Soul Bound

1        Soul Bound

1.2      Taking Control

1.2.5    An Idiosyncratic Interlude

1.2.5.19 On a different scale

Nadine: “I think I’m envious now. I’ve never left the planet, but now I want to leave, go visit these amazing places, see the sights with my own eyes. What’s it like up there? Do you all think on this grand scale?”

Heather replied, a bit dreamily: “The journey up there - something changes inside you. You travel to the big port at Dar es Salaam and then, if you have the right paperwork, out to one of the small islands in the Zanzibar archipelago that’s been turned into a quarantine facility. Beautiful place, and semi-autonomous so it’s completely controlled by the launch company.”

“When every part of you has been probed and tested, and the doctors and psychologists tick their last tick box, you’re allocated to a launch slot and have nothing to do except swim and relax. On the day before your slot, you put on a biocontainment suit and a dedicated train takes your group out to Selela, the space passenger terminal near Odupai Gorge. Hypersonics that don’t use the tether leave from Manyara, and space cargo fit for high acceleration leaves from Engaruka, but if you’re human and want to leave the Earth, it’s Selela.”

“The security at Selela is really tight. You don’t get to bring any clothes or items with you, not even medicines, glasses or hearing aids. They spray your containment suit down before removing it, and from that moment your every move is under total surveillance. And I do mean every moment, even on the toilet. They control every mouthful of food you take and weigh everything that comes out of you. There’s a total information blackout, no net connection, and they know to the minute and milligram what drugs to give you to prevent nausea, stress or sleeplessness. You’re a puppet. Passive. Like being in a womb.”

“On the day, a bot helps you climb into your custom fabricated gmin pod, places a mask over your face and fills the remaining space with gel. You can’t move an inch or scratch your nose, but you can see out. The pods go on a rack and the racks slide into the CAV until it’s as full as an underground tube-train during rush hour, with everyone standing. The CAV is loaded onto a mag-lev trolley and slides into one of the pump chambers where the pressure outside the CAV is reduced by a factor of a thousand, down to just 10 pascals. Completely dark. And when the pumps stop, near silence, just a deep pulsing thrum like a heartbeat.”

“Some choose sedation, but most don’t - it’s their last moment on the planet of their birth, and they don’t want to miss it. It’s a shared experience. There are children up there now who were born in space, but for the rest of us, we remember. You’ve not seen a human face or heard a human voice in over a day; everything is left behind. All ties are cut.”

“Then the chamber opens and the trolley begins to move. There’s a visual feed from the front of the vehicle, a diagram showing your position, and a timer starts. Here, I’ll show you.”

Nadine’s goggles switched from overlay mode, to showing instead a recording sent by Heather.

“Over the first 10 seconds, the acceleration slowly ramps up to 1g. You’re still at Selela, moving at the speed of a fast car.”

“40 seconds, faster than the fastest bullet train, and you break the sound barrier, but you scarcely notice because there’s hardly any air in the enclosed tunnel.”

“100 seconds, and you reach Monduli junction, where the tracks from all three terminals join to head towards Mount Kilimanjaro. The trolley fizzes through a plasma window, and then the acceleration starts increasing towards 2g.”

“130 seconds, and you reach the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro, where the angle of movement changes from horizontal to an eventual thirty degree rise. The forward acceleration eases off for 10 seconds and you shoot up the slope at a constant 1.5 kilometers per second. They try to smooth out the curve using guyed towers, some of them nearly 2km high, but you really feel the sharpest bit, even though the gmin pods try to compensate - they call it ‘the bump’.”.

“140 seconds, and you’re 10 km high in the sky, just leaving the last tower. You pass through another plasma window, into an ultra-low vacuum tunnel at just 1 pascal pressure. They call it the ‘straightway’, and it starts out suspended from blimps. Every meter is expensive now, and the name of the game is to reach the final desired velocity in as short a distance as possible. The acceleration kicks straight up to 3g and stays there.”

“160 seconds, and you’re 30 km up, too high for blimps and drones. The straightway is now supported by twin Lofstrom loops whose turn point is at Malindi on the coast. It has to run all the time, so when there isn’t a tether available, it gets used for hypersonics.”

“200 seconds, and the CAV speeds through the final plasma window at 3.3 kilometers per second. The window is scarcely needed, because you’re 80 km up and the atmospheric pressure at that height is less than 1 pascal. The CAV separates from the trolley and suddenly you’re weightless, in a ballistic trajectory. Instead of the visual feed showing the inside of a tunnel, you can see the Earth is quite clearly a ball and the approaching sea far below.”

“The noise, the pain, the pressure, they’re all gone. And in their place, you can hear the swelling tones of Schilotti’s ‘Earth Rising’. It feels like starting a new life.”

Heather switched the goggles back to overlay, so Nadine could see her.

Nadine: “It sounds like a religious experience, a ritual.”

Heather: “Perhaps that’s deliberate, but I don’t care. It is a big step, and it deserves being treated as more than a ho-hum part of life.”

Nadine: “So what happens then?”

Heather: “There are hubs orbiting above the equator, 1000 km above the surface, with pairs of smart tethers 750 km long rotating about the hub. Each hub passes over the correct spot above the Indian Ocean every 105 minutes, and catches a CAV as it reaches the apogee of its ballistic trajectory at 250 km altitude, flinging it on upwards to the next stage of its journey.”

Nadine: “A tether 750 km long? That’s massive. That’s further than the distance from Sarajevo to Rome.”

Heather: “Comparing objects in space to objects on Earth doesn’t work very well. The scales are different. You have to think in mathematical terms, using multiples of ten. For example, have you heard of statites?”

Nadine: “No.”

Heather: “You saw the spinny thing on the headgear I made for Muhamed? That spins because when light bounces off something, it exerts a tiny amount of pressure against it. Well, in space if you stretch a wide sheet of reflective stuff out where sunlight can hit it, the sheet moves. If the sheet is thin enough and reflective enough, and the sun is bright and far away enough, you can get the force from photons bouncing off it to exactly balance the gravitational force attracting it back towards the sun.”

Nadine: “So it stays still?”

Heather: “Yep. It hovers, without needing to orbit. Which means you can pack lots and lots of them around a star. So many, that they appear to form a continuous bubble.”

Nadine: “Why would you want to do that?”

Heather: “Because, if they’re really light, you’ve got some mass left over and you can hang things from them. Like habitats for humans to live in. Or lots and lots of computers. It’s called a Dyson Bubble, and it lets you make really efficient use of a star’s energy output.”

Heather used her bees to form the shape of a statite. It wasn’t like an umbrella. It was much closer to being a spinning circular sheet of paper, with a teeny-tiny pea, 1/1000th the size of the sail, hanging from it.

Heather sounded like she was grinning, and Nadine felt suspicious.

Nadine: “Just how many people total would fit in a bubble’s habitats? A billion? Ten billion?”

Heather sounded casual: “Oh, about a hundred quadrillion. That’s a million times the total number of individual members of the species Homo Sapiens that have ever lived.”

Nadine: “You think humanity will ever expand that much?”

Heather: “We could expand much more than that. Once we master the asteroid belt, we can set up big masers, and even bigger conducting mesh fresnel lenses, then use solar sails to send out unmanned robot missions to nearby stars, to mine their asteroid belts and set up receiving stations with big masers that humans could use to slow down at the far end, allowing higher speed trips. Stopping is always the tricky part.”

Nadine: “You’re saying a trip to nearby stars could be made in just a few decades? In under a human lifespan?”

Heather: “Yes, and with known technology. No need to wait for artificial wombs birthing settlers from frozen embryos, cryostasis or uploading minds to a machine. No need for generation ships. Given 100 million years, we should be able to colonise the whole Milky Way galaxy. Or, at least, as many of the 100 billion stars as we care to put bubbles around. Even if we pick just 1 in 1000, that would be a total human population of 10^22. That’s a number which, when written down, is a 1 followed by 22 zeros.”

Nadine put on her best Barbie Doll voice: “Maths is hard.”

Heather: “Ok, ok, I’ll stop with the big numbers. Let me try a different way. Have a look at Virgo. I’m going to zoom in and show you something.”

The image in her goggles started small, but grew in detail as Heather added in data from radio, x-ray and infrared. It looked like a coral, or perhaps the neurons of a brain, with filaments full of glowing bulges stretched around empty voids, splitting and merging.

Nadine: “What is that? It looks alive.”

Heather: “That’s the Laniakea Supercluster, the ‘immense heavens’. Each of those glows is a group of galaxies, more than 100,000 of them, many larger than the Milky Way. They’re pretty close together and the space between them isn’t empty - a species could travel between them, with a bit of effort. We’re part of Laniakea. Every human alive today could have their own planet, if they lived long enough.”

Nadine: “Thus your planet of the cats.”

Heather: “There are really only two big questions facing our species. Will we spread out? And, if we do, what will be spread? Everything else is just a stubbed toe, so tiny you can’t see or remember it on that scale, except in as far as it affects those two questions.”