Love and Other Metals
Page 31
“It’s fantastic!” says Mister Doctor.
“She can make sounds but cannot speak,” continues Missus Doctor. “She can move her arms but can’t feed herself, she can’t walk but she can sit up and she’s getting better by leaps and bounds. Every day is a new miracle.”
Well. I step over to the wheelchair and squat down to look Alia in the eyes. I take her hand. Her eyes hold my eyes; I feel her trembling hand gently squeeze mine. She is trying to speak, but can’t. A tear spills from her right eye and meanders down her cheek, leaving a shiny trace. I reach over and touch her cheek, catching the tear with my finger. She does not flinch. I rub the tear between my thumb and finger. I come close and whisper to her. “I believe your life will be better now.”
She breaks into a wide smile.
“Oh my God!” exclaims Missus Doctor. The doctor’s hand goes to cover her mouth as her eyes shine with emotion. She goes to the other side of the wheelchair, kneels down and hugs her daughter.
I feel restless movement on my wrist. I look down just in time to see the wristy turn red. The materia leaps over onto Alia’s wrist with a thump. It wraps around her wrist like a red snake. The red snake swiftly turns into an elegant silver wristy that any woman would envy. Alia’s eyes are wide with delight. She strokes the wristy and makes cooing noises, her smile broader than ever.
“My God, what is that!” exclaims Mister Doctor. His wife is taken aback too, looking at me, horrified.
“It’s OK,” I say. “Really, it’s OK. Trust me. You’ve seen other strange things; now accept this too.”
“But what is it?” asks Missus Doctor. “Don’t we need to remove it?”
“No, no! It’s…a long story. I’ll tell you all about it. But for now, just know that this—this wristy—won’t do your daughter no harm. Just the opposite; it will help her. It will help her a bunch.” The Kapoors exchange worried glances. Mister Doctor sighs and shakes his head, eyes crinkled and eyebrows arched in doubtful wonder.
So here we are, standing in the corr, the doctors and me and the daughter with the living putty on her wrist. I reckon things are working out like they should. Seeing the sparkle in the eyes of this poor girl just brought it all home. To treasure the nice things and keep the bad stuff at bay. To see the best in people, even when they’re a little weird. That goes double if you’re the weird one. But Missus Doctor looks vexed. She is afraid for her little girl. “Is there anything else you can tell us?” she asks.
I shrug. “She may want to be called Sophia,” I say.
About Love and Other Metals
Why should people go into space? Lots has been written about the benefits of space exploration, with credit taken for things like the invention of cordless power tools and the miniaturization of electronics. I won’t debate any of that, although I will say that I believe these innovations would have come about with or without the national space programs, and Tang always made me gag. I think the greater reason is that it is in our long-term interest as a people to push boundaries and eventually establish a presence on worlds other than Earth. Sooner or later, the Earth will cease to be habitable to humans. The environment will be affected by any one of a number of calamities, such as an exploding caldera, massive asteroid impact, deadly pandemic, or war. It doesn’t much matter which one: the result will be the same, regardless. The book *A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson discusses these dangers in some detail in the context of Earth’s geological history, and also points out that 99.9% of all earthly species that have ever existed are no longer with us. Extinction is part of the natural order of things. Of course, there is no practicable possibility of migrating billions of people from Earth to a new planet, but what we can do is establish extraterrestrial colonies to improve our chances of survival as a species in the same manner that a diversified stock portfolio improves the chances of financial success: all our eggs won’t be in one planetary basket. There is a window of opportunity that opens when a culture becomes advanced enough to travel beyond the birth planet, but closes when the big asteroid strikes. We are in that window now; we should take advantage of it.
Plus, there’s mountains of cash to be made. In his book Asteroid Mining 101: Wealth for the New Space Economy, author John Lewis estimates the total mass of near-earth objects and tabulates the value of their metal and water content; in other words, he answers the question “How much money can be made mining nearby asteroids?” His answer: something over $200 trillion. There are caveats that go with that number, most importantly that these materials would find their true value only when used for space-based projects such as space colonies or ship construction. Importation to Earth would likely be a losing proposition. But that too is only part of the picture, since space structures could be used to improve life on earth, such as with solar power satellites sending the unlimited energy of the Sun to the Earth in the most environmentally-friendly way imaginable. And consider that the $200 trillion number is just for the near-earth asteroids: mining the asteroid belt would be significantly more lucrative, albeit farther away. Mining the Moon also has possibilities, but the Moon is a “differentiated” body as opposed to asteroids which are undifferentiated. This means that the Moon has a core like Earth, and most of the heavy metals have migrated there rather than being easily available on the surface. Asteroids, being undifferentiated, are potentially easier to mine.
Straker lives at a time when this space-based economy is ramping up but when governing institutions haven’t yet evolved to keep the peace. How can any Earth-based government enforce laws in the far-flung environs of space? Answer: they can’t. The result is a wild west of competing economic interests and Straker is caught in the middle of it. Bad for him, good for the novelist. And with the combination of removal from the natural world, cultural isolation, hostile environments, and claustrophobic living conditions, living off-world will certainly be spiritually challenging. In Mary Roach’s excellent book Packing for Mars, she describes a number of real-world incidents that illustrate the problem. She discusses submarine crewmen haunting the sonar room during long underwater missions, listening to whale songs and the snapping of shrimp colonies, just to hear sounds that are not machine-made. The participants in an isolation study at the Russian Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) got so testy with each other that there were fist-fights, with blood splattered on the wall, sexual misconduct, and the resignation of Japanese test subject. Jim Lovell, during the Gemini VII mission, displaced his frustrations by bitterly complaining about the food during the two-week flight. Cosmonaut Alexandr Laveikin got so bad he considered suicide while aboard the Mir space station. His crewmate Yuri Romanenko coped with isolation and depression by composing songs. They were apparently pretty good songs. That’s the inspiration for Straker’s song writing.
Music has the potential to be an initial form of communication with an alien species. This is, of course, not an original thought, as it was a main theme in Steven Spielberg’s movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The reason is that music is based on physics and mathematics, which are universal principles. Combine that with the thought that a sentient being, having traveled for hundreds of years in space, might hear a song and find it enchanting in the same way that submariners are attracted to the songs of whales, and you have the beginnings of Sophia’s relationship with Straker. Sophia’s existence is admittedly kind of far-fetched compared to the rest of the novel—which I’ve tried to make rooted in real-world science as much as possible—but google “transhumanism” sometime and you’ll see that people are already working on this kind of thing.
Why does Straker talk like a hick? When we start colonizing space, there will be a need for people who know how to build things, how to fix things: people good with their hands. These will be blue-collar, working men and women. Scientists and rich people were certainly come too, each for their own reasons. But if the going gets tough, the scientists and wealthy will leave, because they can afford to. The workers will stay. This is the har
d-scrabble, frontier environment in which Straker grows up.
The asteroid mining missions in the book are essentially robotic, but with humans going along to fix things when they break. This is based on my personal experience with machines: they always break eventually, and they never fix themselves. I also had a discussion with the presenter at an industry conference on asteroid mission design and asked him directly: why send people, why not just send robots? His answer was that asteroids are so far away that the robots would have to be self-sufficient in the presence of a chaotically tumbling space rock, therefore it was thought that humans should go along to handle whatever couldn’t be pre-programmed into the machines. So the Allgood carries a compliment of drones to perform every task from carrying the mining equipment to the asteroid surface, to performing the actual mining operations. But it also has a small crew (5 people) to keep things running.
The Allgood is propelled by a “closed-cycle gaseous core fission / nuclear thermal engine” AKA “Nuclear Lightbulb”. The concept is that the radiation from uranium hexafluoride heats water, which is then expelled at a very fast rate as thrust. The purpose of the turbopump (which gets damaged in the course of the book) is to bleed off a little of that thrust to drive a high-speed cooling water pump, in a manner analogous to the turbo supercharger that every hot-rodder is familiar with. The uranium hexafluoride is in the form of a plasma that is held within a fused quartz chamber at extremely high pressures and temperatures, but kept under control by a magnetic field and a vortex flow created by the injection of a neon buffer gas. The same radiation that heats the water can also be used to energize photovoltaics and produce electricity: this is its operating mode when the Allgood is actively mining an asteroid. You can google all this—the only liberty I took was in the use of water as the reaction mass, whereas the literature I’ve seen discusses the use of hydrogen as a working fluid.
There is a lot to be learned and gained in space. It’s exciting to think about. We live in a time when all these things are opening up to us. There’s adventure to be had—let’s go! Hope you enjoyed the book. K. P. Redmond
Table of Contents
PART I: THE VOYAGE
Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter 04
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
PART II: HROTHGAR
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
PART III: BACK TO SHACKTOWN
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
About Love and Other Metals