Look
up, sometime in the dark of the morning when your night terrors wake you up.
Just stop. Look. Observe. Look into the eternal blackness of the galaxy spread
out in front of you. Ignore your high school chemistry and astronomy. Remove
Heisenberg, Hawking, Einstein and three thousand years of cultural knowledge
and understanding. Experience the heavens as your tens-removed great
grandparents saw them. Innumerable points of light searing out in the indigo
blanket covering the sun.
Relive the wonder you felt as an infant, seeing the
amazing show put on, solely for you every evening. Realize that even now, with
over a thousand years of accumulated cultural knowledge, a THOUSAND, phrases
like nuclear fusion, balanced gas mixture and critical mass have little meaning
when looking up in the night. The stars are made of light.
Now, without looking away from
this sky-spanning chandelier of light, it’s time to do some basic math. Realize
that the naked eye can see anywhere from 5 to 2000 stars from horizon to
horizon, depending on how close to your local downtown your bedroom sits, and
that there are about 6000 stars visible unaided from the surface of our little
spinning rock spaceship. Compare that to the estimated 300 billion stars in our
galaxy alone, and the estimated 176 billion galaxies observable from this
particular dirtball, the resulting number of stars is a mindboggling number
that can only be written in scientific notation (5.28x1022, to be
precise). So in comparison, night watchers near LA can see something like
0.0000000000000000000001% of the stars, while those in the country can see a
whopping 0.0000000000000000001% of the stars while they look up with you.
Finally, the (even more guesstimated) estimates put about 1.4 trillion planets
in that visible portion of our galaxy, at the lowest estimation, and if even
1/100 of 1% of those spend enough time in the habitable zone around their star
to support life, then there could be as many as 14 million other species out
there in the blackness, looking up at the same time as you are. You could be
unknowingly looking at each other right now, wondering if anyone else is out
there.
This exact though process has
been completed on a widespread, cultural level by every spacefaring race, and a
generation or less later, they flung their best and brightest out into the void
to go find those other watchers.
Enter the warp drive. That’s not
what it’s really called, but the proper name has all 10 major engineers’ last names,
the project name and the facility name as part of its proper title, and
numerous seasons of Star Trek rerun infinitely have enshrined the name “Warp
Drive” into the collective consciousness of Earth, so warp drive is what it’s
called in conversation. There are only about, well exactly 10 people who really
understand how the warp drive works, but the explanation to laymen and world
leaders alike goes something like this:
“You know how gravity pulls you
back to the ground when you jump, and the opposite poles of magnets attract
each other and stick together?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Well, yeah.”
“Okay, it’s doesn’t actually
function anything like that, but it feels the same.”
“…”
“The warp drive doesn’t use
magnetism or gravity to generate faster than light travel, but using the
plotting computer, the drive locks on to a sufficiently heavy spatial object,
like a star or planet, and is then drawn to it at up to FTL speeds.”
“So what stops the ship from
crashing into the object?”
“Warp drive travels from heavy
body to heavy body in a spatially straight line, so to decelerate, the computer
just locks on to the departure object (the one you just left) and the attempt
to draw itself back to that point slows the ship. Then you just unlock at the
right moment and have a zero velocity spaceship, positioned right where you
want to be, assuming you have a good pilot.”
“What happens
if you don’t?”
“You slam into
a rock planet, get swallowed up by a gas giant or burn up in the corona of a
star.”
“…”
“Don’t worry,
it’s fine.”
“If you say so.
Wait, so what about locking onto something really heavy, like a black
hole?”
“We don’t ever
talk about what happened to the Their
Shadows Deep.”
“…”
So there we went, doing what
Humanity does best. Taking our best and brightest, encasing them in a shell of
advanced polymers and alloys, then slingshotting them directly at some galactic
object, and hoping their onboard math is good enough to stop them before they
hit it.
Governments, militaries,
foundations and concerned citizens all vied for the right to install the
equipment they thought most necessary on these early missions into the unknown,
with varying degrees of success. Early explorers of Alpha Centauri and Epsilon
Erandi left in craft named China-US Time
Warner Virgin ”Embark 1” and other such titles, equipped with a dazzling
array of licensed broadcasting equipment (provided at no small charge by Time
Warner), high-wattage chemical lasers (demanded most strenuously by Chinese and
American Admiralty) and pretty paint jobs (sponsored by Coca-Cola, Fig Newton
and Rogaine). When they arrived, they found exactly what was expected, Alpha
Centauri Bb was in fact a “lava world” unsuitable for any form of habitation
and devoid of rare elements, Epsilon Eridani b was a gas giant with an
abnormally high concentration of super-dense oxygen, but otherwise
unremarkable, and Kepler-22b was indeed a super-Earth, with a median
temperature of 72-degrees Farenheight, but with the surface entirely ocean, and
an almost entirely predatory carbon cycle, it too was passed on for
colonization. So went exploration after exploration, and with countless
trillions of dollars seemingly wasted, so the golden age of corporate-sponsored
intergalactic travel ended.
