The Light of Other Days

part 1: THE GOLDFISH BOWL Chapter 4 - WORMWOOD
Extracted from "Wormwood: When Mountains" Melt, by Katherine Manzoni, published by Shiva Press, New York, 2033; also available as Internet floater dataset:

...We face great challenges as a species if we are to survive the next few centuries.

It has become clear that the effects of climate change will be much worse than imagined a few decades ago: indeed, predictions of those effects from, say, the 1980s now look foolishly optimistic.

We know now that the rapid warming of the last couple of centuries has caused a series of metastable natural systems around the planet to flip to new states. From beneath the thawing permafrost of Siberia, billions of tonnes of methane and other greenhouse gases are already being released. Warming ocean waters are destabilizing more huge methane reservoirs around the continental shelves. Northern Europe is entering a period of extreme cold because of the shutdown of the Gulf Stream. New atmospheric modes - permanent storms - seem to be emerging over the oceans and the great landmasses. The death of the tropical forests is dumping vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The slow melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet seems to be releasing pressure on an archipelago of sunken islands beneath, and volcanic activity is likely, which will in turn lead to a catastrophic additional melting of the sheet The rise in sea levels is now forecast to be much higher than was imagined a few decades ago.

And so on.

All of these changes are interlinked. It may be that the spell of climatic stability which the Earth has enjoyed for thousands of years - a stability which allowed human civilization to emerge in the first place - is now coming to an end, perhaps because of our own actions. The worst case is that we are heading for some irreversible climatic breakdown, for example a runaway greenhouse, which would kill us all.

But all these problems pale in comparison to what will befall us if the body now known as the Wormwood should impact the Earth - although it is a chill coincidence that the Russian for "Wormwood" is "Chernobyl"...

Much of the speculation about the Wormwood and its likely consequence has been sadly misinformed - indeed, complacent. Let me reiterate some basic facts here.

Fact: the Wormwood is not an asteroid.

The astronomers think the Wormwood might once have been a moon of Neptune or Uranus, or perhaps it was locked in a stable point in Neptune's orbit, and was then perturbed somehow. But perturbed it was, and now it is on a five-hundred-year collision course with Earth.

Fact: the Wormwood's impact will not be comparable to the Chicxulub impact which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

That impact was sufficient to cause mass death, and to alter - drastically, and for all time - the course of evolution of life on Earth. But it was caused by an impactor some ten kilometers across. The Wormwood is forty times as large, and its mass is therefore some sixty thousand times as great.

Fact: the Wormwood will not simply cause a mass extinction event, like Chicxulub It will be much worse than that.

The heat pulse will sterilize the land to a depth of fifty meters. Life might survive, but only by being buried deep in caves. We know no way, even in principle, by which a human community could ride out the impact. It may be that viable populations could be established on other worlds: in orbit, on Mars or the Moon. But even in five centuries only a small fraction of the world's current population could be sheltered off-world.

Thus, Earth cannot be evacuated. When the Wormwood arrives, almost everybody will die.

Fact: the Wormwood cannot be deflected with foreseeable technology.

It is possible we could turn aside small bodies - a few kilometers across, typical of the population of near-Earth asteroids - with such means as emplaced nuclear charges or thermonuclear rockets. The challenge of deflecting the Wormwood is many orders of magnitude greater. Thought experiments on moving such bodies have proposed, for example, using a series of gravitational assists - not available in this case - or using advanced technology such as nanotech von Neumann machines to dismantle and disperse the body. But such technologies are far beyond our current capabilities.

Two years after I exposed the conspiracy to conceal from the general public the existence of the Wormwood, attention is already moving on and we have yet to start work on the great project of our survival.

Indeed, the Wormwood itself is already having advance effects. It is a cruel irony that just as, for the first time in our history, we were beginning to manage our future responsibly and jointly, the prospect of Wormwood Day seems to render such efforts meaningless. Already we've seen the abandonment of various voluntary waste-emission guidelines, the closure of nature reserves, an upgraded search for sources of nonrenewable fuels, an extinction pulse among endangered species. If the house is to be demolished tomorrow anyhow, people seem to feel, we may as well bum the furniture today None of our problems arc insoluble, not even the Wormwood. But it seems clear that to prevail we humans will have to act with a smartness and selflessness that has so far eluded us during our long and tangled history.

Still, my hope centers on humanity and ingenuity. It is significant, I believe, that the Wormwood was discovered not by the professionals, who weren't looking that way, but by a network of amateur sky watchers, who set up robot telescopes in their backyards, and used shareware routines to scan optical detector images for changing glimmers of light, and refused to accept the cloak of secrecy our government tried to lay over them. It is in groups like this - earnest, intelligent, cooperative, stubborn, refusing to submit to impulses toward suicide or hedonism or selfishness, seeking new solutions to challenge the complacency of the professionals - that our best and brightest hope of surviving the future may lie...