Surviving a Mass-Extinction Event: The Technological and Psychological Challenges
by Mark Thomas (TE Mark)
Staff Writer
UNKNOWING THE PAST: TO MORE EASILY ACCEPT THE PRESENT
“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” (TS Eliot)
You wake from the dream and turn to the port to look out over the city. Rhea is already lit from the early shops and glowing from the cavern lights above. On the ledge, the dorm clock just turned to 05:00. It’s 6 September. Graduation day.
Wishing you could just embrace the excitement; the dream, more vivid than ever is gnawing at you. Forests, mountains, rivers slipping through valleys. And the sky, deep like blueberries.
Knowing you can’t go back in and pick up where you left off, you glance over at Jules who was up late pulling JPEGs from the buried archives making you another artsy display for your image library – pictures from the days before.
Before. A conversation that’s uncomfortable and quietly restricted.
Your feelings for Jules are stranger by the day. Both Gen 9s, you were genome-type selected for marriage before you were born. Typically, a good time to gain your consent about such things.
It’s weird picturing your life together. Her a tech in operations and you the science team’s rookie moving to the semi-private dorms. Privileges. Sperm and egg donors for the next Gen. A life of luxury in an underworld city where even the word was declared a mortal sin.
Vital rungs on a very long ladder to recovering our planet.
WHAT BECAME OF OUR FRAGILE WORLD: ABOVE AND UNKNOWN
“The Earth was small, light blue, and so touchingly alone, our home that must be defended like a holy relic.” (Alexei Leonov)
Image by StockCake
You roll over and look at your wall tablet – still running through pics of the surface, (Jules’ Christmas instalment) before the mother of all Gamma Ray Bursts from a pair of merging neutron stars 6-thousand light years away vapourised Earth’s ozone layer - sending only a lucky few into underground colonies.
Like this one. Rhea. Now called the City of Light and home to 6,240. Always, 6,240. With only a few besides you even curious about what’s up there after 273 years.
But today, as Rhea’s junior astrophysicist, you get to climb into an environment suit and go topside to install a rotor on the new radio telescope the engineers built on the surface.
After today, you’ll be one of 46 who gets to board a gantry lift each morning – to spend your day outside maintaining the reactor, water and air filtration systems – waste, and in your case, evaluating the status of our planet.
Magnetic field strength. The reforming of the stratospheric ozone layer. Soil nutrients – air and water quality. Everything you’ll need to model and draw conclusions about the recovery of our burnt-out world.
You’ve studied and planned and dreamed of this day. And now it’s time to go to work.
THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THE DEFIANT: THOSE DETERMINED TO PERSIST
“One who is not afraid of the truth is truly free.” (Plato)
Image by StockCake
Getting dressed, though trying not to show it, you’re nervous as hell. Since you were a kid running the corridors and main boulevards of the Cavern – looking at the rocky vault in arcade – you’ve been the one imagining what’s up there now where billions once lived and thrived buzzing around in their luxury jets.
Somehow picturing it the way it was, like in the dream: lush and green with real air and wind. Rain and snow in the mountains.
273 years. Can a planet regrow an ozone layer in three centuries? Astrophysics, the subject to which you’ve dedicated yourself, says yes. But restoring the protective ozone is only part of it.
The burst did to Earth what Gamma Ray Bursts do – what the one 450 million years ago did that caused the Late Ordovician mass extinction – it sterilised the planet.
The sun’s UV-B radiation poured in unimpeded causing DNA damage to most life forms. Plants, animals, marine life – and over 7-billion people. The not-so-lucky who didn’t get selected for life in paradise.
Who got selected and who got to choose? That’s yet another of those conversations people anxiously avoid. Asking will typically get you: “Don’t ask questions you don’t really want the answers to.” And maybe they’re right.
But you? You are the defiant one who wonders and asks those tabu questions like: Were our ancestors rich? Connected? Part of some privileged aristocracy? And who decided we shouldn’t know this stuff?
It’s often a pain being you.
UNIVERSAL HAPPINESS: FOR PEACE AND CONFORMITY
“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.” (Aldous Huxley)
Image by StockCake
Following the Late Ordovician extinction, it took 5-million years for biodiversity to recover to pre-extinction levels. With that knowledge, it appears your subconscious with that recurring dream has bought into miracles.
And as hard as you try, you can’t seem to get the nighttime miracle out of your daytime head. That there’s something up there. And a reason for the secrecy beyond what they teach you in school.
That it’s better for your mental health not to know. That down here, away from the UV that sanitized us off the surface, the violent weather, diseases and predation; the enemy is depression.
And in those early days, especially during the first Gen, the people who remembered life out there, depression took its toll.
Having grown up here as one of the lucky ones; it’s hard for you to imagine them walking the same corridors and boulevards, sleeping in the same dorms. All the time knowing the madness that was going on outside.
Was it depression that claimed them or guilt? Did they have radio contact and watch them all dying on the news? Who were they, your ancestors? A privileged class of heartless bastards? Or just people who considered themselves luckier victims.
SOON FORGOTTEN: THE WORLD OF OUR ANCESTORS
“Living long-term or indefinitely underground though possible would present many challenges. Namely our ability to bury the knowledge of what lies above.” (Mark Thomas)
Image by StockCake
You got your ‘Congrats’ from everyone in your dorm before they set off for breakfast. Already suited but hanging back, Jules keeps glancing over as if examining you. A little smirk now and then telling you she grasps your excitement… and tension.
What will you see in an hour? She’ll ask you tonight. They’ll all want to hear it and expect you to break code and describe it for them. What’s happened up there over the last 273 years.
Code is code though. The strictest of the strict mandates in Rhea. Outside is reserved information for committee members, engineers and the science team.
And nobody breaks code.
“It’s going to be Mars.”
You shoot her a look. “You sound sure.”
“If I’m wrong, find us a little cottage on a lake. With a conservatory so I can have an herb garden. A pool would be nice… And a deck with a hot tub.”
You laugh on your way to the door. “That everything?”
“I’ll text you a list.”
“I’m on it.”
She turns in the corridor and sends a hand to your collar – begins mothering you. “Seriously though? Don’t get your hopes up. It is what it is. And besides…” She leans in and kisses you. “…we’re doing all right. And in a year, we’ll be doing better than all right.”
You nod and try to smile. And stand there thinking for a moment before heading off to engineering.
She’s not wrong. About life in Rhea. And you’re trying like Hell to accept the restriction of information. If it weren’t for your fascination with astrophysics and planetary sciences and what a gem our world must have been, and being gifted with a hacker girlfriend, you’d probably be like the others – happy, living the dream.
As Lao Tzu said: “Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are.” And things are great. Everyone is taken care of. No money. No bills. Crime is unknown. Disease and defects were edited out of us long ago through selective breeding and genetic engineering. There is nothing missing.
And yet, there’s something driving that dream – a feeling there’s something happening out there. That there’s more than this existence you’re told so often is perfect. And a reason you’re told so often.
It really is hard being you sometimes.
THE TRUTH: WHEN KNOWING IS BOTH DANGER AND DELIGHT
“Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress.” (Kofi Annan)
Image by StockCake
Walking the south concourse headed for engineering and the gantry lift to the surface, you stop at a café counter to grab a coffee. The laptop kids from the university own the tables, and ahead in the queue are the vertical farmers and a pair from Jules’ operations team.
Looking around, you have to wonder: why are they so content with this; and why are you so determined to get out? To see what’s up there.
This perfect life they keep selling us. And the critical secrecy – the locking away of our past. Why can’t we know things? Like how the first Gen got selected, and when they transitioned to artificial breeding. And who decides what we’re allowed to know.
The contentedness that looks like programmed complacency, seems weird. Like deliberate. To keep us all happy in this ideal, efficient world they built.
Another look around, and you notice how perfect we all are. Like some master race they bred underground – and the story about a gamma ray burst is just that. A story.
You start imagining this as a sci-fi novel about some elitist group of billionaires seeking genetic purity and superiority – choosing life in an enclosed biosphere where they’d breed some modified race of super humans that will one day venture out to assume their place - ascend to all leadership positions.
Conquer and rule.
It’s a great premise. But hard to imagine this was voluntary and out there the world is still chugging along with 7-billion people heading off to work and school – perhaps unaware of us and our little subterranean master race habitat.
Stepping ahead in the queue, you shoot one last glance out into the atrium – up at the cavern ceiling – with the lights full on now – thinking. In one hour, you’ll know. You’ll know what our world looks like, and the dream and anxiety and the constant questioning will finally get put to rest.
THE AFTERMATH OF EXTINCTION: PATHS TO SURVIVAL
“The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.” (Konstantin Tsiolkovsky)
Image by StockCake
“What do you know about the Anthropocene Extinction?”
At a desk in engineering with a doctor running diagnostics on your EV suit, you’re taken aback by the chief engineer’s questions. It’s like he’s prepping you for a history exam rather than a trip outside to install a rotor on a radio dish.
“2025. Gamma Ray Burst from a couple of neutron stars,” you answer while studying the revised specs of the antenna.
This is the 3rd question and not one has been about the installation or the terrain you’ll need to travel – or what you’re going to see. Hardly what you were expecting.
“Faced with mass extinction, what were their options?”
“Options, Sir?” He gives you a look while pulling into his suit. “I’m not sure I know what you mean. There weren’t many. Stay on the surface – wait for the food to run out. The bunkers. Or… head into space I guess.”
He nods for you to kill the drawing and get ready. “We’ll talk more on the way up.”
More uneasy now than you were, you leave the screen and turn to the doc who’s there with your EV ready to zip you in.
It’s strange, how you’ve dreamed of this day. And now readying to head for the gantry lift after a lifetime spent underground, that’s all you can think of is turning around. And saying you’ve changed your mind. But as Helen Keller once said: “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.”
And nothing at all is a bad alternative for you. If for no other reason; just to clear your mind and sleep normally.
OUR DESTINY: TO BECOME WORLD BUILDERS
“Somewhere, something is waiting to be known.” (Carl Sagan)
Image by StockCake
What the engineer had to share with you in the lift on the way to the surface should have given you a hint. The questions about the first Generation to head underground. The alternatives. The government and private space programs.
What they were facing; life fighting for survival on the surface or life in isolated, subsurface biospheres. Self-sufficient – nuclear powered. Water and air taken from surface ice – hydroponic vertical farming. All the comforts for indefinite habitability.
Somehow you were sure he was just prepping you for the disappointment. An Earth-scape that was still millions of years from recovery.
But now, crossing the Herschel Crater heading for the observatory and a part constructed base in the distance, you’re unable to speak. Aware now of the deception – and their justification for the secrecy. That they would keep this from you is unthinkable, but also not.
As you walk, you picture it. The obviousness, that 273 Earth years ago, facing a planet-scale extinction that would last millions of years, there would be more than one survival option. Underground bunkers? Of course, there would be those – with people clambering to get in.
But there would be others who already had their sights on outer space. Especially Mars. Not wishing to be in a subterranean habitat with their friends, families and neighbours above dying from starvation and all known cancers.
Terraforming Mars with its future inhabitants beneath a surface that would be millennia from habitability - and keeping them unaware that their part is simply to abet the continuance of our species on a world just beginning – the picture is suddenly clearing.
Looking at life that will be spent underground inside – would it be better for you to not even know there’s an outside? By Gen 20 they probably won’t.
Troubled with what you’ll share with Jules and the others when you get back tonight. Or tomorrow and every tomorrow until the end of your life, about a world they’ll never know, and another fading slowly into myth, you look sceptically ahead at the observatory wondering if you’re ready. Ready to join on - and become part of this.
“You ready to get to work?”
Confused, unsure, trying to manage your emotions, you nod politely to the engineer and head for the Herschel base. And your new life, finally with the answers. You’re a 9th generation Martian. With a part to play in building a world. But not for you.
by Mark Thomas (T. E. Mark)
StorytellingScience