Chapter 9
The Great Leap
Sofia, lightheaded, dreamed that her blood was boiling in her veins. What a stupid death. To die on Mars just a few miles from Myrtle Beach, she thought, before her mind vanished.
She did not die. Mariah had activated the emergency repressurization system, restoring survival conditions. When 911 arrived, she was sitting on the floor, emotionally devastated but almost physically reestablished.
“Don’t even think about putting me in the red desert. Let them terraform the Sahara or even the Antarctic, where you can freeze to death, but at least your spit doesn’t boil,” she said, laughing and crying at the same time, hugging the friend who had saved her.
Two weeks later, when she went back to Mars, which is what she called the greenhouse, the oscillation of pressures from the pressurization had silenced the genes of some lichens, favorable to adaptation to an inhospitable climate, without killing them. The plants were more alien than ever: they had survived earth’s pressure as well as extraterrestrial conditions. That was what gave birth to the most ambitious project of bidirectional, rapidly reversible evolution. They were on the verge of something historic. Before the accident, they’d had some success in inducing new mutations in the moss they’d bought from Max Planck in Germany and, principally, the lichens that had come from MIT, the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their main idea was to develop organisms that could survive on Mars, which they had achieved when those new lichens thrived.
They now proposed breeding organisms that could survive on Mars, but would still thrive when that planet’s conditions were modified after the initial terraforming phase. Pluripotent organisms, with several pre-prepared states of evolution in their genes that would manifest themselves to the extent environmental stimulation evolved. There would be no need to send successive waves of new species when Mars’s environment changed. Nor would they have to keep hoping for them to be lucky enough that, in a mere two centuries, the plants would be able evolve on a planet undergoing accelerated artificial change. After all, the Foundation was committed to a “quick” solution which, in two hundred years, would let new Martians walk about the planet without spacesuits or masks. These would be multiplanetary plants.
In the greenhouse, they ran cycles of very low pressure, little oxygen and extreme cold and cycles of greater pressure, more oxygen and less cold, with very wide oscillations. The plants and the lichens had to keep the genes that let them adapt to both conditions, the Mars of today and the one of the future, after terraforming.
Mariah’s neighbors detested the idea of having a Martian greenhouse across the street. Things got worse, not surprisingly, when a new version of the movie War of the Worlds came out. “Be careful so, instead of transforming Mars into a new Earth, you don’t transform Earth into a new Mars,” the pastor told them, somewhere between joking and being serious, bringing them a message from the neighborhood. Philip Dexter responded that fear combined with ignorance makes for a poor counsellor. When the film Jaws was released, Mariah’s father reminded him, some people feared going to the bathroom, afraid that a huge shark would come up from the sewer and attack them. The pastor could only produce a forced smile.
The ongoing polemic about China and the United States’ space race and conspiracy theories about the American government’s secret interest in building an interplanetary empire found no resonance in that rich city.
“The future is in the future and will be better than the past. It’s there that we must keep going,” their uncle said, and people agreed. However, having mutant plants in your neighborhood was another story, as biological hazard signs painted on the transport trucks taking samples from the greenhouse to the University warned.
The two friends were known in the neighborhood as the Martian mermaids, until one day when a group of boys crossed paths with Sofia and tossed her a line, “Mermaid, dear, I wanted to dream about you last night, but I have a question about the scenario. Are you from the Atlantic or from Mars?”
“There’s no liquid water on Mars, just ice, which is why Martian mermaids are frigid,” Sofia told them. “Your dream’s not a big deal, champ.” They then became only Martians, despite having long hair and being as pretty as mermaids.
Sofia had a rare talent for mutagenesis, which depended upon directed evolution, as well as an uncommon “spatial vision.” She was able to imagine proteins and other biological molecules, visualizing them in space, turning them, fitting them in, altering them, without needing 3D modeling software. She worked very quickly and used many ideas from comparative biology that Philip Dexter brought from his field work. She was the company’s star.
“Hello, Mariah. Hello Sofia,” said Crane. You two are my favorites. I heard about your latest results. Admirable. You were born for this Sofia and we, to find people like you. Instead of publishing, you should consider patenting this or, if you want to take a chance, registering your ideas with NASA as an industrial secret,” he suggested.
“If they hadn’t invented computer modeling of proteins, it looks to me like I wouldn’t be good at anything,” Sofia responded, accepting the praise. “It’s the only thing I know how to do.”
“No, Sofia,” Crane retorted. “Many of our athletes who enchant the multitudes wouldn’t be anything if their sport had not been invented. What would baseball’s greatest genius be if there were no baseball? Work at McDonald’s, maybe. But you’re different. You can imagine complex forms in space, move and manipulate them in your head. If you didn’t do what you do, you would still be enormously successful in another profession. You would be better at doing what I do than I am.”
Sofia smiled and blushed lightly. Crane was a genius at life support system integration and designing manned vessel interiors; his praise warmed her soul.
“Just don’t ask me to put my feet on that red dust,” she joked.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-one,” Sofia answered.
“You’re too old now, my dear. You are aware that I know nothing about biology, but a question has besieged me. Your lichens and perhaps your moss will be able to survive Mars Landing Day Zero, LD zero, but when you had that emergency pressurization, conditions were like those on Earth. Why didn’t the plants die? Could it be because it lasted only a few hours?
Mars LD Zero was Mars’s natural situation, which will last until the first terraforming mission’s Landing Day. LD one hundred would be the situation one hundred Martian years later—nearly two hundred earth years, since Mars’s orbit is twice that of Earth’s and one Martian year lasts almost two earth years.
“No,” Sofia explained, “the strains manifest three different phenotypes for the three conditions of pressure, temperature and oxygen—Earth’s, which is of no interest, LD one hundred and LD zero. We are achieving spontaneously reversible evolution for the three levels of conditions. But reversion to the earth phenotype has an energetic disadvantage and so we’ll do a knock-out of those genes.”
“Excellent,” Crane agreed. “But send me samples of the specimens with the capability of earthly adaptation preserved. It’s a good idea to save a few of those.”
“There’s an abundance of lichens and moss adapted to Earth around here,” countered the young scientist.
“You know, Sofia, the Foundation thinks the same plants’ ability to adapt to diverse environments is an advantage. There are situations in which adaptability is more valuable than energetic efficiency.”
“I can send them all to you. In the project agreement, we want to optimize conditions in the LD Zero to LD One Hundred range.”
“Agreed,” Crane confirmed. “Last week I spoke about your work to the Foundation, thinking that I’d be presenting them with something new, but you two are already famous there. News spreads quickly.”
* * *
The Earth Two Foundation sprang up from an American private initiative, after the Dutch Mars One competition has been an unexpected success. Despite living from people’s an
d businesses’ contributions, first small ones but later multinationals, it was able to generate millions in funds, making a campaign to colonize Mars and financing scientific and technological research to that end.
Some older private enterprise, that hoped to mine asteroids or transport small asteroids to the Moon or to the Earth’s orbit—nominally those designated type M, rich in rare metals—publicly defended the idea that NASA and ESA’s (the European space agency’s) “Mars Objective” was the wrong strategy. That was the case of Planetary Resources, founded in 2012, by the cinematographer David Cameron and the executive Larry Page, of Deep Space Industries and of Kepler Energy and Space Engineering. But when various giants of earth mining, the aerospace industry, self-replication and robotized tool manufacturers, and energy corporations, among others, began defending Mars as a consensual objective, the matter was resolved. They were the global economy’s heavyweights, supporting NASA and massively financing the Earth Two Foundation.
Mars’s lower gravity and less dense atmosphere would allow sending asteroids to its water-rich frozen poles for on-site exploitation and purification. The mining titans’ technology was easily adaptable to Mars’s moderate gravity, dispensing with zero gravity extraction, which they had not yet mastered. Osmium, rhodium, platinum, palladium, magnesium and other materials essential for industry, threatened with scarcity by large consumers like India and China, were abundant on asteroids. Those metals, and even lead, zinc, copper, and iron itself, are only found on the Earth’s crust due to earth impacts millions of years ago. These metals did not originate on Earth, as the primordial ones had sunk to the earth’s core millions of years ago when the planet was liquid hot. They are a finite resource offered by these celestial bodies that fell a long time after our planet initially solidified and will be depleted within forty to seventy years.
There was a second problem. China dominated the extraction of another family of metals: the rare earth elements. Without rare earth elements (REEs), there would be no high technology in communications, batteries, automobiles, aviation, or electronics. What would happen to the west if one day they and the Russians closed the door on those REEs over which they both almost had a monopoly? Wasn’t that what the Chinese had threatened to do to Japan in 2010? What would the United States, Germany or Japan be without the neodymium, lanthanum, yttrium, or gadolinium that came from the country of the Yellow River, just to name a few?
Officially, the space race began again when North Korea constructed missiles capable of striking the Pacific coast and American intelligence services learned that Iran had produced its first atomic bomb. The Pentagon revived the old Strategic Defense Initiative, known as Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars, based on the dream of positioning an anti-missile defense system in orbit, to which they added the need to defend Earth from collision by a cosmic object.
Since the United States had excluded China from the old international space station, the latter had increasingly invested in space. Many Americans thought excluding China was foolish. They had come to an understanding with the Soviets during the previous century, not because we needed them, but in the name of peace when they were a threat and, unexpectedly, that understanding would later save the ISS when the space shuttle stopped flying. As the old Portuguese saying goes, God writes straight even when using crooked lines or, rather, the Lord works in mysterious ways. And now the Chinese had been excluded? If China were to become a military threat, would they then create joint programs to promote peace? It didn’t make sense.
Contrary to what had happened during the first space race, the public initially had not supported the rivers of money pouring into NASA and the Pentagon’s Star Wars. NASA had lots of money. The Pentagon was swimming in it. The Foundation itself was pouring out money. But all of this was pale in comparison to what would come. Years ago, Crane, in a dinner conversation at the Dexter’s first house, had said that it would not be divergence with another country that would lead to the government investing in NASA on a large scale and private initiative entering the race. That decision would come after an internal debate, a change of heart, the impetus of an endogenous movement in the United States that would precipitate the giant to colonize space, involving the government and competition among private businesses when the right time arrived. He had hit the nail on the head.
Chapter 10
The Speech
There had been a sense of unease in the vicinity due to the supposed biological hazard originating in the Dexter’s home. When the two friends were invited to give a conference at the local high school about the possibility of terraforming other planets, they accepted immediately. It was an opportunity to improve their relations with the neighborhood.
They were told that the students would be from the eleventh and twelfth grades and that there would also be teachers and other adults present. A few tenth graders might show up but, since they were very immature and the auditorium was full, there would be no seats reserved for them. They would sit in the aisles and, if they behaved badly, they would leave. All of the students knew that Mariah and Sofia had come to speak at the school, but not everyone realized why. The story of Mars was known but their city’s involvement was news in the eyes of the youngest. Those were things from Washington or Houston. What did Columbia have to do with it? Mars was a cold planet, right? The fourth rock from the sun, right? If there weren’t really Martians, what was the deal?
The parents realized what the problem was. There was a Martian greenhouse on the other side of the street. In addition to the older students, many tenth graders did, in fact, decide to show up. In their joviality, it seemed to them like a good hour to waste. After all, they knew that two Martians who were real eye candy were coming to talk.
Sofia and Mariah were greeted by the school principal, Ron Gibson. They thought he was younger than they’d been told. He was tall, lightly cologned and had an air of good karma about him. His eyes were gray without a hint of blue. He did not wear a tie. He looked like he was a New Yorker, a European or on vacation. Ron Gibson confessed that he didn’t know much about terraforming but that both the topic and those giving the conference had been suggested by a friend of the community who was involved in his being elected to his position. He had accepted immediately since nobody valued good relations with the community more than he did.
“In the election for my leadership, I was able to win over a record number of people who are not part of the school community, strictu sensu. Those who aren’t teachers, employees or students,” he explained. “Education is everyone’s task, even those who don’t have school age children. They, by definition, are candidates for being students’ parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles and are important financiers for our school. At this moment, eight percent of the people going to our school’s athletic events and, take note, twelve percent showing up at our cultural activities do not have children in school—more than double what was seen before my first term. Thus, when concern for other planets’ future arises in our neighborhood, I’ll want to invite the best in our city so we can learn and debate those themes,” the principal explained.
“Would this harrowing description of the community’s concern you just gave us not, in reality, be the person of Dr. Rebecca Radcliff?” Sofia asked.
“Our school pediatrician is very beloved by all and worries about the future,” Ron said without resentment. “She has a peculiar interest in what she calls heavy metals and for what she calls accidental propagation of mutagenesis in the ecosystem. Don’t ask me why since, for me, if it’s metal, it’s heavy and that closes the case. But, well, it seems that some heavy metals are not as good for children as gold or silver or diamonds,” he said with great familiarity, “and that their use in laboratories located in our community should be explained well so it can be understood well.”
“Diamonds are not considered precious metals,” Mariah began to say, but Sofia interrupted her saying, “but they shine like metal, as do pearls and polished ivory, which is what makes them pre
cious.”
“There you have it,” said the principal. “They may not technically belong to the metal category but they belong to the broader category of metals and other such things. Could it be, given that they are equally precious, they may be considered mutant metals? You tell me. You’re the specialist.” The word mutant seemed out of place and he had looked directly at Sofia when he pronounced it.
“I see that you’re a man interested in science,” Mariah tried break in. “We could ...” but she was once again interrupted by Sofia who clarified that he was very interested and very interesting. A good acquisition for the neighborhood.
“Thank you,” accepted Ron Gibson, unflappably. “I like to please my neighbors and contribute to the community.”
“And you do please,” Sofia confirmed. “You please me. You’re one of those people who looks good anywhere.”
Mariah blushed a little and cut in, “Shall we go to the conference, principal?”
“Let’s go,” he responded, smiling. “We’re all going to learn from you.”
Mariah knew Sofia’s attitude when she was being put to the test. She would become defiant and put the pressure back on whoever was pressuring her. It often turned out well, but it wasn’t always appropriate. Besides, Mariah’s family lived in that neighborhood and had more to lose or gain than Sofia. On their way, Mariah reminded her friend of that. It wasn’t enough to come out of the presentation on top; they needed to win the people over, too.
When they arrived in the auditorium, it was full. The eleventh and twelfth grade students had taken their places in the front and the teachers and locals of different ages and backgrounds were seated farther back. Mariah recognized several people, namely local reporters, but she also saw people she didn’t know and, be it because of their clothes or their attitudes, they did not seem to be from the community.
Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn Page 9
