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February 23, 2007

2.23.07

It's a long way down...

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David: Atop Olympus

Mike was on top of the world. He was rich and famous. He was in perfect health and the best shape of his life. He had his pick of any woman on Earth, from among whom he made frequent selections. His corporations had fingers deeply enough into media and governments across the globe to give him effective control over most world events, or least the ability to alter perceptions of those events for his own purposes. He was the closest thing to a god the world had seen in two thousand years.

Then that video of him appeared on YouTube.

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Jeff R.: Nowhere to Go but Up

Mankind's first permanent dwellings beyond Earth were established accidentally. There were 212 people working in orbit, when panicked terrestrial governments destroyed dozens of satelites, filling geosynchronous orbit with shrapnel that destoyed other satelites, making more orbital shrapnel, and so on. The manned stations evacuated to a higher orbit before the orbital debris cascade reached them, leaving them stranded, with no chance of relief or resupply.

With supreme effort and luck, those stranded astronauts completed work on the Mars Voyager, already designed to support a crew nearly that size for years and establish a colony. Which they did, six years later.

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