It was the legendary Estonian cosmologist Liidia E. Öpik who gave the planet its name in 3027. She said it reminded her of going to the beach in November when at home: “It’s the month that kills off all the light and hope and uses the corpses to decorate its damp house. But it’s also strangely beautiful.” (That was, of course, after the devastation of the Big Change had been addressed and the Earth’s biosphere and climate meticulously restored to its ‘authentic’ state.) After she gained galaxy-wide fame with her discoveries on dark energy, she was known to return to her home village and take long, solitary walks on the local beach.

November was not an obvious candidate for a popular planet. It’s mostly ocean, with rocky islands of different sizes randomly raising from the waves. The temperature hovers around zero the entire year and the water and the sky are usually such a similar shade of grey that it’s difficult to tell them apart. When it’s not drizzling, it’s stormy, and clear spells are rare. With the sun so pale and distant, they are dim and underwhelming even if they do happen. What vegetation there is, is either so dark a green as to look almost grey or a watery beige that can also pass for grey in the weak daylight. The wildlife is made up of fish, bigger fish, some unexciting sea mammals and birds. Perhaps the only conventionally beautiful creatures by human standards are the elegant, very light grey sea birds that the visitors usually call grey swans.

The first people to arrive after the original scientific teams were fans of Öpik, taking long walks on the islands in the honour of their idol and spending weeks reading her more obscure works on the Sitter space and vacuum decay. One would expect this fashion to fade after a few years or decades, as November was (with all due respect) an incredibly boring planet. But this is not what happened.

What started as something of a secular pilgrimage by a handful of scientists, slowly grew into a broader phenomenon. Guests no longer came to exclusively ponder astrophysics, bringing non-sciency books to read or jumpers to knit. It was, they said, the perfect place to escape the sensory overload of the modern world, without anyone telling you to meditate or prey or find the spark within. ‘It’s just peaceful. No wonder Liidia liked to do this when journalists were chasing her around the galaxy.’ 

As the number of visitors increased, a general etiquette evolved that was enforced mostly by intense peer pressure and some magnificent eye rolling, if face-to-face contact happened to occur. People were expected to wear grey and keep their capsule vehicles on a quiet, low hum. Speaking was not forbidden, but encouraged to be kept to a minimum. Various communication and entertainment devices were not forbidden either, but if you wanted to spend your days on November being plugged into the big networks, you were clearly missing the point. Obviously, the planet itself was to be left undisturbed and the approved activities were limited to walking, slightly faster walking, floating on the waves in one’s capsule and perhaps, for the occasional eccentric, swimming in the almost-freezing water. 

The most popular past-time by far, however, consisted of staring at the grey sky or the grey sea or the grey birds and feeling wonder at the beauty of the universe even at its most ordinary. 

(I wrote this after a walk by the sea yesterday and under the influence of Katie Mack’s The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking.)