The Powers That Be

Last night I saw Earth’s government, the United World Government, as hiding the big picture from the populace. (Absolute power corrupts absolutely.) I could see the scene unfolding in from of my eyes: the men in power thinking they know what’s right for everyone and yet some of the people’s “servants” were harboring unspoken selfish intentions. That will be my focus for the next few days.

I also saw “Space Arks” as the type of efficient transport that would allow the kind of world-scale evacuation my novel calls for. The words feel very right and I will spend time researching, one of my favorite things to do.

It’s appearing more and more obvious to me in recent days that I am not going to be writing my usual “romance” book but one with a different scope. It appears to be more about different families and their experience leading up to the mass exodus with government cover-ups coming into focus. I do love a good mystery! And this one is a mystery to me yet...

Ethical Issues

Now that such minuscule implanting devices are readily available, you have to ask if “Big Brother” has it too easy keeping the population in check. Yes, it reduces crime to virtually zero, but what about individual freedoms? How much of our “humanness” are we willing to give up? The movie “Braveheart” understood implicitly the need for freedom. I would love to create a book some day that speaks to the soul—that cries out for freedom for all people.

Less of an ethical concern, but perhaps much more fun, imagine watching the movie you want on one half of your field of view from inside your own head from a small device hidden behind your ear or being able to project it for your family into a 3-D hologram-like image. I think people will still want to be entertained and be able to escape the bonds of reality whenever and wherever they want.

How far is New Earth from Earth? 

Since the recent discovery of HD85512b that is 36 light years from Earth (one light year is 5,865,696,000,000 miles) and our future civilization can travel at the speed of light, then the one-way journey will take 36 years. The media calls this Earth, Super Earth, I’m calling it New Earth, much like adventures called England, New England in America.

(It is 3.6 times the mass of Earth and is a constant temperature of 77 degrees Fahrenheit.)

Which planet would you choose for a mass exodus from our own beloved one?

The Plan and New Inventions:

By 2723, Earth’s in habitants have undergone many devastating events. Having been tainted through the centuries by numerous plagues of man-made viruses, nuclear explosions, naturally occurring volcanic eruptions of scalding lava that had burst inopportunely through the crust on occasion, the near collapse of the ecosystem that planted the idea for their current United World Government and one biotech disaster that decimated the entire population of Areas Ten through Twenty—but still unbowed in the final analysis until the Titan.

The populace, what remained of it after the viral spread of Ebola by terrorists against the World Government, is now evacuating Earth for New Earth.

How far away is the new planet and how long will it take to get there? The populace needs to be revaccinated with the DNA stem cell therapy serum that “sets” their bodies back fifty years to get everyone there alive.

My inventions to date:  2723 A.D.

(1) Rejuvenation Institute for DNA stem cell therapy serum injections that “sets” the body back 50 years to enable a type of immortality.

(2) 100 Earth Zones under one United World Government.

(3) Automatic robot that cleans the apartment:  Turbo-Robot (my personal favorite!)

(4) Titan: More than twenty-three hundred kilometers across, the massive rock and ice structure was bigger than the total square kilometer size of Area Two. The largest of the one hundred Zones that gridded the planet, it stretched its tentacles from the Mississippi River system through the Great Plains to foot of the Rocky Mountains, from the former Canadian/US border to the state of Texas.

(5) New Earth

(6) An army of unleashed von Neumann probes, those self-replicating robots that are “seeding” the galaxy with terraform. (I didn’t invent this as it has already been suggested!)

(7) Previous Disasters: tainted through the centuries by numerous plagues of man-made viruses, nuclear explosions, naturally occurring volcanic eruptions of scalding lava that had burst inopportunely through the crust on occasion, the near collapse of the ecosystem that planted the idea for their current United World Government and one biotech disaster that decimated the entire population of Zones Ten through Twenty.

(8) Gabaray (space incinerator) turns space junk to dust.

(9) Implanted miniature micro chip that allows instant access to a device that acts similar to a twenty-first century cell phone. Also, it has reduced crime to virtually nonexistent due to its tracking nature.

(10) Flash-8, their very own personal flying conveyance that holds one to three people.

(11) Nearly invisible headsets that allow you to mentally key in your thoughts to be later downloaded and stored in the library memory hard-drive for future generations.

(12) Movie screens inside your head that can also be projected into a 3-D hologram on to a 3-D hologram for everyone to enjoy.

(13) Library of Data.

(14) Stay tuned, there will be many more!

Any thoughts?

IMMORTALITY

2723AD: For the purposes of our story, cloning has created a kind of immortality for mankind. Writing vampire novels has twigged me to this idea. With medical scientific advancements, why not?! But then the quandary is, do you keep all your memories as a human being from each reincarnation, so to speak? Or, more importantly, do you want to? But I’m assuming for our purposes you will have no choice in that. Each lifetime you have lived as a biological being will be added to your current lifetime within your younger body. Sounds heavenly, eh! We all have virtual immortality pretty much at the present time if we care to leave our avatar (after death) out there on the internet. Some want to take it to the next level and call them intellitars. But this takes it to wondrous heights. I feel like I’m creating a future Utopia in PLANET…

How large is Comet Titan?

This is an important consideration. Titan needs to be sufficiently humongous enough to have the impact create untenable conditions on Earth, and yet not so large as to seem improbable to fellow humans. I have come up with description, keeping in mind that with Earth’s one Unified Government having been created, I need to describe it more by historical land marks.

       But it was the sheer size of the Titan that defied man’s need to control it, he knew only too well, having spent hours studying every single bit of information that could be collected, both legally and albeit not so legally from a friend perched in high places. More than twenty-three hundred kilometers across, the massive rock and ice structure was bigger than the total square kilometer size of Area Two. The largest of the Areas, it stretched its tentacles from the Mississippi River system through the Great Plains to the foot of the Rocky Mountains, from the former Canadian/US border to the state of Texas.

This should make Titan large enough to destroy life as we know it on planet Earth and make evacuation essential to man’s survival. One can just imagine the dust storm or, if it lands in water, an even more likely scenario as the planet is more than seventy percent covered by water, than the flooding would be unbelievable and swam us all. A worrisome premise, eh!

The Movie In Your Head

If writing fiction is akin to showing someone the movie you are watching in your head, then you need to transfer the character’s experiences to the reader by way of sight, sound, smell and sensation.

PLANET’s setting will be Earth, seven millenniums into the future. Because I can never actually go there, I will have to create the setting in my mind's eye before I can “transfer” it to others. This is an exciting and daunting task. No one can know how far mankind will have come. You can only consider what people hope to see in the future, though history has so often proved them wrong. The courage is in the trying, I believe.

 What kinds of housing will humans inhabit, what foods will they consume, and what clothes will they wear? What won’t be available, is a big question. Will “peak oil” be so on the downward slope that nothing is created from petroleum anymore? Huge considerations.

 How far do you think humans will have come in seven centuries?

All Together Now

Now putting all the last five blog information together, we have the prologue for PLANET.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," 

~Arthur C. Clarke~

PROLOGUE

Armageddon is imminent. All residents of Earth are on highest alert. The world has become one nation without boundaries as its inhabitants stretch skyward on highest tippy toe to swing for the brass ring of the second tier of the third level of the Kardashev scale for categorizing civilizations, well ahead of the original schedule of another millennium. This previously unrealized dream of all citizens being of one denomination has finally come to pass for all peoples of Planet Earth and now an unprecedented monumental disaster is about to strike in the form of the Comet Titan, a massive ice-ball from the Kuiper belt, a zone just beyond Neptune that has sent a steady rain of comets eastward for thousands of years. The inhabitants are scrambling to evacuate their home planet on a great Diaspora just behind an army of unleashed von Neumann probes, those self-replicating robots that are “seeding” the galaxy with terraform, that is, changing the new chosen planet’s surface and climate to be like Earths, for the Titan is coming.

Von Neumann Probes

In essence, self-replicating probes work as follows: A fully-automated probe is launched toward a nearby star via a propulsion system. When it enters that star system decades (or centuries) later, it exhaustively surveys what lies there. It transmits what it learns back to its home planet, which for our purposes, is Planet Earth. It then uses the material resources of the star system present in asteroids, comets, moons, and/or planets to construct replicas of itself, which it sends to other nearby star systems to repeat the process, looking for a new perfect Earth.

 They would be in essence miniature flying factories, designed to use advanced robotic systems to mine and process ore, harvest raw materials, fabricate individual components, and assemble all the varied parts into a whole probe. Depending on the complexity of the probe and the sophistication of the robotic systems involved, the process to produce a single daughter probe can vary from a few days to several years.

The original probe may stay in the system or continue on, depending on its mission parameters. If it stays, it may act as a communication relay between its "children" and its home planet, or it may begin processing the system’s resources for anticipated follow-up colonization ships from the home planet, or it may launch resources back to its point of origin for its building race’s material needs.

For our needs, it will actually prepare the new planet for all the inhabitants of Earth.

Any comments?

*Back on Monday!

PLANET’s Timeline

The twenty-seventh century, seven hundred years from now: If we are only twelve centuries out of the dark ages, exponentially speaking, why not 2700AD as the time period for PLANET? Some may think this too soon to have reached a level 2 civilization, but others might agree. I’m rooting for mankind. And since its' probably my decision in the end, I’m going with the 27^th century. Any thoughts on what life might be like at that time? Or would it be too soon for Earth's populace to be able to vacate our planet for safety?