Fine Structure

by qntm

In the early 21st century, very shortly after memory surgery first became practical but before it became cheap, two hundred and fifty people paid to have their mind-states stored alongside the battery of conventional scientific instruments on the TRIDENT space probe. TRIDENT was sent to observe Neptune and ultimately land on its moon Nereid. It would continue transmitting data until its radiothermal generator ran out, half a century later, and then lie dormant until it was destroyed by an asteroid, most likely billions of years later still. Mitchell Calrus was one of those people. And so, thousands of years later, Anne Poole went to Science City, set herself up as a God and created Empyreanism, the Religion Of Space, in which the sky and planets were Heaven, which humanity had to reach and visit in person in order to obtain salvation. At the expense of all other scientific and social progress, aerospace engineering and astronomy and their related disciplines became the only important undertakings in the world. "Go into space. God says you must. Nothing else matters." The first manned space launches happened within two hundred years. The Moon was reached ten years later and Mars twenty years after that-- most of that time being transit time.