Love Along the Milky Way

Five billion years from now, the sun will have exhausted its stock of nuclear hydrogen fuel, and swell into a ball of crimson glowing gas, extending beyond the orbits of Earth and Mars. Will humanity then possess the knowledge and the technology, and principally the willpower to survive the birth of this new red giant star? The wealth of last century’s scientific and technological developments makes us expect a resounding “yes” as an answer, but history shows...
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Five billion years from now, the sun will have exhausted its stock of nuclear hydrogen fuel, and swell into a ball of crimson glowing gas, extending beyond the orbits of Earth and Mars. Will humanity then possess the knowledge and the technology, and principally the willpower to survive the birth of this new red giant star? The wealth of last century’s scientific and technological developments makes us expect a resounding “yes” as an answer, but history shows otherwise. There are no natural safeguards against a reversal of technological progress. Knowledge has repeatedly been conquered and lost through the ages, most notoriously in the sudden end to Grecian scientific achievements, and the demise of the Roman civilization with the onset of the “dark ages”. In our days of over-achievements, skeptics have good reasons to augur the writings on the wall: Command of “Hi-Tech” consolidates in few places, is carried on by an alarmingly low number of specialists, and often takes second place to sports and entertainment. While advanced medical care is widely available, skills and knowledge did not evenly spread around the globe. Population growth in formerly self-sustaining countries generated a hungry crowd fighting for the leftovers from the more prosperous parts of the world. Some day, we may unwittingly have slaughtered the goose that so far has laid for us the golden eggs. The window of opportunity for action might well be right here and now, and once passed on, will stay closed forever. We shouldn’t waste that maybe unique chance for humanity’s survival of the demise of the solar system. We must boldly aim at bridging the five, ten or fifteen light years to neighboring stars in search for earthlike planets, while we still command the means to do so. Interstellar space travel will become a realistic possibility with the development of controlled nuclear fusion as rocket propellant, expected for the middle of the 21st century. By then, it will be only a question of determination, and of course finance, whether we go or decide to stay home and wait for the day when the inevitable is bound to happen.

LOVE ALONG THE MILKY WAY is the compelling vision of a group of explorers, determined to settle in a solar system other than our own. Set in the timeframe of the waning 21st century, it builds on a realistic assessment of the technology of interstellar space travel, the laws of nature, and the political spectrum afforded for pulling through a project of that scope. Against the odds, astronaut Harry McCraft manages a landing on Alcent, a habitable planet in the Alpha Centauri star system. His attempts to settle on the planet trigger a breathtaking series of adventures, from abhorrent to erotic, with prehistoric fauna, a strange race of apemen, and a stone age tribe of indigenous that takes him prisoner. His life is saved by the chief’s eugenic scheme of creating offspring immune to addiction to a chewing-gum-like sap, ChumChu, which undermined the leader’s efforts toward a better lifestyle for his subjects. But McCraft’s failure to produce offspring with the chief’s designated female gets him expelled from the native community. Threatened by exposure and starvation, he fights his way back to the landing site of the transatmospheric aircraft that once had carried him down to the planet, and now offers him conditions for survival. McCraft’s diary, found years later and radioed back to earth by a follow up expedition, reveals so much of the political chess-game underlying McCraft’s venture, that it gets ordered stowed away and safeguarded in Washington’s deepest vaults, while Larry Fieldings, the only outsider who happened to learn about it, is banned to live on a planet far from our solar system.