Colonists - a novel of the future: chapter 2
Chapter 1 introduced the project to send a group of human beings to another solar system, and some of the principal actors in this project. Sol Lansky is the overall spaceship design chief, a brilliant and very forceful engineer with the manners of a hog (trust me, he’s drawn from life), Takahiko Kuwahara the astronomer with ultimate responsibility for deciding which planet in which solar sysem they will be going to, and Julia Lockmeyer the medical doctor with responsibility for selecting the voyagers and ensuring their wellbeing on the voyage.
Of course, like all government-funded projects, there is always a battle for funding which Julia finds herself, somewhat against her will, to be leading.
COLONISTS - Chapter 2
When faced with intractable problems, Julia had recourse to a small number – a surprisingly small number considering her vast range of acquaintances and professional colleagues – of friends with whom she could discuss things uninhibitedly.
Charles Lansdowne (always Charles, never Charlie or Chuck or any other diminutive) was an old friend of Julia’s. Years ago they had briefly been lovers, but while they were temperamentally unsuited in that role – Charles was too fastidious to arouse Julia to anything more than mild interest – they had rather surprisingly remained good friends. They had met in medical school, and while Julia had gone on to specialize in space medicine, Charles had early on announced his distaste for, as he put it, the blood-and-pus side of medicine and had taken a side track into pharmacology.
Charles was now a very senior professor, although unlike many of his professorial colleagues at his age (he and Julia were born in the same year) he was still active in research. Whereas many academics when they reach a certain level of seniority seem content to sit back and let their junior colleagues and research students do all the hard work while ensuring that most of their achievements are credited to themselves, Charles actually did some serious research work himself. It was largely this attitude of mind that attracted Julia, herself an active researcher, to him. Having been briefly married he was now contentedly a bachelor once more, so when Julia called he was happy to entertain her.
“Come on over and I’ll cook dinner for us.”
Since Julia knew him to be a gourmet cook she accepted gladly and remembered in time not to say “I’ll bring the wine”; Charles’ cellar was legendary and he liked nothing better than to display and comment upon his choicest wines for his guests.
Charles’ apartment was not too distant from Julia’s and with its heavy, solid furniture was very much a fastidious middle-aged bachelor’s home. His dinner protocol was rigid, and woe betide any guest who broke it. Small talk before and during dinner, and serious conversation only after dessert.
“So what we seem to have here, Julia, is a political problem rather than anything technical. From what you tell me, and I’m a complete layman here, we have the technical capability to send several dozen people to a nearby star, but it would cost a lot more money than most people have envisioned, and more importantly, has been authorized to date.”
“That’s it in a nutshell. Money. How do we convince people that, oh I don’t know, that the world is full to overflowing, that it’s in everyone’s best interests to seed the human race somewhere else and start over again, no matter how much it costs?”
“Well of course the first problem you have is that there’s a significant number of people here in the US who seem to think of the human race as a kind of plague that must be stopped from spreading. You only have to look at some of the drivel being spouted in the media nowadays – I read an article the other day by some academic wishing that a virus would come along and wipe us all out – to see the kind of opposition the starship project is facing.”
“I think I read that one too, Charles. I get the impression that there aren’t too many people who actually think like that, but such people are a godsend to media outlets trying to get the attention of a jaded public.”
“Journalists, goddamn journalists. Mind you, you have to sympathize with them to a certain extent. If you have to produce several hundred words to a deadline every day, I suspect the temptation to slap down any kind of nonsense as long as it’s vaguely believable would be difficult to resist at times.
“And of course there’s the funding referendum barrier, with which we’re both only too familiar. After the great crash of the 2040’s when governments found themselves almost choked to death with debt, nobody trusts elected officials to have anything to do with money anymore, so the goddamn thirty-first amendment, which we’ve both run up against before, means that major projects have to be directly authorized by a popular referendum. It certainly keeps the politicians from running amok with taxpayers’ money or borrowing us into bankruptcy just so they can win a few more votes at election time, but it does mean that anyone trying to get a major project funded has to be very, very good at persuading Joe and Jill Taxpayer to part with their money.”
“So how do we go about persuading Joe and Jill?”
“I think you’re looking at a fairly lengthy public relations campaign to get people’s attention. Let’s face it, although Earth has a population approaching twelve billion, here in the US where we’ve kept it down to less than half a billion, life is pretty good all things considered, so over-population doesn’t seriously affect them. However in the overcrowded parts of the Third World life can be a constant struggle for mere existence. And then of course there is the age-old problem that the more there is of anything, the less its value becomes.”
“I’m not quite sure what you mean by that, Charles.”
“Well, suppose you live in a small town of a few thousand people here in the US and suppose there’s a murder. Everyone in the town will know about it, everyone will be interested, and there will be immense pressure on the police to find the murderer. But if the same murder happens in a crowded slum in one of the third-world megacities there will probably be no more than a file-and-forget response, if that. And the real problem is that the greater this lack of regard for human life becomes, the greater the probability of some really nasty abuses springing up.”
“So somehow we need to bring everyone’s attention to this – no, more than that, we need to get them concerned about overpopulation at a gut level. OK, that’s problem number one, but how do we link this to the need for colonizing another solar system?”
“Perhaps we need to think of travel to the stars as a kind of lifeboat, in case conditions here on Earth really go sideways? We’ve already set up colonies on the Moon and Mars, and it’s become painfully obvious that these will never become self-sustaining. Conditions are inimical to life and the only way people can survive is with constant, ongoing supplies and services from Earth. If we want to set up self-sustaining, growing colonies we have to look to some other solar system.”
“I agree Charles. I know you’re right, but how do we convince Joe and Jill Taxpayer that you’re right?”
“There, unfortunately, you have me. The nay-sayers will undoubtedly say at this point that we shouldn’t be wasting our resources trying to go somewhere else while we have such problems at home. Of course, they probably said that when Columbus sailed to the New World in 1492. You just have to have prepared the ground so that when the funding referendum goes out, everyone will automatically say yes.”
“So I guess what you’re saying is that we need a really good PR campaign to convince the general public that going to the stars is in everyone’s best interest?”
“That, plus some fortuitous event that brings home to everyone the necessity, or better still the urgency of doing this. A gigantic earthquake or volcanic eruption that kills millions would be just the thing, loath as I am to say it. And don’t forget of course that you will only get one shot at this when the funding referendum goes out. If you get a No vote it will be very difficult to get another referendum.”
But in the event the problem solved itself.