“G’day. I’m Keegan O’Mali. Welcome to the O’Mali report.” said the Australian reporter. “I’m here in the studio with Dr. Bart Kwan, head of the Celestial Survey Group. Thanks for coming.”
“It’s my pleasure Keegan.” said the other man. The two were both a good bit older than what someone a few centuries earlier would have assumed. Keegan was in his sixties and Bart was in his eighties. Both, however, looked like they were in their low thirties.
“So rumor has it that the CSG is planning on getting into space colonization.”
“That is essentially true. We are working with a group of colonists with a scientific interest to explore a star system that has been of great interest to science, but little interest to colonists.”
“And what can you tell us about this system?” the host asked.
“Well, the Trappist One star System was discovered over two hundred and fifty years ago. The sun is a small red dwarf, 40.66 light-years away, and all of the planets are likely tidally locked.”
“I can see why no one would want to colonize it. Too far away, weak sun with a strange spectrum, and the planets don’t even rotate, so they will always face the same way, which mostly rules out any kind of habitable world we are used to.”
“Yes, but the system also has several features which make it a very valuable source of scientific data. The first is that it has seven roughly earth sized planets, from just over the surface gravity of Earth to around six tenths the gravity of earth, making every one of them in the proper range for long term human habitation without the need for hyper-gravity or hypo-gravity treatment like on Mars. Several of these worlds are also in or near the habitable range of the star, so, while their year will be less than a week, they could have liquid water on their surface.”
“Which is extremely important for colonization.”
“And for life in general. Without liquid water you can’t really live on the surface, and, as far as we know, there’s no chance for life to exist there. The most you will have is a few extinct lifeforms from when there was water, like we found on Mars.”
“And your group is helping to fund a ship to there.”
“Exactly. Normally a ship to such a remote area would only be a survey ship. A group of scientists or a probe would be sent out at a good percentage of the speed of light and survey the system, sending the data back. We would then, if we found a good candidate, send a group of colony ships out there. We have currently sent probes or sleeper ships of scientists out to every star system within ten parsecs, over three hundred of them. But Trappist is about twelve and a half parsecs away, which means that there are still over two hundred star systems until it would normally get a probe. We think we can get a group of colonists there faster than a probe would get there under normal situations.”
“Why not just send your own probe? It would be cheaper and would arrive faster. Some of the newer probes can almost reach 60 thousand kps, about 20% of light speed. According to your press release, your colony ship will only travel at half of that.”
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“Yes, but you can’t underestimate the amount of science that can be done by having people on the scene. Think of it this way. How much data did the first Mars rovers get about the red planet? Now how much did the first colonists gather once they were there? They were the ones that discovered the first true fossilized life. They were the ones that surveyed the planet. It was only because we had a proper industry there which could build the devices needed, and the fact that we had intelligent people their to run the industries and instruct the robots and use the devices, that we had detailed knowledge of the planet. The same thing happened when we first sent probes to the Centauri System, versus when the colonists first arrived at Proxima and started surveying. And now we can do that before a second mission would be able to return to the Trappist system.”
“So the CSG is funding the colony purely for the scientific data?”
“We are providing half of their funding, five billion credits. The other half will be provided by themselves and their members. They plan on doubling that amount before setting off, as they estimate that will be the minimum amount of funding they will need to get in order to succeed in their mission. In exchange for our funding, they have agreed to conduct certain surveys of every world in the system and send us back the data.”
--
Gordan McDowell turned off the broadcast. He had been hoping to retire to some space colony for over a century, but never found one he really liked. Most were simply people looking for more land. Nothing was necessarily wrong with that, but it tended to result in large numbers of low income, low skilled people moving into cramped cities that they didn’t mind as they were an improvement, but which weren’t up to the minimum standards he would want. He wasn’t interested in being a rich executive in a penthouse in a some crowded city on another world.
This one, however, was a scientific group that were colonizing the system rather than just leaving once they had the data they wanted. That meant that they would have decent living standards and would tend to build cities that maximized productivity and creativity rather than population density. And to make things even better, the System was so far beyond the systems that the rest of humanity had settled or were interested in that they would probably have centuries to develop their own civilization before the first colonists arrived. He would need to look into them.
He, somewhat anachronistically, opened up the screen on his desk, revealing a keyboard. Few people on Earth still used keyboards and physical screens, much less mouses. But when he was younger, truly younger and not the fake youth of life extension technology, this was how computers functioned. Of course, now the computers were exponentially faster than they were at that time, but he was content with interfacing with them the old fashioned way rather than through VR or neural interface.
He stayed up all night looking at the colony’s proposal. Their mission statement, their colonial charter. All of it was available on their website. He even toured a version of their proposed ship in VR. Of course, it wasn’t what the ship would look like exactly. They still hadn’t purchased the ship, much less refit it to have all of the features they wanted. The basic concept was there, though. They would buy an old Hab cylinder, probably from a mining company, and add engines as well as all of the extra floors and equipment they would need to hold twenty thousand people and serve as a base from which they could expand once they were in another System.
He wasn’t really interested in being part of the crew on such a ship. He wanted to stop working and live off of his investments. Maybe he’d even start a second family. It had been over a century since his wife had left him, and, though he had had many lovers since, none of them were the kind of woman he wanted to start a family with. That was one good thing about life extension. Anyone could have kids no longer how old they were, so no one was rushed to start a family. Birth control was the norm, usually by disconnecting or removing the organs. They could, of course, be replaced by cloned organs at any time, so there was little risk to doing so. Only accidental pregnancy was really stopped by such a procedure. Any hormone problems it might cause could be compensated for easily, often through cybernetics.
In the part of their site that listed the different ways you could support the project, however, he found what he was looking for. When they left the Solar System they would leave behind half a billion credits in an account, earning interest. Forty years after their launch, that money would be used to purchase one of the probe ships that sent frozen scientists to other systems. They would then load all of their investors onboard, as well as all of the technical developments their group had gathered over the last forty years, and many of their members and would set off at around 11.5% the speed of light, arriving just ten years after the colony ship had. There the investors would receive properties roughly five times as valuable as what they donated to the group. For that reason, this ship would only be launched if they could raise at least a billion from private investors that wanted to go to the colony.
The next morning he contacted his accountant. With all of the money he had saved over his life, there was no reason not to invest a few tens of millions into the colony. If the funding didn’t work out, then he would only be out a little bit of money, but if it did he would have a fresh start on another world.