In 1982, I was still just a kid, so I don’t remember much of what the world was like BB - Before Bane - other than not liking school, having only a few friends I would rather spend my time with than my family, and riding my bicycle all over town. It was in the latter half of that year in which everything changed: Bane showed itself.
That day was the first day I became aware that President Reagan could address the country and the world on national TV, on all three channels, plus PBS. Up until then, I cared not a whit who was President, or even what one was, but to watch my parents glued to the TV, swallowing every word with greater and greater terror on their faces, something told my ultra-naive, self-absorbed little mind that there was going to be a test on this later, and I’d better pay attention.
Bane was a black hole, and it was coming straight for us. The only reason we could even see it was because it gobbled up some asteroid or something out in the Oort Cloud and produced a brilliant flash that could be seen in broad daylight. Nuclear defense systems initially thought it was an attack, but astronomers turned their telescopes to look and found something that could only be explained by a black hole.
There was no way to know how the world would end, only that it would, in about 30 years. There was no blowing it up. We had two chances: slim, and none.
’None’ was, of course, to try to make peace with God. You’d be surprised how violently some people tried to make peace in the name of God or whatever they worshipped.
’Slim’, on the other hand, was throwing everything we had into building rocket ships and casting our lot out among the stars. To be sure, there was no escape for the overwhelming majority of us - spacefaring was still in its infancy - but with $40 trillion dollars of world GDP per year to throw at the problem, surely the major hurdles of spacefaring could be solved well enough within the next 30 years to get SOMEONE to safety?
I cannot begin to tell you the enormity of the proposition. Space is filled with things trying to kill you - micrometeoroids, radiation, space itself. Everything is moving away from you, and there are no gas stations to stop and fill up your tank. It’s also very far apart - you’ll die of old age before you get clear of the nova the Sun will become, to say nothing of getting to the nearest stars. And there was no evidence there was even anything around other stars to get to - that kind of thing was still firmly in the realm of fantasy, right alongside dragons and ghosts and World Peace.
But President Reagan assured us that a way could be found, that the hurdles were all technological in nature, not natural limitations. Very hard; not impossible.
Riots and wars broke out, between those who wanted everyone to die and those who wanted some to live; between those who thought it was impossible and those who were willing to cling to even the slightest chance of salvation; between those who thought they should be allowed to escape at the expense of those they thought should not.
Our salvation came like a cure that is worse than the disease. New mechanisms had to be developed. Intense research had to be conducted to find our biological limitations. We needed to know how to get a ship to another star within a lifetime, how to make it 100% reliable, how to keep a few people alive and sane in that time, how to hibernate people, how to take genetic samples and then regrow full organisms from embryos, preserve our history, and how to protect all that from the rigors of interstellar space travel.
We had none of the things you take for granted now. Computers were huge and primative, and there was no planetary data network. We had no nuclear rockets. We had no unified culture. And whatever leisure time we had, it had to be spent pushing our boundaries. Our freedoms were sacrificed for the chance to send one of our children - in embryo form - on one of the ships as the only payment for our suffering.
With 5 years left before the deadline, with Bane passing inside the orbital distance of Neptune, the first escape ships started rolling off the assembly lines. Those ships carried a handful of live crew and millions of Human and animal embryos and plant seeds, all of Human knowledge, and a few tools that would hopefully make it possible to start a colony on a planet.
I was not supposed to be among those who escaped. I was supposed to die with my family and friends, at my home, such as it was. But fate intervened, and I was taken aboard one of the escape ships, in hibernation. That is why I’m here to tell you this:
We’ve come back from the brink of extinction. We’ve now discovered easy means of rapid interplanetary and interstellar travel. We’ve discovered our kin scraping by on other worlds, or who couldn’t make it, or who are still in flight to their destination. Why a re we still killing each other for tablescraps when all we have to do is get along together and respect other people the way we want to be respected? We managed it once; let’s not wait until we’re on the brink again to make it who we are.
--- Myron Burns, speech before the Conference of Empires