"Space tourism really skyrocketed back then. Car ride platforms eventually began offering it, the Uberocket, from Uber, was one of them. One must imagine stratospheric prices. "Space is not for everyone", people often parroted, including those among the "not for everyone" portion of everyone. Governments around the world started to push for public space transportation, especially countries with exclaves, such as France (with French Guiana) and the UK (the Commonwealth).
– Next station, Kárman Line. Access to LEO, Geostationary Orbit and paid transfer to the Sidereal vicinity. Exit on no definite side. Don't forget your belongings.
On the one hand, it helped aviation, both commercial flights and private jets, to become less burdened. People, especially the rich, started to use billion-dollar-worth personal space shuttles instead of million-dollar-worth jets (often to exhibit themselves while getting exclusive paid paparazzi coverage, without actually travelling).
On the other hand, it's still a flight, and skies have never been so polluted before. All of a sudden, everyone just forgot about the Kessler Syndrome. Eventually, it began to happen, but the overall humanity's reaction was a unison and loud "Meh". The PA announcement had to be updated:
– Next station, Kárman Line Terminal Station. Access services to LEO, Geostationary Orbit and paid transfer to the Sidereal vicinity were temporarily interrupted by ISS debris, we're sorry about the inconvenience. Exit on the Earthmost side.
Yeah, Kessler syndrome barely became a "minor inconvenience" for humans. "It's as expected as the problem that Air Traffic Control exists to solve", specialists said. (Like a footnote, yes, they were so focused on apologizing about their incompetence that they forgot to mention about the passenger's belongings, and you guessed it: people did forget their belongings)
Then it came, Apophis. Said to never to directly collide with Earth, but Earth orbit became the humanity's extension of Earth. Its known orbit was wrong, even though Scientists could swear they calculated it right. It didn't really pose a risk to life on Earth (humans did), but it was a pretty major inconvenience for space dependency.
Apophis wasn't as dangerous as when it first arrived. However, humans had the brilliant idea of trying to alter its course using SpaceX Falcon 11, the reusable booster. They saw an opportunity to ditch those nuclear warheads while "saving humanity". Well, old movies like "Don't Look Up" couldn't be more prophetic: a gigantic Apophis became two smaller radioactive asteroids after the mission went wrong (they blamed Kessler Syndrome as they finally got to recognize it again, although opportunistically as they avoided blaming themselves), then humans insisted and got it wrong again, and now Apophis Alpha and Apophis Beta became countless yet still massive debris (to which there were no enough Greek letters to refer to them), together with Falcon 11 debris, with double the radiation. But, hey, humanity is finally free from those pesky nuclear warheads!
- Next station, Kárman Line Terminal Station. Passengers are required Level-5 protective gear with nuclear suit to board. Access to Kárman Line Terminal Station is temporarily closed, we're sorry about the inconvenience. Exit immediately.
You guessed it: billionaires and celebrities still enjoyed space. No surprise, as billionaires were impavid enough to dive towards the Titanic inside a small carbon fiber submarine controlled by a Bluetooth joystick, so a bunch of highly radioactive, fast-moving and out-of-control debris are no match for all their power and glory... at least in their heads."
this was a really cool read. i love how it's framed like a history textbook when it's things that very well could happen sometime in the future....
and that billionaire submarine accident was wild hahaha. i drew fanart of it back when we got news of it blowing up
this was a really cool read.
Thanks, glad you liked it!
i love how it's framed like a history textbook when it's things that very well could happen sometime in the future....
Exactly, and I often think on how, as humans and society, we're living historical moments which we aren't really able to perceive until it becomes a distant past in the future (to which our current generations probably won't be alive to read as a "21st Century Historybook", hoping that Homo Sapiens didn't go extinct in such a future and there were future historians alive to write such a historybook), just like the Romans couldn't really perceive their own societal downfall while they were living that very past of societal downfall. It's like trying to see the apparent movement of the celestial bodies across the sky while directly looking at them: we simply can't perceive it, it's too gradual and subtle to be noticed. In the end of the day, the grand scheme of cosmos is ineffably big, simultaneously present around us and within us, so we can't perceive it, even with our fancy technological apparata.
It kinda fascinates me how cosmic "forces" (especially the entropy), indifferent to our human existence, could become the sole witnesses and storytellers of our own downfall. It's akin to a blend between the narrators from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (especially the cinematographic version), "The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas" (the book from Machado de Assis) and "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream": no survivors to tell/write the story nor to hear/read it, yet the story is being narrated somehow. This ghostly and cosmically supernatural (edging on the Lovecraftian) yet humorous and satirical characteristics were the inspiration for the prosaic style I chose to the storytelling.
and that billionaire submarine accident was wild hahaha. i drew fanart of it back when we got news of it blowing up
Wild, indeed!
Those people, the "wealthy" and the "powerful", they have a very distorted sense of their own: they live an entire existence seeing themselves covered in an aura of divine immortal grandeur and insurmountable by "mortal peasants", just to find out, at their very last moments, that their "wealthy" is actually illusory possessions, which won't be accepted by Lady Death as a bribe, and they're nothing more than cosmic dust returning to the nothingness and emptiness from the cosmic abyss.