Apollonius
By Bob Kirchman
Copyright © 2017, The Kirchman Studio, all rights reserved
Introduction: A Bit More Reckless Engineering
The establishment of the Alaska Republic in the mid-Twenty-first Century opened up a time of new growth and prosperity for mankind. Tundra farms, biospheres and determination tamed the world's Northernmost frontiers and created homes for millions. Rupert Zimmerman had been one of the initial visionaries but his daughter Elizabeth, his son-in-law Martin and his granddaughter would go even further. The Summer sun never set on the gleaming tower taking shape on Cape Lisbon and crews were working round the clock to complete the gigantic linear accelerator launch complex... a bridge, as it were, to other worlds. On drawing screenpads in Wales, the schematics for the Great Northern, a space ship of epic proportions were being developed. Since the days of Jules Verne, people dreamed of traveling into space and exploring her riches. The American space program set men on the moon in 1969 but there was no economic reason to go further. Great Northern would be built slowly, and the completed ship would be able to make the nine month long journey to the orbit of Mars. There the technology developed to tame the Earth's North; greenhouses and biospheres, would be tested as a means of beginning to terraform the red planet. There were always those thinkers who felt that mankind needed to extend their presence to other worlds to assure survival. Though Zimmerman felt the survival of mankind was in the hands of Someone much higher, he welcomed the investment of such people in the space program.
Indeed; Rupert saw it more as the same need he had first identified in his seven month old granddaughter... the need to go further. The need to move forward! He noticed that the girl was fussy as an infant, but as she learned to push herself up, to roll, and eventually scoot along the floor, she became quite content in her quest for adventure! Humankind seemed created with an almost insatiable need to reach out and that was reason enough for Rupert Zimmerman.
(to be continued)
Construction of the Great Northern.
Terraforming Mars
National Geographic
For some time there has been a fascination with the idea of colonizing Mars.
In 1952, Wernher von Braun wrote a book called "Project Mars" [1.] which imagined that human colonists on Mars would be led by a person called "Elon." Starting with A Princess of Mars [2.] in 1917, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote eleven novels that portrayed an arid world he called Barsoom made habitable by an “atmosphere factory” (these books were the basis for the recent Disney movie John Carter). The stories in Ray Bradbury’s 1950 collection The Martian Chronicles [3.] were set on a desert planet crisscrossed with canals built by an alien civilization to distribute water from the polar caps. Arthur C. Clarke’s 1952 novel The Sands of Mars [4.] also presents a transformation of the Red Planet to support human life. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars/Green Mars/Blue Mars trilogy was published in the period of 1992-1996. [5.]
