"Stephen Baxter - Manifold Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

Manifold:
Time

Stephen Baxter







To two space cadets:
My nephew, James Baxter
Kent Joosten, NASA




Reid Malenfant
You know me. And you know I'm a space cadet.
You know I've campaigned for, among other things, private mining expeditions to the asteroids. In fact, in the past I've tried to get you to pay for such things. I've bored you with that often enough already, right?
So tonight I want to look a little farther out. Tonight I want to tell you why I care so much about this issue that I devoted my life toil.
The world isn't big enough any more. You don't need me to stand here and tell you that. We could all choke to death, be extinct in a hundred years.
Or we could be on our way to populating the Galaxy.
Yes, the Galaxy. Want me to tell you how?
Turns out it's all a question of economics.
Let's say we set out to the stars. We might use ion rockets, solar sails, gravity assists. It doesn't matter.
We'll probably start as we have in the Solar System, with automated probes. Humans may follow. One percent of the helium-3 fusion fuel available from the planet Uranus, for example, would be enough to send a giant interstellar ark, each ark containing a billion people, to every star in the Galaxy. But it may be cheaper for the probes to manufacture humans in situ, using cell synthesis and artificial womb technology.
The first wave will be slow, no faster than we can afford. It doesn 't matter. Not in the long term.
When the probe reaches a new system, it phones home, and starts to build.
Here is the heart of the strategy. A target system, we assume, is uninhabited. We can therefore anticipate massive exploitation of the system's resources, without restraint, by the probe. Such resources are useless for any other purpose, and are therefore economically free to us.
I thought you'd enjoy that line. There's nothing an entrepreneur likes more than the sound of the wordfree.
More probes will be built and launched from each of the first wave of target stars. The probes will reach new targets; and again, more probes will be spawned, and fired onward. The volume covered by the probes will grow rapidly, like the expansion of gas into a vacuum.
Our ships will spread along the spiral arm, along lanes rich with stars, farming the Galaxy for humankind.
Once started, the process will be self-directing, self-financing. It would take, the double-domes think, ten to a hundred million years for the colonization of the Galaxy to be completed in this manner. But we must invest merely in the cost of the initial generation of probes.
Thus the cost of colonizing the Galaxy will be less, in real terms, than that of our Apollo program of fifty years ago.
This vision isn't mine alone. It isn't original. The rocket pioneer Robert Goddard wrote an essay in 1918-ninety-two years ago- called The Ultimate Migration, in which he imagined space arks built from asteroid materials carrying our far-future descendants away from the death of the sun. The engineering detail has changed; the essence of the vision hasn't.
We can do this. If we succeed, we will live forever.
The alternative is extinction.
And, people, when we're gone, we're gone.
As far as we can see we're alone, in an indifferent universe. We see no sign of intelligence anywhere away from Earth. We may be the first. Perhaps we're the last. It took so long for the Solar System to evolve intelligence it seems unlikely there will be others, ever.
If we fail, then the failure is for all time. If we die, mind and consciousness and soul die with us: hope and dreams and love, everything that makes us human. There will be nobody even to mourn us.
To be the first is an awesome responsibility. It's a responsibility we must grasp.
I am offering you a practical route to an infinite future for humankind, a future of unlimited potential. Someday, you know it, I'll come back to you again for money: seedcorn money, that's all, so we can take a first step-self-financing even in the medium term-beyond the bounds of Earth. But I want you to see why I'll be doing that. Why I must.
We can do this. We will do this. We're on our own. It's up to us.
This is just the beginning. Join me.
Thank you.