History’s first human venture outside our star’s heliosphere was an utter catastrophe that ended in insanity. Mankind had sent probes outside our star system at the very birth of space travel, but humans hadn’t ventured much past the moons of Jupiter and Saturn; robots sufficed.
It didn’t seem like a catastrophe at first.
Mankind had tamed Mars and the asteroids and thought they could do anything, so when the technology reached the point that humans could visit other stars, they chose one over eight light years away.
It was a mistake they didn’t realize until after the crew’s return.
David Rayfield was one of the biologists on the trip. The first place he went on returning to Mars was the tavern he and his best buddy had drunk in before Dave left for Sirius.
Dave didn’t yet realize how serious Sirius had been. He walked in, and there his buddy was, tending bar and looking very, very old. Ancient.
“Joe? Is that you? You’re tending bar now? They’re letting you? I thought you’d be retired. How you doin’, you old rascal?”
Joe frowned. “Sorry, son, I must be getting old, do I know you? And it’s my bar now, can I get you a drink?”
“It’s Dave, man. Give me a Knolls lager, draft.”
“Sorry, Dave, we’re sold out of Knolls. We have some Guinness, that’s almost as good. But I’m sorry, I still don’t know who you are. Memory ain’t as good as it used to be.”
“Dave Rayfield, Joe. Of course it’s been a lot longer for you than me. Yeah, Guinness will do.”
“Dave Rayfield? I haven’t seen him since I was twenty. You his grandson?” he asked, pouring the beer.
“No, Joe, I’m Dave. Same Dave you knew back then.”
“But you’re so young!”
“It was the trip. I was in the science expedition to Grommler while I hear you were throwing rocks and ice at Mars from the asteroid belt and Saturn’s rings.”
“The terraforming is still going on here. I’m a little old for space hopping now. Hell, if I spent any more time traveling through space I’d live forever. But how the hell did you stay a damned kid?”
“Same way you’re not dead at a hundred fifty five. Time dilation. Most people die around age ninety five, but speed changes time. You’d be dead by now if you hadn’t been a spaceship captain. It’s been a hundred years since you’ve seen me, but it’s only been twenty years since I’ve seen you.”
“So where have you been for the last hundred years?”
“Twenty years to me. We went to Grommler.”
“Where’s that?”
Dave laughed. “It orbits Sirius, but it was the least serious place I’ve ever seen! Really weird place.”
“Weird how?”
“Every way weird goes. First off, being outside without an environment suit is really creepy. Second, there was no fauna at all, not even insects. Only flora, despite having more oxygen than Earth. The geologists said it was because of the carbon dioxide from volcanoes that there could even be any flora.
“But the weirdest was the plants. We were there for two years, and that’s in static time, and every single plant we tested had cannabinoids and other psychoactive components. There were a lot of brush fires because of the wind and lightning, so every time you went outside you got stoned. Hell, some of the guys practically lived outside!”
“Need another beer?”
Dave eyed his glass and downed it. “Yeah. Jesus, Joe, things sure changed in the last twenty years.”
“It’s been a hundred years since you left, Dave. It only seems like twenty to you,” he said as he filled Dave’s glass.
“I guess. But you know what, Joe? I’m going to clean up!”
“What do you mean?”
Dave pulled out an envelope. “These. Grommlerian tomato seeds. Grommlerian plants have a completely different ordering than our plants, it’s something different than DNA and we’re still trying to figure it out. But they make seeds like Earth plants.”
“Tomatoes?”
“Not really. They look like tomatoes but taste way different, but they taste really good. And they get you really stoned.”
“Well, okay, you found a reefer planet. When you find a beer planet, let me know.”
But it didn’t work out like Dave or anyone else had planned.
Sirius was an impressive combination of hubris and lack of imagination. An impressively pitiful lack of imagination.
Mars and most of the larger asteroids, at least those fit for mining, had been colonized centuries earlier, sporting domed cities for their mining operations. 16 Psyche, the “golden asteroid” was long gone, moved in chunks to Mars, mostly for its iron. Much of its gold and platinum were exported to Earth, where those metals were still valuable.
It had taken centuries, and was part of the reason for their attitude. They thought themselves invincible, with their nuclear fission powered ion ships. The ships were huge, larger than some Earthian skyscrapers. The electrical generators that powered the gigantic ion thrusters were three stories tall alone. The thrusters could get up to a third of Earth gravity for hours before the generators needed to cool.
There were dozens of interplanetary shippers and passenger transport companies. GOTS, the Green-Osbourne Transportation System, was the largest and best equipped outfit in space. They were also the best armed, and had even started a security force that often accompanied other shippers’ ships, at a price, over two centuries earlier. The pirates were still more than a nuisance; there is no more law in outer space than there was on the high seas in the eighteenth century, except for the laws on asteroids and planets. Pirates were dealt with by their victims’ governments.
GOTS had started equipping their space ships with fusion generators that more than quintupled the power. Although all of the power didn’t make it to the engines for various technical reasons, they would do better than an Earth gravity of thrust, and what’s more, could do it continuously. With the fission generators, after two hours one of the two generators would be shut down for an hour, then restarted and the other generator given a rest, and there was less than half of its thrust when one generator was shut down.
Einstein’s theory states that the faster an object travels, the slower the entropy, which is what time measures. It was proven at the beginning of space travel before robots had crawled across Mars, when NASA sent an atomic clock into Earth’s orbit. It had read exactly the same time as an identical atomic clock on Earth, and time did slow down on the orbiting clock; the two didn’t match on its return. It would have been a very big deal had Einstein been proven wrong.
Years after GOTS started using fusions, someone got the idea to visit neighboring stars, since at over a full Earth gravity of thrust, a ship could get you to nearby stars in a decade or less, “nearby” being a very relative term, as it takes years for light to reach us from the very nearest stars, they’re so far away.
A decade or less on the ship, that is. It probably wasn’t the wisest choice to pick a star that was two and a half parsecs away, but they decided to go to Sirius, as telescopy had shown the possibility of its having an inhabited planet, despite being a binary with a white dwarf.
They went to Sirius and came back with little trouble, considering the biggest trouble in any voyage was pirates. Pirates were mostly around Mars and in the asteroid belt, but there were surely dangers in the Oort cloud that luck alone possibly avoided for them, although in space there is an awful lot of space, even in the belt or the Oort.
They brought back some of its second planet Grommler’s seeds. They had taken all sorts of scientists, but the biologists were the ones to hit the jackpot. They found life, and an awful lot of it, all flora. There weren’t even insects, and its life wasn’t based on deoxyribonucleic acid like life on Earth, but a similar but surprisingly different ordering. They’re still being studied.
But the science that paid off second best from the trip was psychology, despite the fact that it was not supposed to be a required field of study and no psychologists had gone. Not until a year after the trip had ended did psychology become a required field, when the crew and scientists started going in-sane.
At first, the cause of their various mental illnesses was thought to be the plants and seeds that had been brought back, as all had psychoactive compounds, and the crew had all been exposed to its smoke while on the planet. Laws were passed making possession of grommlerian seeds a felony.
Psychologists with degrees in psychology set the amateur psychologists straight. They showed that although the fact that there was no animal life on the planet, which some blamed on Sirius being a binary white dwarf, insanity hadn’t caused all the animals to die, they had never evolved to begin with.
And “insane” wasn’t quite accurate, either. The world went insane, in the eyes of the people in the expedition. They had left Mars twenty years earlier, but about a century had passed on Mars when they were gone, while only a couple of decades passed for the people on the trip. They were the first travelers through time, but time travel from relativistic speeds only goes one way, forwards, like time always goes. Time is simply the measurement of entropy. Simply stated, the faster you go, the less entropy there is, for you.
To understand the perceived insanity of the world around them, imagine a person born in 1880 and then in 1900 when she was twenty, instantly transported forward a century. She had seen little or no change in her twenty year long life from 1880 to 1900. When she left in 1900, women had not yet gained the vote, and ladies never ventured into saloons; they were men-only. Women who drank did so secretly. Women never wore trousers, only skirts or dresses, with the hem lower than the ankle, and her blouse buttoned up to her neck. Slavery was still a living memory and the races were strictly segregated. Anyone not White was hated and completely subjugated, especially natives and Asians.
Only the biggest cities had plumbing. Most people had outhouses, and those with plumbing had the toilet in the basement by the coal room, because feces are even nastier than coal. Coal doesn’t even stink unless you set it on fire.
Automobiles had existed all her life, but she had never seen one, only heard of them. They were only toys for very rich men with no practical uses at all; a buggy or wagon was far cheaper, dependable, and comfortable, as well as much faster and could travel over almost any terrain for a lot longer; a horse refuels itself. Autos needed flat surfaces, couldn’t go much faster than walking speed, and most did so very noisily.
The sky had no contrails, ever. Not only were there no military jets or commercial jet airliners to leave contrails, the airplane itself wouldn’t be invented for three years.
There were no televisions or radios or power tools; electricity was brand new, rare, and not very useful. A com-puter was a person whose job was to do complex mathematics. In a handful of cities, like Chicago and New York, electricity was generated, and Edison’s new “light bulb” lit, but oil lamps were mostly used for lighting. Telegraphs and light bulbs were about the only uses for electricity, although she had read that electric engines were starting to be used in industry.
Then all of a sudden after a “twenty year” absence that is actually a century later, everything runs on electricity. The sky is crisscrossed with contrails, and would be for another decade until airliners had wingtips curled upwards, saving fuel and eliminating contrails, except from military and private jets that still had straight wingtips.
There were magic mirrors and crystal balls that show moving pictures with sound, and devices you could stick in a pocket that let you talk to someone in another state, or even on the other side of the world. There were no horses, stables, blacksmiths, whips, farriers, oil lamps, butter churns, coal furnaces, or anything at all the least bit familiar, only magical things and indoor outhouses and asphalt and this stuff they called “plastic” and concrete and unbelievably giant buildings. Women wore pants, and when they wore skirts, their skirts were above her knees, often way above. Worse, they even showed cleavage! Women not only visited taverns openly, and not only voted, but were senators, as were those whose an-cestors had been enslaved in her parents’ time.
It would be hard to understand people’s accents, as well as all of the new words that would enter the lexicon: Airplane, propeller, elevator, astronaut, laser, television, air bag, carburetor, satellite, refrigerator, robot, Freon, login, backup... as well as words whose meanings and spellings and pro-nunciations had changed in a century.
And everyone you ever knew was dead or over a hundred years old, and the ones still living had been children when you last saw them.
Is it any wonder the people in the expedition mostly developed various and serious mental illnesses? Quite a few committed suicide. Two were institutionalized. None ever led any kind of happy lives. No one ever thinks about how much society and technology can change in a single short century.
Nobody thought again about visiting alien stars. Not for another century.
Legend had it that humans had sent solar sails to Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to the sun, not long after the birth of space travel. The solar sails were lost, of course; a parsec is a long way. It takes four years for light to get to Centauri and it took the solar sails decades.
The first solar sails to actually make it there didn’t send back much data. Back then, you couldn’t generate much electricity with an object that small and light, and its cameras were limited to certain frequencies of light, as well. And radios were still pretty primitive, compared to modern radios. Plus, it wasn’t like they could actually land, or even maneuver.
But again, this was only legend. Much of history was lost when the supervolcano under the Yellowstone caldera exploded.
A century after the first humans walked on the moon, legend said that they sent a probe to our nearest star, but its data were lost to history when Earth became a dictatorship long after Yellowstone had exploded, and it is argued that it didn’t even happen. Much history had been lost then.
The nearest star to ours is Proxima Centauri, a very small star, and it has a planet in the habitable zone, Anglada-Escudé, named after the leader of the team who discovered it hundreds of years earlier. It’s a little larger than Earth and somewhat more massive, and has water, which is surprising so close to the star. That’s about all they know about it that they didn’t know hundreds of years ago; telescopes have an awful time trying to image something as tiny as the Earth from a parsec away.
The Earthians did send an automated ship full of instrumentation about fifty years earlier than the manned expedition to Proxima Centauri. It had been missing for twenty years, despite the fact that they actually recorded all its data as it traveled. Of course its radio’s transmission frequency stretched as it accelerated, transmission seemingly slowing down and the radio frequency dropping as the craft sped up. But then it just stopped transmitting, suddenly, in interstellar space where you theoretically shouldn’t even see much dust or even gas. Nothing in its data explained its loss. There was its normal telemetry and the signals simply stopped suddenly. It could have crashed, its radio could have malfunctioned, any-thing, there was no way to know.
The thing is, in the earliest days of space travel hundreds of years ago, they had huge amounts of trouble automating something as simple as landing a probe on Mars. That’s where we are now with trying to reach Anglada. Maybe not even that far.
So they decided they needed to send real brains. Electronic computers have always been complicated adding machines, even though you wouldn’t know it, and they just won’t cut it. A computer can only respond to what it’s been programmed to; “artificial intelligence” is just a programming trick that uses giant databases and pseudo-random numbers. We still can’t make a computer that actually thinks, but sentience is easy to fake.
The only way to send real brains was to send those brains inside of the people who owned them. That’s a problem of course. Time travel causes insanity, which isn’t any good for brains at all.