One Way Ticket
‘Chapter One
I had spent 12 years in this tin can with 300 other travellers the ‘habitat’s’. Our target was in orbit around the planet Uranus. Like most of the ESA/NASA/Russia/ Chinese/India/anything else trips to the outer solar system it was a one way trip with no hope of coming back. Our trip had two aims first to build a settlement on Miranda the second build to build a laser to boast the first solar sail crafts to other solar systems. The crew would travel close to the speed of light and on average reach the target 20 years older.
Like our trip these settlers were going on a one way trip with no hope of every going home but these days space travel was all about getting there.
It could have been worse we could have been building the domed settlements on the surface of one of Jupiter or Saturn large moons or on the surface or under the surface of the vast desert worlds of Mars, Venus or Mercury. Our target was Miranda a large around Uranus our mission was one of many to Uranus large moons each one planned to build a large self contained colony. We planned to cover one of the vast valleys on the surface of the world. In around five years we would see the first ships heading for Neptune’s moon Triton then two years later we would see the first crafts heading for the Oort cloud three years after that we would see solar sail crafts heading with their crews out to Sliver and Freedom and the other Earth-like worlds outside the solar systems.
In my tin can I made sure we did not crash into the other habitants in the fleet there were 15 of us each with 300 crew members. Like the others I lived in a small cabin called a suit with a bed and a large port hole my view shows blue Uranus. The new Earth-like worlds both were almost as hash as Mars and the other desert worlds of the solar system. Silver was a vast desert of salt were settlers planned to settle around the salty lakes, yellow was a planet where humans would only be able to settle the poles as the rest of the planet was a Earth-like hot desert like the Shana then there was ice a place like Antarctica. Mankind was looking to these 140 odd worlds outside the solar system all Earth-like but not one easy to live on like Earth none with lush green hills or vast liveable landmasses. On some people would still need to live under domes but for them they would be living on their worlds not Earth a planet of over 8 billion people.
All 300 of us spent our time reading and asking what type of world we were going to build for our child. In windowless rooms we talked about life we may of been busy but there was little else to do only 50 of us were awake the rest were sleeping. They slept for two reasons first we did not have resources for the 300 strong second they needed to stay young for once they came to Miranda.
When I was not working in the crapped control room of the craft I stay in the garden talked by phone to crews of the other habitants or watch the TV from Earth. Each other the habitants or ships as they were called were cylinders like ours built in sections on the blue and white globe. Rockets took them into orbit where they were bolted together. Like us the crews had agreed to a one way ticket unlike most people in the program they were not busy building power stations and stations for the laser network. The power stations and the laser network were called the star rover program network and these would power mankind’s first manned crafts outside the solar system. These huge blue and white structures were being built everywhere around the gas planets and the belt objects. Many in the outer solar system would not use solar power but fission power to work for centuries. Within a few centuries mankind it was planned would have settled over 40 systems.
As a result of being so crapped it was not hard for even a normal crew member like myself to meet senor crew members. My Cabin on the ship as it turned out was right next to the captain who as it turned out was a woman who was around the same age as me. The captain’s name was Rose she came from across the pond to me on Earth and had lived most of her life in New York. She had big brown eyes, dark skin and jet black hair.
‘You know just because your my neighbour does not mean you can ask for extra favours’
She smiled as she said that we were both enjoying our affair even after all these years almost all the general population does not know that we had a relationship during the voyage. But that's the least of it no one knows that her child who was known as her clone is in fact the result of our union.
In the meantime life on Earth did not change nations still go to war climate change carried on? Football games carried on the seasons from winter, fall, spring and summer did not change however I and the others would never see those seasons again.
The habitat was around 200 metros long and 100 meters wide she was a sliver cylinder shaped which like the cylinders being sent to the stars had been built in parts in many of Earth’s dock yards. The rooms were vast and spacious after all we were not going to be able to spend time outside apart from the odd EVA. Each room had a pine like cladding which had the effect of making trying to make each cabin like those on a 19th century sailing ship. The craft had 20 decks which myself and the rest of the crew could float in zero G up and down. Some were garden decks others had crew cabins or mess hall all the large machines were sent in unmanned crafts. Much of the work infact building the colony would have been finished by the time we got to Miranda.
I remember my recruitment when I was 23 and just out of University. I could have done so many other things like be a doctor or lawyer I did not need to go into space the world was at my feet. They in this case the company needed people for their space program. Most people in the space program even the ones who live in the small domed cities of Luna can return. The most people who go to space don’t even leave Earth orbit, the solar stations that power much of the West and the star rover program are mostly built around Earth in low orbit. They use tugs to move the objects into other orbits around the Sun. As I floated up I remembered the University with its stone buildings that looked forever grey as if the colour had been beached out of them. I half remembered lovers I could remember their names but not their faces. My memories were misty just like many of the cities back home.
Life on Earth was hard and for most people leaving for near space working on a space station or life within a Luna dome was far easer
For the next two years training it was general training they have not worked out which one of us were going to stay on the land and which were going into space. Two years later I was told in a small board room I would work on the great power stations. I soon found out that the rumours were true these were very dangerous places to work. A spanner or a blot could come out of the blue and crash into an astronaut’s helmet quickly killing them within minutes.
Two years later I was taken aside one night and told that I had been selected for a ‘colony mission’.
The words ‘colony mission’ were two of the most dreaded in space exploration like all other space workers I know there was no way out I was never going home. We could leave our jobs for a variety of reasons but it was illegal not to go on a colony mission. Colony missions were the missions to settle the desert worlds of the solar system and eventually beyond. The idea for them had surfaced less than 50 years ago when it was realised it was too expensive in many cases. As a result of these trips being one way the crews had to put up with VR recordings of their everyday life. VR recording was when a recording
Explorers as they were called were a small group of people who got to travel to these new worlds after a few years. These private individuals used the star rover network to visit these remote outposts of humanity. But they usually found were complex societies which has they were described as time went by became more and more alien. This was often the result of the environment as most world is that been settled unlike Venus had much lower G their children were often had to be born in a manmade wound and found it hard to even visit Earth or the other two large rocky planets. But in other ways these new worlds where uneasy for anyone who had left Earth. Often people did not marry and group sex was common on worlds like Io where there were fewer men to women. Also as the settlers needed advanced technology in order to live they often had closer bonds then people on the mother world.
If a person walked into a domed city on Luna or any other planet they soon found that their design was such that people could jump up and down. The low G resulted in places unlike any on Earth cities were designed like vast structures wide skyscrapers on Mars, curved staircase like habitats on many of the low gravity moons or dwarf planets like Ceres and Vesta where known for their weird shaped cities. Great spiral shaped super buildings which inside had houses like those found all over Earth. Both Ceres and Vesta were colonies with over 2 million people each they were two of the smallest worlds mankind had settled but they were still bigger than Miranda and unlike Miranda they were not ice worlds. The settlers on Miranda would have to dig deep under the surface of the world once the machines had done their work.
Me and Rose used to talk about life once we landed on Miranda,
‘You know the government back on Earth wants us to have children like rabbits I think its because its cheaper then sending new people to places like Miranda and her sister Moons.’
‘You know the problem with Low G they have to have namo probes to make sure they can walk at home!’ I answered.
‘We both know the way this is set up it will be years before anyone goes ‘home’. We both know us never going to see the Green Hills, deserts or Rainforest of Earth again. If we lucky then our Grand children will want and will be able to go to the birthplace of mankind.’
I stopped eating my fork almost fell out of my hand in zero G, Rose had looking at me with her deep dark eyes
It would be over 200 years before the first truly Earth-like planets could be settled. They had found in all directs 42 planets that like Earth were liveable and had good climates and unlike planets like salt where humans would have to walk added by masks or suits. These worlds were between 90 to 120 light years from Earth at the very edge of planned human space. The ships that would head to these worlds were being built their crews would like most of our crew sleep for most of the trip in both an ageless and dreamless sleep. The problem of course of these worlds was that there would be few human settlers there was no way of sending even a large number of people from the overpopulated dirty Earth. Most like me who could leave for both desert worlds within the solar system or desert worlds in nearby systems would always been the largest group of settlers.
So three years later I had the first up and close look at Miranda my new home and my children and their children’s children new home. Rose by then had become more distant she had used me to make a child the first child of Miranda. The crew had started off being a friendly bunch we had to be after all we were going to be living together for six years in a small tin can. I would spend every day with my friends drinking coffee to start and discuss with them the events of the day. In those days we all kept ourselves busy with scientific experiments and saying our final goodbyes to our families. Fast forward five years later when the voyage only had less than a year left the atmosphere on the ship as well as well as the other ships in the fleet had changed.
It was partly I suspect to do with the fact that we had been cooped up with one another for years but also partly to do with the fact we had less and less to do. It would perhaps have been better if like the expeditions to other star systems we had been in some form of suspended animation but we weren't. As a result as the voyage reached its final conclusion groups of us started sitting around asking what sort of institutions we should have on Miranda.
The other four moons around the gas giant were typical colonial societies in hash climates. As a result it was seen best that they were ruled as one party states with the iron fist. The only question was which faction would dominate? It quickly became clear that senior officers like for example Rose believed it was their role to run the colony at least in its first days. The senior crews as a result started to organise themselves forming secret societies on each ship and figuring out who their loyal supporters were and who potentially could be a menace to the state they plan to set up once we landed.
For us Miranda would be our new world a planet we would have to cover a huge canyon once we landed...
Chapter Two
We named the new settlement Canyon City it would later become known as Canyon City on Miranda as a number of Canyon cities were built all over human space. Canyon City was really of course 14 small villages in a covered Canyon but we had grand plans. The machines had covered a vast area of the Canyon and the plan back on Earth was within a century to have all Canyons covered.
By now me and Rose in the whitewashed villages of Canyon city had split. She had had four children in the stud farm that was Miranda. In fact life on Miranda was far better than Earth the air was clear, there were no lack of food or water and there was certainly freedom to talk. From the beginning it became apparent to one of the first major industries on Miranda would be fucking and making babies. There were even sex parties where people met to just have sex so to bring up the number of settlers faster.
The environment within Canyon city was designed to be a perfect Mediterranean environment. Olive trees were planted everywhere by the robots which had been deployed by the unmanned solo sailors crafts. You would not have believed it if you lived in Canyon city but outside we all lived on an airless ball of rock and ice. It was designed to look like a valley in a country like Greece but the colony felt more like a Hollywood film set. Under every village were tunnels and passageways which led to automated control centres. Everything that occurred underneath the Canyon which was to do with the environment was controlled by a massive automated artificially intelligent computer system from the length of the days to the biodiversity of the other life forms apart from the humans in the colony. Miniature factories could build new villagers if needed within hours every think was designed to look like part of Earth but we were acutely aware that we really lived in a vast machine like most settlers.
At this point rose and most of the senior crew who had led the expedition had founded the party. The party run by its central committee was essentially an alliance between former senior crews of each ship which had been used to settle the new world. This was a dictatorship which in reality was based on a cult of personality and there was absolutely nothing any of the colonists could do about it. The crews who had set up the party had access to the only weapons on the Moon and as result they practice extreme cruelty in order to maintain their positions of power.
A few weeks after we made landfall a student of mine told me how she was treated by the secret police. I listened to her by now I was an important individual I was a professor who taught engineering. She told me how she had spent eight weeks incarcerated in a cell all by herself in solitary confinement. I did not tell her that I had heard stories of gang rapes and other forms of torture which she probably had not experience as her father was an extremely important councillor.
A few months after we made landfall settlers started to explore outside Canyon city I was not among them. Since my days travelling here from earth I'd made up my mind that I would never leave the safety of Canyon city. A friend of mine called Mark had once left the city limits in order to explore the surface. He wore the classic spacesuit the helmet and the white suit and drove a Miranda rover which was really a heavily modified Luna Rover.
Two hours into his journey he went across and an unseen Canyon the Rover fell straight in. He survived the accident was unfortunately paralysed. Once rescuers got to him they quickly found it was too late he had died from lack of oxygen his death would have been painful and slow and showed the risks of living at the frontier of human existence.
The problem was however that freedom on the ground was not in our everyday life. Since my split with Rose she had gone from being Captain of one of the 15 crafts that had made it to Miranda to being the face of Miranda on both Earth and the other large moons of Uranus Ariel, Umbriel, Oberon and Titania. By that time the five moons had all set up their own governments we were each independent colonies of Earths.
‘You know what Sam is like’ Rose snapped at me, I now sometimes called her ‘the old cow’. In the years since we'd landed she had well and truly lost her looks jet black hair was now becoming greyish her slim body was now a blob and this was all partly due to our new world’s gravity. In low gravity body’s muscles use less energy and as a result they burn less fat so it is easier to put weight on. Over the next few years like on all the human colonies in the solar system apart from Venus we all rapidly became overweight and so did our children. It was not till the third generation of settlers that genetic engineering of the inhabitants of my adopted home world started.
Meanwhile in the first 20 years of our colony’s existence a number of momentous events took place once we had built along with the other four colonies the lasers for the Star rover project. The first of those long-awaited events was the settlement of Neptune's only large moon and the beginning of the settlement of the dwarf planets in the Oort cloud. Once 40 of them had been settled ten years after moon fall from our closely guarded and monitored villages in Canyon City we saw the first star ships. They were aimed at the Alpha Centauri system all 120 crafts and the intention of the settlers was to build a series of colonies on the small dwarf planets and desert worlds of that system. Their main aim was to expand the Star rover project and enable human beings to go further. After another 10 years of seeing dozens of expeditions sent to the stars with at best Mars and Venus like worlds they began to find world that were Earth-like. I saw the ships that aimed themselves at the system with the planet Sliver whose surface was dominated by silver coloured micros but who settlers could simply walk around without spacesuit but with a mask. Salt was another world the interstellar sails made it too it atmosphere was full of chlorine but again they did not need to wear a spacesuit. After 20 years I had seen ships sent to 150 systems aiming to settle 1000 worlds and in total the star Rover program only settled 70 worlds which were Earth-like within a 70 light radius which I would learn on my 140 year birthday.
On my home world as our society grew so did restrictions I only saw a handful of times the child I had with Rose. She was now a senior official in the government and after child reached five she told my lawyer that I could not see him anymore. It's not really surprised me by now I was effectively a dissident I did not agree with the party line so I had to be punished. What did surprise me was the reason of Rose used for blocking my access to my only child. She told the court that it was the child's own safety and my own safety this was identical to the party line when it came to the freedoms of the inhabitants of our young world. On Miranda the government officially at least worried that some psychopathic settler could damage the canopy over Canyon city. As a result the freedoms of all settlers were so severely restricted. Our conversations on the computer network where constantly monitored and our free elections like on the other colonies never came.
I remember the day I was told I was going to be disabled in less than five years. It had rapidly turned out like most of the low gravity colonies that the first generation of settlers who had been born on earth would be disabled eventually by the environment. The low gravity meant muscles worked less as a result we put on more fat the putting on more fat was heart disease which would eventually kill most of settlers early on in their lives.
The key problem with Miranda was that she was an airless desert world of ice and rock in order to get to any resources the government built vast mines both deep into our world and into Saturn's smaller moons. With these mines they gain the resources to cover other canyons they used the ice to produce the atmosphere under the canyons. After the process was complete mostly third-generation settlers as first-generation and second-generation were now mostly confined to a wheelchairs were used to settle the new valleys. My only child when I met him when he was 16 was himself in a wheelchair unable to move his legs it rapidly became clear from early on that second-generation children would be outlived by their parents. The problem was bodies didn't work in the low gravity suits were developed which allowed government officials to walk around but they were expensive. My poor son was in fact terminally ill his life expectancy was only 30 years just the right time for him to have one or two children but he could never have them naturally. The government instructed every first and second generation citizen to give them their genetic material. Quickly became apparent on most super low gravity worlds the only future the colony had now was in genetic engineering. The robots and suites we developed allowing us to walk around but there was no way morally another generation of settlers could be condemned to such short lives.
The engineering was designed in such a way like on the other colonies to make them look the same as people back on earth. Underneath their skin however their muscles were designed to be able to deal with different amounts of gravity they could even unlike the first two generations of settlers visit Earth and the other two large inner worlds. The restrictions became ever greater on my freedom of movement 20 years after landfall not only was I in a wheelchair unable to move my legs and arms but the entertainment I watched was controlled by the government. The work I did by remote-control was to use the vast robots that built the canopies is over the canyons. They were vast mile long Caterpillar like machines the settlers who would inhabit the new settlements were just being born. Many were modified clones from the original first two generations of settlers others were test tube babies. No one in the third generation was given the name instead they were given numbers and their parents or donors if they were clone were not introduced to them.
The birth of the third-generation soon became an official government project given the name ‘the birthing system’. The birthing system comprised of a number of genetic engineering facilities and artificial wound birthing centres. In effect the project involved mass-producing hundreds of thousands of settlers to replace the mostly terminally ill first two generations. As we knew we had 20 years mostly to be replaced in that time people agreed to have their minds down loaded into robots in the hope that they can keep an eye on our society as so many of us were surely going to die before the new generation came on line
It was all part of official government policy known as the clean break policy but this policy only extended to the general population. For the elite known who their children were and they met them in order to groom them to take over once they were gone. Other children presumably clones were given increased ageing in fact they were not designed to be settlers but soldiers for the government. It turned out that part of the third-generation programme as the birthing system had become known. The programme eventually took up most of the government's budget if you did not include the law and order and surveillance department of the government
The older I got the more I realised that I now lived a nightmare.
The law and order and surveillance department otherwise known as the LOSD was not just feared secret police but also the judiciary. As Rose my former lover became less powerful in her later years she remained the official ruler of Miranda however the real power now lay in the LOSD. It was rumoured that five years into her premiership the internal security services had been forced to merge officially with the LOSD. The internal security services had once been under the control of Rose unofficially apart from low-level officials the internal security services (ISS) which had been so feared by the general population had been massacred.
Both the ISS and its successor the LOSD had use barbaric methods. The ISS had been instructed by Rose and the other members of the bureau (as the ruling committee was called) to kill by placing in the vacuum the hundred most dangerous dissidence. Among these dissidents was one of the founding members LOSD the method used by the LOSD was to force these people to walk outside the Canyon without a space suit. They survived less than seven minutes but during those seven minutes they died an agonising death. Usually near the end many would hold their breath and their heads would explode.
This had in the short term the desired effect in that no one from any other of the security organisations that had been set up by different departments and factions would work against the government. However as time went by the ISS became less powerful especially as Rose became like myself unable to move around. The LOSD took advantage of its rival’s sudden weakness by developing the walking suits as they were called. Eventually they rounded up ISS officials and killed most of them by throwing them into a large lake at the edge of Canyon city.
Just over 20 years after landfall Rose was still officially the leader of the colony but in reality she was nothing more than a figurehead. By now the LOSD had control of both the party and through the party the colony. Like their predecessors they ruled with an iron fist now our society moved their reproduction from being natural to being mass produced there was no need for them to worry about how many colonists they killed.
It was 21 years before I was given a platform to put my wheelchair on so I could travel around the rest of Canyon city. I remember my first thought ‘ this place has not changed much’ however there had been some changes for example everyone over 30 seem to be using the same platforms but I was using or if they were not using the like most officials in the party Platforms they were using a power suit. Canyon city was surprisingly quiet building was all over the place the official villages of Canyon city were rapidly being joined by a number of new complexes. Actually by the time I had platform all the villages in the Canyon city area had merged. It was like looking at a large white city skyscrapers the first the moon had ever had on its surface were being constructed in the centre of the city. The canyon that Canyon city lay in was now completely covered by a canopy the result was that the city's size was no longer limited and food no longer needed to be grown within the city limits.
The only people walking around what under 10 years old these were the bright new hope for our colony the third-generation. I landed near a couple of them they definitely looked like normal humans however when I spoke to them they acted shocked. I later on found out that they communicated between one another in the same way as two computers communicate with each of all wirelessly.
They were telepaths otherwise known as the next stage of evolution.
Over the years I have quickly realised that they are like a subspecies of the human race. They look human when you talk to them they sound human but there way of thinking is very bizarre. Today because of the party every canyon has now been covered and now our people live in the new land of milk and honey.
Today I'm the oldest man in the entire colony of 22 million at 144 years old. Mankind has settled on 1000 bodies which are both inside the solar system and outside of it. From what I've been told even the Earth-like worlds they have found are deserts. Human beings however have adapted on most of these hostile climates the societies like my own have been dictatorships. Many worlds the only way human beings to develop them have been to adapt themselves to their climate. On worlds like White people live under vast see-through domes on Ice an extremely cold Earth-like world the cities are underground. Meanwhile the vast star rover laser network keeps on growing human beings now inhabit over 80 systems. They live in a wide variety of environments some on planets others on dwarf planets and a large number on large moons. Many of the worlds are not Earth-like but have more characteristics in common with Luna, Mars or Venus. Then maybe in around 18 cases the world is that just happen to be more Earth-like. Recently a spat of Eden like Earth-like worlds have been found a large number have been found without intelligent life forms however others have been found which have both native and non-native intelligent races. As result many of the new human settlements have gone to war with the locals and a variety of conflicts have taken place.
Chapter 3
The Council of Planets, Dwarf Planets and Moons was a kind of 40th century version of the UN. Every world’s human population within 75 light year sent representatives to Earth where the council was based. Earth was of course the logical place for the Council as the vast majority of human beings even 2000 years since humans had left the solar system still lived on Earth.
So I Ben 22 was the representative for Miranda humans. Human beings had settled in small numbers on over 1000 worlds within those 75 light and many had settled had moved further afield. Human colonies where everywhere. On many worlds humans mostly Earth-like ones they were at war with native races or other settler races for space and resources. Like in my colony often they had to change what they were making modifications to their bodies or like in the case of Venus and water they had to build habitat cities that floated in the atmosphere or were giant mega-oceangoing crafts.
Today 15 billion people lived on Earth another estimated 5 billion lived on all the human colonies. From relatively earth-like worlds like Silver or bench to vast water worlds the size of gas giants like Neptune like for example water. Water’s representatives were in fact always changing as the society was split between free-floating doughnut shaped city states. These cities states had vast fusion powered systems of propulsion which enabled them to travel through the vast ocean. To make matters even more complex as a result of waters internal conflicts and its great resources the inhabitants of waters large moons as well as the other inhabitable bodies in the system had been drawn into the conflict over the world's future.
The council building itself was in the city of London on the island of Britain just off the continent of Europe. It was a cone shaped building laying just outside the M25 the motorway that was effectively the equivalent of the city wall in mediaeval cities. The building was the shape of a cone and the walls were made out of wood the structure was a dark brown. There was a Japanese water garden situated right round the small complex. In the garden were number of plaques to the peacekeeping missions which had been sent to a number of individual worlds and systems other the centuries.
The council itself however we started to lose its importance as time went on human beings increasingly because of the distance from the home system no longer sent representatives. The more recent colonies literally had no contact with Earth world like Eden and Byron had actually been Terraformed and had little interest in the subspecies that dominated human space. Other worlds like yellow had already had intelligent life forms when they had been settled. The result was hundreds of thousands of humans and aliens called Tins had died.
The more you walked around the garden the more plaques from the 200 or so peacekeeping missions you found. Human space was riddled with conflicts and that was just between the separate worlds that did not include the societies themselves that humans inhabited which often had their own civil wars just like water.
Miranda for example over a century after it had been settled was still dominated by the party. The party had roughly a million members who all shared the same genetic material with the original crews of the solar sails. The passengers who form the majority were the remaining 23 million or so inhabitants and they were seriously repressed. Torture, murder, mind control and nano surveillance bolts were only just a few of the techniques used by the security services which effectively had run my home world.
In the end the system started to break down especially once it became possible on a regular basis to travel from and back my home world and Earth. We often saw freer societies once the young generation reached a certain age they started to riot. The government authorities panicked and even briefly considered it later leaked out bringing some of the canopies down which would have killed millions. In the end they lost control of canyon city a vast metropolis with over 8 million inhabitants. I remembered the 2000 year old recordings as my ancestors attacked government skyscrapers the huge glass buildings that the ministries had operated from.
Each of the ministry buildings was effectively its own fortress on the outside were cameras watching what occurred throughout canyon city. It was believed that if disorder did break out in the colony the authorities would first block off the government quarter of the city. This was the centre of Canyon City a large park-like area where government officials had their Manors and where the government skyscrapers were. This area of the city was also completely self-sufficient and was designed in such a way that if the canopy fell down government officials could move into bunkers underneath the city. Inside many of these bunkers were farms which made the government quarter effectively fortress. The elite of our society at that time were right to be scared everyone throughout their history would eventually look back partly with pride and disgust at what had happened.
In the early hours when the revolution started and some government officials have been unlucky enough to be outside the government quarter many had died. Paramilitary units which had rebelled as well as mostly young people and students it was not just that we want freedom but we also wanted to practice our own culture.
As the conflict grew officials declared that anyone who disagreed with the government would be put to death immediately. Of course they never have had the chance to actually successfully the government quarter was quickly overran. Any adults were put to death in what has become the traditional method of execution. They were pushed into an airlock at the edge of Canyon city and thrown naked onto the surface of our world. They quickly died a fast glorious death.
Today that is how our society operates with its zero tolerance policy towards any crime. As a result most of the people on my world do not live beyond the age of 32. Dementia, heart disease and kidney failure at common among the population of our world but we celebrate these conditions and we look forward to time of being thrown out of the airlock.
We all aware that ancestors 2000 years ago were all put on board spacecrafts heading one direction and leaving the world of their birth. As a result the societies developed their own methods of surviving in some of the harshest climates possible and these are our ways.’
Writers note
The reason I do not agree with the idea of sending astronauts on one way trips to desert planets within our solar system is that I believe it would ultimately be cruel. The reason I say this is that once the astronauts had settled on that world we do not know the long-term effects. What I often find funny is how Americans talk about the new high frontier of space. I do not agree with their logic I believe that space will be a much more bizarre environment. Also in all the 100s of years since American has been settled there have been many countries like for example Australia which could have been new Americans. I have actually been told by a friend of mine from down under that Australia’s coastal regions could easily take 300 million people. I believe that for the next few thousand years that least the vast majority of human beings will still live on Earth. It is a key belief of mine interplanetary space exploration will be more like Antarctic and deep oceanic exploration where human beings will visit and explore these remote places but will not settle. I actually suspect that eventually we will find earth-like planets and that human beings will eventually settle on these worlds. My other suspicion is this once these worlds are found the development of space exploration will increase markedly. Within a couple of centuries it's likely in my opinion that crafts will be developed that can reach the stars. These will be one-way expeditions and the odds are that the new world see settlers colonise will still be very harsh. My suspicion however is that they will try and avoid environments like the Sahara and Antarctica and that successful colonies will be on worlds which are more like earth. However I do believe that for the time at least the American space agency is wasting money calling for manned exploration of Mars and the other planets of the solar system as I do not believe that they will be able to get enough settlers to move to these worlds. I call this the Alaska get 1000 people at random from Alaska ask them how many would live in Antarctica then ask that group how many would live under the Ocean. The odds are the numbers would be zero I do believe they should wait for the first really earth-like planets to emerge from earth-based searches like Darwin. The fact is the biggest barrier to colonising uninhabitable planets like Mars is people themselves no one in their right mind would agree to settle uninhabitable planets like Mars. The only way anyone would agree to settle Mars is if they believe they can turn it into a world just like earth. It may very well be possible however Mars has such low gravity it may turn out to be extremely expensive.
The same thing goes for multigenerational exploration between the stars no one in their right mind will go on an expedition where they will never see the final result. The only way human beings will make it to the stars is if they can go in some form of suspended animation. The good news is that science is moving in the right direction in a century or two people will be able to be put in suspended animation I believe once they can do this interstellar exploration will truly become possible but not before.
And with that line I rest my case...
