Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

James’s only daughter, Tessa, devoted her life to watching the stars for signs of another planet. In space – as on Earth – Newton’s Third Law applies. When a star tugs on an orbiting planet, the planet tugs back. From where Astrid was on the ship, the Earth already looked like a blue star in the darkness, but once they reached the edge of the solar system it would blink out of existence. The sun would grow indistinguishable from all the other stars and the only way to tell that there was a little planet spinning in the blackness around it would be a slight wobble measured in the sun’s light.

Years ago, Astrid had been tasked with researching Tessa Dalton for a history paper. It had been a challenge, because history did not have much to say about her even though she had, essentially, discovered Terra-Two.

Tessa published a single paper, proposing the existence of an extrasolar planet circling Dalton’s binary system. Articles supporting and disputing the notion trickled out, but interest in the stars waned until the world’s first deep-space telescope broadcast low-resolution images of Terra-Two. Of course, back then, it had not been called ‘Terra-Two’. It was D56A, just another extrasolar planet in a ‘goldilocks zone’ – an area close enough to its suns’ warmth to sustain life but not so near that it couldn’t thrive.

After the Second World War, UK aircraft manufacturers, like those in the USSR and the United States, had turned their efforts to aerospace engineering. Two decades later, the British Interplanetary Society launched four unmanned satellites at the sun’s nearest stellar neighbours. The initial objective was to examine these solar systems for any signs of life. The project was called Daedalus, and, by all accounts, it was a success. Findings suggested that Tessa Dalton’s planet was terrestrial, with a mass 0.6 that of the Earth’s, and could potentially sustain life. D56A became the focus of attention from astronomical institutions worldwide. It was circled by Soviet satellites in the 80s and was the landing site of NASA and JAXA rovers by the end of that century.

The papers had dubbed D56A ‘Earth-Two’ or ‘Terra-Two’. Some people sported bumper stickers with twin Earths locked together in a peace sign. The Beach Boys released a single titled ‘Another Earth, Another Chance’, which stayed at number one the entire summer and became the informal motto of the Off-World Colonization Programme.

The year that Astrid was born, the International Astronomical Union held a summit. They reviewed all the data collected in the past forty years about D56A, and after a month of consultations, they tentatively declared the planet habitable. According to most accounts, this was when the race to Terra-Two really began. Both NASA and UKSA suspended their space shuttle programmes indefinitely and swore to send a crew to Terra-Two before 2020.

Just before the 2008 financial crisis, China’s National Space Administration had launched a generation ship to the nearby star system. It was slated to reach Terra-Two by 2120. And although the mission was famously unsuccessful, it spurred engineers on every continent to pioneer the fastest way to leave the solar system.

The UK’s programme would not have been possible without the continual funding of the Dalton estate, and corporations like it. In fact, it was the group’s current owner, aristocratic billionaire edmond Dalton, who had famously claimed, ‘the Americans got a rock, we’ll get a planet.’

During Tessa Dalton’s lifetime, historians claimed, there had been no way for her to predict the presence of an extrasolar planet, let alone a habitable one. And yet, she had. Her diaries and letters home were filled with tales of ‘the beautiful planet’. She described the saltwater lakes and green lagoons, the flourishing plant life and peaceful animals. The soil, she said, was untouched by human feet. Every night she felt the pull of it. She longed to die under the light of its suns but she had been born a century too soon. In 1932, her family committed her to St Augustine’s psychiatric hospital in Kent.

The patients on her ward claimed that she spoke incessantly about another, better world and infected the other women with hope. The halls began to echo with their sobs. ‘Fernweh’, the doctors called it, or far-sickness. The patients were sick for somewhere they had never travelled. Would never travel.