Rich Man's Sky by Wil McCarthy

Author:Wil McCarthy [McCarthy, Wil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781982125295
Google: _wCazQEACAAJ
Amazon: 1982125292
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2021-04-05T23:00:00+00:00

5.2

15 April

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Mars Today

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#Marsnow #takeme #iwanttogo

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GLASS: We’re here today with Dan Beseman, founder and CEO of both Enterprise City and The Tunneling Corporation, and the single greatest force behind space colonization in our time.

BESEMAN: Whoa! I don’t know about that.

GLASS: False modesty is uncalled for, Dan. Our audience knows exactly who you are and what you’ve been up to.

BESEMAN: They also know we’re not the only game in town, Howard. Let’s not dumb this down. Now, you put the word “Mars” in there and absolutely, we’re the clear leader.

GLASS: Who else is even in the game? Mars, I mean.

BESEMAN: Well, the Russian and Chinese governments, obviously, although they’re five to seven years behind us, at best. The U.S. government is no longer on that list, though. You may have heard: as of last month, NASA has officially subsumed its Mars colonization efforts into ours. This vastly decreases their budget, which was a primary motivation for them, but it also vastly increases ours, with the only stipulation being that the U.S. government gets to select two of the male colonists, and two of the females, with no input from Enterprise City, Incorporated.

GLASS: Which you’ve agreed to.

BESEMAN: Which we’ve agreed to, yes. On a per-person basis, these four people would be the highest-sponsored candidates in the whole expedition, by at least a factor of five, and we also expect them to be among the most qualified. Since literally anyone can buy a berth in the colony, it’s mainly a matter of definitions; the U.S. government has bought four seats that simply won’t be outbid. Any government could do the same, and in fact at least six of our candidates include national governments among their key sponsors. So the U.S. offer makes sense for us on basically every level. We’d have to be crazy to turn it down, and as NASA itself has reaffirmed, we’re not crazy. We’re very serious about putting a hundred colonists on Mars within the next five years, and we’re going about it very systematically, trying to head off literally every problem the human mind can anticipate.

GLASS: Such as?

BESEMAN: Well, for example, we’ve got provisions for up to half of the colonists to chicken out after six months on planet. We hope nowhere near that number take us up on it, but I can virtually guarantee that return flight will not go back empty, either. So it could be anywhere from, say, five people to fifty. The fact is, we simply don’t know. We don’t have any way to know, because nobody’s ever done this before.

GLASS: And what if more than half the people want to go back, and your return ship can’t hold them all?

BESEMAN: In that unpleasant scenario, we can put those excess people into hibernation on the ground for six months, until the next resupply mission brings another lander. They won’t experience the passage of time, and their resource utilization will be less than a fifth what it would be if they were awake.

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