Planet Blue
Names: Planet BluePlanet Purple
First appears in Book 3: Death's End, chapter 71 (Galaxy Era, Year 409 Our Star)
Appearances
What you know
Book 3: Death's End
- Ch 71Planet Blue is cold, earthlike in size, with blue mobile vegetation, yellow frozen oceans, thin air at 0.53 Earth pressure, and no complex land animals.
- Ch 71Its blue grass and trees physically migrate across latitudes with the seasons, mostly at night. Outsiders (extraterrestrials) often visit, making it too dangerous to settle.
- Ch 71At reduced lightspeed, time on Planet Blue passes tens of millions of times faster than inside the shuttle, so the shuttle orbits it hundreds of times per second.
- Ch 72After about 18.9 million years, the planet's plants are purple, the atmosphere is denser and richer in oxygen, and the old landscape has changed entirely.
- Ch 72Hunter's survey found no trace of humans or other intelligent life on the planet.
Connections
Key moments
- Book 3 · Ch 71Arrival at Planet Blue
Halo travels 286 light-years to DX3906, follows a landing beacon to Planet Blue, and meets Guan Yifan, who has waited for them.
- Book 3 · Ch 71Guan Yifan explains the two-dimensional Solar System
Yifan tells them the collapsed Solar System is invisible and only detectable by gravity, and offers to take them to his human world.
- Book 3 · Ch 71Yun Tianming's arrival announced
Returning to Planet Blue, Cheng Xin and Yifan learn from AA that Yun Tianming has landed with a gift for Cheng Xin, and decide to descend immediately.
- Book 3 · Ch 71Death lines rupture
As the shuttle begins descent, a time vacuum hits and the death lines rupture, spreading over the system and cutting lightspeed below twenty km/s, killing all electronics and trapping the shuttle.
- Book 3 · Ch 71Hibernation in the shuttle
Yifan restores air and swaps to manual suits, starts the slow neural computer boot, and both take hibernation pills to survive the twelve-day wait.
- Book 3 · Ch 72Awakening and exit from lightspeed
Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan wake after sixteen days, decelerate out of reduced lightspeed with antimatter engines, and find themselves inside the light tomb. They land on a purple Planet Blue.
- Book 3 · Ch 72Dating the elapsed time
Radiometric dating shows about 18.9 million years have passed. Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan grieve having missed Tianming and AA, and then hold each other, surrendering to time.
- Book 3 · Ch 72Discovery of the carved message and the door
Cheng Xin insists on scanning for writing; Hunter finds fragments of giant carved words from AA and Tianming deep underground. A smart door appears, and the two walk through it hand in hand.