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    Vested Interest
    Vested Interest
    Vested Interest
    Ebook176 pages2 hours

    Vested Interest

    By Barry Pomeroy

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    About this ebook

    When NASA finally loses its funding and the media claims that the public has turned its back on space, only James Looven and Amy, his daughter’s best friend seem to be outraged. Railing against the world’s stupidity, they soon realize that support for the space program is more widespread than they have been led to believe. Lacking government funding, they rally the many thousands who don’t want humanity to die at the bottom of a gravity well, and even while Earth reels from famine and resource scarcity they decide to build their own program.
    Working with hundreds of like-minded others they realize that the return to space is not only possible but surprisingly easy. Only when they go further afield do they find that the solar system through a telescope is very different than the reality of stepping on an asteroid. In the distant stretches of the asteroid belt they make a discovery about Vesta that changes forever how humanity thinks about the asteroid as well as the potential of such materials. The only question that remains is whether they want to come back to Earth and her many problems.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBarry Pomeroy
    Release dateJul 8, 2015
    ISBN9781987922202
    Vested Interest
    Author

    Barry Pomeroy

    Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.

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      Book preview

      Vested Interest - Barry Pomeroy

      Vested Interest

      by

      Barry Pomeroy

      © 2007 by Barry Pomeroy

      All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention, Universal Copyright Convention, and Pan-American Copyright Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the author, although people generally do what they please.

      For more information about my books, go to barrypomeroy.com

      ISBN 13: 978-1987922202

      ISBN 10: 1987922202

      When NASA finally loses its funding and the media claims that the public has turned its back on space, only James Looven and Amy, his daughter’s best friend seem to be outraged. Railing against the world’s stupidity, they soon realize that support for the space program is more widespread than they have been led to believe. Lacking government funding, they rally the many thousands who don’t want humanity to die at the bottom of a gravity well, and even while Earth reels from famine and resource scarcity they decide to build their own program.

      Working with hundreds of likeminded others they realize that the return to space is not only possible but surprisingly easy. Only when they go further afield do they find that the solar system through a telescope is very different than the reality of stepping on an asteroid. In the distant stretches of the asteroid belt they make a discovery about Vesta that changes forever how humanity thinks about the asteroid as well as the potential of such materials. The only question that remains is whether they want to come back to Earth and her many problems.

      NASA, Feeding the Hungry

      Many years ago, on Saturday, March 7, 2009, the Kepler Telescope was launched into near Earth orbit. Its ninety-two mega-pixel camera (huge by the standards of the day) was meant to scan our close neighbours in the galaxy. Its mission was to record the momentary and regular dimming of stars that would indicate a planetary orbit along an axis visible from our direction. We were told we might find rocky planets close enough to their star to have liquid water and perhaps life. This worthy goal was not embraced by all, however.

      The price tag for the telescope at the time was nearly six hundred million US dollars, and in that early period of the space program it ignited a controversy over NASA’s so-called frivolous research. NASA had been plagued with complaints about its budget nearly since its inception in 1958. Its dedication to pure research was, ostensibly, an attempt to fulfil their mandate, For the benefit of all. For many, however, the cost of NASA’s seemingly pointless investigation of the heavens was too high. They cited the many problems that humans faced on Earth—most of them of human origin—and claimed that those monies would be better spent ameliorating conditions there rather than peering nearsightedly at other stars.

      What do rocky planets many light years away have to do with us here? people asked. There are people starving, they frequently complained. How can we rationalize spending millions on planets we’ll never visit when people are dying right here on Earth? With hindsight, these questions seem at best naïve and at worst obstinate and ignorantly reactionary, but we must remember that in those early days people believed nothing could come of the space programs and the jealous millions on the ground looked with envy at those who seemed to escape their endless rut of despair and propagation.

      At the time, their argument had some features to recommend it. Social programs tended to be under-funded and six hundred million could have gone a long way towards feeding Earth’s many starving people, or preserving their rapidly disappearing rainforest, or researching electric cars people might actually buy, or installing sulphur scrubbers on coal-fired electrical plants, or subsidizing solar power on rooftops, or planting non-GMO food crops, or—the list was endless.

      The endlessness of this list was exactly why that six hundred million would not have cured the Earth’s—or actually humanity’s—ills. Not only was the money too little, but the interest in snatching the money from science exposed that the problem was at least as much educational as it was financial. In those times of strife, the world’s military did not publish a dollar value on each person killed in the resource wars, or perhaps the focus might have been diverted from NASA. Because the military was silent on such matters, many who should have known that more than a trillion dollars were spent annually on the military were encouraged to think that starving the children of desert countries and then beating or bombing them to death was a needful expenditure. Somehow the military’s thanatos-inspired wishes took precedence over scientific curiosity and human achievement.

      The straw man military did not necessarily prove NASA’s research was essential, but it did point to the myopic nature of the public complaint. For example, if they’d given the six hundred million to the poor so that they might feed themselves better, what would have been the result? Did they really think they would see a thriving, caring, environmentally-concerned populace on Earth because the money was spent on food? Or did they know that people would use the money, legitimately enough, to buy food, clothing and housing, and then have more children, thus guaranteeing a Swiftian perpetual scene of misfortunes . . . and the most inevitable prospect of entailing the like or greater miseries upon their breed for ever. The populace would have used the money to merely perpetuate their own flagrant and short-sighted existences, spending the resources of the world merely to ensure that another generation would be there to carry on the fine heritage of destruction and dissipation. Giving them the money was a terrible idea.

      The problems of Earth were scarcely due to the planet herself. Earth has done well by humanity, providing us with food, clothing and shelter for millennia, and more recently, a cacophony of metals, and volatiles we may use for fuel. The problems on the planet, including such global ones as toxicity of the environment, destruction of the ozone layer, and global warming, are entirely human caused. We spent our huge inheritance, and we did it by encouraging our most destructive tendencies, our lack of control over our population and our rampant greed. I doubt even at the time it would have been easy to believe that access to even more of our inheritance in terms of the NASA money would encourage humans to change a course in history that might as well as be hard-wired into the hypothalamus.

      Philosophically, some argued that with humanity’s track record being what it was, that perhaps we shouldn’t stray from the planet to wreak even greater havoc on neighbouring worlds. This argument was much more difficult to answer given our history. We certainly had no guarantee that we wouldn’t soil the nest of another planet. In the case of Mars, however, which to the science of the time appeared to be a dead rock, almost anything that we could have done to it would have been either positive, or at the worst benign. But there are planets, potentially, that we might be able to reach and destroy, given time and our profligate ability to breed and then devastate. If we left the planet, the argument went, it would be much better if we first learned to move beyond our history. But given our vicissitudes, that seemed impossible, at least at the time.

      Many realized that if we remained where we were, using up the last of the volatiles and food and then sapping the energy and brilliance of our science to find or produce more to entertain and satiate the moiling millions, then we would have never gone anywhere. With human population on the planet over 10 billion as I write this, we are still rapidly eating through the biosphere even with world constrictions on population and land use.

      There were those who argued that we had only a few years left to be able to wrest the resources from the starving crowd long enough to get a foothold in space. Many vid broadcasts at the time showed this struggle graphically, such as the video of World Builder’s spaceport overrun by starving hordes who ripped apart the very people who claimed to be trying to ensure them a future. People who saw the misuse of resources more clearly tried to reason with the rabid crowd. They asked the starving millions with their hands out for food and their pants down for breeding, to think ahead even for an instant so they could see it was in their interest to let science get on with the business of trying to locate increasingly difficult to find resources. If they could spare a few pennies now, the argument went, their grandchildren might not have to starve in the ghettos their grandparents were assuredly and rapidly building for them.

      Unhelpfully, the betrayal of the first Martian colonist, Jack Errorease, as well as the fifteen others who were sent to make a life on the red planet, came at a time when the public eye was turning away from the heavens. By the time the broadcasts from Jack Errorease ceased and we presumed he’d died, people had already lost interest. The Brave Fifteen, as we call them now, who were still loading when Jack’s last broadcast arrived, were doomed even while they were in transit. Political will turned against the supporting space programs. Funding was pulled from JAXA, ESA, and NASA and the supply ships were broken up. Even then the callow politicians who were responsible for abandoning the Brave Fifteen decided to let the experiment go forward as planned, and no attempt was made to apprise the colonists of the changing situation. We sent them to their death, many said, although we learned later that they had survived better and longer than our fears would have made it seem.

      This story is about those few voices crying foul when NASA was disbanded, ESA was underfunded, SETI was seen as a joke, and even basic research was asked to turn a dollar. There were a few visionaries like Mike Kearny, Parit Wikran, Amy Altier and James Looven who risked their careers and later their lives to fight to ensure that the wealth of the solar system was available to all. James Looven dreamed of the three billion mega-tonnes of metals and millions of tonnes of water in the asteroid belt. He imagined using those resources to build a solar civilization of many billions, since we still believed, seemingly, that more is better, at least as far as humans go. That turned out to be a dream worth investing in, although curiously, it was not the most positive result from the space program.

      Living in orbiting habitats, and the colonies on the moon and on Mars, meant that we had to rely on delicately balanced natural systems for our air and food. That informed us, so long accustomed to taking the riches of the Earth for granted, about the fragility of our home. Earth’s biosphere extends only a few kilometres under the surface and a handful of kilometres into the air, and almost all of its thriving biomass is on the surface of the planet. Even then we knew that one triggering force could disrupt the entire edifice, and several could indeed bring it tumbling down, at least as far as we were concerned. People like Kearny and Amy Altier were visionaries who realized that that trying to manage closed systems like the Miner Town biosphere or an O’Neill colony could teach us perspective.

      Not only did we learn the importance of husbandry, but isolated, drifting in the empty waste of the solar system, we saw how special and tiny is our world, its glowing surface containing nearly everything that we know, a rock hurling through mostly empty space.

      Seen in this light, those who criticized NASA’s expenditures are like the man, who looking through a beautifully illustrated book on endangered tropical fish, complains that the book does not tell how they taste. Although such science books may not be specifically geared towards his gastronomic narcissism, he only slowly came to realize that in the end those who research the role of genetic variation that leads to the variety of fish may feed him better.

      Although NASA’s research may not have seemed to be on the surface of it useful, in that it would immediately feed humanity’s bottomless hunger, in their forward-looking way, NASA’s attempts ensured we would still be eating long after people like that man have devoured every Earthly fish, have bred themselves almost out of existence, and have finally decided to look beyond their stomachs and their gonads.

      For that insight, and as a tribute to their sacrifice and accomplishments, we strive to explain how James Looven and Amy Altier, initially jaded with humanity’s short-sighted narcissism, took us back to space. Because of them, this story is written in Habitat One of the Altier group, in a loose resonant Titan orbit around Saturn. The mighty rings spill across my sky and even in the dim sunlight cast a glow through my port. Below me, even as I write

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