E33 The Reckoning

Roald Dahl stood before me, a shimmering vision, just how I remembered he looked, without the shimmering. ‘What do you think my Railway Safety story has to do, indirectly, with yours?’ He sounded quite polite.

‘I shall tell you, but first I have my story, which is not finished. I shall talk, later, also about Mathilda.’

‘I remember my daughter Tessa went to school with your wife. Is that it?’

‘No.’

The human shambles continued across Earth. To put that into some kind of context, without the human context, I am spinning and hurtling wildly around the Sun, at a speed of 67,000 miles per hour (108,000km/h). Various possible, unpleasant fates await our small planetary home. I can see the many manifestations of the shambles via web links to the world, upon which I have never relied entirely. But I was starting to think that the ‘madness’, as I call it, was now really getting out of control. At a speed of 30 kilometres a second, that was madness enough. Like travelling from where I live to Plymouth in one second! What would happen if we slowed down a little? (my apologies, I have these kind of thoughts all the time) Simple, we would move closer to the Sun. All about angular velocity. It would be hotter …

Is truth overrated? This question appeared in my mind. Not from me. From somewhere. It repeated, like it was looped. There was a voice that went with it but it did not sound real. A little like the electronic voice of Stephen Hawking. Actually the more I ‘heard’ it the more it did sound like that, Stephen Hawking in my head. He had been dead over four years. I had read his first book, A brief history of time, over 30 years ago. Hawking questioned everything, in genuine Cartesian fashion. For him truth is elusive, possibly overrated, maybe unknowable in any precise sense, a lost cause? He wrote a book, just before he died, that was never published. It was titled, The brief and, sadly for them, prematurely curtailed history of the human race. I wonder why?

Neil deGrasse Tyson claims there are three kinds of truth. Objective, established by evidence, Personal, by faith and Political, by incessant repetition. The last two are generally falsities, repeated often enough for people to think they are true. The COVID pandemic is a good example. Religion is another. I thought this was a clear case of semantics and just playing with words. deGrasse’s comments were a little ‘tongue in cheek’. Genuine truth should be absolute. But truth can be harmful. Sometimes a lie or a little untruth is kinder, is it not? A dilemma.

I wondered what Merlin or Morgan knew about astronomical matters. I asked the question in relation to what are called Near-Earth Objects, a subject of constant interest to me as an astronomer but now more so, with the approach of a fairly large NEO, and I knew there had recently been a number of near misses.

Near-Earth Objects?(NEO) can be asteroids, comets and large meteoroids whose orbit intersects?Earth's?orbit and which may therefore pose a collision danger. This could be 'justice' delivered by the Universe, against homo fatuus. Many of the larger NEOs have been identified and are tracked but many smaller NEOs often remain undetected until they are quite close. There have been a number of these spotted in recent times, as observation techniques improve. If we talk of risk here, I would say that a collision is inevitable. The only question would be size and location. Even an NEO the size of a car falling on a major city could be like a nuclear explosion. With large NEOs, we know what happened 65 million years ago in Mexico. There is no reason why there could not be a repeat. Even the NEOs that are tracked and paths predicted can be changed unpredictably, by a gravitational interaction with the likes of Jupiter.?Then there are Solar Flares ...?Wow, all quite exciting?really! Much more interesting than COVID.

There was no immediate answer to my question, which has become the norm. I was patient. They had claimed to know about the future. If so what was the prospect? Another Mexico from 65 million years ago and you could forget all about truth. There were no humans at that time, but now, it would be the end. The end of the shambles. How silly it would all suddenly look.

‘How did you know?’ It was Morgan, speaking softly. I could not see her.

‘Know what?’

‘About the NEO.’ The NEO….?

This shocked me. I had certainly been thinking more about the topic of late. Maybe that was not ME thinking about it, perhaps my brain running on automatic, picking up something? ‘Am I right?’

‘Yes.’ There was a sadness about her, a futility.

‘How big?’ I, on the other hand, was suddenly like a kid with a new toy.

Back at NSA Headquarters, at Fort Meade in Maryland, there are about 20 people in the room, all men and all wearing suits and ties.?Nobody was smiling and there was no chitchat – just an eerie silence.?After a couple of minutes another person strode in purposefully, clearly the person in charge, also a man and also wearing a suit – nobody moved.

This person, who looked to have some authority, spoke, ‘gentlemen, we have less than 24 hours to consider the so-called ‘recommendations’.?Thus spoke the shadowy, unnamed, unknown person and we do not need to know his name, which might be something like Hiram B. Steinberger III – we shall call him that, with an ancestry traceable to the founders of the country (the USA, not the country stolen from earlier inhabitants), in places like Georgetown, now part of Washington DC.?What we do know is that whoever he is, he is also the grandson of President Lyndon B. Johnson on his mother’s side, LBJ.?He was often reminded of LBJ’s exploits and was a staunch admirer of his grandfather.

I recalled ‘all the way with LBJ’ – a term apparently dreamt up by the Australian Prime Minister of the time, Harold Holt.?Referring to Vietnam, and something about dominoes. That all went well – not.

‘Hiram B. Steinberger III’ continued in what he liked to think was his ‘serious' voice, ‘I would just like to remind everybody that, following the Soviet’s success in placing the first man into space, my grandfather on being advised of this fact, the bluff and grizzled Texan Senator that he was, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), who chaired the Special Committee on Space and Astronautics, waded in:

The Roman Empire controlled the World because it could build roads.?Later – when it moved to the sea – the British Empire was dominant because it had ships.?In the air age we were powerful because we had airplanes.?Now the communists have established a foothold in outer space …?They even put a man in space when the best we can do is a monkey.

He was not happy. Now we have some shadowy aliens trying to push us around because they have time travel and are mind readers.’

As he spoke these words, in an overtly hostile manner, a ‘screen’ appeared from nowhere at one end of the meeting room, the 20 ‘recommendations’ started scrolling slowly.?This was not something initiated by anybody in the room.?Silence enveloped the room, including Steinberger or whatever he was called.?The scrolling stopped at number nine:

We recommend that, following the close out of recommendation 8, there be a worldwide programme implemented to eliminate all military capabilities, with suitable penalties for failing to do so.

Meanwhile I took on board Athena’s suggestion, to ‘mingle’. I was not disappointed. Suddenly, there was Neil Armstrong, Carl Sagan, somebody who looked remarkably like René Descartes, then I saw the Professor who had run my Astronomy Masters Course at Swinburne University. ‘Hello, Alan, welcome’, she said,’ We are Cosmologists for peace.’ She was still ‘alive’.

Amazing. Everything was amazing …