they deliver on those promises? Audiences would say yes. The movie was a box-office success and inspired numerous sequels, books, games, and toys. The movie was also critically acclaimed, receiving many positive reviews. Roger Ebert noted an interesting point about the cast of the movie in his review:
None of them were particularly young. Tom Skerritt, the captain, was forty-six, Hurt was thirty-nine but looked older, Holm was forty-eight, Harry Dean Stanton was fifty-three, Yaphet Kotto was forty-two, and only Veronica Cartwright at thirty and Weaver at twenty-nine were in the age range of the usual thriller cast. Many recent action pictures have improbably young actors cast as key roles or sidekicks, but by skewing older, Alien achieves a certain texture without even making a point of it: These are not adventurers but workers, hired by a company to return twenty million tons of ore to Earth.1
The tagline of the movie Alien is “in space no one can hear you scream.” Is it true? Sound travels in waves like light or heat does, but unlike light or heat, sound travels by making molecules vibrate. In order for sound to travel, there has to be something with molecules for it to travel through. On Earth, sound travels to your ears by vibrating air molecules. In space there are no molecules to vibrate so there is no sound there—so no one would hear you scream!
Space travel as depicted in Alien may not yet be possible, but when it is, how would we prepare for it? In the 2017 book Vacation Guide to the Solar System: Science for the Savvy Space Traveler! authors Olivia Koski and Jana Grcevich explore what travel to space would be like. They argue that although humans haven’t set foot on another planet yet it’s very possible that scientists will find a way for the human body to withstand extreme radiation, long journeys, and difficult conditions. Preparing for space travel would, and does, require some very specific training. Anyone going into space would need to be medically fit, including having good vision and a healthy blood pressure in order to avoid problems in space. Astronauts now, and presumably in the future, go through training in how to work and move in microgravity.2
What does living in space do to the human body? Weightlessness causes muscles to atrophy and the skeleton to deteriorate. Lack of gravity causes fluid distribution changes. Initially those traveling in space get “moon face” from the rush of fluids to their upper half and can have changes in vision, smell, and balance. Eventually, fluids redistribute and astronauts regain their natural look and functions. Another common ailment from space travel is called space adaptation syndrome. It’s similar to motion sickness and can cause nausea, vomiting, lethargy, and headaches. It typically lasts about seventy-two hours while the body adjusts.
There is so much we don’t know yet about space. To learn more about some of the theories being studied, we interviewed Allen Lipke, a former science teacher who worked at a lab that studied dark matter and neutrinos. Sometimes we can learn about space from things here on Earth.
Kelly: “I know you were a science teacher but can you tell us a little bit about the lab you worked in?”
Allen Lipke: “Certainly. The neutrino lab is an abandoned iron ore mine that is about half a mile below the surface. The lab started in 1982 and they were doing research on the possibility of protons decaying.”
Meg: “What did they discover through that research?”