Dear Colleagues

Illustration by Laura Freas

As you no doubt have heard by now, I quit.

Now, I’m sure most of you think old Erica Thompson is a prima-donna. (it’s true), especially since she got that little award. You probably think she’s just in a snit over a raise or something. Actually, this had been a long time coming, and it has almost nothing to do with money. In particular, I was offered a job a few weeks ago, one I would have snapped up in a minute when I was fresh out of school. I’ve sort of gotten used to my cozy lifestyle, though, and I was going to pass it up.

Until this morning.

I was up until two this morning working on a new proposal. Consequently, I overslept. That got me into a rush, and I came down the stairs a little too fast. Naturally, the motion detector at the bottom of the stairs interpreted that as a fall, and deployed the air-bag.

I knew instantly that I had to call the local rescue squad to let them know it was a false alarm. Since it would be against the law to call 911 for this purpose, I had to call the normal number. It was busy. By the time I got through, they had already dispatched an ambulance and rescue vehicle, which means I’m stuck with a five-hundred dollar fine.

I was mad at myself for being so careless, but I was inclined to chalk it up to experience and get on with the day. I headed into the kitchen for a container of fat-free, cholesterol-free, salt-free, high-fiber, toxin-screened, FDA-inspected. AMA-accepted, UL-listed, nutritionally labeled, high carbohydrate fuel for Homo sapiens. Blueberry flavored, my favorite. Then I stepped over to the utensil drawer for something to eat it with. I fumbled with the child-resistant catch, and opened it to find nothing in the drawer but spoons.

Of course, you say? What else would you have in a utensil drawer? Friends, I remember when we also used knives and forks to eat with. That’s right, we used to put four-pointed implements right into our mouths, back before the Insurance Institute for Culinary Safety managed to get them banned.

Anyway, I grabbed a spoon and my briefcase, resigned to eating breakfast in the car again, and headed out to the garage. I was grateful, for once, to just be able to tell the car my destination and have it handle the driving while I choked down the tub of mush and looked over the proposal in perfect, computer-controlled, NHTSA-mandated safety.

I reached the Institute with minutes to spare before presenting my proposal to the review committee. I caught myself running down the corridor, fortunately before any alarms took notice, and reached the conference room a few seconds before the appointed time.

Dr. Prunebottom—and yes, since I’m quitting I will call everyone by their accepted nicknames, and maybe someone will tell Prunie how he earned his—glanced at his watch. “By the hair on your chinny-chin-chin, for once, Dr. Thompson. What wild and mysterious rending of the laws of physics do you propose this time?

I passed out copies of my proposal. “I want to modify the Higgs field generator for a much smaller and more intense field. I think I can get the Supercollider’s collision cross-section up enough to have a significant chance of getting to within an order of magnitude or so of primordial density, at least on a sub-nucleonic scale.”

Dr. Pigwhistle was aghast. “After the havoc you caused last time?” She held up an invoice and shook it in my general direction. “We had to replace all the detectors in the collision chamber. And you want to go further?”

I nodded. “That’s right, I do. I think I’m on the verge of something really exciting.”

Dr. Ruth—see, Ruth, your nickname isn’t all that bad—glanced over the proposal. “Well, Erica, I see you’ve included a more… shall we say… robust? Yes, a more robust detector and field generation assembly. Substantially so. Ought to be capable of soaking up quite a blast, in fact. Now, Erica, I know you have a Nobel prize and I don’t, but the fact is that you either can’t or won’t explain why these reactions are so violent. From what I can tell, you expect a geometric increase in output from the last run.”

I shrugged. “Not immediately. The detector is over-built for the present proposal. I’m hoping, however, to demonstrate a radically new physics that will lead to advanced and extremely powerful propulsion systems.”

Prunebottom pursed his lips and puffed out his cheeks in that expression he thinks conveys disgust but which actually cracks us up. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with that wild-assed idea of yours that there is a form of energy faster than light, would it?”

I grimaced. One tiny little paper as an undergraduate, and your peers label you as a crackpot for life. “Let’s just say I think I’m on to something hot, but something which no responsible scientist would believe without convincing proof. I think I’ve done it already, but the detectors couldn’t take it so I lost my data.”

“Sounds to me,” Prunebottom snorted, “like you’re messing with the fabric of the Universe.”

I put my face in my hands and my elbows on the table. “Here we go again. The Trinity wager. What are the odds the first atomic bomb test will trigger a fusion reaction of the atmosphere and blow up the world? What are the odds that Erica Thompson, in approaching the conditions of the Big Bang, will snag a thread of reality that makes all of Being unravel. Guys, I thought we built the Supercollider to investigate that corner of physics.”

Pigwhistle wheezed a couple of times—my dear, you do it with every anxiety attack, which is how you earned the nickname. With a quavering voice, she offered this gem. “Please don’t repeat it outside this room, but I always felt we really built the Supercollider to keep high energy physicists off the street. Frankly, we’re already so far ahead of the technological capacity to exploit what we learned with the last generation of accelerators, I wonder how we can justify what we’re spending on this one.”

I picked my head up out of my hands. “Approve this proposal, and, if I’m right, I’ll justify it a thousand times over.”

“Justify, shmustify,” Prunebottom retorted. “We deal in pure science. But our esteemed bean-counting colleague here is right that there may be no big payoff other than knowledge. That being the case, it behooves us not to charge ahead carelessly with experiments which could be unimaginably dangerous. After all, the goal is knowledge. The way I look at it, by cautiously progressing one step at a time, waiting for peer review and confirmation, testing alternative hypotheses which would explain the data, in other words by doing good science, we should be able to reach Dr. Thompson’s goals in, say, twenty to thirty years.”

The others nodded agreement.

“OK, then,” Ruth said, pulling out her calendar, “I think we should convene a preliminary safety review board to examine the methodology used in the last test, and to propose a retro-design to back off Dr. Thompson’s parameters…”

I got up slowly and trudged out of the room, unable to watch as they castrated my proposal. I headed back to my office and spent an hour in a total funk. Finally, my head cleared and I began to examine the problem rationally.

The problem, as I now understand it, is that the whole damned country has gone to hell. And, I am ashamed to say, so have I. As individuals and as a society, we have become afraid to take risks. Each of us has come to believe that our own life is somehow important, and we’ve become so obsessed with protecting our self-important asses that we virtually eliminate any chance of accomplishing anything meaningful.

Remember the argument for eliminating forks? After a prime-time expose of the disgraceful cover-up by the utensil industry of the number of injuries a year attributable to forks, the safety officials came out with their usual line: “Every life is precious.” Mind you, other than prisoners sharpening fork handles into knives, I don’t think they actually came up with any deaths, but hey, the potential was there.

I suppose we should have seen this coming. When I was a kid, physical education classes meant playing ball, running, jumping, and all that. Today, it means fifteen minutes of low-impact aerobics plus a lecture on the importance of exercise. School sports programs were eliminated long ago due to the insurance and liability problems. (Funny thing is, I don’t remember very many kids dying of heart attacks when I was small but it is a growing problem today.) General aviation died long ago, killed by runaway liability claims and regulations designed to prevent any possibility of an accident ever happening. Most people didn’t mind, since most people were scared of little-bitty airplanes anyway. Then, using about the same logic, they eliminated human control of automobiles. That caused quite a squawk, but it passed, because certainly the risks far outweighed the dubious joy of using your own skill and judgment to get from one point to another.

When I was in college, some of my friends liked to climb sheer cliffs with nothing but their toes and fingertips to hang on with. I had other friends who not only went up in little-bitty airplanes, they jumped out of them, just for fun. There were people who jumped off bridges with big rubber shock cords tied to their ankles. I had a motorcycle for a while, and I loved riding through white-water rapids on a rubber raft. Try doing any of that today, and if you aren’t arrested for it, you will at least lose your insurance coverage.

Do you old-timers remember the Challenger disaster? We all knew spaceflight was dangerous. Then, suddenly, we knew it for real. Seven people died. Tragic, but, if you will excuse my saying so, big deal! Throughout history, in enterprises both great and small, people have died in much greater numbers. But this time, instead of pressing on with renewed determination to make their sacrifices meaningful, we paralyzed the space program with the attitude that we must never again have another accident because every human life is precious.

Folks, the more we believe that, the less true it becomes.

And I have been just as guilty of it as the next person.

Until now.

Let me tell you about that job offer I almost turned down. You are certainly aware of the pilot asteroid mining project timidly initiated ten years ago. The discovery of relatively abundant rare earths, particularly scandium, in certain asteroids, plus the unprecedented demand for those elements for such applications as high temperature superconductors, picoaccelerators, gamma-pumped electron cascades, and other engineered ceramic molecules, put a strong economic incentive behind the project. In fact, most economists believe that these materials are absolutely crucial for meeting Earth’s energy needs. A massive terrestrial mining effort sufficient to meet current demand would be environmentally unacceptable, even if the nimbies permitted it. It looks like we’ve finally found a good substitute for beaver pelts in space.

You did know this country was built on the beaver-pelt business, didn’t you? I read that somewhere when I was kid.

Of course, production is still low, in part because transportation is so slow. The piddly little electric rockets they presently use take too long to move too few supplies and people up, and refined rare earths back down. Fortunately, UNASA, not being the encumbered behemoth of its US counterpart, is acting more as a coordinating body for interested investors. Very interested investors. They think they’re going to get unspeakably rich, and don’t mind if a few poor souls have to stick their necks out to do it.

God bless their greedy little hearts.

Some years ago I was on a committee to develop concepts for a fusion-powered spacecraft. Based on a variation of a Higgs-field reactor design of mine, we came up with what we thought was a practical proposal. However, NASA is only interested in exploration, not exploitation, and the robots we were sending into deep space were patient types. So were the people who had job security monitoring the data for years and years. Quicker spacecraft were considered a threat, not a priority.

My, how things change when a gold rush is on. UNASA wants me to head a project to build a fleet of big, fast, fusion-powered freighters. Notice, I didn’t say they want me to head some management group in an office in Milwaukee. I mean they want me to actually go up there and make it happen. Friends, I would have killed for a job like this just a few years ago. But, until this morning, I was going to turn them down.

I’ve built myself a comfy life here. Safe, secure, predictable. I have prestige, money, and all the free chicken dinners I care to attend. Space is dangerous and the accommodations are spartan. The money would be great, but there is nothing up there to spend it on.

At this moment, quite literally, I wouldn’t pass this job up for the world. And I’m hiring, if you agree with me.

I’ll be honest with you about the ordeal you’ll be getting yourself into. The belt miners are shipping back only the rare earths. They have been producing and stockpiling the byproducts: enormous quantities of engineering materials too massive and low in value to transport back. We will be going where the materials are. There is some basic manufacturing capability there already, and we will be taking all the tools we can, but it will be a bit like setting out for the west with a crosscut saw, an axe, and a plow.

By the way, this is a one-way ticket: If you want to come back, or bring your family up, you have to build the ship to do it. That’s the employee incentive plan.

Unless you are a space nut like me, you may be amazed at what is available up there. The belt has about every non-volatile material you could want, if you don’t mind the materials being a little raw. The belt is a lot sparser than most people envision, but it is huge, and the amount of material, compared to minable materials in Earth’s crust, is staggering. There is a project underway to exploit comets for volatiles (mostly water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen compounds, etc.). The goal is self-sufficiency, to eliminate the enormous cost of launching supplies to the belt.

The trip out will take about two years. We will design our construction facility and prototype freighter on the way. It must be something we can build with minimal support from Earth, and it must be durable and repairable. I suspect we will also settle for something a lot simpler than anything a team on Earth would design. We will be licensed to copy any design on Earth, but we’ll have to build it ourselves. Consequently, we need people who are not only willing to get grease under their fingernails, we need people who can make their own grease.

No specialists need apply. We need almost all fields of expertise, and we won’t have nearly enough people for one of each. Initially, a few hundred of us will be doing work that NASA would probably use a few million to do. Everybody will become expert in whatever is needed. Oh, and no lawyers need apply. We’ll probably get three times as much done without them.

This will be a workaholic’s dream job. There is nothing to do but work, and an unending amount of it to do. At first, it will seem like we are constantly reinventing the wheel. Small tasks will be much more difficult than on Earth. Example: we will take tools for resharpening hacksaw blades.

On the other hand, you can have anything you want if you are willing to build it from raw materials. Just tell me how much asteroid steel you need, budget your time, and it is yours.

There probably won’t be much of it for a while, but most of your free time you will probably spend building and maintaining your habitat, growing food, inventing conveniences, and even running your own businesses. The belters have developed their own economy, based on a unit of currency called, of course, the “credit.” They buy and sell services, parts, equipment, food, entertainment, whatever.

All you need to run an economy is energy, raw materials, and human talent. In the belt, the third element is the one in short supply. If we attract the talent and enthusiasm I think we will, the progress will be phenomenal. I am tempted to say it will be unlike anything ever seen on Earth, but I’m not so sure.

Our work place will be modeled on the Skunk Works, the legendary facility that built the U-2, SR-71, and Aurora, and their magnificent successors. The philosophy there was to give talented, hard-working people responsibility for a particular task, the authority to get what they needed done, and autonomy to work unmolested. That facility managed to build, almost from scratch, aircraft that were twenty years or more ahead of anything else flying. They invented new technology to do it, they did it faster than anyone else thought possible, and they did it elegantly.

The pioneers with their saws and axes, and the engineers at the Skunk Works, are the sorts of people who made America great. The chunk of real estate they occupied had little to do with it. Today, most of the occupants of that patch of land are fat and timid. But there are still a few, in this country and around the world, of the kind of people who made “American” a label to be proud of. Space will be populated by them. At this moment, I can’t bear the thought of hanging around down here while something like that is going on. I’d like to think I am, after all, an American.

Consider, if you will, the Old World backers of New World exploration. They expected to acquire great riches—gold, beaver pelts, and so forth. They had no idea of the tremendous wealth they would produce. But, that wealth stayed, for the most part, in the New World. The New World was, itself, the thing of value. That is what is going on here. Earth thinks it will profit greatly from the scarceium we will ship back, but compared to what we will build, it might as well be material for high-fashion hats. The big difference is that no native populations or furry critters need to die for us to succeed.

Now consider your prospects if you remain here. You will be safe and comfortable, I suppose, but your opportunities will be rather limited. You will be competing with about ten billion people for a finite pool of land, air, water, sunlight, and other resources. It is a sum-zero game with an increasing number of players.

I’d like to continue my present line of research eventually. The review board may be right. Maybe this planet isn’t the right place for my experiments, and if they work, I’d have to take the technology into space to exploit it anyway. I’d like the chance to build some really hot rockets, and I don’t know that I would get the chance in my lifetime if I stay down here.

If you understand why I’m taking the job, and if you want to come along, call me at 555-7263 for an interview. I’ll be taking applications in room 201 of the Holiday Inn just down the road for the next week or so. Just remember, I’ve worked with most of you. I know which ones of you can wield a wrench and which ones are pure theoreticians. I know who thinks they’re too good to clean a toilet and who steps in to do whatever needs doing. And I know who has the talent and desire to do it all.

So, who wants to join me?

Sincerely,

Erica Thompson