Stellaris: People of the Stars

by Robert E. Hampson

  If people want to risk their lives on spectacular feats such as space travel, do we, as a society, have a right to stop them? Do we have a right, or even an obligation, to withhold resources that might aid in their success? Does it matter if the people involved are normal citizens like us, and not those specifically trained to recognize and evaluate the risks? What makes an astronaut remarkable and commendable is the willingness to undertake a great risk while fully understanding the nature of the risk; that is part of their job and we respect them not for being reckless but for being aware.

  These are not moot questions. Society benefits from great feats successfully accomplished. Society suffers the consequences of a spectacular and fatal failure—especially if it impacts future policies and hinders further progress through risk-aversion. Even beyond this, if the decision to support these endeavors is made as a society, then a great number and variety of societal institutions can marshal themselves to the cause: educational, civic, research, and financial. In this way, the resilience of the endeavor is enhanced through multiple institutions and societal structures contemplating and developing multiple simultaneous solutions and approaches (rather than a more constrained and narrow approach that would be feasible under the auspices of a small group without that broader societal support).

  Fortunately, we are in a position to take incremental steps in this direction, and they are taking place now. Commercial suborbital space flight will be a reality soon. Passengers will be able to pay for a suborbital rocket hop that takes them into space (above about one hundred kilometers) for a few minutes of weightlessness. These trips will, especially at first, entail significant risk, regardless of the great amount of engineering and due diligence now being invested in making them safe. The decision in the United States, at least for now, appears to be that the less oversight and regulation for this new industry, the better. The concern, once the spacecraft have been tested and the passengers informed as to risk, is the safety of those on the ground who have not elected to be participants. This is an approach that places great responsibility on the flight operators and their customers, and implicitly asks society to accept the attendant risks. It remains to be seen if this approach holds up in the face of disasters, near-misses, or mishaps that are inevitable in this new venture. The decisions made at those times will tell us much about whether we are ready to face the greater challenges of planetary colonization.

  REFERENCES

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  Clément Gilles, and Angeli Bukley, ed. 2007. “Artificial gravity.” Springer Science+Business Media.

  Francisco Dave, and Elkin Romero. 2016. “NASA’s Human System Assessment Process.” Presentation at Human Research Program Investigators’ Workshop (8–11 Feb). Galveston, TX.

  Kahn, J. P., C. T. Liverman, et al., ed. 2014. Health Standards for Long Duration and Exploration Spaceflight: Ethics Principles, Responsibilities, and Decision Framework. National Academies Press.

  Lackner, JR, Paul DiZio. 2003. “Adaptation to rotating artificial gravity environments.” Journal of Vestibular Research 13, no. 4–6 (February):321–30.

  Manzey, Dietrich. 2004. “Human missions to Mars: new psychological challenges and research issues.” Acta Astronautica 55, no. 3-9 (August–November):781–90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2004.05.013.

  Mindock, Jennifer, Sarah Lumpkins, et al. 2017. “Integrating spaceflight human system risk research.” Acta Astronautica 139 (October):306–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2017.07.017.

  Parihar, Vipan K, Barrett D. Allen BD, et al. 2016. “Cosmic radiation exposure and persistent cognitive dysfunction.” Scientific Reports 6 (October):34774. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep34774.

  Shelhamer, Mark. 2016. “A call for research to assess and promote functional resilience in astronaut crews.” Journal of Applied Physiology 120, no. 4 (February):471–2. https://doi.org/10.1152/japplphysiol.00717.2015.

  White, Frank. 1998. The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution. AIAA.

  Young, LR. 1999. “Artificial gravity considerations for a Mars exploration mission.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 871 (May):367–78.

  At the Bottom of the White

  Todd McCaffrey

  New York Times bestselling author Todd Johnson McCaffrey wrote his first science fiction story when he was twelve. He has published over a dozen novels, including eight novels written in The Dragonriders of Pern universe and nearly twenty shorter works. His latest book, The Jupiter Game, tells of an alien first contact. You can learn more about him at www.toddmccaffrey.org.

  you are leaving eden.

  The words floating in the air rustled as Cin approached them. The letter “Y” glistened at the top and seemed to be turning itself into some stylized butterfly—bio or software? Cin wondered, her lips twitching upwards as she walked through them.

  Eden was the safest place on the ship: a combination of oasis and hydroponics garden on a massive scale.

  Cin craned her neck over her shoulder for a moment as she confirmed that—once again—the letters had completely rearranged themselves to say:

  you are entering eden.

  As she turned back and continued her exit, another set of floating letters asked: entering cross-contact area. clothing required.

  She moved out of the walkway and into the alcove that was the changing area. She went to the dorm’s locker and pulled out her shipsuit through the simple expedient of reaching in and pulling out the first thing she found.

  Valrise knew her: She would never get the wrong clothes. She could have reached her hand into another locker and she would still have received the right clothes—and a polite admonition as well as an unvocalized bio-check to be certain that she wasn’t suffering from some mentally debilitating malady.

  Valrise was an old ship; she had quirks that newer ships might not value but…Valrise was an old ship. An old ship is one that works.

  Cin was surprised to feel a bulkier sweater among her things. She was going somewhere cold, she surmised, shrugging on the sweater after pulling on her single-piece shipsuit. The sweater smelled new—clearly something Valrise had cooked up for the occasion and had Cin’s name stenciled over the left breast.

  “And some makeup,” Valrise said. “There are Customers in the ice rink.”

  Cin gave her a questioning look.

  “They aren’t used to shaved eyebrows,” Valrise explained.

  “Makeup?”

  “Use the dark pencil to mark your eyebrows and the synthetics will do the rest.”

  Cin felt inside her locker and pulled out a slim case. There was a mirror inside and a thin stick with dark substance on it. Cin had used makeup before—a couple of years back—so she wasn’t totally unfamiliar with the notion.

  “Lip color?”

  “Natural will do.”

  “Anything else?” Cin asked after using the liner.

  “Hair,” Valrise said. Cin grinned as she looked in the mirror once more and saw that hair had sprouted on the ridge of her eyebrows. “Pull the hood of the sweater up over your head.”

  Cin complied.

  “The young ones are competing,” Valrise told her. “The Customers are quite amazed at our gravity control.”

  “How far back are they?”

  “A good hundred, hundred fifty years,” the ship told her.

  “Poor, proud, and paranoid?” Cin asked, repeating the mantra that the crew used when referring to earthers.

  “Exactly,” the ship replied. “Now, go!”

  * * *

  Cin was glad of the sweater when she entered the much cooler confines of the ice rink. She paused as one of the contestants took to the ice, gained speed, and darted toward the low mound in the center. Cin’s newly applied eyebrows descended thoughtfully as she judged the positioning of the skater: She was de
liberately off the central axis.

  Cin’s observations were confirmed when the skater shot up the mound, entered a skew loop and neatly landed upside down on the inverted rink, and continued in a curved loop “down” the mound and onto the flat ice on the “ceiling” of the rink. Those of the crew watching applauded mildly while the more obvious Customers looked on in slack-jawed wonder—antigravity was always one of the first technologies to be lost when colonizing new worlds.

  Valrise and the other trader ships spent some of their time reestablishing contact—and trade—with lost colonies. It was short-term and not as profitable as hauling goods between advanced worlds—the advantage was in establishing long-term trade. Valrise, in her hundred years of existence, had built up quite an extensive trading circuit. There was always danger in establishing new trading partners; care was required and friction inevitable as hopelessly outdated planets met up with the latest technology…and culture.

  Hence the “dog and pony show”—as Valrise called it. Cin had been so intrigued by the phrase that she’d looked it up: She couldn’t understand why a sentient starship would communicate with references to various four-legged mammals but she’d long ago come to recognize that the ship had a quirky sense of humor.

  The Customers had been brought out for the day by Lewrys, one of Valrise’s fast shuttles. Valrise herself was still a good two weeks away from her flyby of the planet, so Lewrys’ high-speed run had been its own sales pitch. Lewrys had already made the same run earlier when Valrise had first returned to normal space to reopen negotiations and arrange the present festivities aboard Valrise.

  A second skater started on the downside rink and made the leap to the upside rink and then the two of them entered into a very precise—and risky—pas de deux between the two gravity fields causing not just the Customers, but also crew, to gasp in delight.

  The world of the new Customers was named Arwon. The inhabitants, at least some of them, were Arwonese. The Arwonese had just recently completed a war of integration—another affectation of lost worlds that Cin didn’t entirely understand (it was bad for trade, so why?). Valrise had provided a news précis which had left Cin mostly bored and slightly informed—she got the impression that the losers were in hiding and an inkling of some dark means of repression being used. Messy.

  Cin had learned a number of years ago that the Customers could be evaluated by how conservatively Valrise had the ship’s crew dress: These Arwonese were clearly among the more straitlaced worlders—every crew member visible was fully clothed and wore eyebrows and head coverings or actual hair.

  “You are Cin, the bouncer, are you?” a stranger’s voice asked from beside her.

  “I am,” Cin said. She found herself looking down into a pair of intense dark eyes set in a face framed fetchingly by raven locks of hair. There was almost an impish look to the…woman…Cin guessed from the shape of her body. Cin called up her implant and provided it with a feed from her optic interface.

  She is the Calmt Prime, Valrise informed her through the link. A quick overview of the governing hierarchy and the woman’s place in it caused Cin to blink in surprise: She was talking to the third most powerful person from the planet.

  “And what is it like, bouncing?” the Calmt asked her.

  Cin closed her eyes for a moment, recalling memories. She smiled as she said, “It is like nothing ever experienced before.”

  “We have developed skydiving in recent years,” the Calmt informed her.

  “That is when one falls in the air until restrained by a high-drag device?” Cin asked, trying to frame the words appropriately.

  She must not have gotten it quite right; the Calmt smiled before replying, “Something like that.”

  Cin nodded. “Bouncing is more involved than that. Our bouncers are purpose-made to resist high temperatures while giving their occupants complete control over their position and angle of entry.”

  “And you bounce off the planet’s atmosphere?” the Calmt asked, clearly trying to understand the allure of such an undertaking.

  “Yes,” Cin replied. “We have sensors to feed us and our bouncers are transparent. So we get to see it in real time.”

  “What do you see?”

  “At first, nothing,” Cin replied. “But as we get deeper and deeper into the atmosphere, the air around us begins to glow a deep pink with the heat of our transit.”

  “That must be quite frightening.”

  “Oh, no!” Cin said, shaking her head. “It is quite beautiful.”

  “Aren’t you in danger of burning up?”

  “We control our angle and our thermal bleed,” Cin said. “The bouncers radiate excess heat away every time they leave the atmosphere.”

  “But it is dangerous.”

  Cin nodded. “Although I imagine it is less so than hoping that a high-drag device deploys on time.”

  “A parachute?” the Calmt said. “Not opening?” She nodded. “It happens very rarely these days.”

  “Very rarely for us, too,” Cin replied. “And, of course, mostly we use remotes for the momentum exchange.”

  “And you will train our people to perform this momentum exchange?”

  “So I understand,” Cin said. When she saw the questioning look in the other’s eyes, she added, “It makes more sense to have a trained planetary crew. With momentum exchange, half will end up with only orbital energy while half will have ship energy.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “We use the momentum exchange between our incoming cargo and the outgoing cargo to slow down the incoming and speed up the outgoing—it saves energy and costs.”

  “And the bouncers bounce off the planet to change direction,” the Calmt added.

  “With equal masses, we can slow down and speed up equal cargoes with a ninety-five percent efficiency.”

  “Why not just have the cargo containers bounce themselves?”

  Cin shook her head. “There is too little control. It works best when we can provide small changes in momentum.”

  “And it looks cool with all those flames in the atmosphere,” the Calmt said with a grin.

  “And it looks cool,” Cin agreed, choosing not to argue the point.

  “All orbital transfers involve momentum exchange in one way or another,” the Calmt said. She nodded toward Cin. “Your way is elegant and efficient, if a little odd to those of us with lesser technologies.”

  “A lot of time was spent developing the momentum exchange,” Cin said.

  “The advantage of the smaller exchanges is a lower acceleration, less stressful to certain cargo,” the Calmt observed.

  “Yes.”

  “The human body can withstand accelerations many times that of normal gravity,” the Calmt continued. Arwon was a nearly Standard planet, with a gravity just a bit below that of ancient Earth.

  “True,” Cin agreed, wondering where the woman was going with the conversation.

  “Is the Calmt learning much?” a male voice spoke from Cin’s far side. Cin turned to face a taller, handsome man dressed in clothes that were considered fine on the planet below. To Cin’s eye, they were boorish and overbearing.

  “Yes, I am, Your Holiness,” the Calmt said, speaking around Cin.

  “Good,” His Holiness replied. To Cin he said, “The Calmt is expected to learn much.”

  “There are many things in which I am ignorant,” the Calmt agreed. To Cin she explained, “My people only recently were integrated into the Greater Whole.”

  Cin gave her a blank look while sending a silent query to Valrise.

  The most recent acquisition by the large, unifying government, Valrise explained. There was fighting and many casualties. The details are suppressed.

  Can you not discover more? Cin asked through her link.

  I am trying, Valrise replied. But I must consider the impact on trade if my inquiries are discovered.

  “In fact, Your Holiness, I was hoping that I might participate in the training f
or our bouncers,” the Calmt said, glancing hopefully to Cin.

  “That is not—” from Cin clashed with:

  “I don’t see—” from His Holiness.

  The two exchanged looks of chagrin. Cin motioned for His Holiness to speak with a polite, “I’m sorry.”

  His Holiness accepted it as no more than his due and continued, “I don’t see why you would prosper from such training.”

  “I am told it is very risky,” the Calmt said, “and I should like to know the risks myself so that I can best describe them to others.”

  Cin bit back her immediate response: It wasn’t risky, only delicate. Instead, she said, “Most of us have implants and years of training, Your Holiness.”

  The Calmt gave Cin a half-pleading, half-grateful look. Cin got the impression that the Calmt wanted His Holiness to be concerned by the risks.

  She is offering to risk death for the Greater Whole? Cin asked Valrise through their link.

  So it would appear, Valrise agreed. Cin was troubled by this notion; Valrise seemed just as troubled.

  “If you wish it, I will consult with the Council,” His Holiness said to the Calmt. To Cin, he said, “Can she learn without your ‘implants’?”

  “All the recruits will start without implants,” Valrise spoke up. “I’m sure that, if it is acceptable to you, we would have no difficulty training the Calmt.”

  His Holiness jerked around, trying to find the owner of the voice.

  “That was Valrise, our ship,” Cin explained.

  His Holiness made a warding gesture before quickly composing himself. “I had forgotten that your ship talks. It must be quite alarming.”

  “We get used to it,” Cin said. “She has saved more than one life with her quick warnings.”

  “Really?” His Holiness said. His brows furrowed. “And why would she?”