longer.blue

So, I'm testing out "LongerBlue" which is supposedly usable on BlueSky. This is the prologue for my next book, "The Swiss Experiment". "Prologue: “Do not swear by the moon, for she changes constantly. then your love would also change.” ― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet “For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads, ‘We came in peace for all Mankind.’ As the United States was dropping seven and a half megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock.” ― Carl Sagan At first, Earth was alone in its orbit. Oh, sure, there were lots of collisions with asteroids and even the occasional comet. These were mere sand grains on a mountain, in comparison to its size in the beginning. It swung about, silent, implacable, moving according to the unchangeable laws discovered by one of its later inhabitants. New, fresh from the formation of the system around it only a brief hundred million years or so before, it was a barren, lifeless, crusted ball of cooling down rock hurtling through space at over fifty thousand miles an hour, swallowing up anything in its path. Until Theia appeared. Mandated to slide along its own path by the same laws that governed how the planet moved in orbit around its early Sun, it held close to the same orbit as the early Earth but near the Lagrange point, farther along the same path, like one jogger keeping steady pace in front of another on the same racetrack. But the race was due to end. Jupiter’s enormous influence, as well as that of the closer Venus, began to make the smaller planet wobble slightly in its orbit. Nothing immediate. Nothing urgent. Nothing dramatic. And nothing stoppable. Closer Theia came, slow in comparison to the larger planet. Formed of the same star debris but with a larger composite of water ice and other minerals, it wasn’t a brother to the planet, but more like a neighbor. A deadly one. At a relative snail’s pace of four kilometers per second, it approached the young Earth. As the two planets grew closer, their gravity began to affect each other even more. Earthquakes and tidal waves of first solid then molten rock began to appear on the surface of both planets, as they reached for each other. Then they hit. The mass of Theia plowed into the Earth, shattering it much as one egg is used to break another. Billions of tons of molten debris went spinning into space around the elongated glob that was once two separate planets. Spinning, churning, wobbling like a dumbbell made out of molten clay, it eventually began to separate. The process took thousands of years but slowly, surely, the Earth was reformed, larger than it had been before, because of the added mass of the lost Theia. What remained, was the new Moon, circling its mother planet. The Earth day then was only about four hours long, and the Moon was huge in the sky, hanging there only around thirty thousand kilometers above the surface of the Earth. Slowly, slowly, it began to recede. Taking some of the Earth’s momentum with it, and its own mass slowing down the Earth’s day by less than a millionth of a meter a day, locking itself and the Earth into a more stable orbit. Soon, in geological deep time, life appeared on the once barren planet. Bolstered by liquid water, a precious substance that was nowhere else in the Solar System at that time, life began to flourish. Microbial at first, then larger and larger forms, variating, branching out, flora and fauna, sea, then land, then the skies above both, life flourished on. Eventually some of those life forms landed on the once-sister planet, now the satellite of its former sibling. They raised a flag, then left it alone. For decades. Till they realized that there were treasures there. Minerals, materials, wealth as they deemed it, beyond measure. And the fight for domination, ever the base existence of life since the planet formed, began anew on the Moon. Eventually that seemed settled, too. An uneasy but long-lasting equilibrium held sway upon the Moon. Till Tuesday, October 27th, 2099."