“Ed said the Alliance is sending its own mission. What if we end up back on the same planet together? Or at least in the same solar system?”
“They’re going to Wolf 1061, same as the Intrepid did before. The Liberty is going to Proxima. We’ll have more than a few light years between us, which is a whole lot better than we have now.”
“Assuming we settle in Proxima.” Catalina shook her head. “Ed said you need five million Sols to buy a ticket for just one person to board the Liberty.”
“If we sell up everything, we could afford it.”
“With no money left over!” Catalina added.
“Whatever currency people come up with in the new world, or on board the Liberty, it won’t be sols, so it’s not like saving them is going to help us.”
Catalina frowned and took refuge in the remainder of her margarita cocktail.
“So?” Alexander prompted after a momentary silence. “What do you think?”
“I think it sounds dangerous,” she said.
“You mean exciting.”
“Same thing.” Catalina drained her margarita and set it aside. Turning back to her husband, she laid her head one his chest and said, “Let’s stop worrying about the future and enjoy what we have now.”
“Just tell me you’ll think about it.”
“All right… I’ll think about it.”
Alexander lifted her chin and kissed her. “That’s all I needed to hear,” he said as he withdrew.
But she already had thought about it, and she knew that she didn’t want to leave Earth.
He’ll come around, she decided.
Epilogue
—One Year Later—
Catalina took the window seat while Alexander finished packing their carry-on luggage into the shuttle’s overhead compartments. As soon as he finished, he squeezed into the seat beside hers.
“Nervous?” he asked.
She shook her head, not looking away from the window of the shuttle. Mars looked just as dreary as ever. A red desert, red sky, and blowing red sand as far as the eye could see. Lights from the domes that made up the city of New Moscow winked at her between gusts of sand.
Overhead speakers crackled to life, “Ladies and Gentlemen, my name is Ana Urikov, and I’ll be your chief flight attendant for today. On behalf of Captain Lieberman and the entire crew, welcome aboard Solarian Shuttles flight 77. Our estimated time to reach the Liberty will be just over twenty minutes. At this time please make sure that your seat-belts are securely fastened and that your ARC lenses and comm bands are turned off or set to flight mode until we arrive. Thank you, and we hope that you enjoy your flight.”
Alexander placed a firm hand on her knee, and Catalina realized she’d been bouncing it up and down like a jackhammer.
“Everything is going to be fine,” he said.
She turned to search his brown eyes for an answer to the question burning inside of her. “What if we’re making a mistake?”
He shook his head and grabbed her hand, lacing his fingers through hers. “We’re not. Nothing’s changed. We want to have kids, and we can’t do that on Earth with population controls being what they are.”
“We could have kids here…” Caty said, her gaze slipping back out the window of the shuttle to the desolate Martian desert. But even as she said that, she questioned the wisdom of having children on Mars. After centuries of terraforming it was still a wasteland, and that wasn’t likely to change anytime soon.
“We could,” Alexander admitted. “But that won’t get us away from the other problems in the Sol System. Sooner or later Benevolence is going to realize that the only way to prevent a war with humanity is to come to Mars and install himself as the absolute ruler of the Solarian Republic, too. No, we need a fresh start, and this is it.”
Catalina nodded along with that, wondering if they weren’t trading one set of problems for another. Even if they found a habitable world at Proxima Centauri, the challenges they’d face there were completely unknown—possibly even worse than the ones on Mars or Earth. For one thing, the planet in Proxima’s goldilocks zone—an orbit where liquid water might exist—was predicted to be tidally-locked around the sun, which meant that one side was always facing the sun, the other side always facing away.
Goldilocks planets were meant to be just right—not too hot, and not too cold, but with the tidally-locked version that was not the case. One side would be far too hot, and the other would be far too cold. The only theoretically habitable region on a world like that was a thin temperate band between the overly hot and overly cold sides of the planet where liquid water might actually exist. The winds crossing that band due to the temperature differential would probably be terrible, but that was a subject of some debate, and windbreaks had been proposed as a possible solution if the atmosphere was breathable—another unlikely event. Regardless, if the planet had liquid water and a temperate region to colonize, then they’d probably settle there. If not, they’d push on for the binary star system of Alpha Centauri, where they’d start the search all over again. For Catalina it was just one too many variables—too many ifs and buts to make her feel safe.
The intercom crackled once more, this time with a message from the captain. “Cabin crew, please prepare for launch.” A moment later he added, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we are at T-minus thirty seconds to launch.”
Even as the captain said that, Catalina heard a deep, thrumming noise of hydraulic pistons, and she felt the floor of the shuttle tilting away under her as the landing platform raised them into a vertical launch position. She glanced out the window once more to find that she was now sitting—lying down, actually—high above the Martian landscape.
An automated countdown began at ten seconds and the shuttle’s thrusters came rumbling to life. The shuttle shuddered and shook, and Catalina squeezed Alexander’s hand until her knuckles hurt. She squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth.
Alexander’s voice reached her ears in calm, measured tones. “Focus on your breathing. Long, slow, deep breaths.”
Catalina cracked an eye open to glare at him. “You’re used to this. I’m not.”
“Actually, I’m used to riding the space elevators back on Earth,” he said.
“You know what I mean.”
The automated countdown reached one, and then the rumbling of the shuttle’s engines exploded in a violent roar. In the next instant, Catalina felt herself being pushed into her seat, and suddenly she couldn’t breathe. It felt like an elephant was sitting on her chest. Panic set in, and she tried to send Alexander an urgent look, but even moving her head was difficult.
He smiled reassuringly back, and mouthed, I love you.
Somehow that broke through the panic and calmed her down. She could still breathe; it was just a lot harder than she was used to. Her mind cast back to riding roller coasters back on Earth on the few occasions that Alex had convinced her to join him. That’s all this is— she thought, gritting her teeth against the nauseating sensation of extreme acceleration. —a roller coaster.
When she’d finally calmed down enough to glance out her window once more, Catalina saw Mars speeding away below them in a blur of red sand and rocky outcroppings. Cities dotted the landscape like strange, alien growths—each one a little piece of Earth with clusters of brightly-illuminated domes concealing lush green gardens and farms with deep blue reservoirs of water that might have passed for lakes.
This was the last she was going to see of civilization for a long time.
Gradually, the sickening tug of acceleration eased until she felt the reverse—a nauseating weightlessness. Catalina focused on the view to still her roiling stomach. The thin Martian atmosphere gave way to stars and the black velvet of space. Seeing the controls below the shuttle window, Catalina realized it was a configurable holo display. She set it from looking out the side of the craft to show a view from the bow. Now space sprawled endlessly, and stars pricked the darkness full of myriad holes. Sitting amidst those bright
points of light she saw a silvery speck, growing nearer and larger as they approached.
“You can zoom in like this,” Alex said, leaning over her to press a button on the control panel below the window.
Suddenly that silver speck became a massive starship glittering bright with the light of thousands of real viewports. Blue-tinted glass on some of those viewports made a pattern of letters emerge—
LIBERTY
The ship was shaped like a fat cylinder, broken in places to reveal another thinner cylinder in the middle—the ship’s stationary drive core. They were going to spend six months living in that central part while the ship accelerated up to its cruising speed of half the speed of light. After that, they’d spend the next eight years in the outer, rotating hull. There they would grow their own food and spend time learning the various trades that they would need to survive on another planet.
From this distance it was hard to grasp a sense of scale, but the thousands of pinprick-sized viewports in the rotating outer hull gave her some idea. This was an entire city floating in space.
A transparent dome capped the nose of the ship, revealing a garden like the ones she’d seen growing in the domes on Mars. There was even a pool of water there, lying impossibly still beneath that dome.
Catalina wondered at that. How could water stay like that without floating away? “There’s gravity on board?” she asked.
“They’re accelerating at a constant one G to simulate Earth’s gravity for the passengers already waiting in the central core.”
“They’ve already left?” she asked, shocked.
“No, they’re flying in circles around Mars until we depart.”
Catalina nodded slowly as if she understood how that might work. “I can’t believe we’re going to spend ten years living on that… toilet roll.”
“That toilet roll is our new home. And it’s only going to be nine years. Six months to accelerate, eight years cruising, and another six months to decelerate.”
“Close enough.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. I spent about that long living on much smaller ships—and for a lot of that time I was cooped up in G-tanks. We won’t need tanks for this. It’ll be slow and steady as she goes the whole way to Proxima. You won’t even feel the ship moving. Just one long, pleasant stay in a luxury space hotel.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Crazy in love,” he said, kissing her cheek.
“I’m also crazy. I can’t believe I let you talk me into this.”
“You want kids, and I want a real future for them. This was the only way to have both.”
Catalina turned to look at him. Her eyes felt like they might pop out of her head at any moment. “I hope you’re right.”
“I am. Trust me.”
He leaned in for another kiss, this time on the lips. Catalina gave in to it, but all the while her brain was screaming at her to go back now.
This is a mistake, she thought. We’re all going to die…
The Story Continues in...
Exodus
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Appendix
Relativistic Weapons/Missiles
Original Research Question
What would actually happen if a 10,000 kilogram object moving at a third of the speed of light hit Earth?
If you’re curious about the effects but not the process of research and inquiry that led me to them, skip to the sub-heading entitled “Results.”
Hypothesis
My initial reaction, and likely yours as well, was that this would be an extinction level event, capable of wiping out all life on Earth.
Then I started to do the research. I asked a lot of experts what they thought would happen—plenty of physicists, and even someone who works for a NASA contractor. Their estimates were a lot more conservative.
In order to find out why, I needed to identify how much energy the impact would release, and then compare that to known values for past extinction level events.
Initial Investigation
You can calculate the kinetic energy for a moving object here: http://smarturl.it/calckinetic. Note: we need to use the equation for relativistic kinetic energy, because as an object approaches the speed of light it takes increasingly more energy to make it go faster. The result of this calculation is 54,601,175,014,973,900,000 Joules. That number is hard to make sense of, so let’s bring it down to something more familiar.
Using another online calculator we can convert Joules to Megatons of TNT, something we use to measure nuclear explosions. Try it here: http://smarturl.it/joulestomegatons. The result is 13049.99 megatons. Since we’re just trying to get a rough idea of what might happen, we can round that off to 13,000 megatons.
Now, to give you a meaningful reference point, the largest nuclear weapon ever tested was the Tsar Bomba from Russia. It had a 50 megaton yield. You can read about it here: http://smarturl.it/tsarbombawiki but the fireball alone was 8 kilometers in diameter. The heat from the explosion could cause third degree burns at 100 kilometers away, and windows were broken up to 700 kilometers away. Some of this far-reaching damage is attributable to the fact that the bomb was detonated 4.2 kilometers above the ground, so it was able to reach over the horizon, but even so it generated a seismic wave between 5 and 5.25 on the Richter scale.
Given all of that you might think a 13,000 megaton blast would crack the Earth in half. I was also thinking that, until I dug a little further.
First of all, we need to remember that this object won’t detonate above the ground. It’s going to hit at ground zero. It won’t break up or disperse because it’s moving too fast. Explosions take time. An object hitting our atmosphere at a third of the speed of light will punch straight through to the surface in 5.5 ten thousandths of a second, or 0.55 milliseconds. (Time = Distance/Speed: 55 km thickness of atmosphere / 100,000 km/s (30% speed of light) = 0.00055 seconds). Explosions have a velocity of about 6900 meters per second (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_wave#Detonation_wave) so how far would the debris from a relativistic missile travel in the time it takes that missile to reach Earth? Let’s find out: 6900 m/s * 0.00055 seconds = 3.795 meters. That’s how far debris from the exploding missile will travel in all directions before they hit the surface of the Earth. Chances are the actual missile has a radius of one meter, so add 3.795 meters to that. The missile will turn into an extremely energetic ball of plasma with a radius of 1+3.795=4.795 meters. As far as the Earth is concerned, that’s not going to be any different than a solid projectile, because not enough of the energy will be dissipated on the way down. Almost all of that energy we calculated earlier is going to be released at ground zero.
In order to find out what kind of damage it might do, we need to find some other known events that released a lot of explosive energy in Earth’s history. For ease of comparison, the closest thing would be an asteroid impact, so I wondered, what kind of energy did the asteroid/comet that wiped out the dinosaurs carry?
Wondering about this, I found a handy comparison chart for events with yields measured in megatons: http://smarturl.it/tntequivalents. I scrolled down and found that the asteroid impact in question, known as the Chicxulub impact, generated a whopping 100 teratons of energy, or 1*108 megatons. Divide that by our 13,000 megaton impact using Google’s calculator and you’ll find that the Chicxulub event was 7692 times more devastating.
Well, the Earth is still here 66 million years later, so I guess a measly 13,000 megatons won’t crack the Earth in half. I had a few people raise concerns about such an impact (the 13,000 megaton one) measurably altering Earth’s orbit, and a few of the physicists I asked actually calculated the alteration for me—it turned out to be somethin
g so slight that it’s not worth mentioning.
Okay, so we’ve established that the Earth has been through far worse, but it’s hard to compare a 13,000 megaton impact event to one that’s almost 7700 times more energetic. I needed something a lot smaller to compare.
Finding the Right Rock
One of the experts who replied to my initial inquiry, Jeff Morris, an Aerospace Engineer that works for a NASA contractor, referred me to this handy impact calculator from Purdue University: http://smarturl.it/impactcalculator which he also used to give me an answer to my research question. His answer was also one of the more accurate ones I received.
Using the calculator he referred me to I did some trial and error calculations using the variables from this calculator to find a rock with the same kind of impact energy as my relativistic missile. I decided that the diameter would be the variable I played with, so I set the density to 8000 kg/m3 (pure iron) and the velocity to 20 km/s. Then I calculated the weight of different-sized asteroids with a 8000 kg/m3 density. Using that weight and a velocity of 20 kilometers per second I checked what size of rock would carry the same kind of kinetic energy as my relativistic missile.
After testing asteroids with diameters of a 1000 meters and then 600 meters, I tested one with a 400 meter diameter and this was the result of my calculations:
Volume of a sphere with a 200 meter radius (400 meter diameter): 4/3*π*2003 = 33500000 m3
Weight of an object this size (assuming a density of 8000 kg/m3): 8000kg/m3 * 33500000 m3 = 268000000000 kg
Kinetic energy of an object that heavy moving at 20,000 meters per second (20 km/s): 1/2*268000000000 kg*200002 m/s = 53,600,000,000,000,000,000 Joules
Mindscape: Book 2 of the New Frontiers Series Page 30
