Spin (Spin, #1)

by Robert Charles Wilson

I had once asked Jason why this was. He said, “Consider what we’re asking them to believe. We’re talking about, globally, a population with an almost pre-Newtonian grasp of astronomy. How much do you really need to know about the moon and the stars when your life consists of scrounging enough biomass to feed yourself and your family? To say anything meaningful about the Spin to those people you have to start a long way back. The Earth, you have to tell them, is a few billion years old, to begin with. Let them wrestle with the concept of ‘a billion years,’ maybe for the first time. It’s a lot to swallow, especially if you’ve been educated in a Moslem theocracy, an animist village, or a public school in the Bible Belt. Then tell them the Earth isn’t changeless, that there was an era longer than our own when the oceans were steam and the air was poison. Tell them how living things arose spontaneously and evolved sporadically for three billion years before they produced the first arguably human being. Then talk about the sun, how the sun isn’t permanent either but started out as a contracting cloud of gas and dust and will one day, some few more billion years from now, expand and swallow the Earth and eventually blow off its own outer layers and shrink to a nugget of superdense matter. Cosmology 101, right? You picked it up from all those paperbacks you used to