“Hey Raj,” Jeff called. “I wouldn’t be so concerned for your protégé so much as how you’re going to survive the retirement party next week! You’re going to be up way past your bedtime you know,” he continued to poke at his friend. “Just make sure that your doctor clears you for the event ahead of time.”
“I’ll have you know,” Raj said with a grin not often seen on the man, “that I have been checked out by my physician, and I’m pretty sure I can still drink most of you under the table!”
“We will see, won’t we my friend,” Jeff challenged.
“Well, getting back to business,” Raj said before Izzy intervened. “We’ve figured out how to collect material from Saturn’s rings. A special vehicle was designed to gently guide a forward-facing scoop into the ring’s debris. The scoop is part of the nose cone. It will open and unfurl the funnel which will be larger than the profile of the ship, so that minimal impact to the ship will be seen. The difference in velocity will funnel the material through the belly of the ship and pile up. There is a mechanism in the hold that helps the material head for the back of the hold to pack them in. We are still refining the design, and we hope to have a prototype ready in the next eighteen months. If we could do this, it would help out a lot with manufacturing. The particle size in the rings range from dust to as big as your fist. This is like having pre-processed ore, saving much manpower and energy. The composition of the ring material ranges from methane and water ice crystals to all the other ore material we could mine on any of the planets. This is because the ring material were once planetoids, moons, or other small bodies that were snagged by Saturn’s gravity well. The big difference here is that we don’t have to dig it up. Our studies have shown that it’s common for planets to have rings. If we must stop for resources on the way to our destination, we wouldn’t necessarily have to go down on a planet to get resources. This may end up being a safer way to mine in the long run. Setting up a mining village on a planet takes a lot of manpower to bring up to production. A fleet of these ships could give us the flexibility to obtain more resources relatively quickly and safely.”
“On the human knowledge project, we have scouts running all over the planet taking 3D pictures of everything they can get their hands on. A large part of this is art and architecture. Another section is interviewing and recording sessions with important people of the day on down to the ‘man in the street’. It is a big task to interview a few billion people. We know that we won’t finish that part, since it is so time consuming, but we are triaging this work the best that we can so we can optimize our return on this. Our section is continually trying to think ‘outside the box’, and we also get suggestions from Alice and Sonny that are helpful. We will be keeping at this right up to departure and beyond. We have plans to continue to record the happenings on the planet after departure, and have them beamed to us until we lose contact all together with the place we called home.”
“Thank you, Raj,” Izzy said in a rare motherly tone. “I think I speak for everyone here in saying that it was our honor working with you on this monumental journey. You have been the best kind of partner in this venture. And by the way,” she said with a grin, “I think you’d better stay sober at the party. I don’t think you will survive the hangover, even if you survive the party. Dr. Baudelaire, if you’re ready to give your briefing for the P.A.M. Section, you can proceed.”
“Thank you, Madame Chairman,” Gwen replied. "Good afternoon all,” she turned to address the members. “Terraforming is a tedious and seemingly never-ending job. Replicating natural aspects of our home on Earth has been difficult. It’s easy to throw down some grass, plant some trees and flowers and call it good. However, as we all know in nature everything depends on everything else. You just can’t plant some flowers and trees. If you want them to reproduce and spread, they must be pollinated. How do you do that in space? The grass grows and exchanges oxygen and CO2, but what about water vapor? How does that relate to the general humidity in the ship? How much humidity should the ship have? You see that one answer spawns many more questions. It’s a many headed hydrae that dogs us even today forty years later. We have answered many questions. Because this is an experiment in progress, we continue to tweak and learn about the inner workings of nature. Over these forty years we’ve been getting a better feel about what works in space and what does not. There are also many instances of things that kind of work. They must be helped out to supply a missing element from nature that wasn’t apparent in the beginning. An example is bees. I mentioned pollinating a moment ago. We’re finding out that nearly every species on the planet relies, in some measure, to the Earth’s magnetic field. Bees rely on this, in part, for navigation. We’ve noticed a number of the worker bees that go out to collect pollen are coming back confused as to where they got the pollen. They have trouble communicating this to the hive, and the hive suffers somewhat for this. We’re still in orbit around our planet, and so enjoy the protection and safety of Earth’s magnetosphere. But, what happens when we depart and there’s no longer any planetary magnet to ‘home’ on? Will they adapt or not? We know by our experience so far, is that the answer will most likely be that some will adapt and some will not. We are currently ‘training’ bees to remember their navigation without the magnetic component. This may work out, or it may not. It takes time to ferret these things out. We must make alternate plans in case a critical element in the ecosystem will not function correctly in the ship environment. In the bee example, we may need to manually pollinate our plants here. However, there have also been successes here aboard ship as well."
"Our vertical farms have been so successful that they are part of the ‘template’ of ring development. It takes about three or four farms to feed a full ring. Along with algae processing and some fish, we’ll do alright. Most notably, we have figured out how to culture meat in mass amounts. We’ve been able to do this on a small scale for some years. Growing cow muscle leaves out the necessity of having cows running around the ship and the whole butchering thing. We won’t be able to manufacture enough for you to have a ‘hamburger’ everyday, but you won’t be craving meat either. And so, between meat, fish, nuts, and tofu, I think we have the protein thing locked up.”
“On the water and salt loss problem, we could not really account for all of the loss. The only thing that Sonny and the team could figure is that it is from people coming and going off ship. When someone leaves, they take some salt and water with them to deposit this somewhere else. When they come back, they are bringing salt and water with them; however, there is a net loss in the transfer. Sonny said that it was a reasonable assumption, and a high likelihood. We’ll know more about this loss after we get underway. We think the data will become apparent, and this problem will go away.”
“We’re currently on target to make quota with sleeper production. We’ll make it with a little to spare by our calculations. We’re making sleepers safer and more efficient all the time. It was very efficient to make the core components of the sleeper modular so that future innovation and refinement would not scrap the whole design and would have to remanufacture them.”
“We have some concerns about the availability of certain minerals. We’re finding it more difficult to obtain rubidium, iridium, palladium, and platinum. There are other ‘endangered’ metals out there, but these are the most critical to our work. We are offsetting some of this from mining off planet like Mars, asteroids, and even comets. However, it is unclear whether we will be able to maintain production until departure. We are prioritizing our efforts to find new sources of these projected shortages. Construction and Resources sections are continuously updating their needs for these precious metals and other rare resources.”
“Thank you, Dr. Baudelaire,” Izzy began. “If you need any help, I can see to it you get what you need.”
“I appreciate your support, and thank you,” replied Gwen.
“Good, well then, I think the Navy is up next,” as Izzy turned to face the adm
iral. “If you please, Admiral Johnson.”
The admiral nodded to Izzy. “Chairman Rocha,” he said. “Good afternoon everyone,” he began. “As most of you are aware of, the preliminary tests on the scale ship was nearly a disaster. The telemetry shows that as we ramped up the energy to the engine, there were fluctuations in the warp field that nearly tore the ship apart. Sonny saved the ship by shutting down the systems all over the ship faster than a team of humans could have. Repairs are being made. Sonny, the engineers, and physicists have gone over the telemetry and have agreed on the solution to the problem. They have outlined the modifications that need to be made. We will make these modifications and extrapolate to the Project. When the time comes, we will need to do as much testing as time will allow. We will be able to do a second test run on the scale ship in couple of years. It will take that long to go over every structural inspection and make repairs. There is much more detail in the data packet you received. If you have any questions I will try to answer them.”
“Just what was the source of the fluctuations, admiral?” Izzy asked.
“Well essentially ma’am,” Admiral Johnson explained, “the shape of the warp generator was wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“Yes, this was the main reason that we built the scale ship. It was the largest ship built except for the Project ship. We wanted to see if the formulas still held for larger ships as it did for the smaller ships we had built and successfully utilized. We had no data to suggest otherwise. We do now. It seems that it’s not so much the size of the ship as the mass. There seems to be breakpoints where a warp field becomes increasingly unstable. Optimal masses will work best. The more you deviate from those masses the more inefficient and unstable the field gets. That’s of course, if you are using the same shape. Sonny has discovered that by changing the shape of the torus that generates the warp field, you can change the ranges of the optimal masses. The long and short of it is, that the new shape for the warp generator of the Project ship’s calculated mass will allow efficient warp travel at plus or minus about fifty percent of the mass of the ship. A pretty large barn door! The original shape would not have worked at all.” There were murmurs of astonishment amongst the small crowd. “Yes, I know! It was through this failure that we will be able to save ourselves. In a couple of years when we will be ready for another test run on the scale ship, and we will know for sure if the resources we put into creating Sonny was worth it.”
“It is worth it,” Sonny said out of nowhere.
“We do have every confidence in your abilities, Sonny,” the Admiral commended. Sometimes Admiral Johnson felt startled by the rare but sudden ‘appearance’ of Sonny in these discussions. He forgets that Sonny is always listening, and does not always watch what he says. He suspected that this was the case with the others as well.
“On another subject,” Leonard said, moving on, “five years ago we custom outfitted a couple of long range probes. These special probes were sent with the most sophisticated A.I. we could give it in such a relatively small space. The probes will not be back before departure. They have been sent to a couple of high value targets Sonny has picked out. On their way there, they will have to stop and refuel several times. The probes will stop in a targeted waypoint system, seek out the gas giants there, and retrieve more hydrogen for their engines to use. Their targets are a couple of yellow stars about our sun’s age that show promise as a system like our own. However, they are hundreds of light years away. They will gather their data and return on a rendezvous course of our projected heading. The probes will be ‘listening’ for our beacon to home in on. They will meet up with us later. Hopefully we will not need their data, but you never know. That is their mission. The Project ship will also have a compliment of probes of our own to continue to scout for a new home while ‘on the road’, and for short range scouting.”
“Thank you, Admiral,” a somber Izzy said. “You and your section give us hope. And now I would like to talk about world events a bit. Alice tells me that global population is only slightly down. This is the first time population has actually gone down probably since the beginning of humanity, so it’s a big deal. I did not know whether people would have lots of children, or no children. It would seem that the truth is somewhere in the middle. It’s good that population is not way down, because we need to keep the efforts of the Project going right up until the end. We’ll need to put a campaign together to get one more healthy generation born so that the population does not collapse when the older people start dying off. We must get the planet to understand it’s not time to give up yet. We must keep going if we are going to survive.”
“The regional governments have been very helpful in transitioning resources Alice have been providing. They have also helped to a large degree in keeping the cause strong in the people’s heart through advertising, sporting competitions, and rallies. The antisocial elements like the Enders, survivalists, and some religious factions, are monitored and raided on a regular basis by Global Security. They’re assisted by these regional governments which are supplying intelligence on these groups. Terrorist activity is down for a change, due in large part to Alice and Global Security coordinating preemptive raids and aggressive counterstrikes to Project attacks. They’re either getting the message, or they are going further underground.
Technologies have come along such that some organizations are getting the idea that they can build a ship of their own. Most of these have been half-hearted attempts, but it’s clear people are exploring these avenues. Now, it’s my opinion that these people should be free to pursue their own happiness. However, it will not happen at the expense of the Project. Resources will not be redirected, manpower will not be shared. We should start thinking about what would happen if we have company, even an unplanned caravan of ships coming along with us.
T-Minus 25 Years
“Hey Bob, can you toss me the tool bag?” Ken was putting up a new rack of plant beds. Bob tossed him the tool bag that he forgot to take with him. “How long have you been putting up these vertical farms?”
“A little over twenty years,” he replied.
Bob said, “I was transferred to vertical farms about a year ago. I used to work various terraforming jobs.”
“How long have you lived here aboard ship?”
“Twelve years,” Bob replied. “I’ve got a wife and two boys back on Terra. I get back home about once a month.”
“That’s gotta be rough,” Ken said as he put the last bolt in the rack. “Help me stand this up.” Grunting a little, they stood up the rack so that it could be bolted to the other racks making it a very sturdy assembly.
“I like the lights,” Bob said.
“Yes, the pink and purple lights are strangely alluring,” Ken said beginning to bolt the racks together.
Bob asked while assisting Ken with the rack, “Why pink and purple? I mean, I know that it has something to do with the growth of the plants, but why not just regular lights?”
Handing the wrench over to Bob, Ken answered, “It has been known for a long time that white light does aid in the growing of plants, however, you can optimize the growth if you use just a few certain wavelengths of light. They are the most attune to the wavelengths that give you pink and purple which make them grow the fastest.”
“Oh,” he said, “I never really gave it much thought. I’ve been working with the vertical farms for just a year, and that’s just been with construction.”
“After construction here is complete, the farmers will move in and set up shop. They’re the ones responsible for the day to day operations. The automation guys will stay behind to make sure the setup works as intended, and then just five or six farmers will run the place.”
Bob was incredulous. “There will be just five or six guys running the farm? This building is ten stories high and is as big as an office building. How can just five or six guys work something that big?”
“Automation, baby,” Ken said. “The system will feed and
water the plants, and the farmers will pick the crops with the aid of various machines, and put the product in the vertical conveyor like that one over there.” He pointed to the chute at the far end of the floor. “The product is transported to their various destinations where it is cleaned and processed for consumption. You should stop by a completed one sometime and take a tour.”
“I think I will,” Bob said intrigued.
Meanwhile…
Marion Alverez had awoken this morning like any other morning both dreading and excited to go to work. She loved the work she was doing. She got to work all over the ship. As one of the many engineers that rode herd over the work that was done on the Project ship, she specifically was responsible for cross checking anything out of the ordinary with ship function. She loved figuring things out, but hated the process sometimes. She had arrived at her current problem with her trusty rat. She was beginning to get a headache.
“I don’t care what the schematics say; I’m tellin’ you that it is not where it’s supposed to be!” Marion was having a fruitless conversation with one of the tunnel rats. Tunnel rats were small robots equipped with cameras and sensors to inspect the small places that humans could not go. They did a lot of inspections and weld checks.
“Sonny says that the water valve is at this juncture,” the tunnel rat said. It was like having a conversation with a cat.
“Well, I’ll tell you what; why don’t you go down there and see for yourself. I have other sensors that say it’s not there. A cursory scan also doesn’t give me indications that the valve is at this spot. I believe my sensors. So, go down there and all three of us can be enlightened.”
The Journey of Atlantis_Leaving Home Page 15