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"Wow," Vicki said dryly. "Now I really feel better."
Kronia's scientists had reached the conclusion that the conventional picture
of a stable and orderly Solar System repeating its motions like clockwork
since the time of its formation, was simply put wrong. Cataclysmic encounters
between planetary and other bodies had, they maintained, occurred through into
recent historic times, and there was no reason to suppose that such events
would not continue. The Kronian leaders accepted this view and for years had
been exhorting Earth to put a greater investment of effort and resources into
spreading a significant human presence across the Solar System. For as long as
the human race remained concentrated in one place, they insisted, it was
vulnerable, literally, to extinction. In fact, they claimed it had almost
happened in the not very distant past.
But Earth's institutions remained wedded to their dogma of gradualism, which
maintained that only the processes observed today had operated in the past,
and, apart from temporary local fluctuations, had done so at the same rates.
Extrapolating backward the currently measured rates of such processes as
sedimentation and erosion had yielded the immense ages assigned to geological
formations, which had come to be regarded as unquestionable.
In the main, Earth's policymakers had rejected the Kronian urgings in
preference for the orthodox view. With the military no longer able to press as
compelling a case as in the days of superpower rivalry, and other lobbies
jostling for a share of largesse at the federal trough, expansion of the space
sciences and industries had not been a high government priority. For the
private sector, ventures much beyond the Moon were too massively demanding in
outlay and too risky to interest the major institutional investors, who looked
to areas of secure returns such as launch systems for satellites and limited
scientific payloads which conventional technologies served adequately.
Comfort and security had become the world's foremost concerns. Only fringe
outfits like Amspace, and a few visionaries who were prepared to back them,
had continued pushing for a general
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calling for the enterprise that advanced, long-range, spacegoing capability
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would open up: colonization. Hence, organizations like
Amspace had found themselves natural allies of the Kronians, communicating and
cooperating for the same end: the Kronians to impart a cultural imperative;
the Keenes of the world and the Joyces, spending weeks on end in a cramped,
orbiting boiler room; the Wallys, hoping to create a better world for their
grandchildren pursuing lifelong dreams.
Then Athena happened and surely, they had all believed, that would change
everything. But astoundingly, it had changed things hardly at all. Of course,
the early months had seen a media orgy of sensational pictures of the
planetoid and a deformed Jupiter gradually regaining its shape; hurried
explanations by scientists; and endless lurid articles and documentaries that
the public eventually grew weary of. Sales of amateur telescopes, astronomy
books, and videos soared;
related college classes reported record enrollments; catastrophism saw a
dramatic revival. And yes, the scientific community conceded, with some
hemming and hawing and smoothing of ruffled plumage, that their theories
needed revising and then clamored for more funding to support the new research
that needed to be done. But the kind of research they had in mind involved
bigger and more lavishly equipped departments, computers that even the
particle physicists would envy, more chairmanships and committees, and
appointments to oversee unmanned missions to various parts of the Solar
System. The mainline contractors got in their bids where they saw opportunity,
but practically without exception the equipment and techniques envisaged were
all safe, proven, and more of the same. Nothing they talked about anticipated
any meaningful move toward getting people in significant numbers out there
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