Stunning View of the Earth

Stunning Views of the Earth...

Odry rapped on the metal hatch of the blister. After a moment, the bolt slid back and the door opened.

Odry entered through the first access door and directed herself across the spacious open expanse of the module’s laboratory section toward her office, located in the fore starboard corner. Inside the office, she powered up her communications console and called the headquarters in Huston. She had a selection of voice encryption chips at her disposal. The chips broke up the voice transmission into meaningless signals that would be reassembled by another chip at the receiving station. Eavesdropping ham-radio operators would hear nothing but Chinese violins. Odry didn’t often use encryption when talking to the Earth, but today the language could become dicey. So she pressed a chip into its slot.

The outer surface of the dome was covered by an aluminium clamshell shield that could be closed to prevent damage from meteoroids, ice particles of the Cloud or debris. Retracting the shield in different ways offered stunning views of the Earth, the night sky or both.

There was the Earth, breathtaking, sparkling blue and brilliant white, gliding past beyond the Lexan windows. But Odry barely noticed the spectacular panorama. She focused on the Cloud, long, immense and deadly calm.

Stunning views of the Earth. Photo by Elena

Do People Dream in Space?

Do People Dream in Space?

The judge looked as a pretty woman with vines for hair. She said with a passion: We the members of the Jury being duly constituted in the State of Grace, and otherwise perfectly lit to determine the issues presented here, find the defendant guilty of playing with nature and otherwise intending to make the world a worse place for a living. Give me a minute so I can pass a comb through my hair, answered Norma.

She was asleep and yet she was conscious about a dream she was in. She didn’t know that people dreamt in space. And in the dream the judge and the foreman of the jury were the same person. And this woman was floating freely inside her cubbyhole making notes on a clipboard. Norma ignored both the decision and the pain.

This dream was telling her something, but what exactly it was saying? That the end was approaching and the epoch of humanity was over? It was a sad thought, but it was a logical one.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George B.)

Space Dream. Illustration by Elena

Cosmos as Home

Cosmos as Home

We are made of stellar ash. Something in us recognizes the Cosmos as home, as our origin and evolution have been tied to distant cosmic events, and we are the children of equally of the sky and the Earth.

However, the Cosmos was discovered only yesterday, as for many years it was clear to everyone that there were no other places than the Earths. Indeed, in the last tenth of a percent of the lifetime of our species, in the instant between Aristarchus and ourselves, we reluctantly noticed that we were not the purpose and center of the Universe, but rather lived on a fragile world lost in immensity and eternity of the Cosmos. Our small world drifts in a great cosmic ocean dotted here and there with a hundred billion galaxies and a billion trillion stars…

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George B.)

Infinite Space. Illustration by Elena

A science fiction novel by one of the most prolific and bestselling authors of our times, George B., the novel which will change the face of the planet Earth forever. You have never read a novel like this one. Oscar for the best original script guaranteed!

Jupiter Module

Jupiter Module

After leaving Daniel in the command module, Odry made her way down the station’s central tunnel until she passed through the double hatch marking the boundary between the station proper and the Jupiter module.

The lab of the Jup Module was even murkier than the connecting tunnel. The gray floor and salmon ceiling blended into a single, dismal blah. Odry moved through the snadows cast by the equipment and floated toward the end of the module, heading for the bulky figure waiting for her there.

The station’s goal is to develop bioremediation techniques, using genetically engineered microorganisms, to help reverse the environmental damage done to our planet by generation water, soil and air pollution.

The Jupiter Project was a joint effort between the European Space Agency and NASA to test humans for a planned flight to Jupiter. The original purpose of the project was to stimulate the rigors of an actual flight to that distant planet. A dozen men and women had been selected to spend five full years in space.

The project though gradually metamorphosed into a study of the subtle stressed microgravity places on the human body and the not-so-subtle conflicts that can arise when people live in close quarters for extended periods of time.

(Rain)

Odry was more English than Big Ben (or tried to be). Image: Elena

How to Survive Technological Adolescence

How to Survive Technological Adolescence

Yes, civilizations would take billions of years of tortuous evolution to arise, and then snuff themselves out in an instant of unforgivable neglect. But let’s consider the alternative, the prospect that at least some civilizations learn to live with high technology. Just imagine that the contradictions posed by the vagaries of past brain evolution are consciously resolved and do not lead to self-destruction. Or, may be, even if major disturbances do occur, they are reversed in the subsequent billions of years of biological evolution.

Such societies might live to a prosperous old age, their lifetime measured perhaps on geological and stellar evolutionary time scales.

If only 1 percent of civilizations can survive technological adolescence, take the proper fork at this critical historical branch point and achieve maturity, then the number of extant civilizations in the Galaxy is in the millions. These estimates are stirring. They suggest that the receipt of a message from space is, even before we decode it, a profoundly hopeful sign which will mean that someone has learned to live with high technology and that it is possible to survive technological adolescence. This alone, quite apart from the contents of the message, provides a powerful justification for the search for other civilizations.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George B.)

Technological Adolescence. Photo by Elena