Last modified: >> Wednesday, 26 July 2000
A race against time to evacuate your people
from the planet Mars and the inner planets.
of the Solar system in this futuristic scenario
because the sun is
going nova.
Perils abound in your quest for the relative safety of the Alpha Centauri system.
Welcome to the afternoon of the Solar System.
You find yourself on a latter-day Mars - Once an idyllic world
after being terraformed.
Gradually the Martian colonists have lost virtually all their
technologies. Living simple lives for millenia in their nurturing
Eden-like environment and aided by the various Genetically
Engineered LifeForms {GELFs} to supply their every need.
Contact with the other outposts of humanity has been lost.
But a disturbing thing has been discovered by our Astronomers...
The Sun is going to
go *NOVA*
Our Astronomers estimate that in about 500 Years, there will be a
massive increase in the solar diameter and a massive flux of
harmful solar radiations of all kinds. This will render the Solar
System uninhabitable.
However it is part of Mankinds' folklore that millenia ago
robotic probes sent by our forebears have shown that there are
viable planets surrounding Alpha Centauri that are capable of
nurturing life (as we know it).
For Humanity (and your Nation) to survive it will be necessary
for your nation to rediscover the lost wisdom of the ancients
- To see if it is possible to construct a ship to travel between
the STARS, as folklore suggests.
 |
Mars is a now no longer such a benign world. You are unfortunate enough to have found yourself in the Epoch known to the latter-day inhabitants as the "Great Dry". The once fertile river valleys and plains have in part dried and cracked. The oceans, including "Grand Tethys", are but puddles of their former fecund glory. |
Some of the genetically engineered life forms (GELFs) have been
by the increased solar radiation and the slippage of the
environmental norms outside of "safe" parameters.
Some of the woodlands have mutated and no longer bear edible
provenance. There are also a variety of toxic plant forms or
GELF-mutated forms that are inedible. Certain of these
GELF-animals have gone rogue, and various human nut-cases wander
the landscape.
For Aeons only city-less Nomads roamed the surface of the
Paradise that was once Mars, but now the Halycon days of that
second Eden are over, and the harsh conditions have forced a
return to primitive forms of agriculture.
It is said that it only takes 3 generations of not having enough
time or inclination to read for a culture to lose its learning
and to sink back into barbarism.
Interplanetary teleporters were developed millenia ago but
Earth-kind was never able to get their
"Heisenburg-Compensators" (See Heisenburg Uncertainty
Principle, Quantum Mechanics) to work at distances beyond that of
the Gas-Giants of our solar system (That is, beyond about 250
million Kilometres or so).
Remnants of this Teleporter network, with nodes in a variety of
shapes and sizes, can be found scattered across the landscape.
Some of the nodes in this old inter-planetary network may still
work, and this network may represent your best chance to travel
to lost Earth, but alas, the knowledge as to how to build them
has disappeared into the mists of time.
Nor does anyone know quite where each one will take them within
the solar system, this knowledge also having gone the way of the
dodo.
No-one knows what has happened to the Earth over the millenia,
but is is likely that the Earth is the only place in the solar
system likely to have sufficient resources to allow an
inter-stellar spacecraft to be built.
The bad news is that the Earth may also be environmentally
devastated, and even there decent pockets of arable land may thus
be hard to find...
And finally,
*Beware* of the
Neo-Luddites ! A sect that believes that we must accept
the will of the cosmos and not research into the forbidden
knowledge of our misguided ancestors.
However, as with so many single-minded belief systems, they are
not averse to using whatever military or scientific wisdom may
come their way to reinforce their point of view and service their
ideology.
See the Accompanying "Read-Me" File and the Civilopedia
for more details.
The Scenario can be picked up from :
My Kestrel18
tripod Escape-from-Sol site,
Please e-mail to me at kestrel18@bigpond.com if
you have any comments or questions.