/sci/ - Science & Math

It was wider than the Earth and it could wrap itself around it, bits of relativistic sail falling through the atmosphere, tunneling down and forming wide walls of plasma radiating as much wattage as the laws of physics allowed, until they stalled and blew up.
Problem was, Mr. Bachmann didn't know that because of relativity, the trip had lasted 11 years of time-objective, but little more than three years of time-subjective from David's frame of reference. A simple-minded man like Michael Bachmann could not understand, also, that the last thing someone like David would do was go crazy. Crazy of joy and childish curiosity, sure, why not? But not crashing-a-ship-against-Earth kind of crazy.
Interstellar Vehicle Carl Sagan became a blueshifting star, for a few minutes, lightning up like a supernova in the infrared wavelengths and some visible-light ones. They thought the vibrations that had ran along the surface of the sail would shape the canister, the crew module, to death, and it would be over.
Charles Pellegrino's rocket, which he had envisioned would take the first men and women to the stars at little below the speed of light, became the weapon that destroyed such mission.

Are you familiar with the concept of Anacyclosis? Because this is what happened here, before Jan and the Commonality, before the Rediscovery of Earth.


The ship had been built by the Commonality, but there was no Commonality, no Brussels, and no people anywhere, anymore. Behind Mankind trailed an enourmous, and mostly forgotten, past.
It spiraled around Jupiter in its inward path as long, electrodynamic tethers drained power from the plasma belt to fuel the ship's memory. Inside, people rested in tanks of a fluid full of microbots constantly supplying the coma-inducing drugs, rebuilding the telomeres, and managing stem-cell reconstruction and cellular autophagy.
Thirty six thousand years had passed and the ship had not received the launch order from Earth. People remained in their tanks. Nothing changed, as the Interstellar Vehicle Icarus fluttered closer and closer to Jupiter with each orbit.
Back on Earth things had been different, before. During the old Century of Wonders things had happened so fast, waves after waves of products entered the market, systems were recycled in days or weeks.
The long-awaited Nanotechnology Revolution brought forth, not a molecular assembler per person, but a tightly-controlled research. Universities were barricaded. R&D labs guarded by the feds. If a molecular assembler left the lab, people could make copies of the machine and there were a lot of people who didn't want to lose their grip on society. Post-scarcity was their nightmare.