Lightship

by Stephan Besik

  Planet Three Lives On

  “While there are few positives in this story, there are some. Although the dominant species of the planet is extinct, a fairly large number of animal and plant species survived. In particular, some hardy polar- and mountain-acclimated species survived and are in reasonably good condition after a thousand years. This includes a few large predators, some fairly large grazing animals, and a wide variety of small animals, as well as many species of plants. As the planet warmed after the mini-ice age, the surviving species adapted and have filled ecosystem niches vacated before and following the nuclear devastation. We have also noted that species from the less-damaged hemisphere are a little more varied and a little more populous. As the planet has warmed, the animals and plants of the relatively intact hemisphere have moved into some of the empty ecosystem niches on the heavily damaged hemisphere.

  “Concerning sea life, we have found that a wide variety has survived and to some extent flourished given the absence of the top land-living predators. Research staff believe that many forms of sea life were under stress due to predation by the dominant species prior to its demise. Of course, that stress was eliminated after the extinction of the dominant species.

  “At this stage of our investigation, Research Group staff believe that the biological foundations of this planet’s ecosystem are adequate to support a settlement effort on Planet Three.

  “The resilience of the planetary ecosystem is something of a surprise. There is substantial evidence of the heavy overuse of plant and animal resources by the large population of the dominant species. In addition to overuse from overhunting, overfishing, and general resource mismanagement, it appears that global warming had also seriously degraded biological populations over the entire planet.

  “Another of the positives in the planet’s condition is that relatively little of the water on the planet was lost. Although sea levels worldwide dropped following the nuclear holocaust, most of this was the result of increased snowfall and glaciation during the conflagration-induced cold period. As the planet has warmed, the water locked up in new ice has been freed and sea levels have risen almost to the levels existing prior to the majority of the technological evolution of the extinct race. In fact it appears that ice and water have returned to levels similar to those in the early centuries of the civilization, before the development of significant technologies.

  “Assuming that the establishment of permanent settlements is attempted, however, a substantial reclamation effort will be required to redevelop or work around the many destroyed sites at critical water junctions. The rehabilitation will not require water and atmosphere replacement as much as a long-term effort to clean and rechannel existing resources.

  “While I could go into further detail about the path of demise of this technological species I think I should leave that to subsequent meetings and discussions.

  “Clearly further research is necessary to establish a plan for permanent habitation, but the Research Group are ready to assert that this planet should be prioritized as a candidate for reclamation. The conditions on the planet are such that it will provide a favorable environment for new settlers. Admittedly, there will be reclamation required, but the circumstances are well within our power to mitigate problems and enhance conditions.

  The planet is also of enormous scientific value given the relatively recent civilization collapse and our evidence of a chain of multiple factors that led to the demise of the dominant species. The planet will provide fruitful paths of research into causes of extinction of technological species.

  “Questions about the reasons for civilization collapse are not the only ones this planet may help us to answer. We may be fortunate enough to gain greater understanding of our own history. How is it that we have succeeded where so many others have failed? There are theories that assert that we were able to create a unified global government far earlier than other civilizations and thereby avoided the possibility of major nuclear conflicts. One theory suggests that the creation of a free global education system was critical to our survival, eliminating sources of social inequality and optimizing mechanisms of social mobility. Another theory is that we were better custodians of our planetary ecosystem than those who have failed. With historical sources from this species and a determined effort to translate them we may be able to illuminate our own path of survival.

  “This world may also help us to understand what must be done to help a new civilization survive. We have yet to encounter a civilization at a lower level of development, but the longer we survive and the further we travel the greater the odds are that we will have such an encounter at some point. Might we be able to help a new civilization overcome the obstacles to long-term survival? Is it possible that we will be joined by another civilization in the exploration of our region of interstellar space? What we find on this planet may help answer these questions.

  “Beyond any effort to establish long-term research facilities here, Planet Three should be relatively easy to rehabilitate as another permanent home for our people. The cost to rehabilitate the planet and make it habitable for our species will be low compared to many other planets investigated by the Interstellar Research Survey. The damage to the atmosphere and the oceans is comparable to that on other planets on which extinction of a technological species has occurred. While it will be necessary to maintain a long-term program to prevent the return of global warming, stabilize the atmosphere, cleanse the oceans and repopulate plant and wildlife, the planet is immediately habitable for enough of our people to conduct research and begin a rehabilitation effort with a good chance of success. By no means is this a lost world, as some of our other interstellar expeditions have found.”

  Just then the male who had left the Atrium before the presentation returned, breathing heavily as if he had been moving quite rapidly.

  “Am I too late? Are the recommendations over?”

  The Chief of Research looked up and smiled ironically. “Not quite. The recommendation of Research is to proceed with a program of rehabilitation.”

  “Ah, good. When can we start?”

  “Are you asking if members of the crew can remain as part of a permanent research station here?”

  The anxious one responded, “Why, yes. I for one would like to stay on the planet and continue the research I have begun. I see no reason to return to Homeworld or seek another destination when there is so much of interest here.”

  The Chief looked uncertainly at the Commander. After all, it was his ship and his crew. She thought it was unlikely that operational crew members responsible for the ship would be allowed to stay (and would probably have no interest in doing so). On the other hand, members of her Research Group might well have an interest in staying. Like the male who had asked the question, others might want to stay behind to continue research already begun.

  The Commander knew it was one of those times he had to be Commander. “I think under the circumstances a limited number of Research Group staff can remain here. I must caution you, however, that the safety of the Ship and the success of this voyage are paramount. I will not approve any effort that jeopardizes the safe completion of the last leg of our voyage and return of the Ship to Homeworld. Nor will I approve any settlement effort that entails significant risk to those who choose to stay, regardless of their willingness to risk their own survival.”

  He looked at the Chief. “Is that understood?”

  A sense of relief and gratitude showed in her eyes. “Yes, Commander.”

  He looked at the wayward researcher. The ambitious and anxious male appeared somewhat disappointed, but there might have been some relief, too. “Yes, Commander.”

  He nodded. “Then let it be done. Chief, I will ask Ship Operations to work with you to survey Ship’s Crew and Research Group staff to determine how many would like to stay on Planet Three with the first cohort of settlers. I suggest you consider additional work in the near term to firm up your current recommendation and ensure that Planet T
hree will be a safe destination for settlers. We must ensure that any risks to our habitation and reclamation effort on Planet Three are uncovered.”

  The Commander looked again at the Chief of Research. “Do you have any additional information to present at this time?”

  The Chief motioned a negative. “No, Commander.”

  The Commander looked up at the audience. “Are there any questions for the Chief of Research at this time?”

  The audience was silent.

  “Very well. This presentation is therefore at an end. The Review Committee will come together to consider the information presented this day and continue its evaluation of Research Group findings to date. Chief, thank you and thanks to the Research Group for a job well done.”

  The audience rose and began to file out of the Atrium. Planet Three was still in view, the whites, blues, greens and browns jewel-like in the light of the planet’s sun. The Commander rose, too, and spoke briefly to the Review Committee.

  “We now have a more interesting circumstance to consider than we had before this presentation. I had not expected a request from the Research Group for members to stay after the Ship departs. I suppose in hindsight it should have been expected with the discoveries that have been made here. Still, the proposal is a risky one on its face, certainly for anyone who wishes to stay.”

  Just then the Chief of Research approached. “May I speak to you in confidence, Commander?” The Chief looked worried, perhaps even frightened.

  The Commander hesitated for a moment, and then turned to the Committee. “If you will excuse me for a moment?” He stepped away from the group and motioned the Chief to follow him. “How may I help?”

  She spoke quietly, intensely. “Sir, I am not sure that my report was satisfactory. I think- it did not deal with the- the horror of this place. I stayed within the guidelines of Research policy for First Presentations, but they seem so superficial compared to the reality on the surface.

  “I have been down to the planet a number of times. The sites I visited are scenes of massive devastation and death. I have stood at the edge of craters so large that ruins on the opposite edge are barely visible. From the edge of a crater, I could walk away for half the daylight time on the planet and still walk through ruins.

  “For half of that distance there are no remains of the old inhabitants. But that isn’t the worst. The worst struck me as I began to see the skeletons. The farther away from the blast, the more skeletons there are. At many of the sites there were apparently so few survivors that burying the dead was impossible. At some sites there are mass burial areas for tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of remains. How can we expect settlers to make lives in a place so filled with the remnants of death?”

  She shook her head. “Perhaps I am too young for this. The older members of my staff, the ones who have studied for decades, those who have been on another expedition, don’t seem to mind the sights down there. Perhaps their experience helps them deal with the reality of this place.” She looked at the Commander with haunted eyes. “When I am down there, the souls of all those destroyed beings seem to reach out to me.”

  She looked away, as if she were ashamed of her reaction. “Like everyone else, I went through the orientation program. I was sure I could live with what we were likely to find on the planets we were to visit. I entered the immersions from other expeditions, walking where they walked. But this- these ruins are not from ancient days, many thousands of years in the past. Time has just begun to bury the dead, only beginning to hide bones under dust for our archeologists to dig up. Here, even after a thousand years, the signs of death are fresh. The aura here is truly frightening.”

  The Commander eyed the head of his Research Group sympathetically. This was his second voyage. On his first and on this one he had been to the surface of a planet devastated by the acts of supposedly intelligent species. On his first voyage, the dead race had been buried and gone for nearly ten thousand years. Bones were fossils; structures were little more than crumbled rock and outlines on the ground. From space, experts could detect city sites. On the ground, one would never believe that anything terrible had ever happened.

  He understood his chief’s feelings on this planet. Death was indeed fresh, and he too wondered whether trying to inhabit a planet so recently ruined would work.

  “I understand your concerns. I feel the pain of this place, too. It is its pain, though, that makes it so important.”

  “You know our story as well as me. When our first starships came upon the remains of dead civilizations centuries ago, we could not understand how races of intelligent beings managed to destroy themselves, often ruining the planets they left behind. Even now we don’t understand this phenomenon. What we know so far is that technologically advanced species, for all their knowledge and power, are frail almost beyond comprehension. For most, the power they acquire through their learning and their technology has not brought them a deeper understanding of the cosmos or of existence. For nearly all, it has been a trap.

  “You must remember why we are here. Of least importance, we are here because intelligent species and civilizations rise on planets that are well suited to supporting them. We reclaim the least damaged of the dead planets because the odds are good that our communities will survive and grow on them. We also settle on such planets because we believe it is a sin to let a planetary ecosystem simply die- many of which would do so if we were not willing to stay, heal, and repair. It is a great sorrow to our culture that many of the civilizations that died took their planets with them- the worlds on which they lived are at best wastelands, at worst little more than airless, waterless rocks.

  “The last reason is perhaps the most important. The more we continue to evolve as a technologically sophisticated society, the greater the power we as individuals, and we as a society, wield for good or ill. If we do not learn from the mistakes of others, we may well make the same mistakes and doom our own civilization to the fate that so many other civilizations have brought upon themselves. We may now be more successful than those that went before us, but as you yourself said in your introduction that is no guarantee that our civilization will continue to prosper and grow. If we do not learn, we may end like all the others who have gone before us.

  “From what we know now, all civilizations eventually perish. We may not be able to prevent our eventual end, but if we fail to learn from the past we throw away our only defense against the hazards we face.

  “You know as well as me that as painful as Planet Three may be the pain can and should be endured. Here are the freshest clues to the mistakes of the past. Perhaps you find the older ruins tolerable for this very reason- that you cannot see the mistakes, or feel the pain of the last moments of their builders. If our civilization is to survive, perhaps the keys to that survival are on this awful planet.”

  The Commander stopped for a moment, considering his next words. “As a senior member of the Ship’s crew, you should not stay here. I think you will find that between the Ship’s Research Group and the many specialists among our settlers we may leave behind there will be adequate talent to uncover the story of this planet and share what they learn with others of our Commonwealth.

  The Chief shook her head. “How can I leave my people on this planet when I feel the way that I do? How can I send someone in my place? How will the settlers survive here?”

  The Commander motioned some frustration.

  “If you review the situation here and find that we lack what is needed to establish a successful colony and research station, we can request additional resources from Homeworld and the other Communities. At worst, we can simply abandon this place. I doubt that we will have to do so; aside from your feelings about Planet Three, nothing in the work you and your people have done so far suggests that the task here is insurmountable. The option is there, however. It is up to you and the Review Committee, including myself, to make the right decision for the Ship, for our pioneers, and for the Commonwealth. You need not make t
he decision alone; you must assist in making the correct decision for us all.”

  The Chief was silent, and looked up at the luminous sphere shining above the dome of the Atrium. “I often wonder what the old race of this world would think if they knew that we were coming to take their place. That we would unbury their buildings, their machines, even their bones in our effort to understand.”

  The Commander looked up as well, looking at the damaged jewel that they might soon take into the care of their people. “They might have been just like us- wondering how they could have been so foolish.”

  Epilogue- A Few Facts and a Few Guesses

  At Hiroshima in 1945, detonation of a fifteen kiloton atomic bomb caused an estimated 100,000 deaths and 200,000 casualties overall (deaths and injuries).

  A lot of testing was done in the years following Hiroshima, to understand what atomic weapons actually did and how they could be fully optimized. As a result, most weapons in the “modern” U.S. arsenal are half-megaton devices. The testing suggested that high altitude air bursts (detonation at around twenty thousand feet) would be most effective for the relatively large weapons in the U.S. nuclear inventory (the Hiroshima bomb was detonated at approximately 2,000 feet). Further, since the damage done increases with the square root of the increase in yield, bigger isn’t really all that much better. It turns out that a cluster of “small” bombs will result in substantially more damage than a single big bomb or missile warhead of the same explosive yield. Besides, there aren’t that many really big cities in the U.S. or in Russia. It makes more sense to have a lot of “small” bombs for the “small” targets, rather than a small number of big ones. Small bombs can always be dropped in bunches if the target is big enough. Of course, small is relative.

  The bottom line is that using four half-megaton nuclear weapons detonated at high altitude is likely to produce quite a bit more damage than a single two-megaton weapon delivered at the same height as the Hiroshima bomb. A two-megaton weapon would be roughly eleven times more effective than the Hiroshima bomb. (Even though it’s 133 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, the effectiveness only increases as the square root of the increase in power. More powerful weapons spread over larger areas, the effect diminishing as it spreads out.) A half megaton weapon would be six times more effective than the Hiroshima bomb. Thus four half megaton weapons would produce a result that is twenty-four times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. That single two megaton bomb would do only half as much damage, even though the megatonnage is the same. Given reasonable targeting, a pretty large metropolitan area could be completely destroyed with four relatively small weapons.