Journalist Cory Redman concludes her controversial expose' from year 2076 with her depiction of the race to send a manned mission into deep space; the goal being to seek out long term possibilities for galactic colonization.
She turns her attention to the GU’s diabolical and rather ambitious 30-year long space flight program which began in the 2040's. In 2049, the GU Food and Agricultural Ministry calculated that food production had to increase by a minimum of seventy percent by the year 2100. Yet there isn't a definitive way to accommodate this rise in need – not on planet Earth, anyway. Temperatures on the planet have increased upwards of 3.3 ◦C, and expectations are for that to triple by the end of the century. There simply isn't any easier answer. Studies all reach one irrefutable conclusion: the destiny of humanity is to explore and colonize space.
Kapteyn B, an exoplanet within the Kapteyn star system, 12.8 light years away, is believed to be the best candidate for colonization.
Journalist Cory Redman concludes her controversial expose' from year 2076 with her depiction of the race to send a manned mission into deep space; the goal being to seek out long term possibilities for galactic colonization.
She turns her attention to the GU’s diabolical and rather ambitious 30-year long space flight program which began in the 2040's. In 2049, the GU Food and Agricultural Ministry calculated that food production had to increase by a minimum of seventy percent by the year 2100. Yet there isn't a definitive way to accommodate this rise in need – not on planet Earth, anyway. Temperatures on the planet have increased upwards of 3.3 ◦C, and expectations are for that to triple by the end of the century. There simply isn't any easier answer. Studies all reach one irrefutable conclusion: the destiny of humanity is to explore and colonize space.
Kapteyn B, an exoplanet within the Kapteyn star system, 12.8 light years away, is believed to be the best candidate for colonization.
Hello, and welcome back to Twin Paradox. I'm King Everett Medlin and what you're hearing is a SciFi trilogy I wrote four years ago under the pseudonym Purple Hazel. Twin Paradox follows my first podcast series entitled Deathwalker Colony, which is now a full length novel available for purchase on Amazon. It's on sale today in E-book format for only $2.99, as well as the first two books in the Rijel 12 Series, The Rise of New Australia and Return of Anarchy. You can check out those as well as some of my other works by going to the link provided in the transcript.
In this first book of the Twin Paradox trilogy, the reader learns of our current society's collapse. How the major cities of Earth plunge into anarchy. How the American credit-based economy comes crashing to the ground, bringing an abrupt end to a system that goes all the way back to 1971. Part One is called Collapse and Aftermath and in the first five chapters you're hearing of a new world order taking shape following the debacle ... not to mention the beginning of an exciting new era in human history in which mankind seeks to conquer space.
Twin Paradox is a SciFi series encompassing three full length novels; all of which will be read in their entirety during the coming weeks. You can go online and download the E-books by searching Twin Paradox ... Purple Hazel ... or, if you prefer, tune in each week and listen to me read them to you. So let's continue.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Twin Paradox, Chapter Five, Operation Goldilocks ....
The crown jewel in Cory’s 2076 exposé was her depiction of the race to send a manned mission into deep space; the goal being to seek out long term possibilities for galactic colonization. That was the most exciting part of her presentation and she saved it for last.
Back in the 2040’s, scientists had begun work on developing innovative solutions to the challenges surrounding missions beyond Earth’s solar system. There were several obstacles but the biggest by far, and the one most seemingly impossible to resolve, was distance. Star systems nearest to Earth were just too far to reach, given the technology mankind possessed at the time. This she didn’t hesitate to emphasize.
“To do so with a manned spacecraft would require decades … unless of course technology advanced to the point a propulsion system could be designed which might travel at or near the speed of light,” she said in her report. “And even then, missions to potentially habitable planets might require something like Generation Ships, or basically interstellar arks, which might take a century to reach nearby star systems at sub-light speed; with the grandchildren of the original crew ultimately landing on the destination planet.”
In Part 5 of her series Cory turned her attention to the GU’s diabolical and rather ambitious 30-year long space flight program which brought the world’s best and brightest together in order to create a propulsion system capable of doing just that … before the Earth could no longer feed its burgeoning population. That became the impetus – the inspiration to pursue this goal. For having resolved humanity‘s previous threats, this was the one remaining issue facing the globe. Feeding the world became the next major priority for the leaders of the Global Union.
The world’s population was on pace to hit eleven billion by 2100, social scientists predicted, with most of the increases occurring in developing countries which already suffered from strained resources. To ever hope to be able to feed all these people, the GU Food and Agriculture Ministry (FAM) calculated (in 2049) that food production needed to increase by a minimum of seventy percent. Failing that and the consequences, it coldly stated, would be dire – even more so perhaps than anyone would like to think about. After what Cory had learned so far from first-hand accounts about urban anarchy during the Collapse of 2028, she could only begin to imagine what this might entail. Terrified citizens, starving and stirred to rebellion, rampaging through the streets of major cities? Rioting? Murdering? Could the world again endure such a terrible disaster?
Yet there wasn’t any definitive way to accommodate this rise in need – not on planet Earth. True, global climatic change had not resulted in oceans swallowing up the world’s major port cities – but the facts were, rising sea water had been gradually shrinking coastal areas resulting from the ongoing melting of the polar ice cap. Urbanization, desertification, crop disease, soil erosion, salinization … were all working against mankind. The clock was ticking.
Cory was amazed at the brutal honesty she found in decades-old government writings pertaining to this. Nothing seemed to be censored. Truly, humans were consuming food far faster than they could produce and thereby sustain themselves as a species. What’s more there was no gentle way to state this in her exposé. Anything less than the unabridged truth would have been poor journalism. Similarly, government ministers weren’t about to mince words either.
“The world will begin running out of food by the end of the century, scientists say,” said Cory in her report, “And they’ve been warning of this impending threat for decades. There simply won’t be enough food to handle a growing world population, expected to exceed 11 billion by the year 2100.”
She filmed this segment while sitting in the cab of a massive solar combine harvester in a Michigan corn field, with the camera filming her from ground level looking up. The camera then panned around the near-infinite fields now devoid of corn stalks shortly after the annual harvest.
“No matter how much we plant, how much we grow, or however much we try to conserve, the land can only yield what it can. So we have to ask ourselves … what happens when we’ve exhausted all that our planet can give us?”
Using videos clips from forty-year-old news broadcasts, Cory next showed stock footage of starving Sudanese villagers crowding around food trucks offloading sacks of grain, potatoes, yams, and rice. Hands reaching desperately, no one even bothering to wait their turn. Longer arms reaching over old women and young mothers clinging to babies. Cries of distress and despair intermingling ‘til it became a roar of heartbreaking misery.
In her husky narrator’s voice, she calmly spoke over the partially muted audio with the ominous words, “Think it can’t happen again? Think it can’t happen most anywhere in the world? Think again. When food runs out, it likely will. And this could be the fate of people living in most any territory within the Global Union, not just Africa. Climate change is affecting agriculture in uncontrollable ways. Average temperatures are rising, changes in average rainfall adversely affect crop yields in lower latitude countries. What’s more, ironically enough, agriculture contributes to this very same problem via anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, and through the clearing of forests and grasslands, attempting to convert them to farmland. Deforestation affects our planet by changing the climate. Tragically, the more land we clear, the worse this becomes, making it harder to attain the same yields per hectare. Therefore, we must pose the more difficult question: at what point do we start seeing diminishing returns … and what might be the repercussions? Drought … famine … panic and insurrection?”
And she was right. Temperatures on the planet had increased upwards of 3.3 ◦C, on average, and the expectations were for that to triple by 2100. There simply wasn’t any easier answer. Studies all reached one irrefutable conclusion: the destiny of humanity was to explore and colonize space.
During this last part of her 2076 exposé, Cory turned her attention from such fearful foreboding about the future of planet Earth, to the dedicated work of scientists - especially astronomers - who worked tirelessly to find a solution. In the last half hour of her broadcast she concluded her five-part series with an inspiring and detailed look at what was discovered and proposed during the 2040’s and ‘50’s; something few knew about.
Kapteyn B, an exoplanet within the Kapteyn star system, 12.8 light years away, was believed to be the best candidate for colonization. The only remaining obstacle was in somehow getting there. Getting there and establishing a colony that is – with enough people, equipment, supplies, and in a short enough period of time that humans could lay the foundation for conquering and setting an alien world. This was the daunting task facing scientists throughout the 2050’s. That being said; science was rapidly catching up, Cory hastily pointed out.
“As always,” she said in her broadcast, “when properly motivated, those in a position to do so rose to the occasion to champion all of mankind.”
Cory was glad to state this with a tinge of pride. But the process by which science had “risen to the occasion” had its origins many decades earlier, she was shocked to discover. Probes had attempted to explore this far away system as long ago as the 2030’s using a ground-breaking technology called Breakthrough Starshot. This was a project that ultimately manufactured a fleet of nano-spacecraft … literally shooting them into space at nearly half the speed of light then far faster over the years.
Amazingly enough, with all the exciting developments going on in both solar energy technology as well as the mining and exploitation of the Moon, astronomers were diligently working with aerospace engineers and other scientists to determine the next step for mankind. Only 24 years old at the time and fresh out of college when she put together this report, Cory could hardly fathom how all this had been going on thirty years prior – with everything that was occurring around the world and with the many challenges that still needed to be resolved. Yet it was right there, in official texts published on the government macronet.
The origins of this “Breakthrough Starshot” technology hearkened back to before the Great Collapse of 2028, when physicist and venture capitalist Yuri Milner teamed with world-renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking (along with an investment of €111 million just to get the ball rolling). With a final cost of 10 billion US dollars (€11.1 billion), when finally completed, a “mothership” carrying around one thousand tiny “spacecraft” (centimeter-sized, weighing one gram each) was launched into orbit. Earth-based lasers were then directed toward them, sending a beam of light onto the crafts’ “lightsails” so to accelerate them into space.
Solar sails (aka photon sails) were a form of spacecraft propulsion which used large mirrors driven by radiation pressure exerted by sunlight. Cory left out much of the scientific mumbo-jumbo regarding this bizarre technology, but basically light exerted a force on the mirrors much like wind blowing a boat sail. High-energy laser beams could be used to create greater force than mere sunlight. No moving parts. No propellant. They could simply catapult through space and travel within 150 million kilometers of their target then send back captured images of a high enough quality to determine surface features of any planets they passed.
By the mid 2060’s, almost 25 years since these tiny probes were launched, grainy but full color images were being broadcast back to Earth; and the excitement it stirred within the scientific community was electric to say the least. What’s more … Kapteyn-B was thought to be habitable! It contained vast oceans, land masses apparently capable of sustaining plant or even animal life, inland seas and marshes, and quite possibly fresh water lakes and rivers flowing from its icy polar caps. It had rocky deserts in the continental interiors. Vast mountain ranges ringed inland plains likely devoid of life on the dark side of the planet. But otherwise it looked like Kapteyn B could support a colony.
The Kapteyn System was estimated to be 11.5 billion years old – much older than our own Solar System. But there were even more intriguing facts about this mysterious planet that were coming to light as the “Star Shot Probe” transmissions began reaching Earth. Nearly five times the mass of Earth. Gravity 1.7 times that of our own planet. It would be hard to live there, and there was no telling whether there would be breathable oxygen. But with its giant oceans on the sunny side of the planet, it still made for a tantalizing prospect.
Kapteyn B was classified as a “synchronous rotator”, with one side always facing its sun. Models developed by scientists for this much older planet indicated such planets could maintain habitable conditions if they possessed a sufficiently dense CO² atmosphere. Thus if Kapteyn B had always been a terrestrial planet, similar to the inner planets of our own Solar System, there must be a good chance it possessed such an atmosphere; at the very least as a natural consequence of its position within the habitable “Goldilocks Zone” … as astronomers playfully referred to it. Not too hot, not too cold, in other words.
Scientists prior to the Star Shot Probe’s exploration of the Kapteyn System had often worried that “B’s” extreme age (10 billion Earth years) would present a problem. This was vitally important, because as planets age, they slowly cool (due to the decay of their original radioactive elements). Perhaps then, “B” might be a geologically dead planet that slowly lost its atmospheric CO² and entered a perpetual Ice Age, eons ago.
However, and to the delight of Earth scientists within Space Programme, this turned out not to be the case (apparently, some speculated, because the cooling of a super-Earth like “B” was much slower than smaller planets like our own). Whether it be God’s providence, mankind’s manifest destiny, or just plain good fortune, the sunny side of Kapteyn B had maintained an ability to support oceans and inland seas likely to support vegetation, even if the chances of finding vast jungles and forests was no longer likely, based on probe transmissions.
Intelligent life existing there was also given a slim chance on such a cold, aged planet. Scientists from both camps were quick to caution against trying to imagine intelligent beings scurrying up to greet landing parties or even swarms of insects or edible plants anywhere on the surface. Any forms of life to be discovered, they seemed to agree, would likely be found in the planet’s massive oceans. Official plans from Space Programme depicted a planetary operation that might involve harvesting marine life and plankton to be turned into edible food; perhaps inland agriculture utilizing desalinated ocean water. The only thing left to do, therefore, was send a large, well-supplied, manned mission and determine this from the planet’s very own surface. In fact, that’s just how Cory concluded her exposé back in 2076:
“The race to develop an exploratory mission to Kapteyn B quickly became the prime focus of legions of scientists funded and authorized by the Global Union to develop a craft capable of traveling this great distance and actually colonize this alien planet. Operation Goldilocks, as those involved with the project nicknamed it, was in full swing.”
Thus concluded her report.
*****
Ten years had now passed. Cory’s career had flourished. Her ground-breaking 2076 Exposé about the Collapse of 2028 and its aftermath garnered global recognition and even a few awards. The international film academy in Berlin recognized her with its prestigious FELIX award at the restored Theater des Westens in Berlin.
And yet, as she sat in her chair receiving touch-ups to her makeup on this Sunday afternoon in 2086, Cory could only think of the exciting new report planned for this evening’s broadcast. She’d been working on the story for over a year, and tonight was finally going to be her opportunity to tell the world.
This concludes tonight's podcast of Twin Paradox Book One, Chapter Five: Operation Goldilocks. I hope you enjoyed it. Watch for episode six; which I'll be posting very soon.
I wrote Twin Paradox books one, two, and three, four years ago under the pseudonym Purple Hazel; and each book in the trilogy is organized into parts. What you've just heard over the past five episodes is Part One: Collapse and Aftermath. In next week's podcast we'll get to meet the main characters in the story as we jump into Part Two: Pioneers and Explorers.
Also, and don't forget, my latest full-length novel ... Deathwalker Colony ... is available right now in E-book format and can be downloaded today on Amazon.com, along with the first two books in the Rijel 12 Series, The Rise of New Australia and Return of Anarchy. A link to these as well as some of my other works can be found in the transcript for this episode.
I'm King Everett Medlin. Thanks for tuning in.
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