Beeeeeeeeeeeeep!!! The alarm clock just went off and I’m left backtracking a dream as fast as I can, ransacking my mind to try and remember it all… I’ve been on board my craft The Continewton for over one year and I’m just passing a Generation Ship that is travelling slowly away from the Earth. Studying its crew, I’m so close that I can see the details of their faces without the aid of telescopic devices. Maybe if I reach out I can touch them to see if they really exist? Finding myself unconsciously fixating on one older gentleman, probably because his is the only baldhead among them, I see that his brow is deeply furrowed and that he has an overgrowth of nasal hair. They’ll die on that ship as their offspring spreads the next generation of beautiful human life further into space. In my youth such noble ships had only existed in science fiction novels, but now precisely calculated, they carry 500 crewmembers in total; the effective population size preferred by conservation biology to maintain overall genetic variability (and prevent an unacceptable rate of inbreeding generally tolerated by domestic animal breeders). I’ve passed them now, and they’re gone… Less than a year has passed and intuition (always a bad idea) tells me that life is getting better in the populous biomes of Mars - the first planet gulfed with artificial gravity and the official off-Earth backup of human civilisation. After years and years of terraforming, homeostasis there is conducive to the growth of many nutritional supplements (like gingerbread; an important part of the local diet). Bill Gates offered Internet Explorer for free here years ago, so communicating with aliens has never been easier with the release of recent versions of MSN messenger, and Skype finally became a free universal telephony company. Apart from the bank machines that will only allow withdrawals of denominations not less than the current value of 500 American dollars, the good news is that the traffic chaos has subsided somewhat. There are less and less low cost vehicles from the Chinese hotbed of spacecraft manufacture en route, and the introduction of a transport system based on electromagnetic catapult technology means the 18 months round trip has been halved. The low cost space tourism navigators take Martians to the artificial biospheres of Earth’s orbiting satellites on weekend holidays when life becomes too intelligible (and when hunting wild elephant across the craters and underneath their transparent roofs becomes too banal). The tourist knows that someday they might not get that chance to holiday if the need occurred to reverse colonise the Earth after an extinction event… Drifting past the Earth’s Moon, I wish that it had enjoyed a similar fate. Once predicted to be a goldmine for IKEA who would sell small candles for its dark side, it’s now home to biohazardous experiments because of its nearly limitless extreme vacuums. Although, who could complain about that opportunity, and also receiving unlimited amounts of metals and silicon products plundered for Earth’s uses? (Apart from the investors who lost out as a result of the inevitable stock market crashes fronted by The Space Frontier Foundation). I guess we’ll all be okay as long as we don’t destroy the Earth, and learn to save its environment (But last I heard carbon emissions were up… Back at school on Earth, I’m getting a rudimentary education of man’s toils in space by viewing documentaries on Galaxy Wars I and II and by consulting Wikipedia which is available in new languages that I learn and understand. Who would have thought that war over the introduction of the lower priced Banana from Mercury would have caused the death of two billion human beings? But the subsequent establishment of the United Planets was inevitable I guess - so hierarchical government had a future after all, as well as declarations of autonomy, ‘freedom, equality and fraternity’, (and several megalomaniacs). In the news just now, the Earth is hoping for human-alien marriages to be allowed there too, following a recent precedent set on Mars. To be honest, I did once visit an Irish pub frequented by Aliens and they didn’t seem that strange… On a space walk, I feel it’s all too much to take and I hold my breath as I remove my helmet to expose myself to space. My body starts to swell up, my lung ruptures, my eyesight starts to dim and I get sunburn from the severe radiation. I’m falling unconscious and the water on my tongue is starting to boil. If I’m not mistaken that’s asphyxiation coming on… Beeeeeeeeeeeeep!!!
Posted on: Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:19:01 +0000
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