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squint your eyes or wear sunglasses at the beach.
We spent a few minutes checking the air for anything that would be harmful to
us. We could see no microbes or deadly gasses. It was a mixture of oxygen,
nitrogen, argon, and other gasses. The oxygen was a little richer than on
Earth, but that was no problem. We sat still in the ship and waited a while
and watched for signs of indigenous lifeforms that could be harmful: snakes,
bees, bugs, crocodiles, and three headed humanoid-eating E.T.s. Nothing other
than an occasional alien sea oat reared its head.
An hour passed. We had made every measurement we could think of. Jim finally
said, "To hell with this, let's go outside."
Tabitha reminded him that the protocol that he helped write required two hours
of tests, analyses, and observation before running out into an alien world to
be eaten by monsters or alien bacteria. So, we waited a little while longer.
The air was fine. I never even saw an insect. Perhaps they just didn't evolve
here. We took a lot of vegetation samples. None of us could figure out how
they pollinated without bugs. The ecosystem was completely different here. I
guess the wind was good enough.
A couple of days later we split up. Tabitha, 'Becca, Jim, and I flew
Einstein further inland while
Margie, Anne Marie, Sara, and Al hopped continents in the
Starbuck
. We were to meet back on the beach in two days where we would leave the
habitat cylinders.
We finally found insects and 'Becca swore that she saw a rodent of some sort.
It would take years and teams of scientists to catalog all of the species of
life there. We were physicists and engineers, not botanists, entomologists,
and exobiologists. We would have to bring some next time. Two days passed
quickly, and no creatures tried to eat us, not even the insects, if there were
any insects.
Margie and Annie were docking the ships back to the habitat cylinders. Tabitha
and I stood on the beach with the crystal clear water frothing at our feet.
Even our treks to the bottom of the oceans of this
world didn't reveal any underwater cities, although we had seen some big fish.
I was watching the alien red sunset. Tabitha, of course, was watching the
docking procedures and muttering to herself about "teaching Annie how to fly
better than that." I laughed at her and nudged her.
"Hey General, you got time to look at this really cool alien sunset?"
Tabitha turned away from the spacecraft and looked out over the ocean. "Yeah.
It is pretty. You seem sort of solemn tonight. What's bothering you?"
"Nothing really. I just wanted to find more, you know?" I held my hands out as
if to encompass the planet. Then I shrugged my shoulders.
"Yeah, I know. You wanted to find aliens. You did, just not the kind you can
talk to."
"Maybe someday we . . ." I shook my head. "There are just so many stars out
there. And it appears the potential alien homeworlds are farther away than we
might have imagined. I keep telling myself that it is statistics. They are out
there and we're bound to find somebody somewhere someday. One of the things
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that burns me up is that the people of Earth will never know we have been
here. They'll never know what we, the human race, have accomplished."
"We will find aliens, one day, Anson. And some people on Earth know what you
did. You saved the world from itself and have ushered in a new era of
technology."
"Yeah a technology that they will never know exists. And I had a lot of help,
Tabitha. And the world isn't out of the woods yet. Eternal vigilance and all."
"I know you had help, sweetheart. But you did it nonetheless. You, did it. And
I have come to know you enough that I think you'll continue to do it. As long
as it takes."
"I guess," I said.
"We will find intelligent aliens out there and we will get to tell the Earth,
some day. But in the meantime, I miss my little girl and I'm sure she misses
her mommy and daddy. What do you say we go home?" Tabitha held my hand and
pulled me to her.
"Sounds great to me." I kissed her. "You know this is what I always dreamed
of. I've always fantasized about inventing the warp drive and flying off to
new and alien worlds with my beautiful wife and having wonderful adventures
and saving the world. It's a childhood dream come true; I guess I can't think
of anything that could make me happier."
She held me a little while longer and looked into my eyes. "I'm pregnant
again," she said.
"Well, except for that." I laughed.
We went home.
APPENDIX
The Current Status of Warp Drive
In 1994 a scientific paper was written by Miguel Alcubierre entitled "The warp
drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity." It was a short "Letter to
the Editor" and was published in the scientific journal Classical and Quantum
Gravity. In that paper Alcubierre showed that within the confines of the
currently understood theory of General Relativity that:
. . . without the introduction of wormholes, it is possible to modify a
spacetime in a way that allows a spaceship to travel with an arbitrarily large
speed. By a purely local expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship and an
opposite contraction in front of it, motion faster than the speed of light as
seen by observers outside the disturbed region is possible. The resulting
distortion is reminiscent of the "warp drive" of science fiction.
Alcubierre went on to show that there was no reason to believe that such a
warp drive would be impossible. That point has been the topic of debate at
many conferences since then. The contraction of space required in front of the
spaceship is nothing more than a gravity well. On the other hand, the
expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship is an inverted gravity well, which
to date has not been observed anywhere in the universe as far as we understand
it. The problem with the expansion in spacetime can be explained simply. What
causes a contraction in spacetime or in other words what causes a gravity
well? The answer is matter. Massive objects cause gravity wells. Okay, we
understand how that part works. Then what could cause an inverted gravity
well? The answer could be negative matter? What the hell is negative matter?
There in lies the rub! Then is it over with for warp drive?
No. Matter is also energy and vice versa. Energy can be portrayed in many
forms: matter, electricity, magnetism, and possibly other more strange quantum
phenomena. The equation Anson talks about in this story that I like to call
the Warp Equation describes this very well. That equation in laymen's terms is
written as:
Curvature or Warp of Spacetime = Energy per Volume
This equation is actually known as the Einstein equation and each side of it
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