Читать книгу The Expanse and Philosophy - Группа авторов - Страница 33

Yet, once it becomes evident just how much is at stake, another point comes into view. It matters greatly, not only that humanity expands, but how quickly. On one self‐consciously conservative estimate, every second that we delay colonization of the Virgo Supercluster is “a loss of potential equal to about 10¹⁴ potential human lives.”⁶ That is one thousand times as many human lives as have existed until now.

The opening of the Ring System is even more important than it might seem. About 130 years prior to the beginning of the series, humanity had barely begun to colonize our solar system. The settlement on Mars was dependent for resources on Earth, a planet that was struggling to provide its own inhabitants with the wherewithal for survival. The invention of the Epstein drive changed this situation radically. By allowing humans to move much more quickly throughout the solar system, the inhabitants of both Earth and Mars could begin to extract and utilize the resources of the asteroid belt and the moons of the giant planets beyond. The Epstein drive’s importance is made clear by the fact that during the first four seasons, the only substantial flashback we see is to Solomon Epstein’s invention of the drive named after him (“Paradigm Shift”). Improvements in the Epstein drive continued for more than a century, and the results rightly impress. As the series begins, the construction of the LDSS Nauvoo, a generation ship with the most sophisticated Epstein drive ever created, the G4000, is close to completion. The G4000 is so powerful that eight of them can accelerate a ship that is 2 kilometers long and half a kilometer wide to over 10 percent of the speed of light. By way of contrast, the tallest building as of this writing, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, is not even half the size of the Nauvoo. Moreover, the fastest humans have managed to travel in space is 0.0037 percent of the speed of light, just 1/27th of the speed of this generation ship.

Even so, the Nauvoo would have taken about 100 years to reach its goal, the Tau Ceti system, a mere 12 light years away. The journey of the Nauvoo would have exposed its crew to a century’s worth of extrasolar risks, all of which it would have to endure without any possibility of help. Moreover, even if the inhabitants of the Nauvoo were lucky enough to avoid 100 years of extreme danger, Tau Ceti might not have a world habitable by human beings. The journey could easily have been a literal dead end for everyone involved. Now, consider the fact that the Milky Way’s diameter is between 170,000 and 200,000 light years. Hence, relying on Epstein drives to explore and colonize the galaxy would take hundreds of million—if not billions—of years and cost an unimaginable amount of future human lives.

In contrast, the Ring System presents humanity with over 1,300 portals to worlds that they know to be habitable. The system allows journeys that would take unnumbered generations millions or billions of years to be reduced to a matter of months. For example, a mundane research vessel like the Edward Israel traveled from Ceres Station, just beyond Mars, to the planet Ilus in a mere 18 months. Though we are not told how far Ilus is from our solar system, it could easily be tens of thousands of light years. Furthermore, though the Belter settlers on Ilus, such as Felicia, Jakob, and Lucia Mazur, were clearly on the bleeding edge of human expansion, the Ring System allowed them to remain connected with the rest of humanity. They arrived on Ilus with limited supplies, but they planned to extract lithium from the planet so that some of them could return through the ring to our solar system. Unlike the would‐be colonists on the Nauvoo, these settlers didn’t have to do the impossible and plan for every contingency. To be sure, the Belters faced great dangers on Ilus—and not only from Royal Charter Energy’s goons. But colonizing the rest of the Milky Way galaxy via the rings would be many orders of magnitude less risky for individual settlers than doing so while relying on Epstein drives. More importantly, it would also be many orders of magnitude faster.