From the Earth to Mars and Back Again.

Strap motors on it and send it off to Mars.

Louis Shalako

It was recently announced that Russia is no longer interested in supporting the International Space Station, preferring to focus on paying launches perhaps. There’s little doubt it is a pressure tactic in the political arena, where the U.S. and Russia stand poised on the brink of another cynical and not-very-friendly non-war.

(Talks are back on again. – ed.)

If the U.S. and its partners can’t find additional funding, the station could be abandoned (or at least no longer under development) by the year 2020. Every such system or machine has its natural life. It can’t stay up there forever in any case.

Big question then is; what do they do with it?

My suggestion is to strap motors on it, slap on a couple of bipropellant fuel tanks, and shoot it off to Mars orbit using both autonomous and telemetric control systems.

Four small steerable motors, off-the-shelf if possible, are enough for a slow acceleration as well as steering and control. The rickety old thing isn’t designed to take a lot of gees, and in fact some systems, like the solar panels, will probably have to be demounted and rigged for safe storage. If it takes all day to get her up to a plausible ‘X’ m/s Delta-V, no big deal. Using a simple Hohman transfer at opposition, it’s not necessary to make the shortest possible trip because it’s un-manned. We don’t have to worry about a human crew, considering the long-term effects of zero gravity, cosmic rays and solar flares, and including ‘social and psychological factors.’ Psychological factors come into play on extended, multi-year missions.

But, it basically represents an exercise in getting a large package into a stable Mars orbit, and it represents assets in situ for a series of eventual manned Mars surface missions.*

It represents a livable habitat where stores, life-support and backup systems are already operative. You don't have to land on the Martian surface and start setting things up. It’s a place to mount the latest in cameras and sensors, and other equipment. It’s an LMO observatory. In the meantime, waiting for a human crew, NASA is constantly monitoring the system and its components. Changes in the Martian surface can be monitored over the long term. This includes weather observation, one of the keys to a successful surface landing and return.

The next phase of the mission is to send off further habitat modules, oxygen and fuel tanks, a simple pair of highly-upgraded, new type of landers, additional resources, and other necessary equipment (including nuclear power generators) to orbit the planet separately in a planned configuration, one designed for easy recovery. Each of these assets would retain some small reserve fuel/maneuvering capacity aboard the transit package. They have the ability to maneuver in orbit for eventual rendezvous and recovery. The landers, once unleashed from their transit cocoons, would use autonomic systems to dock with the space station for eventual use. Even the cocoons** could be reusable, if nothing else as a supply of refined metal for on the spot fabrications.

The landers themselves, unlike the Lunar lander, would be more versatile in that they could deliver a tracked robotic vehicle to the surface just as well as a human crew. In the Lunar phase, only the manned pod left the surface. The new landers are also a return vehicle, and have a desirable ability to return on their own as reusable machines. They’re not abandoned on the surface, but then they don’t have to be—there’s a surplus of fuel a hundred and forty or so kilometres above the surface in the Mars Station stocks. The landers are designed to go back and forth. The surplus fuel stocks are the Delta-V budget for exploration.

Manned missions from Earth to the Mars station would carry the minimum of supplies and equipment, which means less mass. Less mass per mission/shot means more fuel available for speed, i.e. shorter transit times. This is only possible if a multi-year supply of oxygen, water, food, batteries and bulbs, materials, tools and wrenches, socks and underwear, everything our astronauts might need, is already waiting in Mars orbit. 

The top stage of a large rocket could take our crew from Earth to Mars orbit in about six months, and they would have something like the volume of a modern house-trailer to hang out in while they are in transit. Three or four-person crews would be plenty.

It might take fifteen years to build up the orbiting base, but it’s all waiting in Mars orbit for their arrival. This brings up the next point. Other than the International Space Station itself, all of these cargos would be launched from Earth. Everything is built in a factory, and not in orbit.

They would use tried and tested, existing technologies, except for the upper stage manned package which is specially designed for the Mars flight. Yet we’ve put packages onto the Martian surface, coming within a few kilometres of the target, and putting a package in orbit is much easier. This system requires building up flexible launch capabilities over the long haul.

An option is to bring the manned mission package to LEO via old-fashioned shuttle technology, which implies the building of a fleet of new shuttles. Then the Mars mission is essentially launched from the cargo bay of a much larger shuttle than the one we are familiar with.

The problem of using the present shuttle technology for flight to Mars is of course the problem of duration. If no other cargo is carried, the ship is still not very efficient in terms of life support, storage, and viability over a period of months or years with humans aboard. The present design is not adaptable.

This is in spite of the cargo bay in the back, however, if shuttles could rendezvous with and acquire additional tankage in LEO, then the problem is relatively well-solved without attempting to build Battlestar Galactica-type ships on orbit, with all the attendant problems of manpower, supervision, housing, supply and quality control. And again, the crew has so much space and mass allotted to food, water and life support that the interior space really isn’t that large. For the flight between Earth orbit and Mars orbit, aerodynamics are of no consequence. It doesn't matter what the package looks like.

In order to escape an orbit, simply add power. (Peo. Wiki.)

Simply put, rather than send one big ship to Mars with everything in it, all in one go, we send a bunch of little cargos to Mars on missions that are unmanned.

Rather than assemble our dream spaceship in LEO, and then shoot it off to Mars and hope for the best, shoot a bunch of little cargos off to Mars. The first crew to the new Mars station begins further, more flexible assembly. The first mission studies the planet’s surface for the best place to situate the first scientific colony as fresh cargos and fresh crews are already in transit from Earth. Each manned mission retains capability for two-way flight, at much lower cost than a large, fully-contained mission. Each mission deposits some surplus of resources on our new Mars station…

When a crew arrives in Mars orbit, some reserve of food, water and life support onboard their machine would be necessary, (10 to 20 % of overall figures) but unused supplies go into the base reserve for future demands. When planning a Mars-to-Earth return flight, the machine could be designed to rendezvous in LEO with a shuttle. It could re-enter, and make a water recovery, or glide down using lifting body technology, speed brakes and sturdy landing skids with a drag 'chute for utter simplicity of design. Allowing a ten percent reserve for maneuvering on this return flight, it seems almost inevitable that most missions would actually transfer excess fuels to the station before departure. In the event, a ship could reasonably be topped up if necessary and circumstances arose.

Space station facts and figures.

Orbital transfer. (AndrewBuck. Wiki.)

Notes:

*You need a motor at the back to get it going, and one at the front to slow it down. The other two are back-ups.

Every component of the space station has survived high-gee lift from Earth to LEO, however, once bolted together, various angular moments come into play when thrust is introduced to the configuration. Without study, the Space Station is presently an unknown quantity in structural terms.

Components that survived high-gee compression forces might not have equal tensile qualities or torsion resistance.

In the Lunar landings, crews descended to the surface aboard a landing module while a pilot stayed behind in an orbital module. When returning to orbit and rendezvous, the actual landing gear remained behind. Only a small pod blasted off from the top of the lander, carrying two crew members after a relatively short stay on the surface. Considering the ships were built by men and women using slide-rules and paper drawings, it was a remarkable achievement.

However, when descending to the surface of Mars from the Mars Station, an unmanned lander can descend by remote or autonomous control. The following crew lands near a spare lander, which in some degree is a distinct tribute to Robert Zubrin, author of The Case for Mars and his multiple redundancies.

**the cocoons are basically just streamlining. They protect assets from Earth’s atmosphere during launch, and offer some protection from micro-meteors and the consequences of direct heating by the sun during transit on components, including those all-important fuel tanks. Cocoon shells may be useful for little more than additional shielding from cosmic rays and solar flares once on-site. This alone is not really enough reason to transport them all the way to Mars. Slightly modified, they might act as unpressurized storage bins for bulky and non-essential stores or waste/scrap materials, containers, tools, etc.

The planet Mars has about 0.38 the mass of Earth and is correspondingly quite a bit smaller in diameter.

Shuttle fleet grounded. 

NASA's latest launch systems.

If we must dream, let us dream in technicolour.

***

What Is Bitcoin, the virtual currency?

New York Stock Exchange.

by Louis Shalako

Love, or money, is what makes the world go around.

Let’s talk about money.

There are of course moral and ethical dilemmas surrounding the issue of money. This being the future and all, the one we were all madly reading about when we were kids, there are new kinds of money.

Plastic debit cards, credit cards, in-store gift cards, have all changed the face of transaction in the sense that we do things our parents never would have done. Our parents, certainly our grandparents, would have never swiped a card through a reader, waved an electronic speed-pass in front of a gas pump, or bought and activated a plastic gift card.

Let’s look at gift cards. When the ‘credit’ or ‘money’ is loaded up on the card, it is said to be ‘activated.’ 

That’s backed up by something on the front end, some kind of deposit somewhere. and on the ‘receiving end,’ when the card pays out in the form of groceries, gas, a pair of shoes, that transaction, is still backed up by coin of the realm, a stable ‘real’ currency, backed up by the assets of the state, and, or, its holdings in specie or bullion. This ‘money’ is backed by a state, who uses the currency to pay its bills, pay entitlements, and carry out its social and economic goals or programs.

If you want to purchase such a gift card, you have to hand over some cash, pay with a credit or debit card, or you simply won’t get your purchase. No money, no card. U.S. or Canadian dollars are pretty stable. You have one year on a gift card to use the funds, or you lose your ‘rights’ so to speak, and that is one of the criticisms of the cards. If you are paying cash, it’s just easier to use the currency of the country you are presently in—I once had problems buying a sandwich twenty miles inland in Michigan. All I had was a Canadian ten-dollar bill. I was on the way to Flint or something and the trip came up at short notice. No sandwich, end of story.

Virtual currency is different. It has no backing from any state or bank, there are no holdings in gold, dollars, bonds, whatever has been used previously to covey the idea of value, of monetary worth. The transacton is real because some person paid some other person for the bitcoin. That is its only backing, (my own conclusion.). The bitcoin is worth what someone paid for it and no more, and it has also been volatile over its short history.

Bitcoins are traded like a commodity. A peck of soybeans is a commodity, a sow-belly is a commodity. 

Conventional commodities are traded electronically, on trust, by reputable and registered traders.

They own the right to the funds generated by the sale of some peck of soybeans or a sowbelly somewhere, and those trades are backed up by the intrinsic worth of the commodity itself.

An international, virtual currency is only worth what somebody has paid for it. Demand for it drives the worth of it up, and the same thing can happen to soybeans or sow-bellies or whatever.

The difference is that the commodity is real, as opposed to virtual.

Make no mistake, if I buy one bitcoin, real money is coming out of my account, otherwise I don’t have the right to own it. If demand is high when I cash it in, real money comes out of some virtual font somewhere and if I want then I can go and buy what I want.

What’s different about a virtual currency is that it’s new, ladies and gentlemen, and it’s also international.

Is it a threat, and by that, I mean is it a threat to me, personally? Enlightened self-interest, right?

How does this affect me?

This writer is not a hundred percent sure of just how I would go about buying a sandwich, ‘twenty miles inland’ in some country, any country, with a bitcoin. Debit card for sure, and that U.S. dollar transaction would be electronically calculated and converted instantly so the bill is paid in U.S. dollars from my Canadian account.

Right? That seems simple enough.

Bitcoin charts.

Business Insider interview with Paul Krugman.

“Economist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman says that "in principle, you can have assets, which are considered valuable, even though there is nothing backing them," but he is skeptical about what drives the recent surge of the bitcoin.”

It also seems simple enough, that in the trading of bitcoins, simple electronic and mathematical rules apply. Conversions from and into bitcoin virtual currency would be relatively simple.

The question to a consumer, and we live in a consumer society just as much as in a ‘money-trading’ society, is, “What good is it? What is it for?”

But if a virtual currency like Bitcoin is to become a valid international consumer currency, it must be in denominational units of small enough for convenient use. One bitcoin worth say, $450.00 isn’t much good if all you want to do is to buy a cup of coffee. If the coffee is valued at $1.60, that’s 1/287^th of a bitcoin. That would essentially mean nothing to the average consumer, and if it’s volatile, one minute the value of your bitcoin is soaring, and the next minute it is plummeting.

So that is the starting point for the research to this story. I would like to know what it’s good for.

Here’s what people in nine emerging markets had to say about bitcoin. Sounds to me like they know more about it than this writer, but the M-pesa digital currency in Kenya is interesting. At time of writing, apparently it’s the most advanced such system in the world.

Bitcoin shut out of Chinese market, second largest in world. If it didn’t serve state policy, and if the government saw it as essentially chaotic, then it would be highly suspect in their eyes.

Will virtual currency break the power of the state to control monetary policy?

“There is another concern about Bitcoin that gnaws at me. Control of money is the State’s most important tool for maintaining power. Controlling money allows governments to engineer society, rewarding the politically connected while keeping the underclass content. It gives government the ability to promote the illusion that there is such as thing as a free lunch, and that the State is the fountainhead from which all good things flow. Thus, governments will crush anything that undermines their control over money. Absolutely no competition in this area is allowed.”

“Perhaps it’s my conspiratorial side, but something smells fishy here. If Bitcoin is as dangerous to the State as its proponents in the liberty movement claim, why isn’t the State already moving to crush it?” – Lew Rockwell.

Money Beat.

“Virtual currencies, perhaps most notably bitcoin, have captured the imagination of some, struck fear among others, and confused the heck out of many of us.  Indeed, based on conversations my staff and I have had with dozens of individuals both inside and outside of government, it is clear that the knowledge and expectation gaps are wide. Fundamental questions remain about what a virtual currency actually is, how it should be treated, and what the future holds.”

“Virtual currencies, perhaps most notably bitcoin, have captured the imagination of some, struck fear among others, and confused the heck out of many of us.  Indeed, based on conversations my staff and I have had with dozens of individuals both inside and outside of government, it is clear that the knowledge and expectation gaps are wide. Fundamental questions remain about what a virtual currency actually is, how it should be treated, and what the future holds.”

What’s so special about Bitcoin?

“The fact that Bitcoin advocates rely so heavily on the niftiness of its underlying algorithms and protocol is one of the best reasons to predict its demise.  If all you have going for you is a cool algorithm, then at some point there will be someone else out there with an even cooler algorithm. And then someone else.”

“Indeed, there is evidence that this process is already underway. If you don’t want to use Bitcoin, you can always try Litecoin.” – Forbes

How is Bitcoin different from the dollar?

Steven Kinsella, as quoted in Forbes:

“Bitcoin has no use value, only exchange value, and because it is has no worth in use other than what others are willing to pay for it, it is always in a bubble: these happen when prices of assets get dislodged from their fundamental value. So Bitcoin is the perfect bubble.”

“(Charles) Goodhart argues that states have essentially always been in control of monetary systems. He emphasizes that governments have always viewed seigniorage as a useful form of revenue and are unlikely to allow this source of revenue to be replaced by a private source of money.”

The article concludes, “There’s no doubt that Bitcoin is an interesting invention, useful at a minimum for provoking good classroom discussions in Money and Banking courses about what exactly is the meaning of money. But people should be wary of investing large amounts of their savings in Bitcoins. History provides plenty of reasons to suspect that private money is unlikely to work. Maybe this time is different. Usually it’s not.”

To go further than that, what are the ethical or moral considerations of allowing Bitcoin and other private currencies free reign, to conduct a global experiment that could, in the longer term be disruptive of national economies?

I have some philosophical sympathy with a new form of disruption, for it seems self-evident that at some point in the not-too-far distant future, new forms of international government will arise.

When the European Union came into being and adopted the Euro, some national powers had to be given up, and yet the currency is backed up by the combined holdings in all the member nations.

Their gross domestic product, the real wealth of the nation, (the more developed a nation is, the more it is ‘worth,’) the ratio of debt to income and expenditure, all these factors contribute to the worth, or value of the Euro. In relation to other similarly-baked currencies, its values fluctuates over time as circumstances and therefore demand the Euro as a holding currency, (a commodity of value) goes up and down. This only becomes volatile in moments of crisis. The fact the European Union is international really doesn’t change the rule-set. And everyone involved at least understands the rules.

Issues of national sovereignty are touchy, hot-button issues, and yet civilization is advancing—we are becoming more organized, more knowledgeable. Social systems are getting more complex, and the demands for international cooperation are growing rapidly as the challenges of the 21^st century become apparent or when they reveal themselves for the very first time.

It may be necessary to strip away some small portion of the sovereign powers of the state in its theoretical sense, in order to give some power to an international organization, one where all states and nations could hold membership, and have the right to speak, consult, debate, and set policy.

Also, if it is not to be completely powerless, such an international organization would have to have some funding, some revenue stream, generated by contributions on all members, dare I say ‘international taxation,’ and ultimately such an international entity would acquire assets. Their virtual currency, traded and used by consumers world-wide, might very well be backed up by an acceptable standard commodity—like gold, or even good old U.S. greenbacks as well as other high-value, stable currencies.

Such an international organization would of course use monetary policy to advance its social policies on a global basis, i.e., ‘world government.’ In its initial stages, that institution would be as experimental, and most probably just as potentially disruptive, certainly long term, as highly-speculative virtual currencies now in the marketplace.

In that sense, something very much like Bitcoin might be useful for an emerging world-wide electronic culture. Part of the usefulness of that tool might lay in its ability to subvert existing power structures and in laying the groundwork for something both benevolent in principle, in so far as it can be said that commerce is essentially benevolent and a socializing factor in human relations.

In terms of science-fiction futurism, displaced people, refugees, stateless persons, would still be citizens of the globe. No one could seriously claim otherwise. They might not want to acknowledge them as citizens, for that gives them certain rights, but the unfriendly state of origin in question could hardly suggest that they came from some other planet.

An international government might take some responsibility for those global citizens, but more importantly some virtual currency that they could take, send, receive, spend or trade anywhere in the world would appear to be their natural, supra-state currency. That currency would be a tool for further consolidation of a planetary government, once suitable institutional architecture is in place. a

And the world as we know it might even be a better place for it.

Sorry, even I didn’t see that one coming.

***

Additional Resources.

Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer virtual payment system. (Wiki.)

How It Works.

How to Steal Bitcoin in Three Easy Steps.

Bitcoin units.

Weaknesses.

Transaction Fees.

***

END

The Next 25 Years of Spaceflight.

The next twenty-five years in spaceflight will be fascinating.

At time of writing, Chris Hadfield circles the Earth in the International Space Station.

The next period of microgravity experiments in physics and chemistry, medicine and botany, microbiology, entomology, (yes, ants in space!) crystallography, will bring results we can’t foresee, for many of the most important discoveries in history were accidental. But there will be results.

More powerful motors needed

With Hubble finding new exoplanets almost weekly, there is more of an incentive to do the research into interstellar drives. The power units we have now make for slow trips within our solar system. They’re simply not suitable for interstellar flight. While a Moon base is often bandied about as an alternative to Mars, it looks mostly like a military proposition. For that reason it is more likely to happen than an immediate Mars expedition. Mars doesn’t command the high ground of a terrestrial battlefield. The Moon does. The Moon offers certain advantages for surface-based telescopes of any wavelength. Mars has none of these advantages, its only attraction is for long-term colonization. It has an atmosphere,  the Moon does not.

Here’s the thing with Mars colonization. It’s completely unnecessary assuming we learn to manage and conserve our terrestrial resources of air, water and topsoil. As a backup to Earth, maybe there is some logic in it. Looking for life on Mars does not require colonization, only probes of increasing sophistication.

A colony on Mars

A colony on Mars would in some ways be a lot easier than a Moon colony. While there must be ice or water somewhere under the Moon’s surface, the fact is that the Martian atmosphere has small quantities of water vapour, surely an easier proposition in terms of harvesting it. Mars has tons of water in a hundred cubic kilometres of the Martian air. All you need is an air pump. You would need to process hundreds of tons of Moon rock or soil to extract one litre of water. The difference is a technical challenge—the Moon is a lot easier to get to. It’s quicker, two days as opposed to two or three years.

We already have the technology, which is part of the attraction.

Several companies have been formed for the commercial exploration of space, more specifically the asteroids. At an economical Delta-V, an accessible asteroid might take four years round trip for a sample to be returned to Earth.

433 Eros

The elements we take for granted in modern industrial processes, platinum, gold, antimony, and others, will possibly run out in the next sixty years. Mining the asteroids, processing the materials in space, and then shipping the refined product to the Moon or to Earth could be profitable for the firms involved. With modern industrial growth, even at one hundred percent efficiency of recycling, stocks will eventually run out. Totally robotic ships could be designed to mine and refine the ore. I recall an Isaac Asimov story with Martian colonists engaged in ice-mining and asteroid-finding. What was once science fiction is now within the realm of possibility, if not immediate probability.

The space elevator

A space elevator might be feasible within a few years. The cost per ton of getting materials into low orbit would be phenomenally low compared to chemical launch vehicles. Building it might be like trying to build a spider’s web—a lot harder than it looks. The first filament makes all things possible. Initially, we would either have to unroll a filament on launch from the pad, and keep it intact until orbit is achieved, or anchor one end somehow in space and then descend to Earth, again keeping the filament intact. Once one filament is in place, it must be strong enough to haul up one that is twice as thick, the full length required to be properly anchored or counterbalanced on the ends.

Yet ultimately, I think that’s how it will be done. Much like a cable-laying ship of the nineteenth century, with no need to join short lengths. It will all be one piece. I see something like a tungsten leader—just like on the end of a fishing line. This will take the heat of the rocket exhaust, and the actual filament, likely of nano-carbon tubes or something similar, will be attached to the end of it. The actual cable will be on a motor driven reel, unwinding as the rocket climbs out so as to reduce drag and directional input from the towed filament.

The only other way to do it would be to build the full structure from the ground up, stabilizing the top with gyros, or even drive units holding it in place against the winds, which would be variable at different altitudes. It would take a lot of computer power, super instrumentation and a flexible control system just to keep the thing upright. If the cable is 38,000 miles long, the problems seem insuperable. Different types of flying machines, including high-altitude helicopters and airships need to be developed for construction of this type.

New kinds of flying machines

Part of the weight initially could be borne by tethered balloons, with drive units of their own to help maneuver and steady the structure on the way to completion. My big idea, which seems more practical than hot chemical rockets, is to use a machine shaped much like a jumping-jack to get that first filament into space. The central spindle has the cable or filament attached at the bottom end. The central spindle is the working body of the ship with propellant tanks and small reaction motors for later use in space. Once the cable is up and self-sustaining due to centrifugal force, the ship itself is useful on its own. On the arms of the jumping-jack are a minimum of four laser targets. The ship is propelled by a ground-based array of laser machine guns of great power.

They must go through the charge and discharge very quickly and the pulses would be controlled by computer software. The people of North America might be willing to give up electricity for a day or so to get the thing up to its destination. And that first filament makes all other things possible…we need to avoid heat transfer from the targets to the body of the ship. Here’s the interesting thing mathematically. Once you push your package to the halfway point, the power required, which was increasing at an exponential rate, begins to taper off in terms of increasing power requirements. It originally went up due to the increasing weight of the cable.

But gravity varies inversely with the square of the distance. One end of the cable is weightless, but it still has mass. What that means, at the halfway point, centrifugal/centripetal force begins to tug some portion of the cable away from the earth, like a ball on a string swung at arm’s length. At that point you are away to the races. By doubling the size of the cable, each one strong enough to pull up its replacement, you eventually end up with cables not unlike those used to suspend the Golden Gate Bridge, and by having an array of launchers, all using a common laser array, you can build a structure that looks ultimately like an Eiffel Tower made of carbon cables, one that doesn’t stop with an antenna and a flag on top, but one that just keeps going up and up and up…until it gets all the way out into space.

Photos: Wiki Commons, NASA.

Extinction Level Event.

The asteroid travelled through deep space for a billion years, when it came into the orbital influence of a planetary system. In response to this new stimulus, it changed its course and headed towards an inevitable fate, perhaps one long overdue.

The first few times into and out of the inner system, it missed all of the planets, moons, and the star itself. Like a yo-yo, it went around and around, and in and out. Every nearby body bent its trajectory, some just a little, and some a lot. At this stage of the game, the odds were even that it would hit something. Or perhaps it would find its own home, and take up an orbit, and begin circling around the star just like any other body in the system. With its mass fighting against its momentum, there was one brief moment of time when anything was possible. But there was no escape. That brief moment occurred when the nearest other star body was on the far side of the system, relatively speaking in relation to the asteroid. If it had been on the near side of the system, its gravitational influence, small as it was, might have pulled the asteroid out into space again, with sufficient velocity to escape the system. It was not to be.

When the balance is so fine, even a feather can tip the scales, and with the accretion of several small comets, an asteroid or two, with the aggregation of dust, and particles, the thing finally became too heavy for its own good. A decision had been made, whether by mischievous spirits, or God in his infinite wisdom, predestining all things at the time of creation. Or perhaps some unconscious decision had been made by an indifferent Mother Nature. What had caused it makes no difference. A cause is a cause and an effect is an effect.

Millennia passed, and it finally found its mark. Plunging down past a trio of small, stony satellites, each snug and secure in their own familiar orbits, it hit the atmosphere, dense and deep compared to the hard vacuum around it. With its fiery mass streaming a tail of flame, it smashed into the unnamed planet, which wasn’t much bigger than itself, with enough force to shatter it.

The planet was about one and a half billion years old, and uninhabited. No animal life, other than small, unicellular creatures, sharing the characteristics of plant, animal and something else.

But their simplicity made no difference. Their fate was all the same.

Except for one. This one was different. While dormant in the cold winter months, this life-form was neither plant nor animal. With the extreme conditions, inimical to life at the best of times, the life-form had adapted. It had grown, and adaptively radiated, filling in ecological niches, and since there was little competition, it filled in all of them until it covered the planet.

With the brief flash of heat and light to stimulate activity, the spore-sacs opened, and began to gently drop their precious burden to the ground below. Summer was short, and there was much to be done. When the planet disintegrated, the spores had no ground to fall on. With the rushing winds, the vortex created by the wreckage of a planet, the little spores, the only hope of posterity for the life-form, found themselves floating in an unfamiliar environment.

To the spores it did not matter. They were designed, built, and adapted to prevail under the harshest conditions, and they went back into dormancy. While the greatest number of them perished, enough survived. Some of them had sufficient velocity to escape the system, as over time the asteroid was not the only object to impact or pass through the system, and the spores were subject to the attraction of bodies just like every other body in the universe.

More millennia passed; tens of millions of years passed.

And then one day, although the spores were completely unconscious of it, they began to speed up. Perhaps they were coming home, although they would not have recognized the word.

Every life form needs a home.


(Above photo: Comet Hale-Bopp, by Phillip Salzberger, Wiki Commons 2.0 Share-Attribution.)

http://salzgeber.at/astro/pics/9703293.html