Noriama: Chapter 3
The Kolonie-Arche Projekt was what had first brought Michael and Antje together. Two decades prior, at a fancy EU party, the then-newly appointed EUSAA director had pinned a freshly elected German minister to the wall when she had inadvertently expressed an interest in space-exploration.
“It’s a common mistake,” Michael explained. “Everyone still assumes we’re planning on colonizing the solar system.” There were countless papers and projects to that effect. Deep in the EUSAA’s files, Mars, Venus, and even the moon were officially slated for colonization. Scientists had been talking about it for decades, and the programs and designs for doing so were dime a dozen.
“No?” Antje took a sip of her wine. “I am still new to the Bundestag; I am always learning about new projects. I assumed the EUSAA would have been working on something like colonization.”
“We are,” Michael licked his lips. “Or rather, I am; but not for our solar-system. Colonizing outside the solar system is the only project that makes any sense.”
Antje passed the test; instead of laughing or rolling her eyes, she cocked her head. She was curious, incredulous, and most importantly, listening.
Michael took a breath, like a maestro preparing to play a well practiced symphony. “What do you know about automation?”
“Not nearly as much as I know about astronomy, and I know nothing about astronomy.”
“Here’s all you need to know. AI systems have gotten complex and intricate enough to perform multi-level tasks with speed, efficiency, and precision beyond our own. We have machines capable of building mines, factories, and shipping facilities without any human interaction at all. You’ve heard about the Mariana Refinery?”
“Of course I have.” It was the first gas-refinery ever constructed in the crushing depths of the Mariana Trench, able to extract gallons of natural gasses every day.
“It’s not just automated, it was built by autonomic robots too. There were a few ‘foreman’ machines piloted by remote control, but it was mostly robots.”
“Ah,” Antje shook her head. “What does that have to do with colonizing the solar system?”
“It means we’re too late,” Michael smiled. “What possible reason do we have for colonizing Mars now? Or Venus? Name me some, go on.”
“Well, you won’t accept mineral opportunities,” she guessed.
“Of course not. If we can automate the Mariana Refinery, why bother sending humans to the moon? Just send a rocket of robots and let them build the mines and ship the ore home. Same with anywhere in the solar system; send a team of robots and they’ll be able to do anything a human can faster and safer.”
“Okay, how about military reasons?”
“What possible military reasons are — no, never-mind. It doesn’t matter. Radar systems, off-planet missiles, whatever idea you have in mind; robots are still cheaper, easier, safer, and more reliable.”
“Space, then,” Anjte spoke before hearing what she was saying. “I mean, living space. Room. More territory to own and live in.”
“Unnecessary,” Michael grinned wider. “Do you know we have yet to build a single ocean-based habitat on the whole planet? We have tons of space on Earth to live, all we need to do is expend a fraction of the effort we’re willing to spend on living on land. Why colonize another planet when we could simply colonize the ocean instead? Closer, cheaper, easier, and if there is an emergency, rescue could be there in minutes instead of days.”
“Overpopulation would still be a problem,” Antje pushed back. “People living in the sea would still drain the Earth’s resources. If they were living on Mars, they’d have Mars’s resources to plunder.”
“A fair point,” Michael nodded, “but not good enough. If Earth is overpopulating, creating a colony on another planet won’t stop it; the math doesn’t work out. We’d need to emigrate a greater number of humans off-planet every year than are born to lower the global population, and just think about how much that would cost.”
“Not resources, not overpopulation,” Antje pursed her lips. “Not pollution either, then…”
Michael was impressed. “No? You don’t think we could terraform Mars or Venus into a new Earth, and leave this scarred planet behind?”
“You shot down the mass-migration idea already,” Antje shrugged, “and besides; I’ve seen some of the detailed plans the URC is already working on to repair the earth. Moisturizers, evaporators, bio-engineered atmospheric condensers…Anything we can use to terraform another planet we can use to heal our own. That would be much easier than starting over from scratch on another planet. You have some answer, I presume…Social reasons, perhaps? Kick undesirables off the planet?”
Michael laughed. “No one has ever given me that answer before! No, that’s not the answer I thought of, but I must say its tempting.”
“Alright then,” she spread her arms. “I surrender. There is no good reason to colonize another planet.”
“There is one,” Michael nodded. “I’ll give you a hint; Remember I said it has to be done outside the solar-system? That’s the only solution to the problem.”
“Okay then, Overpopulation and pollution are still better solved on earth. Automation is still better for mining…”
“Actually, interestingly enough, it isn’t outside the solar system,” Michael smiled.
Entropy was an inescapable problem, he explained; machines could wear out, break down, and even self-repair methods might someday fail. If the factory were on the moon, a week long trip would be all it would take to fix any broken machinery or repair any unforeseen issues. As the distances grew, time became a larger problem. It would be bad enough if it could take weeks just to learn the robots had broken down and then months or more to get a repair team to fix them, but most of the colonizable planets were at least tens of light-years away. At that point, the more pragmatic solution was to have a repair team constantly on hand. And of course, the team would need farms for their food, living space for their families, schools for their children, and at that point what was really stopping them from just colonizing the whole planet? It was the economy of scale on a human level; as travel time increased, any economic endeavor would eventually need to become a colony.
“But that’s not worth the trouble until we’ve drained our solar-system dry,” Antje tapped her lips. Michael was certain she was about to give up, when she shrugged. “Well then, there’s only one reason to colonize another planet with humans that I can think of.”
“And that is?”
“Exo-system colonization will protect the human race from extinction if something happens to our sun.”
Michael was giddy. “Oh, well done!”
“But how likely is that?” she cut in. “It will take billions of years for our sun to die out, right? And by then, I imagine we will have developed far more advanced technologies to assist in reaching another solar system. No, I think there is a far better reason than any threat to our sun.”
“Oh?”
Antje nodded. “Leaving the solar system would need to be a global project, no? I may be young for a politician, but I know that a unified goal helps improve international and cultural relations. When there is a guiding purpose to any group of people — whether household, town, or country — smaller differences and problems tend to fall away. If the whole world joined together to work towards colonizing another star-system, there’s no telling how such efforts could improve the geo-political situation. I think its far more likely this project could finally bring about a united humanity. World-peace.”
The next day, Michael sent along his preliminary reports, as she had asked him to.
The next week, he traveled back to Brussels to meet with a small task force Antje had assembled.
Within a month, a select group of scientists, engineers, and experts had holed themselves up in the labs of the EUSAA, working day and night to craft a proposal for the URC: the Kolonie-Arche Projekt, or KAP.
Michael had little to start with. The project’s first efforts were directed at historical endeavors from the bygone ages of inspired and fantastical dreams. The hope of their ancestors, however, had little practicality. Defunct projects like the Breakthrough Starshot had never gotten off the ground, literally; while the more recent projects had barely gotten beyond the planning stages before money or interest had vanished.
What little information they had was now woefully outdated. Technological advances in propulsion, light-sails, nuclear energy, and light-weight materials had revolutionized the world in the last century, but the possibilities of exosystem travel had not progressed very far. In most cases, the KAP was starting from scratch.
They managed, thankfully, to unearth the records and research from the long since defunct European Southern Observatory. The ESO was a research organization founded by sixteen separate nations, before political and financial upheaval forced its doors to close in 2034. It had been a groundbreaking institution of the time, including discovering the Milky Way’s black hole core, the gamma ray fingerprints of merging neutron stars, and the most detailed information to date on several of the galaxy’s closest exoplanets.
The ESO’s stellar catalogs were detailed for the time, and it gave them clues where to look first, but their technology had been insufficient for the KAP’s requirements. After purchasing time on multiple different radar arrays, they were able to get more detailed information in a year about these exoplanets than the ESO had in their hundred years of activity.
Proxima b had not been the scientists first choice. When it came time to select planets for colonization, the darlings of most of the scientific community were Luyten b and Kepler-442b. After enhanced scans were taken and improved data had been collected, the two planets had clear advantages over their other potentially-habitable brethren.
Luyten b was one of the most Earth-like planets ever found. It was almost perfectly settled within it’s star’s habitable zone — the distance from the star where water would neither freeze nor boil away, but remain in liquid form — and had an average temperature of about 259 degrees Kelvin. While this was far too cold for a long-term colony, an atmosphere — once constructed by the colonists — would likely create a greenhouse effect that would warm and distribute the heat from its star across the surface, raising it to a much more habitable range.
Perhaps most important, Luyten b’s star was a quiet one. It had a slow rotation period — over 118 days — and rarely spat out the harsh flares and solar winds of similar red dwarfs. The atmosphere, once formed, would be subject to very little erosion, and require little maintenance on the colonists part.
Kepler-442b, on the other hand, was slightly smaller, less massive, and a bit warmer. What appealed to the KAP about Kepler-442b was its sun was much younger than Sol, a K-type star instead of G-type. At first the star was overlooked, as K-type stars tended to be far more aggressive than most, with strong solar winds that could prove quite hazardous to most forms of life. A closer look proved that Kepler-442 was aging out of its turbulent youth, however, and would soon be quite amicable to colonization.
As for the planet itself, it’s tilt was very small and its orbit almost circular, which meant a likely season-less year. Combined with a day/night cycle that was weeks long, and Kepler-442b would provide a level of stability to the colonists that would support steady and reliable progress.
There were ten other planets the KAP looked at, mostly for completeness sake, but everyone knew that in the end it would be one of these two planets that would be the first to cradle a human colony.
Michael hadn’t been so certain. He had suspected mankind’s first secondary home would be Proxima Centauri b.
On paper, Proxima b was nowhere near as appealing as Luyten or Kepler. It was comparable size and shape, and nestled in Proxima Centauri’s habitable zone, but this habitable zone was terrifyingly close to the cold red-dwarf sun; Proxima b was only five-million miles away from the star, almost five percent of the distance of the earth from Sol. As a result, Proxima b was subject to solar wind pressures more than two thousand times those of Earth; enough to blow away any atmosphere there might have been on the planet.
Coupled with that, the short distance to the sun meant that Proxima b was tidally locked into synchronous rotation, similar to the moon and the earth. One side of Proxima b would always face the burning sun, while the other side would be permanently covered in freezing darkness.
These two facts alone struck Proxima b off most experts’ lists, but Michael was less dismissive. If one side of the planet was boiling in the sun while the other was frozen, then there had to be a thermal terminator line — a band of transition between the hot and cold faces of the planet — where the temperatures would be steadily temperate. It was possible that water had already formed on Proxima b, possibly even enough to form oceans along that line.
If that was true, terraforming would be easy — as far as any terraforming could be easy. As soon as a thicker atmosphere began to transfer the sun’s heat more evenly across the planet, water would retain its liquid state naturally, and irrigation could support extensive farming. This, in turn, would strengthen the atmosphere, and a kind of non-homogeneous equilibrium could be achieved. With a strong and carefully balanced ecosystem, any atmospheric erosion from the solar winds could be replaced. With a society of dedicated colonists, a wide band of the planet could be naturally habitable within ten generations.
“Seems a lot of unnecessary work,” Antje had said when he explained it to her. “Luyten b isn’t nearly as much of a risk. Why go to all that trouble?”
The answer was so simple, Michael was surprised Antje hadn’t thought of it. Proxima b had to be the first exo-colony of earth, not because of a calmer environment or a similarity to earth, but simply because it was closer.
Luyten b was twelve and a half light-years away. Kepler-442b a staggering thirteen-hundred. Proxima b, on the other hand, was a mere four and a quarter light-years from earth. A lifetime of blank looks at parties had taught Michael well; people couldn’t grasp complicated concepts beyond their own frames of reference, and they rarely bothered with anything that didn’t impact them directly. A multi-generational colonization effort was exactly that.
If humanity was to ever leave its home, people needed to know that someone they knew and cared about would be affected. For the KAP to ever be embraced, the world needed to believe their grandchildren would see its completion.
In short; the KAP needed to colonize a planet within two generations of its launch, and with the interstellar distances involved, Proxima b was the only solution.
With Proxima b their target, sociologists and engineers worked in unison to create the ideal habitat for extraterrestrial pioneers. Simulations were run, testing ideal diversity, genetics, mindset, intellectual and physical ability, and social structure. Thousands of habitats were drafted, blueprinted, tested, prototyped, tested again, and scrapped. Modular designs were banded about like trading cards as each and every teammember tried to find the perfect solution to the countless problems they had discovered, and the even more countless problems they would never think of until it was too late.
All the while, Antje was building support across the EU. She was new in the German Bundestag, but she was energetic, passionate, and had the uncanny ability to make politicians consider ideas unconnected to winning elections or cultivating social power. Her work was cut out for her; it was a solution to a problem no one seemed to be too concerned with.
Antje knew why no one cared; people simply couldn’t think very far ahead. Problems were solved only when they became problems, not before. The old adage “to prevent is better than to cure” was difficult to embrace when there were so many problems that still needed cures.
The URC itself was only in its tenth year, and opinions were still mixed. The data didn’t lie: fewer people were dying of preventable diseases in the poorer countries, food was being distributed in an equitable manner, education was increasing, and pollution was down. Poverty was decreasing, while the wealth gap was growing thinner every month. On paper, the scars of the twenty first century were finally beginning to heal.
At the same time, the URC policies that brought the earth back from the brink were not popular ones. Rationing had been hardest for the Americas to deal with, their lavish and extreme lifestyles chafing under restricted access to food and fuel. Several regions, including the Seven Nations of Aisa and the former Russian Bloc struggled to accept governance from any external body. Justifiably so, as they had suffered the worst under the final years of the UN. Firebrand politicians of the African continent spat at the obvious attempt to claim sovereignty over their people, and no one wanted to risk damaging the tenuous peace that had finally been brokered between New Jerusalem and the Pan-Arabian States in the Middle East.
As idealistic a project as the KAP was, too many questions remained unanswered. Which regions would subsidize this project? Would each country give a flat amount, which would severely punish the poorest regions; or would funding be proportional to GDP, which would mean the most powerful five nations of the world would fund more than eighty-five percent of the total cost? What if the project failed? How would the blame be proportioned, and what punishments would there be? What proof was there that this was not some elaborate ruse to drain the African Union, the Seven Nations, and the Indian States of their coffers so the EU or maybe the Australasian hegemony could claw their way to economic dominance? What assurances were there that this project would provide anything of value to an already strained and over-worked planet that was only now beginning to mend?
Before long, Antje was forced to sit Michael down and explain that it was time to give up. Every year for seven years she had re-introduced the project to the URC, requesting funding and support for its study and implementation — and every year it was voted down. The KAP answered every question time and time again, adjusting itself to become more palatable for the stubborn URC, but every year the URC adjourned without accepting the proposal. Yes, countless scientists and astronomers had spent decades developing new alloys, technologies, and whole branches of mathematics just to get the colonists to their destination; and yes, engineers had developed intricate blueprints of modular colony bases that were not only efficient, but almost energy neutral; and yes, diplomats, philosophers, and politicians had all consulted on crafting a compact that was not only fair to all the Regions of the Earth, but also provided rights for the colonists themselves, but there were still too many questions and not enough satisfactory answers.
The KAP was dead.
“You think he’s lying?”
“Natürlich,” Antje leaned forward, fingers lightly pressed on her desk. “If he’s read our report, he knows every alternative we put in the verdammten thing!”
“Every alternative we countered,” Michael raised a finger.
“Oh, come on, Michael. We cherry-picked the best numbers for us that we could find. You know that, I know that, and Mr. Takenaka knows that too. You told me yourself back when we first met; if he really wants tantalum there are plenty of places inside our solar system that are cheaper, easier, and faster than building a colony on Proxima Centauri b. If everything went precisely according our ideal estimations, Earth won’t receive a single ounce of tantalum for over a hundred years. Even the Seven Nations don’t plan mineral resource yields that far in advance.”
Michael paused in his pacing. “You think maybe he’s giving us the same cover we tried to give? He made up a story about mining estimates so the Seven Nations will take another look at the KAP?”
Antje tapped the requisition form where it lay on her desk. “Take a look at his requisition letter. He’s not just asking for our planetary data, he’s asking for everything the KAP researched.”
Michael waved his hand. “I’ll take your word for it. Okay, say he’s lying. Or maybe only a half-lie, maybe they really are running lower on tantalum than they thought they would be. Why come to us? They have better resources than we have now, never mind what we could put together years ago. Why drudge up old and out-of-date data?”
“Do you want me to tell you? Or would you rather work it out for yourself?”
Michael glared at Antje before continuing to pace. “He could want to study the designs for an undersea habitation project. We did research on mining operations, didn’t we?”
Antje waved her hand. “Naive proposals for future technology we hoped would be around when the KAP finally launched.”
“Our sociological studies, then? Or maybe the old psychological reports on long-term mission stresses on the human psyche?”
“Nothing that hasn’t already been shared or surpassed with recent advances.”
Michael paused in his pacing. “Were you being serious, just then? Do you know why he’s lying to us?”
Antje’s mouth twisted under her fingertips. “You know science, Michael, but I know politics. There is only one good reason I can think of.”
Michael sat, pressing the palm of his hand to his eye. “Well? Don’t leave me in suspense.”
“Politicians don’t like to waste time,” Antje ticked off on her fingers. “If the work is already done, they might subject it to review, but they’ll never ask for it to be done all over again. Second, they’re cautious. The more consequences their actions have, the less likely they’ll engage in them. Better to make a million little steps that go unnoticed, than one giant step that lands you in all the papers. Third, they like to be seen.”
Michael nodded, filing each fact into his brain before he realized Antje had finished. “And?”
“And that’s it,” Antje smiled, spreading her hands.
“I don’t see it. That’s what?”
“He wants us to know he’s looking at the KAP.”
Michael blinked. “Then…then why not simply tell us that he wants to start up the KAP again? Why come here with a pretense for —”
“I said he was cautious; if he tells his superiors he wants to work with the EU on KAP, he needs to be able to tell them he’s got our support. But, if he tells us before he tells his superiors, he’s conducting diplomacy beyond his jurisdiction. The only way this works is if both the EU and the Seven Nations believe it’s the other who asked for a joint effort.”
“That’s politics, is it?”
“More or less. Plausible deniability is the oil of the modern world, I’m afraid. Everything falls through the cracks until it works, then everyone takes credit.”
Michael sat down, leaning back in his char. “So what do we do?”
“You go back to the EUSAA offices. Pull up everything you can on the KAP; all the old reports, the hard data, and everything that didn’t make it into the final report. If Japan is willing to support the KAP, we’ll need to help convince the Seven Nations council. If the Seven Nations are on board, the EU will be too, and that means the Northern Americas are in the bag. That will help convince the African Union and the Indian states.”
“Should we connect with the other regions? South America, Australasia, maybe the Pan-Arabian states?”
Antje pursed her lips. “You let me worry about that. Australasia will probably be on board, but the Southern Americas can be…prickly.”
“What I’m asking is,” Michael’s voice lowered, “the science community is a bit more…open with its communication than politicians. Should I do this…quietly?”
“Yes,” Antje said after a moment’s thought. “If this is going to work, we need investment of the right people in the right places. If we lose control of who knows what, we risk everyone sticking their fingers in before we get everything settled.” she paused. “Would that insult anyone? Being kept out of the loop?”
Michael laughed. “Being purposefully kept away from the opportunity to help craft the first exo-colony arc in human history? Anyone we don’t approach to help will be furious.”
“Well,” Antje grimaced. “That’s probably a long way out anyway. This is only going to be the first of many steps.” She heaved a sigh and leaned back in her chair. After a moment she spoke again. “Do you really think it will work, this time?”
“What do you mean?”
“Last time, everyone was interested — excited, even — until they weren’t. Suddenly other things became more important, and the KAP died out. Do you think this time will be different?”
Michael gave a slow nod. “I do.”
“Why? And don’t give me any ‘I have to believe it’ bullshit. When we first approached the URC, we all still thought the world was on the upswing. There was no energy-rationing then, no resource restrictions, the member regions were relatively well disposed towards each other…now we have less to build the KAP with, and less goodwill and trust between nations…why do you think we have a better shot now?”
Michael collected his thoughts. “I think we made a mistake before. Back then, the world was optimistic. We really thought that our problems were solvable. Better living standards, civil liberties, everything seemed like it was improving. Then, once the Jacksonville Tsunami killed over a million people, that optimism was directed towards the Earth. New standards, better technologies…and anything that went towards colonizing Proxima b felt like a waste of effort. Why bother, when we could make things better here?”
Antje nodded. “And now?”
“Now, climate events aren’t getting better. Energy rationing is an unpopular solution to tamp down our climate impact. Food shortages aren’t regular enough to be predictable, nor scarce enough to be tolerable. People aren’t seeing the world as something they can just fix, anymore. As cynical as it sounds, the idea that we’re creating a better world on another planet that they believe — however wrongly — they might someday escape to, might be all the excuse that they need.”
Once the words had passed his lips, Michael broke down into tears.
Antje took his hand while he collected himself. They sat in silence for a moment before Michael shook his head again. “I’m sorry, my brain is running all over the place. I just…I never thought that…I don’t quite believe it. After so long, I can’t…”
Antje, without another word, stood up and walked to her office cabinet and pulled out the half-full bottle of scotch.
By the end of the evening, the two friends had laughed the bottle empty.