THE YEAR OF TWO SUNS RISING
(Second installment in a series)
At low tide on a mud flat along the southern edge of what is now the Indonesian archipelago, a clan of shellfish gatherers waded into the shallow tide pools to dig clams, pluck muscles from rocks, and capture small squid and prawns trapped in the shallows for a meal. In the March early morning Ice Age chill 41,000 years ago, on a shoreline where sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today, the harvest was promising. The day dawned clear, not a scudding cloud to mask our yellow sun.
As the clan worked, backs bend over, heads down, the tide pools suddenly flared with intense light. Each jerked his or her head skyward in astonishment to witness the ignition of a small blue white disc in the heavens. In seconds the new creation swelled in brightness, its light too painful to behold. Overwhelmed by the terrible incandescence in the sky above, the clan raced from the tidal flats, sought refuge in the forest, and made their way to huts under a low rock ledge
By nightfall all were desperately ill with fever and nausea. Many would not see the strange new blue visitor aglow again, rising before sunrise to rival the waxing moon in its nightly wandering.
In the constellation Gemini several hundred years earlier, a massive dying red star collapsed in on itself suddenly, then rebounded in a colossal supernova flare, releasing as much energy in that instant as the star had output in all its thermonuclear days. Located on our galaxy’s spiral arm where our solar system meanders, the guest star – that some today believe is the supernova gaseous envelope of a dead star dwarf ember known as Geminga – is close enough to have played a role not once but three times in the evolution of human culture if not we humans ourselves.
What the seafood harvesters witnessed on the far side of the planet from where we sit in North America was the awesome photon surge that brought brilliant life to the celestial visitor. But what they could not see was the intense radiation bow-wave that slammed across earth’s path within minutes and the fatal or near fatal dose of cosmic rays that arrived with the bright flash.
All across southernmost Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the eastern margins of the African continent and every square inch of Australia and New Zealand, most species of animals larger than a dog were wiped out by the radiation exposure. Plant leaves shriveled following the high energy particle onslaught. Those creatures small enough to burrow or that lived in water suffered much less so than the larger beasts. Human populations in Asia suffered catastrophic losses, declining precipitously as most people succumbed to radiation sickness within days or weeks. Survivors would carry the threat of future chronic disease with them and some of their offspring would be subject to the curse of stillbirth or cruel deformity for a millennium.
Six months after it instantly flared to life in the heavens, the new sun/moon faded away to invisibility but remained a quiet presence in the night sky for years. When our familiar sun and the bluish glaring newcomer shared the sky during the daylight hours, temperatures soared, and it was difficult to carry on daily foraging and hunting in such extremes. When two moons rose in the sky together, perpetual dusk ruled. Night did not fall. Birds did not roost and animals carried on in the cooler evening hours as if it were daylight.
An Atayal tribal tale from what is now the island of Taiwan speaks of the terrible tribulations of living under two suns and two moons. And their deep-time legends tell of an eight-year-old boy who suggested to his tribe members that he could rid the world of the awful blue star by shooting it down with bow and arrow. The youngster was laughed at, but the boy insisted. So, his father escorted the child to the highest elevation in the land and watched as the boy threaded his bow, set his arrow, pulled the taught string back with all his might, and let the arrow fly away. It found its mark. The boy killed the new blue sun and saved his people from the horrors that it had loosed upon the Earth. Oral tradition speaks fondly of that young ancient one to this day.
The extinctions and terrible maladies that followed the supernova flare may have been accompanied by a benevolent twin. While the high dose of radiation damaged DNA in human populations on three continents and would negatively impact many generations to come, a few of the genetic mutations may have been very beneficial, indeed. For not many generations after the supernova faded from the sky, pictorial art flared to life on cave walls. Complex language and symbol creation (precursors to writing) seemed to evolve rapidly at the time, as well. The human skull appeared to gain volume to accommodate an increase in the size of the expanding frontal lobe of brain. The additional capacity may have edged our species to a tipping point, a threshold beyond which our true humanity as we experience it today was finally realized.
We are, as all life is, children of supernova. The iron in our blood, the calcium and phosphorous in our bones, and the trace elements in our tissues were all forged in crucibles of dying suns. Is it too much of a stretch to venture that intelligence may be a byproduct of supernova cosmic castoff?
