The Journey of North

A Journey Home

I remember an old quote from a movie that always stuck with me. When the main protagonist was asked, "Do you think there is life in space other than us?" she responded with this: "There are billions of stars in the sky. If 1% of those stars had planets orbiting them, and 1% of those planets could sustain life and 1% of those had life on them and if 1% of those had intelligent life, then there would literally be thousands of races out there we have yet to meet." I'm paraphrasing of course. I never was very good in the memory department, but you get the idea.

Mankind has looked to the stars for centuries and wondered, "Am I alone?" That is a good question. Science tells us that the odds of there being sentient life among the stars are extremely rare. They tell us that the human race, was such a 1 in a trillion shot, that the odds of it occurring anywhere else is so remote as to be laughable. I would like to state for the record, that mankind is incredibly vain and self-centered to believe that we could be the only sentient life in the universe. Granted, whatever life there may be out there, may be so far removed from what we would consider a life form, that it would be easy to mistake them for anything we would deem sentient.

Mankind had just discovered the existence of another planet that looked to be able to support human life in the Proxima Centauri galaxy. The planet Proxima B, an exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, looked to match all of the sweet spots needed to support life, or humanoid life, but it was far enough away that with our current technologies, it would take around 1400 years to get us there. That's quite a long time to travel and the choices to reach there were either a generational ship where our great, great, great, great... however many greats it would be, grandchildren would arrive to colonize and explore. Or, a type of cryogenic suspended animation. The latter meaning that everyone you have ever known or loved would be dead by the time you got there. It would also be feasible to assume that technology on Earth would have advanced sufficiently enough that another ship could be sent long after the original ship was sent and beat it there by many, many years.

Let's fast forward 25 years shall we.

Technology has gotten ridiculous. Everyone has their brains plugged into the net now. We all have wireless receivers directly linked to our brain and we can use them to control everything from the locks on a door, to piloting a vehicle. We can research information instantaneously with a thought, and schools have all but been abolished. Who needs teachers and classrooms, when anything you want to know can be in your brain instantly? When I say school, I'm specifically targeting higher education actually. Children still go to primary school because implants cannot be grafted into a person until the body reaches maturity. After implantation, there is a short school to help people adjust to the new flow of information and how best to make use of it. Just like with anything else in the world, there are purists who refuse this technology and instead, live in their own small communities as simple agrarian societies. Now you might think this is all well and good and very, very cool, but this is a capitalistic society. Only the rich can afford implants that don't come with ads and spam. Yes, you heard me right, spam and advertisements straight to your brain. How scary does that sound? Want to know what else is scary; remember how texting was such a big thing? Well now people send mental texts to other people. Hardly anyone actually speaks anymore because it's faster to just shoot the information to the person you're talking to. Think of it as techno-telepathy. Actual computers are no longer used; we use our brains now as the computers that run things. Companies now hire people based on the computing power of their mind and employees spend eight hours a day, at work, processing data in their minds for their company.

Now, as with all things medical, there are people who can't handle technology like this. Their bodies reject the implants like a virus and therefore they end up living in the agrarian societies like 'primitives'. Once all of this technology had become mainstream, there were a lot of things that were scrapped because it was no longer compatible with techno-telepathy. One of those items was a newly created NASA project called ARC (Advanced Research into Cryogenics) Alpha. This was to be the first exploratory vessel to go to ProxCent-161c for the purposes of exploration. There would be a crew of eighteen. They would consist of a captain, executive officer, pilot, flight engineer, payload specialist, computer systems specialist, a doctor, a nurse, a biologist, a chemist, a botanist, a physicist, an archaeologist, and 5 flight crew personnel trained in everything that would be needed to keep the ship running. Everyone would have remedial training in other specialties so that, if the worst happened, there would be someone to take over. The ship carried the latest in suspended animation technology as well as the newest ion propulsion drive available. This new drive cut a 1400 year trip down to only 890 years. Huzzah... It was decided, that since this project was so expensive and cutting edge, that they couldn't afford to scrap it altogether; so they offered a challenge and reward to the agrarian societies. If the agrarian societies could provide and train the needed crew to man this high tech vessel, then the government would fund the agrarian societies for the next century. It ended up being a no brainer really. The agrarian societies always needed outside resources and had to scrounge to be able to afford them. So a 100 year supply would help the colonies support themselves for the future ahead.