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* life on pluto *

Who would have thought
back in the 21st century, that life
existed elsewhere in the solar system,
in such abundance,
after the empty
searches revealed
the desolation of
the moon, &
mercury, & mars &
the hell of venus.

The wastlands of the asteroids
offered nothing viable in abundance,

so the Moons of Jupiter beckoned,
Galileo's swan-song:
Europa,
Io,
Ganymede & Callista; but,

single cell life forms
as our first real alien encounter
is both profound
& somewhat
off-putting

so planetary travel
seemed a silly thing,

Uranus & Neptune,
large & gaseous & useless old farts
with moons more cold
than sad old Jove.

And Saturn is nice to look at,
and the decades of struggle
that it took to make contact
with our second alien life-form

was twice as costly
and less than half as interesting,
"but the rings were pretty".

Yet another
extra-terrestrial amoeba,
yawn.

So it stopped,
and only when,
we had tired of old Sol,
and ventured forth
to Sirius, Canopus, Arcturus,
Fomalhaut,
and sometime early in about
2200 AD or so,

did we discover
the ice-oceans of Pluto,

perpetually grinding ice
into liquid water
beneath a frozen crust,
churning liquid seas,
held in a tidal liquid
chariot race
by its workhorse moon,
old faithfull Charon,

a single equatorial ocean
teeming with arctic life-forms,
dozens of times larger,
than the old blue whale.
Older by millenia
then even the Greatest Trees
of Earth.

hidden in the recess
of the underworld,

the infinite river winds its cold
and lonely pathway
to the edge of space,

then one eye turned,
to Quaoar, and
one to Sedna...

*
Title: Life Lines
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