Today was a bit of a rough walking day although I did manage a little over six miles keeping both my daily streak as well as my progression to my yearly and monthly targets largely on track. As rough as it was for walking, I had an even more challenging experience with picture taking, and as a result, I do not have a contemporary photo to show. It has been my practice to date to use only contemporary photos (i.e. taken on the same day as the post), so I'll not break with that tradition now.
What I will do is launch off on a very rough draft of Chapter 1 of a novel that has been informed, to a degree, by my walking experiences and observations.
CHAPTER 1
The next step in the evolution of humankind did not unfold in the precise way that many prophesies had envisioned. Let's not kid ourselves, we call it a step in the evolution, but the future is very far from certain, and it's entirely possible that this story will end up being the tale of our destruction. From a standpoint of human habitation, the earth has already been destroyed.
I am writing this account of the events that I witnessed over those terrible hours and days from Ark Naamah. This is the story of how I came to be in this ship that is currently orbiting Sol in an elliptical path that at it's perigee is slightly closer than earth's orbit and at it's perigee slightly farther than earth's orbit. It's been and adjustment, and our years, though similar are 400 earth days long.
As I said earlier, the events that unfolded were similar enough to the predictions leading up to them to allow our Ark to survive the destruction of our habitat. The predictions were also far enough wrong that the events facilitated my own personal survival.
Toward the middle of the 21st century, there began to be enough evidence that to provide for the survival of humanity, some far looking individuals and governments began to make preparations to escape earth when the time came. There were predictions of an extinction event meteorite strike based on some relatively close passes of intergalactic objects passing through our orbit. The threat of nuclear destruction at our own hands had not substantially subsided although over one hundred years had passed since the first, and to date last, use of nuclear weapons in warfare. A number of plagues had been narrowly contained, and our interaction with the environment appeared to be leading to an inevitable medical disaster. The population had stabilized at approximately 12 billion individuals, and signs pointed to a lessening of pressure as attrition caught up with the birth rate, but the narrow extractable energy margins threatened to upset this delicate balance and unleash regional famine with devastating results. In short, there were enough signs that a timely and orderly escape from the planet might prove to be a last ditch necessity.
From this backdrop, nation states began researching larger scale manned space travel within the constraints that national resources and a need for secrecy could accommodate. Mars had been visited, but three of those seven missions had ended in complete loss of life for the nine individuals involved. We had certainly made progress from the Apollo and International Space Stations days, but large scale evacuation of a survivable number of individuals was still quite a ways off when distributed efforts began, first slowly, and then with renewed interest as spin off technologies led to economic growth and the ability to provide additional resources to put toward the effort.
I know just the barest of facts from these early days since they occurred about one hundred and twenty years before I was born. Within Ark Naamah, these stories exist as legend and mythology more than anything else. Before leaving the earth, there was simply not enough time to execute the planned population of digital records that had been anticipated to occur over the course of a several month preparation period prior to the final launch. There are people aboard that had a working knowledge of this history, but since the efforts had been shrouded in secrecy, I'm not even sure we can put together a reasonable accounting of those efforts based on the first and second hand accounts that are at our disposal. We have the technical documentation of the results of those efforts, but I'm afraid much of the history and earth centric anthropological studies have been lost.
The evacuation occurred quickly and haphazardly, and the cause for the departure from earth was not accurately anticipated by anyone. It happened fast, and it happened dirty.
What I will do is launch off on a very rough draft of Chapter 1 of a novel that has been informed, to a degree, by my walking experiences and observations.
CHAPTER 1
The next step in the evolution of humankind did not unfold in the precise way that many prophesies had envisioned. Let's not kid ourselves, we call it a step in the evolution, but the future is very far from certain, and it's entirely possible that this story will end up being the tale of our destruction. From a standpoint of human habitation, the earth has already been destroyed.
I am writing this account of the events that I witnessed over those terrible hours and days from Ark Naamah. This is the story of how I came to be in this ship that is currently orbiting Sol in an elliptical path that at it's perigee is slightly closer than earth's orbit and at it's perigee slightly farther than earth's orbit. It's been and adjustment, and our years, though similar are 400 earth days long.
As I said earlier, the events that unfolded were similar enough to the predictions leading up to them to allow our Ark to survive the destruction of our habitat. The predictions were also far enough wrong that the events facilitated my own personal survival.
Toward the middle of the 21st century, there began to be enough evidence that to provide for the survival of humanity, some far looking individuals and governments began to make preparations to escape earth when the time came. There were predictions of an extinction event meteorite strike based on some relatively close passes of intergalactic objects passing through our orbit. The threat of nuclear destruction at our own hands had not substantially subsided although over one hundred years had passed since the first, and to date last, use of nuclear weapons in warfare. A number of plagues had been narrowly contained, and our interaction with the environment appeared to be leading to an inevitable medical disaster. The population had stabilized at approximately 12 billion individuals, and signs pointed to a lessening of pressure as attrition caught up with the birth rate, but the narrow extractable energy margins threatened to upset this delicate balance and unleash regional famine with devastating results. In short, there were enough signs that a timely and orderly escape from the planet might prove to be a last ditch necessity.
From this backdrop, nation states began researching larger scale manned space travel within the constraints that national resources and a need for secrecy could accommodate. Mars had been visited, but three of those seven missions had ended in complete loss of life for the nine individuals involved. We had certainly made progress from the Apollo and International Space Stations days, but large scale evacuation of a survivable number of individuals was still quite a ways off when distributed efforts began, first slowly, and then with renewed interest as spin off technologies led to economic growth and the ability to provide additional resources to put toward the effort.
I know just the barest of facts from these early days since they occurred about one hundred and twenty years before I was born. Within Ark Naamah, these stories exist as legend and mythology more than anything else. Before leaving the earth, there was simply not enough time to execute the planned population of digital records that had been anticipated to occur over the course of a several month preparation period prior to the final launch. There are people aboard that had a working knowledge of this history, but since the efforts had been shrouded in secrecy, I'm not even sure we can put together a reasonable accounting of those efforts based on the first and second hand accounts that are at our disposal. We have the technical documentation of the results of those efforts, but I'm afraid much of the history and earth centric anthropological studies have been lost.
The evacuation occurred quickly and haphazardly, and the cause for the departure from earth was not accurately anticipated by anyone. It happened fast, and it happened dirty.
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