Imagine This: The Short Space Commute
- Sean Bela
- Feb 20, 2017
- 5 min read
On one of my recent trips, I was able to visit a few people and ask them about life in the year 2417. My first interview was with a middle-aged woman from Brazil named Martina. This is her story.
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NAME:
Martina-6465217
AGE:
40
HOMETOWN:
Sao Paulo, Brazil
EDUCATION:
Bachelor of Ethical Studies at the University of São Paulo
Masters of Ethics at Princeton University – Brazil
Doctors of Ethics at University College London
OCCUPATION:
Gifted Student Supervisor (16 years)
PLACE OF WORK:
Andean Learning Academy, Mars; Sector 147
2:00 AM/ET
I wake up to a vegetable shake at 2 Am in the morning, Earth time. The shake lasts the whole day. I’m on a strict diet because I’m considered obese at 6 feet and 150 pounds. I am required to exercise 1 hour a day. The doctor says that it will increase my life expectancy to 168 years if I stay on this regimen.
I take an electronic shower for about fifteen minutes. After this relaxing muscle-stimulating shower, I head to the São Paulo Botanical Garden. It’s on 6,000 acres of former farmland. While there, I visit my sponsored animal; he’s a lion named Jacob. After about thirty minutes talking to Jacob through my digital interface, I give him a treat and head to one of the three Pickup Centers in my village where I take an Air Train to a Space Depot.
The only major thing that’s provided on Earth are emergency medical services, which are administered at home to stabilize you for your 45-minute trip to a Martian Medical Center. People who are under 21 without jobs are required to go to school 5 hours a day. Bachelor’s degrees are required for all entry level work. And it takes about 6 years to finish your first degree. Most students finish around the time I did, at 21.
3:15 AM/ET
Earth has 16 billion people, in 15,000 villages, each with about 1 million population quotas. The rest of the land is free space for people to roam and play; they’re zoos, national parks, animal spaces and gardens.
I live in Apollo Village in São Paulo, we have 2 million people in our tower and they’re generally very nice. I commute with about 4,000 of them, who are fellow school workers. We take the last Air Train to our local Depot. We commute to and from the planet aboard one of 50,000 (5,000-foot-long ships) that hold 20,000 people a piece. When there is too much traffic, it can be a nightmare, especially during rush hour.
From there, I get take the A-Line to the Space Elevator which gets my section there in 4 minutes. You have to take one of 50,000 space elevators to a spoke center and this is where you take your trip to the Hub which is 500,000 miles out in space. From the Hub, you board your ship to Mars.
We take the M-Line to the Deep Space Port and then have to transfer to another ship, which takes us to Mars, to another space elevator and then finally, I reach the top floor of my school via an Uber Dock. Disembarking is quick because all the sections of the ship are pre-boarded and assembled and then we’re ushered out quickly.
There’s over 5 billion people working on Mars. A third of the planet is a big business district and the two-thirds is nothing but industrial and agricultural space. Almost everybody I know works on Mars, all our food is grown there, manufacturing is done there and most of our services are provided from there. People must travel there to get even the most basic services.
Some people work even further out; like my husband Mike-7003691. He takes the Z-Line to the Alpha Centauri B system, where he is a Planetary Deconstruction Engineer. His team mines the resources of entire planets and brings them to other planets in the system for consumption.
The Andean Learning Academy is one of 6 specialty mod schools – meaning the students have been genetically modified to be excellent at one thing. My school specializes in ethical problem solving and industrial productivity. The lowest IQ score to gain entry is 141 and each year it gets more and more competitive. My children are working with a gene therapist to get an upgrade which will allow them to get admission to the school, but they will be competing with more than 4,000,000 students for 36,000 spaces.
5:00 AM/ET
I supervise 400 students in my class. They range in age from 6 to 15. The school day starts at 5 am Earth time, and finishes at 2 pm Earth time. I plan out their discussions and evaluate the tasks they’ve decided to do for the day. I have 50 assistants in my hall. My school is a small school with only 6,000 students.
All the actual learning is done through group discovery, I only guide them in the process. They have take-home assignments which challenge them with only one question, which is a productivity problem our society faces that day and they must solve it by the next day. The school is entirely funded based on its ability to solve these issues. The public schools are only partially funded this way.
5:15 PM/ET
On my commute, back to Earth, I work on progress reports which are sent back and forth from enterprises that use the data created by the students in my class. The forty-five-minute trip is more than enough to finish them. When I get home, I visit Jacob, the lion, one more time for the day and we have talks about tomorrow. At the end of the day, I program what I want to watch in my sleep and it’s usually a comedy or action hero adventure where I’m the supporting character. I head to my bedroom and kiss my children goodnight and take my dream pill.
My Weekends
My favorite days of the week are the weekends because that is when I get my meat allowance. I can take as much meat as I can eat in two days from Mars and bring it home to cook. The rest of the week, I have to drink my shake, which comes in various flavors. And even though it keeps me full the entire day, it’s no fun to drink all the time.
On the weekends, I generally catch up on missed connections with people in my village. We are not permitted to do anything that involves work on the weekends so it can kind of get a little boring. One way to stave off the boredom is to go swimming with sharks – it’s exhilarating and always a new experience.
I also go to a killing field where I can live out sordid fantasies of being murdered over and again in different ways. It gives me a glimpse of the past atrocities humans used to do to each other and makes me happy to be living in this exciting era.
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