Oceanworlds

  And then the wrenching news. His mother had died—he had meant to visit for the past two years, always encountering a minor obstacle that added a few more weeks of delay. Time was supposed to heal but he found it didn’t help. Now was too late to have kissed and thanked her, for her to have spent the last hours with the children she brought into the world. If he could only believe, as she did, that it was just a change in shape, that she may be roaming happy and peaceful as a butterfly in a spring forest.

  Misery loves company. Hours later, his fiancée got a hold of him. She couldn’t have known about his mother, yet was crying over the phone. “I’m sorry—I’m sorry.” It was over. The ring had been returned. Someone else had stolen that heart. He had no indignation, only resignation. It was clear then, the many times when work got in the way. She never complained but they silently drifted apart. The wedding always sliding forward, its date fluid, mercurial.

  It was a moonless, cloudless sky. He looked at the twinkling stars. Bei Ji Xing, the North Star, the direction where he needed to drift to have a chance at living. Shen, Orion’s Belt, the most recognizable tattoo in the sky, visible from anywhere on Earth. But he needed something closer, more intimate. He scanned the firmament and found Tǔ xīng, Saturn, low in the heavens. It was much closer than the others yet still impossibly far away, a dot competing among countless thousands. It’s all trivia really. The absurd reality is that anyone on Earth can see it, yet nobody can see me.

  He woke to a low-pitch roar and spotted the Maersk cargo ship pushing forward at great speed. The indescribable relief quickly became concern as it seemed to be coming straight at him. The thing was huge and he could easily be sucked into the massive propellers. That would have been a death for the history books—the thing is, the only ones in the know will be the fish eating my remains. In survival mode, he took out the flare gun. There were six 12-gauge flares. They worked during daylight, but competing for the attention of the clueless crew with a bright Sun was unfair at best. His nervous, shaking hands grabbed the first cartridge to put it in the barrel, but fumbled and it fell overboard. Way to cooperate, survival kit. He became frantic. He closed the gun, pointed it up, and pulled the trigger. The flare climbed to the morning Sun. He could barely see it ignite. Second time. Aim, shoot. He realized this wouldn’t be the ticket home.

  Just a few hundred feet away, he could clearly see individual containers. In the urgency of the moment, he was surprised to find a detached part of his mind scanning for a jagged geometrical pattern of colors in the stacked wall of containers coming at him. Once a mathematician, always a mathematician. Third time—aim, shoot. For a moment, he recovered hope. Maybe they saw! No. They did not. Thank you very much.

  He wouldn’t need to worry about being eaten alive by the propellers though. Maybe sharks would have better luck. The huge structure of metal, thousands of containers on it, went past him a safe distance away, oblivious to his presence. The sound was overwhelming, yet he still stood on top of the longboard, bouncing up and down and screaming his lungs out. He only realized the board had flipped when his throat choked as his body entered the seawater headfirst. The tranquility under the water was seductive and had it been just about closing his eyes and falling asleep, he may have taken it.

  If he got rescued—when, not if. Once he was rescued, the news wouldn’t travel far past the local Shenzhen newspaper. He had read about Poon Lim, the Chinese sailor who in 1942 became the only survivor of a merchant ship when a German U-boat sank it in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Lim managed to get into a minuscule raft and for the next 133 days drifted, resorting to ingenuity to make a hook, catch a fish, then use the fish as bait to catch a shark, then lost it all in a storm, only to start again by catching a bird and drinking its blood. And then one day Brazil finally appeared in front of him.

  How could I make such a stupid mistake? If I die, I know who’s to blame. Halfwit. I have been behaving like a 12th-century sailor. Earth’s curvature! The Earth is round and having ignored this may cost me my life. It was a geometrical problem: he was flat on the longboard, so his face was at sea level. That meant the horizon was just under a mile away. If he sat up, the horizon would instantly retreat to three miles. He had been scanning for a big ship silhouette in the distance, but if there was one six miles away, the only part above the horizon would have been the bridge. He was expecting to spot a standing cow when only the tip of the horns would have been visible.

  Another day gone by. Tomorrow is my two-day solo anniversary. Hooray. The Sun had sunk a few minutes before. With his newfound knowledge, he had counted three certain and two tentative ship sightings that day. One of the latter was crossing in the distance right then, only its upper half visible. Time to commit. If they didn’t see him, he probably wouldn’t survive the days or weeks before he washed up on Taiwan’s southern coast.

  He had always been tough, so could conceivably survive weeks without eating. But without water, not even Poon Lim could endure more than a few days, and he only had a quarter of a liter left. His tongue was a dry piece of leather and his throat stung terribly on every inhale and exhale. So, as he loaded the gun with the first of the last three flares, he knew this was it. He waited for the ship, now barely identifiable in the remaining light, to be at what he sensed was the minimal distance. Raised the gun. His heart was pounding. He fired. The flare climbed a good few hundred feet before starting its descent, projecting a strong red light until it fell into the water. He counted in silence for the longest twenty seconds of his life before reloading, pointing, and firing again.

  A young Filipino exited the deck. He looked down at the countless, perfectly piled containers, lit a cigarette, and made two deep inhales before he puffed out a cloud of smoke, which flew past his face as the ship raced forward.

  He was hurrying the second cigarette so he could resume his position in the control room when something caught his attention. For a few seconds, he saw a red light in the distance. It’s probably nothing, he thought to himself, yet he didn’t move or stop gazing. Then a second light climbed up into the darkening sky. He dropped the cigarette and screamed as he opened the heavy metal door.

  The crewman was finishing the report before contacting the different port authorities.

  “NAME: YI MENG; HEIGHT: 5 FEET, 9 INCHES; WEIGHT: 157 POUNDS; NATIONALITY: CHINESE; AGE: 28; PROFESSION: NOT KNOWN (SOMETHING ABOUT ROBOTS); IMMEDIATE FAMILY: NO; CONTACT INFORMATION …”

  There were just three people on the ship’s no-frills bridge, including Yi. Automation had decimated the shipping industry of its human components.

  Yi was seated in the background with a thick blanket around his shoulders. His face looked weathered and exhausted, but he was recovering fast. Dozing in and out of consciousness.

  Someone changed the big screen attached to the roof from a soccer game to BBC News.

  His face underwent a transformation. Suddenly he wasn’t tired anymore.

  8 | Fame

  BBC BROADCASTING HOUSE, LONDON

  The HARDtalk show anchorwoman sat between the two guests facing each other.

  “—a masterclass in bogus marketing and shaman science is all this really amounts to.”

  “But Chris, as former CEO of the space division at Boeing, I’m sure you agree James Egger’s credentials are immaculate,” said the anchor. “A PhD in electrical engineering from Harvard; the second-youngest astronaut to live on the International Space Station; and after an early retirement from NASA, goes on to work at SpaceX. Right before this mission proposal, he was associate professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University. And all this at just 32 years old.”

  “He’s extraordinarily accomplished by any yardstick. I personally know him. And he’s unwavering. When Stanford said no to his request for a leave of absence, he resigned. Resigned from a cushy career in academia at one of the top three universities in the world,” said Chris. “No, the issue here is not about him but about it. I have issues on so many levels with this … idea. W
here do I start? Space is really hard. In fact, the first rule of space travel is ‘everything that can go wrong, will go wrong.’ Yet he’s proposing a mission to Saturn. To Saturn! Remember Mars One in 2014? It was an outlandish plan by a dreamy-eyed Dutchman to take people on a one-way trip to Mars. Went down in history as yet another Ponzi scheme for gullible people. But at face value, that was frankly more reasonable than this. Mars is on average 600 times further from Earth than the Moon. Saturn is 3,000. We haven’t gone to the Moon in half a century and now a private expedition intends to go to Saturn? It sounds as if they were playing darts at the local Irish bar and happened to hit the ringed planet. Because why would anybody pick Saturn?”

  “I have to take issue with that, Chris,” said Anna, a former astronaut, “and considering the respect we have for each other, I have to say that’s a rather dim question. Saturn’s moons are the best candidates in our Solar System to answer the two most central, pressing questions of mankind: are we alone in the Universe—”

  “Anna, sorry for interrupting,” said the anchor, “but for the benefit of the audience, please allow us to play a short section of his Kickstarter video where he defends himself.”

  The three turned to a screen where James was speaking to the camera against a black background, wearing a white T-shirt that said “ASTEROIDS are nature’s way of asking: ‘How’s that space program coming along?’” The T-shirt was not exactly subliminal, but it was the sole mention of Death from Above during the video.

  “As Carolyn Porco likes to say, if we could demonstrate that genesis has occurred not once but twice, independently, in our humble Solar System, then it means by inference that it has occurred a staggering number of times, that we are suddenly not alone, that it’s only a matter of time before we encounter another civilization. This would be the most profound discovery in history … yet we are far from unveiling the truth.

  “In today’s age, the search for extraterrestrial life is done by robots. For sixty years, we have searched for past or present life on Mars in vain. Dozens of missions have covered a total distance well under fifty miles and haven’t brought so much as an atom of Martian soil back to Earth. Apollo 17’s astronauts and lunar rover covered a third of that distance in four hours, bringing back a sackful of Moon dust. Our astrobiology learning pace is equivalent to building the Great Wall by arranging stones with a pair of tweezers. Add to this that a robot can only look for what it was sent for, yet most groundbreaking discoveries in history have been serendipitous findings you weren’t searching for. Mind you, these missions are multibillion-dollar enterprises, with decades of lag between conception and start—”

  The video stops playing and it’s back to the studio.

  “A little further on, he reminds us about one of the most egregious faults of his concept: its demented schedule. Departure on June 2027. That’s less than three years from today. A thousand days!” Chris pointed out.

  “You’ve spent too much time finding cracks and forgot the logic of it all,” said Anna. “And while I agree three years is a really tight window, I do think it’s doable. He has made all the information public, so let’s dissect the problem. The date of departure is anything but arbitrary. June 2027 allows the shortest possible round trip all the way to 2040, at six years and three months. As for time to departure, eight years elapsed between Kennedy’s speech and the landing on the Moon. And that was building a space program from scratch! James’ mission uses an existing and proven spacecraft—SpaceX’s Starship—which has been in development since at least 2015 and has already landed cargo on Mars. And let’s also not forget that he was directly involved in its design.”

  “Exploration should be gradual—”

  “No, it’s not. Exploration is by necessity daring. Columbus did not incrementally go to America. You either cross the Atlantic or you don’t … those sailors knew that scurvy, dehydration, starvation, mutiny, the plague, or shipwreck lay ahead. Dreading the moment the leviathan would come from the depths and gobble up their ships, or the fleet would fall off the Earth’s edge. Compared to that, our visits to the International Space Station are paddles around the marina in a canoe.”

  “I’m amazed you can be so—so naïve, Anna. I’m going to ignore your Rime of the Ancient Mariner for something more current. You are a veteran astronaut with almost 200 days in space. If I hear correctly, you are suggesting that the Apollo program is somehow comparable to this. That’s absurd. The communication delay between Earth and the Moon was a second; the delay between Earth and Saturn is seventy minutes. The light, traveling at the fastest speed in the Universe, takes over an hour! As opposed to a second! Using your analogies, you’re comparing soaking in a bathtub to crossing the Atlantic inside it. The scales are not even related.”

  “Bad example. Franz Romer crossed the Atlantic in a handmade kayak in 1928—as Apollo 13’s Jim Lovell used to say, ‘there are people who make things happen, there are people who watch things happen, and there are people who wonder what happened.’ Which one are you? The ‘this is impossible’ tirade has a long and illustrious history of defeat. It’s darn unwise to bet against human ingenuity and courage.”

  “I think we should leave the history lesson and go back to examine this confusion between science fact and science fiction,” said Chris. “How does he intend to finance the expedition? Through Kickstarter. Is he laughing at us? This makes Mars One’s intention of selling space-reality-show TV rights sound like a sensible idea.”

  “That’s mudslinging and you know it is. It’s clearly stated as Phase I. He is asking for $13 million for an accelerated feasibility study to provide a cost estimate in nine months,” said Anna.

  “Good luck with that. Besides, there’s no need for feasibility studies—NASA has done it already. A manned mission to Mars, much simpler than Saturn, requires in the order of $100 billion and twenty years—”

  “When you force risk elimination from an inherently risky field, you end up with $100 billion price tags, which is really the only responsible thing NASA can do to imply but not say, ‘with that straightjacket, thank you but no thank you.’”

  The anchor said, “From rags to riches in under thirty-six hours. The project goal is already overfunded by 400 percent. $70 million in the project’s bank account. Whatever you want to call it, this has turned into a global sensation.”

  Chris must have felt like coming out of a Faraday cage or an Alaskan cabin after the thaw, but he quickly recovered. “You are confusing being in the news with being real news. It’s short-lived sensationalism. He obviously touched a nerve. We are fascinated by exploring the unknown. The Final Frontier will always be space, something we hold so sacred and mystical we call it ‘the heavens.’ And if this wasn’t a cartoon of a mission … it could well have become the most transformative event in human history. But no amount of wishful thinking can get over the hard facts. Read my lips. They’ll get a few weeks of glory, then even the tabloids will hang their heads and dismiss them as charlatans.”

  “What do you think are the chances of something bad happening, Anna?” asked the anchor.

  Chris interjected, “Anna, look at me. Can you say with a straight face they aren’t committing suicide?”

  “You keep missing the point. I won’t be speculating on the probability of a human being dying. Do I think it’s risky? Very. I should probably say extremely. Space is merciless. Millions of things must go right, yet one going wrong may be all it takes. It’s an incredibly unfair game. Being 99.9 percent right can easily get you killed … but here’s where we depart. A third of all climbers that make it to the summit of Annapurna die, but that doesn’t deter people from a selfish and dangerous activity. It’s the yearning for adventure, for testing yourself, for daring to overcome the impossible. And while these certainly play a part, the most important one is this: military, police, and firefighters put themselves at risk every day, but nobody could possibly accuse them of recklessness or suicidal tendencies. Because they save and protect peopl
e …”

  “You seem to have gone off on a tangent, Anna,” said Chris.

  “No, I haven’t. Let me break it down for you. If you think that humanity is in danger from any of a number of self-inflicted wounds and ailments, there is simply nothing as important as that mission to Saturn. If they succeed, a colony on Mars will not only look possible but well within our immediate reach. If they succeed, survival for long periods of time in space will be irrevocably demonstrated. If they succeed, we will be overwhelmingly closer to being able to defend the Earth from comets and asteroids … and I’m completely ignoring the principal mission objective—the search for life—that could revolutionize chemistry, biology, medicine, religion, philosophy. Then, when you consider the monumental payoff, the immensity of the consequences—potentially the biggest in the history of mankind—even a very low probability of success makes the attempt almost obligatory. One thing is certain: the probability may be low, but if we don’t try, it’s zero.”

  “You’re talking about human lives as if they were disposable napkins.”

  “You’ve hit the bullseye: the paradox today is that by our unwillingness to take risks for a few, we are gambling our entire civilization. James Egger is evidently convinced that the voyage is worth a handful of human lives, including his own … someone once asked Alan Shepard if he ever got scared on top of the Saturn V rocket. He answered something like, ‘I’ll be sitting at the top of a huge amount of explosive fuel, in a vehicle that contains over a million parts, all made by the lowest bidder on a government contract. Why should I be scared?’ Neil Armstrong was the one that said, ‘The rate of progress is proportional to the risk encountered.’ You know it well: the White House had a prepared speech honoring the deaths of Armstrong and Aldrin. To many, the combination of human error, mechanical failures, and analog technology made the triumphal outcome something bordering a miracle … sending humans to space is nothing but the latest expression of an ancient practice called human sacrifice. Thankfully for our species, a few are willing to take these odds. Thankfully for our species, a few are willing to offer themselves for the wellbeing of many. And today you have a supremely impressive individual determined to sacrifice everything … for you. And me. For us. What the Greeks called a hero, a demigod.”