LTrotsky
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- Sep 22, 2013
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MJD 56529
The short story is . . . I (or should I say "we?") made it to Mars. Perhaps I shouldn't say anything. In fact, I think I am breaking a law by doing so. It is a secret law for a secret program. So saying something might be okay. Until I died a secret death by a secret agent. The dead tell no tales.
I don't regret where I am or what I am doing. I just don't know what I'm doing. It's a bit difficult to run a secret program, things have to be done quick and cheap, or people will find out one way or another. Quick and dirty also doesn't work. Dirty leaves a mess. It has to be clean.
Clean is the problem, 200 million miles away on Earth. That is, the lack of it. Certain powerful people, from many countries, came to the conclusion that Earth was in big trouble from various factors. Climate forcing was one of the problems. The bigger problem, or let's say the derivative problem, was how angry people would be when the world started caving in. Angry individuals make futile gestures. An angry people make revolutions. So, in secret, the powerful decided to save their own skin, or preserve the system that made and keeps them powerful. No, not by cleaning things up and ending the injection of CO2 into the atmosphere. But by making another world. Literally.
People who can either settle in or be shipped off to another world are less likely to make revolutions at home. So, some collection of geniuses - really, sub-geniuses, decided the best solution to the messy future was to terraform Mars. It has as much surface area as the Earth, and enough resources to be viable *with certain technological developments*. Really, the idea of it is brilliant, but it's also stupid: Make a whole nuther Earth so people don't make a revolution on the real Earth. The stupid part is that the powerful just can't clean up their climate forcing act, which would be from a technological standpoint much more efficient if they could. Plus, I think they think they can import resources in abundance from Mars (like, for example diamonds and titanium) and have the terraforming pay for itself and then some.
But this all has to be secret for now. Maybe for another generation. If it came to light that hundreds of billionaires and politicos were conspiring right now to terraform Mars because Earth is going to heat up people might start revolutions right now. After all, the billionaires won't live here (on Mars), the people who might otherwise overthrow the powerful will be shipped here. Some of them, voluntarily.
It all has to start somewhere, though, doesn't it? In this case, it's me, and this spaceship called the Delta Glider. I renamed it the LDT, as was my privilege. The people who permitted the change don't know (or don't care?) that those are the initials of one of the greatest revolutionaries in history. I find irony funny, most of the time.
This is not one of those times. The damn ship's computers aren't rigged up for the complex calculations you need to get a precise return trajectory from this distance. I might be, in a word, stuck here. And, by default, soon dead. So much for my little rebellion with the acronym.
I've used the program to figure out, I think, that I have a departure window in about 30 days. I check it everyday, and the numbers are always different. But, so far, that window seems the most consistent of all the results. My mission is over, I dropped the little package of genetically engineered bacteria on the Red Planet, and I want to go home. I'm starting to think that the computer was specially engineered too. To prevent me from coming back.
I can't understand why I didn't see this coming. A secret program, a secret astronaut, secret bacteria, etc. No need for me to physically come back. This isn't the Apollo program. But, I also can't understand just now why they didn't just do this with an unmanned flight. Maybe it was all the radio transmission that might be necessary in that case.
I'll figure it all out when I get back. Or, if.
The short story is . . . I (or should I say "we?") made it to Mars. Perhaps I shouldn't say anything. In fact, I think I am breaking a law by doing so. It is a secret law for a secret program. So saying something might be okay. Until I died a secret death by a secret agent. The dead tell no tales.
I don't regret where I am or what I am doing. I just don't know what I'm doing. It's a bit difficult to run a secret program, things have to be done quick and cheap, or people will find out one way or another. Quick and dirty also doesn't work. Dirty leaves a mess. It has to be clean.
Clean is the problem, 200 million miles away on Earth. That is, the lack of it. Certain powerful people, from many countries, came to the conclusion that Earth was in big trouble from various factors. Climate forcing was one of the problems. The bigger problem, or let's say the derivative problem, was how angry people would be when the world started caving in. Angry individuals make futile gestures. An angry people make revolutions. So, in secret, the powerful decided to save their own skin, or preserve the system that made and keeps them powerful. No, not by cleaning things up and ending the injection of CO2 into the atmosphere. But by making another world. Literally.
People who can either settle in or be shipped off to another world are less likely to make revolutions at home. So, some collection of geniuses - really, sub-geniuses, decided the best solution to the messy future was to terraform Mars. It has as much surface area as the Earth, and enough resources to be viable *with certain technological developments*. Really, the idea of it is brilliant, but it's also stupid: Make a whole nuther Earth so people don't make a revolution on the real Earth. The stupid part is that the powerful just can't clean up their climate forcing act, which would be from a technological standpoint much more efficient if they could. Plus, I think they think they can import resources in abundance from Mars (like, for example diamonds and titanium) and have the terraforming pay for itself and then some.
But this all has to be secret for now. Maybe for another generation. If it came to light that hundreds of billionaires and politicos were conspiring right now to terraform Mars because Earth is going to heat up people might start revolutions right now. After all, the billionaires won't live here (on Mars), the people who might otherwise overthrow the powerful will be shipped here. Some of them, voluntarily.
It all has to start somewhere, though, doesn't it? In this case, it's me, and this spaceship called the Delta Glider. I renamed it the LDT, as was my privilege. The people who permitted the change don't know (or don't care?) that those are the initials of one of the greatest revolutionaries in history. I find irony funny, most of the time.
This is not one of those times. The damn ship's computers aren't rigged up for the complex calculations you need to get a precise return trajectory from this distance. I might be, in a word, stuck here. And, by default, soon dead. So much for my little rebellion with the acronym.
I've used the program to figure out, I think, that I have a departure window in about 30 days. I check it everyday, and the numbers are always different. But, so far, that window seems the most consistent of all the results. My mission is over, I dropped the little package of genetically engineered bacteria on the Red Planet, and I want to go home. I'm starting to think that the computer was specially engineered too. To prevent me from coming back.
I can't understand why I didn't see this coming. A secret program, a secret astronaut, secret bacteria, etc. No need for me to physically come back. This isn't the Apollo program. But, I also can't understand just now why they didn't just do this with an unmanned flight. Maybe it was all the radio transmission that might be necessary in that case.
I'll figure it all out when I get back. Or, if.
