Lifeboats: Tales from the Evacuation

By John K Berntson

Excerpt:
“So, here I am, telling you about the end of our world and a mad dash to move ourselves to a place of comparative safety. Are you frightened by all this? If so, you can count the First Lady and me among you. This is a frightening time. Even if you do not expect to be alive fifty years from now, it is still an uncertain future. But this is not the time for fear; there is work to be done and you all need to do it.
“And of course you can do it. You are all the descendants of survivors, people who came through situations as desperate to them as the ones we now face. It is time to show our forebears that we can do it too. It is time to show ourselves what we can do, if only we have the will to do it. It is time to overcome hardships with grace and humor. You and your children must not have your futures taken away by an expanding sun.”
The president got a sly look on his face.
“We must not become the victims of inflation.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: John K Berntson
• Release date: Apr 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301310579

John K Berntson

John K Berntson is an old computer geek who thinks he can write.To this too-familiar tale, he does bring some extras, however. He has professional background in software, defense, telecommunications, financial markets, fuel distribution, and lodging. Currently residing in the land of his birth, Long Island, New York, he has lived in twelve states.He has many disparate interests, but chief among these is the freedom movement and the Libertarian Party, where he was once a mover and shaker.He is married with two adult stepsons, two dogs, a former dog, a former cat, and a feral cat. To those keeping track, the turtle has gone to live with other turtles in an earthly turtle paradise.To see his slowly running commentary, aka blog, please go to:http://vanguardobserver.wordpress.com/

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Preface

I spent nearly two years in the Alaskan Bush ending in 1995 and, besides a couple of short stories, I did not do very much writing while I was up there. However, I had a great idea brewing in my head - at least I thought so - and since I had put a fair amount of money in the bank, I decided to take a few months off when I returned to Colorado (read: Civilization) and write a book.

That book would be somewhat based on where I had been in Alaska and the people I met. Most of it was already worked out in my head - always the hard part - before I even left. What would eventually become Sky Yukon was ready to be written as soon as I got home.

Then something odd happened. Somewhere on the long trip home - Galena to Nome to Anchorage to Salt Lake to Colorado Springs, which included an overnight stay, an earthquake, and many hours of flying - another idea popped into my head. It intrigued me. At first, it was just a bit of a mental exercise, a thought experiment, a simple question and a can it be done? It kept me occupied when I was not sleeping, which is most of the time for me on planes.

It was the end of May 1995 when I arrived back in Colorado Springs and discovered that it was Air Force Academy graduation weekend. If that had not already injected chaos into the city, the president was in town for the festivities. The next few weeks were spent finding an apartment, buying a car, getting my things out of storage, collecting the other things that I shipped down from Alaska, setting up a household, reconnecting with friends, and all that other stuff.

So it was at least a month before I sat down to write and, by that time, I had decided to write this. Writing full time - which for me means sitting down at the computer at 10PM, writing till my eyes would not stay open, and then sleeping till noon the next day - it only took me three weeks. Then I took a few days off, the thought experiment over, before I started work on Sky Yukon, which took me three months. After that and a couple of road-trips, ever an eye on the bank balance, it was time to get a job - which for about the only time in my professional life only took me two months.

Now, when I say it only took me three weeks to write this story, I am talking about the original version. Not quite sure if anyone ever saw that version, but I soon put it aside in the rush to do other things, like work and politics, always meaning to come back to it some day and put a polish on it. Some day I would add a couple of parts that I realized were missing. Some day I would finish the thing.

Some day turned out to be the Spring of 2012, though most of it was actually written in the Fall of that year. I added in the missing bits, that spurred more ideas, and those spurred even more ideas. When I was done, I had a story that was three times the length of the original. It is still no more than a novella - or maybe a short novel - but quite a lot of new ideas got in there and a lot of editing had to happen, just due to the passage of a decade and a half.

Which I hope explains the odd mixture of technologies and a timeline that does not quite make sense. I had meant the beginning of the story to be today when I wrote it, meaning 1995, so some of what you see there is somewhat quaint looking at it from this current today. As I wrote the original, I was only connecting to the internet for the very first time, that being through AOL, using a dialup modem. As I rewrote and appended the story last year, I decided to leave the quaintness intact and made very few changes.

So if it helps you, pretend that the president’s address occurred in 1995 or a little later and that everything you read happened in a parallel universe and they are only now in the middle of it. Or just assume that I am a lazy writer or too married to my words to make needed changes. Either way, I hope you find it enjoyable.

John K Berntson

Hampton Bays, NY

March, 2013

INITIATIVE

☉

David, this has been one of the most confusing three weeks in my forty years of journalism, said the pundit. Some of what we are hearing suggest a minor hiccup in our lives, while other sources are saying outright disaster. That the president is going to speak of this at all, however, is probably not a good sign. I would say -

Wait! I have to interrupt you, said the anchorman.  We have just gotten the signal that the president is ready. Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States.

The picture changed. In the Oval Office, the president sat at his desk.  The curtains behind him were open onto the south lawn.

 Good evening, my fellow Americans, he began.  "You have, no doubt, heard many disturbing rumors over the last few weeks. Certainly, the media has been broadcasting them.  I would very much like to tell you that they are all false. However, as it turns out, some of them are true.  Despite what we have always been told, despite decades of scientific theories, it now seems clear that our sun’s lifetime is much shorter than we were once led to believe.

"Best estimates now predict that the sun will expand, becoming what astronomers call a red giant, sometime between fifty and one hundred years from now.  When this happens, the Earth, our home, will either be engulfed by the sun or, according to some estimates, will be right on the edge of the expansion.  Either way, the Earth will no longer be habitable.  It will either be totally consumed or burnt to a cinder.

"As you may know, this event has long been forecast to take place billions of years in our future; an event triggered by the sun beginning to burn helium.  It now appears that our understanding of the sun’s makeup was in error. Extreme error.  I will not go into this in detail; I do not pretend to understand it myself.  Scientists across the globe have all come to the same conclusion: fifty to a hundred years and then oblivion.  Doctors Hanscom and Powell will appear in the press briefing room, shortly after this broadcast, to explain the details.

"However, you don’t need to know all of the details to understand that we have come to the most critical juncture in human history. Never, not even during the Cold War, has humanity faced such total and certain annihilation. I do not say this to frighten you, but to compel you, to make you understand that we are at a crossroads. We have been handed an ultimatum: adapt or die. We must decide - and soon - our next course of action.

"So, what do we do?  What can we do?  There is general agreement that there is no way we can significantly alter the sun’s composition.  Therefore, we must concentrate on surviving this cataclysm.

"I have spent the last few days speaking with experts from NASA and the space industry, as well as leaders from the many private foundations and societies.  They seem convinced that we can set up colonies that will be self-sufficient and will be far enough out in the solar system to survive the expansion.  The population figures given me for these colonies totaled between one and two million people.

"Yes. One or two million people.

"As you might tell by my eyes, I have not gotten a lot of sleep the last few nights.  Two million people saved out of three hundred million.  Less than one out of a hundred.  How does one choose?  How does one live with the choice?  I do not worry for myself;  my wife and I will be long gone by the time it happens.  Even my children will be old or gone before the end.  But my conscience and my oath require that I do the best I can for the American people, present or future.  The First Lady and I spoke about this long into last night.  Early this morning, I came to a decision.

"My decision, quite frankly, is to tell the experts to go to hell.  Forgive me, but I will not settle for one in a hundred.  I will not even settle for a solution that saves every American.  I want a solution that saves every one of the seven billion people of Earth.

"We must become a spacefaring culture.  The answer is not a colony on Mars, on the moons of Jupiter, among the asteroids, or in artificial habitats.  The answer is all of the above - plus many options we have not thought of yet.  We must put every resource into creating an infrastructure that will support us out there.  We must spread out into every portion of the solar system that is likely to survive the coming disaster and get a toe-hold.  We must create space-based industries and agriculture to keep us alive.

"We will need to take everything with us that we can.  Every plant or animal that exists must be brought along, either alive or as frozen embryos.  Every mineral that we cannot get out there, must be brought from here.  Every piece of equipment that increases our chances of survival must be sent to a place of safety.

"And I do not mean that mankind must scavenge a life living in little tin cans.  We must bring our cultures.  We need our arts and literature to sustain us.  We must learn not only to survive, but to live full lives, without the benefit of this wonderful planet of ours. This is something that we can do, that is within our power to do. We do not have to give up and die.

"So, why am I right and the experts wrong?  Because they have been trained to think of space projects in terms of government budgets and leading-edge technologies which are hard to make work properly.  I, on the other hand, in my benign ignorance, know only the power of people.  The productive output of three hundred million people - not to mention seven billion - is a staggering force.  We must depend on the people, individually and collectively, to do what is necessary to survive.  We must depend on our industries and the service sector to find the opportunities and exploit them.  I do not know what the future will look like or what it should look like.  Leave it to the people to decide for themselves.

"That is not to say that government does not have a role to play in this.  There are some preliminary things we can do to help industry get a start.  First, we must immediately go to the moon and perform an exhaustive mineral survey.  No, the moon will not survive either, but the metal for most of our ships and structures will have to come from there.  We will also build a lunar dormitory to house the initial construction crews, the crews that will build many other dormitories for the large number of  miners and technicians that will follow.

"We also need to go to Mars and the asteroid belt to conduct initial surveys.  We also need to build ships capable of going to Jupiter and Saturn.  Unmanned probes need to be sent out practically everywhere.  And never mind economical orbits and efficiency - everything is going express.

"While doing this, we must also build an initial dormitory in orbit, to house those who will build all the structures we will need up there.  The shuttle fuel-tank proposal may be a solution for this.

"We need to drastically increase our space launch capability.  The old shuttle fleet is obviously not up to all this, so we will need to design and build many new types of shuttles.  Expendable launchers will need to be built in large quantities.  We need to develop single-stage-to-orbit vehicles to handle our freight needs, perhaps reviving the old Clipper project.

"Congress will need to do most of these things.  I will meet with congressional leaders tomorrow and help get the process started.

"As for myself, I am ordering an internal review of the defense and energy departments in order to have any classified information released that may help private space industry get started.  I am also ordering NASA and the Department of Defense to open launch facilities for use by private concerns.  Additionally, I am announcing the abrogation of all treaties that might tend to stop or slow the exploration and exploitation of space.  I am directing the Secretary of State to coordinate our efforts with other countries, but also to warn them not to block our path. We will be moving quickly and this is no time for the typical kind of internationalism that gets in the way of progress.

"That is what I am going to do.  Now, what are you going to do?  How are you going to help build the kind of society which your children will need to survive?  Where to start?  First, get an education.  It doesn’t need to be formal, but you need to understand the basics of science and math, get a firm grounding in economics - that’s what I said - and, most of all, you need to be able to communicate, in its very basic form: give and get useful information while recognizing and ignoring the irrelevant.  Then you need to get some skills.  What skills?  Who knows?  Most of the basic skills we use today, from engineering to medicine to agriculture, will be needed ‘out there.’  But if you are in the kind of job where you knew almost as much on your first day of work as you do today, you had better go out and learn something more.  We will need you.

"So, here I am, telling you about the end of our world and a mad dash to move ourselves to a place of comparative safety. Are you frightened by all this?  If so, you can count the First Lady and me among you.  This is a frightening time.  Even if you do not expect to be alive fifty years from now, it is still an uncertain future.  But this is not the time for fear; there is work to be done and you all need to do it.

"And of course you can do it. You are all the descendants of survivors, people who came through situations as desperate to them as the ones we now face. It is time to show our forebears that we can do it too. It is time to show ourselves what we can do, if only we have the will to do it.  It is time to overcome hardships with grace and humor.  You and your children must not have your futures taken away by an expanding sun."

The president got a sly look on his face. 

We must not become the victims of inflation.

 ☉

Do you mind if I ask you a few questions, Dr. Powell?

Depends on what they are, young man.  I have been fielding the same questions for nearly a month now and I am getting tired of rephrasing the same things.  Why the president had to pick me as his astronomy expert is beyond me.  What’s your name, son?

Martin Pearce, sir.  I’m from Free Press Seven, on the Internet.

Oh, I’ve read some of that.  Uninformed rubbish.

Come now, doctor.  We’re dedicated to finding the truth, whatever form it takes.

There, there, of course you are.  How long have you been with them?

Three months, sir.  They hired me fresh out of journalism school.

Well, I apologize then.  You must know everything.  Ask your questions!  I’ll answer them if I feel like it.

Thanks.  Have you come up with any theories as to why we were mistaken about the sun’s composition for so long?

No, not really.  Oh, a few prattle on about layering and how we were reading only the layers near the surface.  It doesn’t wash with me, but I don’t have any better suggestions.  Maybe some evil aliens came along, stole our hydrogen, and replaced it with helium.  Don’t write that down, son, I was just kidding.

You sound as if you don’t believe the threat is real.

Instruments don’t lie, son.  The helium content of the sun is much greater than we thought.  Don’t ask me why.

So, what do you think of the president’s plan to evacuate the planet?  Does it have a chance?

A chance?  Certainly.  There is also a chance that Galileo will come along and present me with a new telescope, but I wouldn’t put a lot of money on it.

So you wouldn’t put too much faith in evacuation?

Oh, it’s a good idea, as far as it goes.  I thought those initial colony estimates of one to two million were pessimistic; we should be able to improve on that dramatically.  But people are going to be coming up hard against economic realities.

The president mentioned economics in his speech, last month.  I would have thought that this sort of thing was beyond economics, just a matter of pure survival.

Did you go to a public college, son?

Yes, sir.

Then I will forgive you your ignorance.  Economics is always with us, especially in survival situations.  It is productive effort, choice, and value.  For instance: you are out in the open, there is a lion chasing you, and you have a choice of two shelters, one a hundred feet up-slope and the other a hundred feet down-slope.  Which one do you choose?

Down-slope, I hope!

Right!  You only have so much personal effort to give - you will be running, flat out.  All else being equal, downhill gets you there sooner.  You use your energy and your choice - between competing alternatives of direction - to get the best value: saving your precious skin.  Now, what if one shelter were a hundred feet down-slope and the other was twenty feet up-slope?

Then I would pick up-slope.

Probably the right choice.  But what if the up-slope was a sheer cliff?  Then, downhill might be the best choice.  Then again, maybe getting just ten feet up the cliff will get you out of the lion’s reach.

Depends how high a lion can jump.

"Precisely!  You have to weigh dozens of alternatives and come up with the optimum solution: life!  Economics in a nutshell.  It is just these kinds of decisions that people are going to have to come to grips with.  Somebody might start building space shelters at a very rapid rate, but if they don’t shield people well enough from radiation or if they do not provide enough