DDSCB:2020 To Boldly Go
April 25, 2101: My name's Jim Kirk. I get teased a lot about that. Oh well. I'm about to be a passenger on a historic voyage. We're kind of experimental and there are no guarantees. More about that as we go along.
Eight years ago there was a pretty incredible breakthrough in physics. I'm not a physicist so I won't even try to explain in too much detail. This is the layman's version.
Einstein said space was flat, and that stars, planets, and everything else kind of depressed the flatness by a certain amount, depending upon the given body's mass.
Later physicists confirmed that but so what? It wasn't much use, interesting as it was.
Well Tyson Meltor found a use. He and his colleagues found a way to... get behind(?) the flatness. Turned out, according to their theory, that once you got behind the flatness weird things happened, especially related to the distances between bodies. They got closer to each other for some reason. Again, this is the layman's version of something I don't really understand.
So if you could get a ship back there you might actually be able to travel to other stars and explore the planets around them. Pretty big deal!
Now the speed of light still holds. No one has found a way to get to more than about .1 light speed, which translates to about 67 million miles an hour. That's pretty fast, but given the enormous distances between stars it would still take a while to get to the nearest stars, let alone those far away. BUT remember... once you get behind the flatness, those distances aren't nearly as great.
So Meltor and some others actually found a way to get behind the flatness. That was four and a half years ago. They've been doing all sorts of experiments since.
They sent ships with robots, ship[s with robots and various plants and animals... But they haven't sent a ship with people... until now.
The WSS Meltor will take off in three days with 600 people on board. Its mission is twofold: first, to report back everything they discover, experience, feel...
Second, to find a planet that humans can live on and to settle it.
The first part will simply be a more sophisticated report than the robots have given. We know we can get messages back to Earth from beneath the "blanket" so to speak. The robotic ships did that successfully on every voyage. But humans will be able to send different kinds of messages.
The second part is more speculative. During the last century or so we've learned a great deal about planets orbiting other stars, but there are things the most powerful telescopes and other devices just couldn't tell us. We will be able to report on all of that.
It's all pretty exciting, and it's being planned as a one way trip. All 600 volunteers understand that they will be settlers, who almost certainly will never return to Earth.
There's going to be a lot more to tell and I'll do my best to tell it all as we move along, but that's enough for now. In my next journal entry I want to talk about college basketball and my role in it, past, present, and hopefully future.