List of Foundation Universe Planets - Alpha

Alpha

Alpha is a fictional planet orbiting the larger of the two stars in the Alpha Centauri system.

In Asimov's Foundation Series, Alpha Centauri is cited by Lord Dorwin as one of the solar systems where humankind potentially originated. The others are Sol, Sirius, 61 Cygni and Arcturus. Beyond mentioning that it is in the Sirius Sector, Dorwin gives no further details.

In a later book, Foundation and Earth, Alpha is a planet orbiting the larger of the two stars in the Alpha Centauri system. Golan Trevize discovers Alpha when he attempts to find the location of Earth by locating the center of a 'best sphere' made from the co-ordinates of the 50 Spacer worlds.

The planet is discovered to be entirely covered by an ocean, with the exception of a single island with a surface area of 15,000 square kilometres. (For comparison, Sicily is just over 25,000 square kilometres.) The inhabitants call it New Earth and live a simple lifestyle. While the inhabitants seem to be warm and welcoming, co-existing peacefully in an egalitarian society, this might be a show designed to put foreign visitors at ease while they were infected with a virus. The only certain facts about New Earth culture are that both women and men are completely shirtless, weather permitting, and the men engage in long sea voyages to fish.

The planet Alpha was apparently terraformed habitable by the old Galactic Empire and its only land surface is the small island on which the Alphans live. This can be explained by its history: according to information pieced together by Janov Pelorat, the Galactic Empire, likely under Kandar V, laboured to create land on which the last refugees of Earth could live. Then the funds and interest of the Empire ran out and the plans for continents were scrapped. Alpha was left alone for millennia, with only highly advanced weather control and biotechnology.

Alpha first appears in Foundation and Earth, which confirms a merger between the Spacer and Foundation series. In the Spacer series, the planet Aurora in the Tau Ceti system is the first extrasolar colony, suggesting that Alpha Centauri had no habitable worlds. This fits with the late and expensive settlement of Alpha.

Less easily understood is the belief in the early Foundation era that Alpha Centauri might have been the original solar system; a terraformed planet with a very small land area would not be plausible. However, as Alpha is depicted as being solely aquatic with the exception of its single island, it could feasibly have been a planet whose ice caps had melted, covering what might have originally been a larger landed area. Such would likely have been the reasoning of someone like Lord Dorwin. This could just as easily be explained (as it is in the series itself) by the deterioration in standards of academic research in the late Imperial Era, since Lord Dorwin explains that rather than going to places and gathering firsthand evidence, he prefers to pore through available archives from which by this stage much was missing; he refers to this as the "scientific method". Alpha and Sol were therefore not worlds Dorwin knew by experience, but only by vague report.