Fiction Short Story – Planeteers
Photo credit: pschubert from morguefile.com
Now, it seemed so long ago, that the project was envisioned planned, and got kick started.
We have come a long way indeed. It has been more man four hundred years since religious, economic wars, earthquakes, droughts and famine ravaged our planet and decimated the population down to a less man billion and men the world count into a mini page, and it still is. Whole countries are concerned in ice now. Many countries are out of business so to speak. The world is truly one big village now. You have people from all faiths, colour, caste and creed living together and administrated by a global government. All weapons of mass destruction have been permanently destroyed or decommissioned. No more armies. No food, clean air, water and space constraints. We have all of us become lifelong students. Perhaps in a way we badly needed to learn lessons in life, get back to our roots, to be at peace with each other. To cherish this beautiful, bountiful, strong, fierce, tempestuous, and loving planet of ours. Don’t get me wrong, what happened over four hundred years ago was horrible, brutal, cruel and absolute inhuman. But we all need our lesson. Don’t we? I mean how long are we not going to change ourselves for the better, not had the worrying signals: how long? We really needed this. We got small doses, but we did not come for each other. We had become totally disconnected with each other. But raping our mother earth. Yes, that’s me correct word, raping. And our mother earth raped us back, double dosage.
There is reciprocity in the world. We get what we deserve. Anyway, you must be wondering why I am saying all these things: after all it has been over 100 years… because every person in our global village has to compulsorily go through a one year course on our fallacies of our past. Our tragedy has to be kept alive and passed on to our future generations. It is me only course along with a course dietaries, the proverbial cannot and stick way of not letting those horrible events do not ever occur again. Ever.
There is hardly any police. We simply do not need them. We follow our hearts and intuition balanced with our logic. And that fine balance helps us from doing any misdeeds. There is no crime at all. No violence. We have opened our eyes of our minds to a greater reality, a much wider, more expansive sense of existence. It’s a beautiful, beautiful, delicious life. And if is fun , we want to learn. We want to explore ourselves and the universe. There I go again. I am a teacher and biologist. I love to teach lecture and talk.
I am a biologist, in my early forties, very happily married to a lovely, gentle, loving and a very strong woman and I love to talk and tell stories. Now love, honor, knowledge and integrity. These are over buzz words, and have been for me past 100 years, and they will be for moment 100 years or so at least. I am part of a twenty member team. Most of member move intelligent and smarter man me. But I am the funniest guy of the lot. Twenty people and we are going to embark on the most astonishing, exciting, fantastic and a most profound journey ever under taken by human beings.
There are naturalists, physicist, research need on this. We have found a planet, in the goldilocks zone about 57 light years away. It is absolutely perfect for human colonization. The weather is perfect, the geography quite diverse and breathtaking. Light years are really not a problem anymore, since we have discovered warm holes and know how to use them. We can travel a thousand times faster than light. There are some technical details which I might like to explain but you won’t really understand theme, and any way I really don’t have much time. Perhaps later.
We searched for nearly five decades to find a planet as close to our home planet. Although planets are quite abundant, but finding the perfect one is extremely rare. We analyzed over 5000 planets to find this one. But there are huge challenges. You see the problem is that, although this planet which we have named hypatia has abundant oxygen, is trapped in compounds. You can say that weather is a problem, it is not hospitable for human beings us.
There are nearly a thousand as so people already residing there in bases, working out all the small but equally important tasks. They are laying other groundwork for us. Once we arrive our job is to kick start the project on the planet. Then we all leave the surface of the planet and there keep the planet under observations for a thousand years or so. Our job is to create a very hospitable environment on the planet and then seed it. Yes we are going to literally breathe life into the planet. We are the planeteers. The first ones, probably. But I seriously doubt it considering the enormous evidence that we have unearthed.. And we will be leaving our home planet for the next 5 years on our skip Sophia.
Our plan is to seed the planet with seeds all across the planet wherever there is waste available. The plants then would absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen into the atmosphere. We have figured out what is going to happen and how quite precisely at least as good as we human can hope. According to our calculations keeping in mind that we have technology and more importantly we understand the human brain very well, the plants and microbes that we are going to use have very high metabolic rates. That they would be producing to the extreme in consuming carbon dioxide and releasing that more most wonderful of gases oxygen.
Given the temperatures present on the planet coupled with a strong magnetosphere and given enough quantity of microbes and high growth plants and plenty of water we have absolutely no doubt that there would be significance in atmospheric oxygen very rapidly. We would then slowly introduce more and more species gradually or rapidly till the outlive atmosphere comes up to such a level that animal life can exist. No doubt it is a very long term project, but you have to understand that we measure human lifespan in centuries how and not decades which is in your case. If truly anyone can understand our undertaking it would be Sophia and Christos.
I would not be going to far in thinking that they would be homely overjoyed and proud in their children’s progress. Oh yes they especially she would be more proud. Because she has homes us in her in her womb. She would be crying and weeping fear of joy and happiness and we humans would be having a bountiful harvest back on earth.
Oh how beautiful life truly is. It is a great privilege and maybe after this when we start panspermiating other planets, we would perhaps meet other races of peoples across over galaxies, who are also engaged in profoundly fun explorations. We would maybe one day start learning from each other, and maybe we have friendly matches in creating the most beautiful, rich, diverse planets teeming with myriads of life forms. And maybe the winning team would be allocated a regional of our galaxy which is teeming with potentially has habitable.
–END–
