St. Remedius: A Primer on Extraterrestrial Construction and Materials

Popular perception versus reality, and popular perception is a lot less messy

One of the greatest outreach projects ever conducted by the St. Remedius Medical College involved its annual “Identify Your Spaceship” open house. Much like natural history museums offering a day of paleontologists happy or at least willing to give a positive ID to possible fossils, St. Remedius technologists and xenobiologists pored over items brought in by the public to verify whether the items had an extraterrestrial origin. As with natural history museum experts having to explain the difference between fossils and pseudofossils, and how that “dinosaur egg” was really a septarian nodule or simply an interestingly-eroded rock, St. Remedius teams often had to explain that the “alien ship handlebar” was just an abandoned Model A Ford suspension camber or, worse, a lost lawn dart from the 1970s. Much like the natural history museum open houses full of laypeople who couldn’t believe the museum wouldn’t write a check immediately to take that “dinosaur egg,” and then abandon the items once they learned that their treasures had a much more prosaic explanation, St. Remedius kept a large dumpster out front to hold the various car parts, appliances, corroded transformers, worn lawn sprinklers, and strangely shaped rocks dumped off by disgusted visitors whose “priceless family relics” weren’t worth dragging back to take their former positions as tire chocks and doorstops. Just as how every interesting stone is either a meteorite or a dinosaur bone, any piece of obviously artificial material, no matter how mundane, HAD to be a part of a starship crashed on Earth thousands of years ago. Either that, or it was the sole remaining piece of a craft that otherwise burned up in the atmosphere before that last remnant crashed in Chickenfelcher Falls and bounced off the outhouse before blowing out a window on the pickup truck. (And yes, some would threaten to sue for damages, too.)

The immediate benefit to the general public, or at least the portion interested in an academic career with St. Remedius, of these open houses was to dispel the cliches and assumptions made about spacecraft crashes and abandonment. The traditional view of a pirate vessel at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean involves a creaky but still recognizable wooden vessel, tattered but otherwise intact sails still billowing in the currents, with cannon still in place and maybe a few picturesque still-articulated skeletons scattered about and hanging from the crow’s nest. Likewise, the view of a spaceship crash usually involves a derelict but potentially still-functional vessel, running lights still operating and a skeletal but still recognizable pilot in the command chair, beaming out a distress beacon via old-time radio after thousands or millions of years. The spacecraft might have a ostentatious amount of damage to one side, but just enough to show how bilateral symmetry worked in alien engineering, but otherwise nothing that some human pluck and about four or five rolls of duct tape couldn’t fix. The interior controls still worked, the holds were full of alien gems and other items not immediately recognizable but obviously worth multiple fortunes, any chemical-based propulsion still had usable fuel, and any fission or fusion reactor was just one interior control away from its factory defaults. Even if buried in a hillside, it still had working ventilation systems that pushed around an atmospheric mix identical to Earth’s, and the only dangers would be from invasive organisms that caused the crash in the first place but died in the impact…mostly.

Naturally, this was silliness. Only a tiny portion achieved anything approximating a soft landing, or a landing that would leave anything other than a smear. A hulk moving at one-fourth of light speed hitting a reasonably immovable object doesn’t leave much to study, as the far side of the moon can attest. Then there are the derelicts or disabled ships that get caught in a slow decaying orbit, with little to nothing surviving their spectacular flameout. This isn’t even counting the touchdowns that happen to be in extremely inaccessible places, such as the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Any arrival has a three in ten chance of landing somewhere where the remains could be studied, and Earth has a tendency to cheat.

The reality was that Earth was a really miserable place for extraterrestrial wrecks, starting with the atmosphere. Between oxygen, nitrogen, and water vapor, metals corroded at varying rates upon exposure to Earth air, with even the hardest alloys succumbing to regular rainfalls eventually like a water drip wearing a hole in a stone. Plastics usually crumbled long before metals, and ceramics sometimes remaining when the metallic portions of a starship crumbled to interestingly-colored rust and verdigris, but eventually succumbing to rain and plant roots. Organic technology faced the same fate as carbon-based bodies therein: Earth’s extensive and ever-hungry bacterial horde were happy to turn living hulls to dead hulls and dead hulls to dust and carbon dioxide. Sometimes in as little as 100 years, only an authority could recognize a seeming relatively rich deposit of metallic ores as once having traveled beyond Earth’s gravity, and even crystalline hulls and internal structures eventually crumbled to sand. This isn’t even counting cases where the crew and passengers were rescued, cargo and life support moved and reused, the ship salvaged for usable components, and the only remains being the junk not worth the time to pull out of the planet’s gravity well.

“But what if they were suddenly buried?” Go talk to those who buy abandoned missile silos or discover neglected nuclear fallout shelters about groundwater seepages and sudden flooding. Chat with the engineers responsible for permanent installations on either ice cap, with shifting glacial rivers or lenses of ice in permafrost eventually destroying foundations and requiring expensive facilities to be abandoned every couple of decades. Or consider the eventual damage of reactors failing: even a perfectly functioning fission reactor eventually throws off enough gamma ray leakage to weaken every structure and item near it, long before its containment vessel collapses and exposes everything in the vicinity to whatever remains inside that hasn’t already turned to lead. After enough time, the only way to recognize the contents of a fission reactor would be from the unique compounds produced as a part of the reactor collapsing and melting down. Fusion reactors are even worse: good shielding will prevent damage from the occasional escaping neutron, but enough of them get out eventually, especially if the walls of the reactor are already weathering from without. This is in addition to atmospheres becoming toxic from outgassing or reaction with components, or their being even more reactive than Earth’s. Even a reasonably intact wreck is something best explored with a full pressure suit and lots of radiation detectors, not by someone who picks up a spare paint filter mask from Home Depot and wings it.

So what about structures protected outside of Earth’s atmosphere? The assumption is that whatever the issues on Earth, something in orbit or in other near-vacuum conditions, for instance on the moon, should last forever, right? It would if not for the constant assault from projectiles, ranging from micrometeorites to products of radioactive decay to cosmic rays blasting from the gulfs between stars. Whether on Earth or on the moon, even the best-buried facility or vehicle takes enough hits from random cosmic rays and the occasional neutrino that if only one hit per year, the wear from thousands or millions of years would be comparable to being within Ground Zero of a fission explosion. On the surface of the moon, a few hundred thousand years of sunlight, unfiltered by Earth’s atmosphere or magnetic field, and the strongest starship hull would resemble a paper bag given a good scrub with a sandblaster. Given enough time, and the universe has plenty of time, and absolutely nothing would survive in a recognizably artificial form: if large enough to attract other particles, an especially big artificial structure may attract enough free-floating dust and debris to make it indistinguishable from a naturally occurring asteroid, but most would be stripped to near-mist and spread across the rest of the universe on the solar wind.

Alas, the oldest known artificial objects in our solar system were eventually dated to approximately 65 million years old, by this time resembling charcoal briquettes left in the rain for too long, and completely unidentifiable as to their original form and function. Everywhere, from Mercury to Triton, any bit of non-human detritus hit that time barrier, and what is known of the few indigenous pre-human intelligent species on Earth before then, particularly the Harkun, comes from other sources. And in the rest of the universe, disintegrating Dyson spheres and eroded Alderson disks all point to the same cosmic deadline, sooner if the stars near them are more active than our own.

That’s why one of the biggest revelations in extraterrestrial structures ever seen at St. Remedius was an item brought in by a ten-year-old from Fort Worth. A perfect dodecahedron about six centimeters on a side, the item was apparently found while on a trip to pick-your-own fossil beds in Mineral Wells, Texas dating approximately 325 million years ago, and at first thought to be composed of blue diamond. The diamond, though, was self-healing when exposed to carbon compounds of any sort, including human skin, and further investigation discovered that the spaces in its carbon crystalline lattice caused by the even application of boron atoms within (hence the blue color) were absolutely seething in quantum activity. The knowledge gleaned from its study led to the construction of the St. Remedius Library, possibly the greatest collection of extranormal information (and samples, and individuals) ever kept on this planet, What nobody knew at that moment, and in fact learned at the worst possible time, was that this item was broadcasting its location in both space and time throughout the universe and across the lateral timestream, and the separate travels of multiple parties to retrieve it led to both the beginning and the end of the so-called Quantum War. But that’s another story.

To be continued…

Essential Reading

Nonfiction:

Postmortem: Establishing the Cause of Death by Dr. Steven A Koehler & Dr. Cyril H. Wecht (Firefly Books, 2006)

Yes, We Have No Neutrons: An Eye-Opening Tour Through The Twists and Turns of Bad Science by A.K. Dewdney (John Wiley & Sons, 1997)

Raven Rock by Garrett M. Graff (Simon & Schuster, 2017)

Retail Gangster: The Insane, Real-Life Story of Crazy Eddie by Gary Weiss (Hatchette, 2022)

Fiction:

Horror Book by Thom Carnell (Macabre Ink, 2021)

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (Saga Press, 2019)

Greatest Hits by Harlan Ellison (Union Square & Company, 2024)

The Drive—In: Multiplex by Joe R. Lansdale et al (Pandi Press, 2023)

Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.