What if You Lived on Trappist -1e?

[Music] Like most children, you go to bed early in the evening. No later, as your mother tucks you in, you see the warm glow of the sunset hitting your ceiling, the soft reds and the pinks of twilight playing on your bedroom walls. Then, as you've seen her do every night, you watch as she closes the thick black curtains, plunging you into sudden silky darkness.

When you wake up several hours later, calm and refreshed, you throw open the blinds as usual. It's just as dim as when you went to bed. You see the twilight glow and, again, it's soft reds and pinks playing on your bedroom wall. You run outside to find your mother in the front yard.

"Hello, Mom!" you scream as you run to meet her, but then you remember her teaching you to say good morning when you wake up, so you do that instead. Even though you've never really understood her stories about mornings and evenings and a place where the sky isn't always twilight, to you, this is all there ever was.

The sun always hangs in the West on the horizon, exactly where it is before you sleep, and throughout the rest of the day that follows. There have always been not one, not two, but six crescent moons shown across the sky, and the weeds in your front yard have always been jet black. This is all you've ever known. This is life as a human born on another planet, a mere 40 light years from Earth.

There's a dim red star called Trappist-1 that hosts seven rocky planets. Only they've been pulled together so tightly that they don't rotate anymore, so they no longer experience days or nights as we know them. The fourth planet from the star, which astronomers call Trappist-1e, is suspected to have a sliver of land mass that might be habitable to humans.

You see, because the planet doesn't rotate anymore, Trappist-1e is effectively split in half. One side is a bleached, molten death desert. It swelters under the heat of an endless high noon and thick storm clouds that offer shade but never water. On the other hand, is a biting Arctic cold. Here, the stars rain eternally over mile-high glaciers that crush the continents beneath them.

In this world of extremes, the only place life may thrive on this planet is in the space between the two extremes: the Goldilocks Zone. The thin line between darkness and light—a land where the sun never sets but never rises either. Despite how different it might seem from the world we know, Trappist-1e may be humanity's best bet for life beyond our sun.

One of the missions of the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope is to investigate one and its siblings. We know they're as dense as our rocky Earth, but are they as wet, warm, and cloudy as we believe? If so, it's very possible that one day our great-great-great-grandchildren might call this new planet home.

And although it might take some adjustments, Trappist-1e might just be more similar to Earth than you think. [Music]

On the ship to Trappist-1, your mother learns for the first time that she's pregnant. She's worried and scared but also hopeful and excited for what life on another planet might look like for her and her new newborn. You, alongside flipping through parenting books, spend the waking hours of her journey reading about the midnight sun on Earth—how in Arctic regions, the planet's axial tilt makes it so that the sun never sets for months on end, just as it is on Trappist-1e.

Only she's surprised to learn how the toll of an endless day can exact upon the human mind—how your body finds it difficult to tell you when to rise and when to rest. She begins to feel it herself, trapped in the cramped fluorescent quarters of the ship, and she worries for the child she never expected to have. She doesn't know if you'll be able to grow up without ever knowing the tranquility of night.

When she finally arrives, the SLE doctors give her a solution: gene therapy. Your circadian rhythms control 10 to 15% of your genes, they say. By altering those genes, you might stave off insomnia, heart disease, and cancer growth in the same way that polar animals do. Reindeer, for example, deactivate their circadian rhythms throughout the summer sun and reactivate them in the autumn while some forms of ge...