Captain Trishan Das continued gazing into the void of space, something that caused his lips to quirk up into a slight smile as he wondered whether Nietzsche would roll over in his grave or not. After all, he was definitely misusing the idea, despite space being just as endless as the abyss spoken of by the German philosopher.
Still, he was in a philosophical mood and couldn’t help but think back on all of his struggles growing up poor in rural India. In fact, if it weren’t for the efforts of Jai Chakrabarti, the Coeus Foundation’s CEO, he would still be living in a mud hut with a rusty corrugated steel roof over his head. So Captain Das had good reason to be thankful for the Terran Empire, as it had personally uplifted both him and his family.
His mother, father, and little sister were some of the first to design their home in a fortress city, and Trishan himself was here, the captain of one of the largest spaceships ever built. He had to admit that, if his younger self knew where he would be today, he would probably laugh himself to death and accuse whoever told him his future of being the most outrageous liar he’d ever known.
Shaking himself out of his daze, he brought up his monitoring screens and got to work.
......
News agencies from around the world had broadcast Aron’s speech to the explorers, then followed it with footage of the cityships beginning their journey into interstellar space. The complete lack of any reference objects was enough to prevent people watching from figuring out the speed of the enormous vessels, though that didn’t stop people from trying.
Scientists from around the world had already begun discussing it and trying to work out the potential acceleration of the TSF ships, even going so far as to resurrect old internet forums like stackexchange, MathOverflow, and the Polymath Project, which had all fallen out of usage with the introduction of Pangea Home and the Akashic Record. Panoptes viewed the discussion with something like disdain, since none of the estimates were anywhere near the real performance of the ships; as it turned out, the majority of humanity simply couldn’t conceive of the technological capability of the Terran Empire.
Up until that point, after all, they had been relegated to the most fantastical of science fiction writing.
And it wasn’t just mathematicians and physicists who were interested, either. The space craze had spread, and almost everyone on Earth had been bitten by the space bug. So nearly everyone watched the speech and the departure that followed it, but it didn’t spark much conversation among laypeople. Only a few days had passed since the solar system had been made available to everyone, so most people soon went back to focusing on designing, building, or even buying their own ships.
Even if they couldn’t explore interstellar space, they thought, at least they could explore the solar system. It was perhaps a more modest goal than the lofty explorers of the universe at large were fulfilling, but the solar system humanity grew up in still had plenty of mysteries to be discovered. Or so they thought, anyway; Aron had wisely classified and hidden away most of the information gathered by the simulation and the probes he’d sent out to map the system, manned and unmanned alike.
It wasn’t that they had discovered anything dangerous, exactly, but more that he wanted to foster a spirit of exploration in the people of Earth. And simply giving them the detailed map and all the answers to their very many questions would run counter to that goal.
Another reason not many people were hyperfocused on the broadcast was another shakeup in the empire’s economy, specifically in the commodities market that dealt with mineral and other material resources. News of the upcoming asteroid mining industry had shaken the foundation of the historically stable market, and “savvy” investors nearly sent the entire economy into a tailspin as they rushed to sell their commodities stocks before the market completely crashed.
Everything that was considered valuable on Earth, like gold, silver, platinum, diamonds, and many others, was actually quite common in the vastness of space. In fact, most scientists believed that Uranus literally rained diamonds! The methane in the atmosphere would break down thanks to the sun’s rays, creating carbon atoms. The resultant carbon would then fall deeper into the gas giant’s atmosphere, where the pressure would compress them into diamonds.
Whether or not the mining ships that people were now busily designing could actually gather those diamonds was another question entirely. But even if they couldn’t collect them now, that didn’t mean they would never be able to.
If the empire hadn’t already announced strict controls on importing resources from the depths of the solar system, the economy would have already spiraled into a recession. But by the simple expedient of limiting the amount of mineral commodities from space and prohibiting any mining on Earth itself, the disaster had been staved off. Any surplus over and above the mandated import limits would be sold to the empire, and the process was automatic. As mining ships dropped off their loads at the processing stations, the empire would take it from there and everyone would be satisfied with the outcome.
The empire would receive vast stocks of mineral resources, the miners themselves would be handsomely paid for their efforts and finds, investors could rest assured that the commodities market would remain stable, and manufacturers that relied on those raw resources would be able to purchase them from the empire at a reasonable price. It was a flexible model and would easily transition from an empire that was bound to a single solar system all the way to a galaxy-spanning empire that stretched from one edge of the Milky Way to the other.
And one thing ensured that smuggling wouldn’t exist: quarantine. Sure, there were indeed greedy people, but the only people licensed to mine in space would be those who passed the most stringent of security checks that included personality scanning via brain data. Part of the processing that was done at the processing stations in the Trojan asteroids was a scan that detected and eliminated any possible microorganism, preventing potential disease outbreaks that humanity wasn’t equipped to handle.
After all, H.G. Wells had thrust the idea that aliens could be defeated by something as simple as the common cold. Thus, it was obvious that the same concept could work in reverse, wiping out humanity just as easily as an earthly virus had wiped out the invaders in War of the Worlds.
