Consolidation Earth
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The hundreds, thousands of blue lights in the night sky - and the daytime, too - gradually dimmed and reddened as the escaping spacecraft whose exhaust plasma they represented drew further away and whose speed became increasingly relativistic The lights showed the progress of hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - of people leaving the solar system, forever, on trajectories which might take them to other stellar systems in a few hundred years’ time. At least, from our perspective; relativistic effects meant that the journey time might only be a few months, from the point of view of those actually travelling. Even now, a new light would occasionally appear in the sky as another Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud iceball started to accelerate; there are hundreds of billions of frozen objects in the dark and far distant reaches of the solar system, hundreds or thousands of times further from the sun than the dwarf planet pair Pluto and Charon. At this extreme distance, most objects are made of ice: not just water, but ammonia and methane ice too, as well as more exotic materials which only form under conditions of extreme cold. It was these objects that the radical Expansionists, with whom we had been at war for decades, had been secretly converting into interstellar spacecraft. Exactly how, and what, they had been doing we did not know, although our best spacecraft engineers theorised that the mass production of carbon nanotubes as a basic building material using methane ice as feedstock was essential to their engineering. It was widely considered by even the most intransigently hawkish military commanders that there was no virtue in pursuing the fleeing Expansionists even if it was immediately practical. It was not: a whole new design of huge spacecraft would be required, with a fleet numbering in the thousands: the financial and political cost would be obviously unacceptable. The cheaper route was favoured instead: a propaganda campaign declaring that the Expansionists were no longer a threat with a strong suggestion of 'good riddance to bad rubbish'. A Peace Dividend was declared, to general and genuinely heartfelt approval: the war in space had gone on for decades and everybody had felt the hardship, even though relatively few people had actually died. Now, there would be a substantial reduction in military expenditure, with the funds being used instead to provide better living conditions, improved infrastructure, and all the rest, although not, naturally enough, a reduction in taxes. As a result of another intensive and highly successful media campaign, a popular movement soon formed to undo or repair or rebuild the effects of centuries of exploitation of planet Earth, the replenishment of environments damaged by rapacious misuse. 'Love our Gaia' was the rallying cry. Of course these actions took many and various forms, from planting trees and removing dams, to rewilding rainforests and refilling mines and quarries. It also brought about a fashion for living in space, leaving Earth surface and its rivers and oceans to nature. There had been space-based fortresses and orbital military facilities for decades, all build with materials mined from asteroids; now, the same technologies were being used to fabricate increasingly large habitats in Low Earth Orbit, easily reachable from the surface by reuseable spaceplanes, and even more easily from lunar shuttles, Mars express services and the stream of transports to the Belt and beyond. During the war, scientific research was inevitably focussed on immediate military objectives, although whether any of those innovations actually had any real impact on our battles with the Expansionists is open to debate. The Peace Dividend changed all that, not quite overnight, but surprisingly quickly; now, it was entirely possible to get funding for research in scientific disciplines with no discernible military benefit; instead, in topics which might be useful in, for example, reversing the effects of petrochemical pollution or removing heavy metal poisons from the environment. Which is how I come in. I am Joe Momoa - Doctor Joseph Momoa, if you want to be formal - and I am a Research Fellow at the University of Hawaii at LEO, a medium-sized orbiting habitat dedicated to the university. The University of Hawai'i has long had a great many campuses on different islands, which are of necessity tens or hundreds of kilometres apart, so it was not much of a stretch, many years ago, to open another campus whose distance varied wildly but was only a few hundred kilometres away when directly overhead. The University of Hawaii has a long history of research into both oceanographic subjects and astronomy, the Hawaiian Islands having long housed telescopes of many kinds on mountain peaks. In modern times, the university has branched out to become a leading light in space research as well as, more recently, the growing area of techniques for cleaning up the oceans. I am researching self-assembling molecular structures, a field popularly known as nanotechnology. Of course, the world we live on is replete with self-organising molecular structures - the phenomena commonly known as 'life' - and, for many purposes, engineered microbes are an excellent vehicle for achieving clean-up of pollution: getting the bugs to eat the plastic, for example. For other applications, though, there are real advantages to getting the devices to count and perform logic and, ultimately, make decisions, to become tiny self-replicating computers, if you like. There is a considerable body of theoretical work on how such machines should work; the focus of my work - and that of many others - is attempting to make them work in reality. I can tell you now the behaviour of the materials we have been making do not correspond to the theory.
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Introduction