by Hickey, Greg
In 2036, a South Korean automaker, Kwang Automotives, developed the first compressed air engine automobile having a range of over 2000 miles. By 2040, the company had sold 500 million of these cars. At mid-century, 85% of all cars in the world used some sort of non-petroleum fuel source. A completely petroleum-free commercial airplane, the Vesper VII, flew across the Atlantic Ocean in 2098, powered by compressed air and solar and hydrogen-based energy. A decade later, a revamped Vesper carried passengers from Los Angeles to Sydney. By 2147, 35% of all commercial airplanes were powered entirely by non-fossil fuels.
Yet despite their countless innovations, humans remained powerless to alter one basic fact: they could not make their world any larger. And this was the unassailable quandary that faced humanity in the 21st and 22nd centuries. Without their countless innovations, the human population would have almost certainly dwindled in number as a result of war, disease and self-pollution. In time, perhaps only the best and brightest of the species would have remained, those capable of caring for themselves and their precious habitat. But in providing new solutions to every problem facing them, the thinkers of the race, the scientists, doctors and inventors, successfully thwarted the law of the jungle, at least temporarily. Cures for disease and stop-losses for global warming meant a better, healthier environment, and as a result, the human race thrived. The population boomed, but this growth only meant less food and more pollution. While global warming might have culled human population to a sustainable level, stalling global warming meant more humans, more greenhouse gases, fewer resources, more wars and even more global warming.
The only solution for humankind was to expand its empire, and that meant finding another habitable planet and the technology to reach it. In 2054, Japan announced that its scientists had designed and built a spaceship capable of transporting human beings to Mars. The Japanese attempted a manned mission in 2056, but the ship’s navigational system malfunctioned one-third of the way into the journey, forcing a return to Earth. A second mission in 2059 also failed. However, in 2061, a team of American, British and Japanese astronauts aboard Mars Odyssey III successfully landed on the red planet. The journey took three months from Earth to Mars, and the astronauts spent two days exploring the planet’s surface before returning home. Buoyed by the success of this mission, a team of private investors from the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Russia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Iran pooled their considerable resources to found Space Exploration for Sustained Human Life (SESHL, more commonly referred to as Seashell). As its name suggested, Seashell investors possessed the single-minded goal of finding a hospitable planet to serve as a new home for humankind.
After decades of exploratory dead ends, Seashell-funded scientists announced in 2092 that they had discovered an Earth-like planet approximately sixteen light-years from Earth. This planet, later named Pearl, was believed to be rocky, about half the size of Earth, and potentially bearing surface water. It orbited a dim red star comparable to the Earth’s sun, called Falder 347, with a mean orbital radius of 56 million kilometers. The only problem, assuming Pearl was capable of sustaining life, was how to get there. In 2101, Seashell scientists built a satellite, Pearl I, to attempt a voyage to that distant world. The satellite was powered by a modified version of the Bussard ramjet prototype, renamed the Petrov ramjet after its designer, the Russian aeronautical engineer Dr. Ilya Petrov. The Petrov ramjet was driven by a fusion rocket capable of propelling the satellite at 70% light speed. The massive quantity of fuel necessary for this sustained fusion reaction could not be carried on board the satellite but instead was gathered in the form of hydrogen gas from the interstellar medium by a series of electro-magnetic fields, 50 kilometers in diameter. These magnetic fields collected and compressed the hydrogen to generate a thermonuclear-fusion reaction, then directed the energy of that reaction opposite to the intended direction of travel to produce the forward acceleration of the ramjet.
However, when collected while the ramjet traveled against the stellar winds, these hydrogen ions created a significant drag force equal to the mass of ions collected per second multiplied by the velocity of the ions as propelled by the winds, estimated to be about 500,000 meters per second. Seashell scientists decided Pearl I could not travel in a straight line, but instead would have to maneuver like a sailboat, tacking back and forth to either reduce drag force or maximize the effect of tailwinds. By traveling straight ahead at its maximum velocity of 70% light speed, Pearl I could have reached its destination in just under twenty-three years. Yet given the problem of stellar winds, the satellite would require an onboard navigational system to direct the craft in relation to wind patterns. Accounting for these course adjustments, Seashell estimated it might take up to 60 years to reach Pearl. Nevertheless, Pearl I was launched on January 1, 2103.
While they waited for their satellite to arrive at its destination, Seashell worked to improve the ramjet design, launching a new prototype satellite every five years from 2103 to 2143. In 2146, Seashell announced that Pearl II had crashed on Pearl, but its video equipment had been damaged and no images of the planet were available. Two more satellites were launched in 2148 and 2153, and in 2157 Pearl IV successfully completed an orbit of the planet. Video confirmed what Seashell had believed all along: Pearl, indeed, seemed capable of supporting human life.
Further verification came courtesy of video from Pearl VII in 2160 and Pearl IX in 2164, convincing Seashell the time had come for the first manned mission to Pearl. The organization launched the generation ship Pearl Voyager I in 2170. The Voyager carried four devoted Seashell astronauts and their spouses, all of them committed to conceiving and rearing children to carry on the mission in their stead. Unfortunately its communication systems failed ten years into the journey and the ship was lost forever. Pearl Voyager II was launched in 2184, but mechanical failures forced it to return to Earth in 2199. Growing impatient, Seashell launched a third manned mission in 2191, while Voyager II was still en route, and in 2225, the astronauts aboard Pearl Voyager III became the first humans to orbit Pearl.
The next logical step would have been an attempt to land a manned spacecraft on the planet, but World War IV had given the Seashell investors reason to doubt the future viability of Earth as a cradle of human life. By the time Voyager III completed its orbit, Seashell had already drafted plans for a colony on Pearl. Over the next two years, 56 manned Voyager ships were sent to Pearl to erect the colony’s foundations, while Seashell undertook the construction of a massive generation ship, a ramjet-powered spacecraft capable of transporting thousands of people to Pearl. New designs had improved upon the aerodynamics of the old ramjet model, allowing for speeds of up to 90% light speed, but a generation ship the size of the Pearl Colonizer, with magnetic fields approximately 1,000 kilometers in diameter, was expected to travel much slower. Those astronauts who left Earth on the Colonizer would not survive the journey and the mission would have to be carried out by their descendants.
Seashell completed construction of the Colonizer in 2235 and launched the ship on December 31 of that year. Excluding the enormous magnetic fields, her body was 70 meters wide, 400 meters long and 70 meters high. She carried 3,245 human passengers and crew from all over the globe, 100 embryos of 20 species of livestock, and had a greenhouse with artificial sunlight capable of growing enough food to sustain 5,000 people for 200 years.
Seventeen years into the voyage, an estimated one-fifth the total distance to Pearl, the Colonizer lost contact with Seashell headquarters on Earth. The crew contemplated turning back but decided against it, fearing the worst had happened to their comrades back home. On June 21, 2325 the Colonizer landed on Pearl.
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1 World War III (2139-2147) began in India with the mass uprising of the minority Muslim population on February 2, 2139, the date on which Indian Muslims celebrated their religious holiday Laylat-al-Qadr, or “the Night of Power.” Religious civil war erupted throughout the country, and within a few months international allie
s of both the Hindu and Muslim factions joined the fray. The war spread into the Middle East and northern Africa and ended in a relative stalemate eight years later with the Muslim bloc ascending to political control in India and lasting international alliances having been drawn along religious and ideological lines.
About the Author
Greg Hickey was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1985. After graduating from Pomona College in 2008, he played and coached baseball in Sweden and South Africa. He is now a forensic scientist, endurance athlete and award-winning writer. He lives in Chicago with his wife, Lindsay.