When Randy got back from getting his Nobel Prize, what was the first thing he wanted to show me? The medallion? The check? Him in a tux trying to give a speech? No. “Patty—you’ve got to see this—they interviewed me. Me. They cut it down to only a few minutes for broadcast, but she put…
Month: June 2021
Tranquility
FULL STORY. After all, why buy energy all the way from the Moon, when the U.S. military had fully scaled up Bussard Polywell Fusion, and was in the process of licensing it out? The reactors were pretty easy to build—it wouldn’t take long—not long at all—before they were everywhere.
Cassandra
EXCERPT: I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, took a few seconds before responding. “Yes, sort of. There’s enough thrust developed, in a light enough system. But the infrastructure we’ve got around it—the cooling system, the containment system—they’re not up to military specs.”
“Right. No one’s saying that the systems here,” he waved a hand around, almost sending himself into a spin before he grabbed a handrail, “would be up to the sustained stress of military duty. But a few days of stops and starts? Why not?” When I didn’t immediately respond, he added, “You don’t see a reason why not? I trust?”
Why I started Sunmarks
My mother’s mother’s cousins had a fabric company in the Garment District that lasted until the late 1980s. They were the Marks family (no relation to the one who spelled his name with an x); and they named their business “Sunmarks Fabrics”. My grandfather—who they recruited to work there—would bring us surplus order pads from…
The Tower in the Tunnel
EXCERPT: “Well, I assume you’ve heard about near-death experiences?”
“Yeah, sure I have,” I said. It’s a cliché, the tunnel and the light and all that.
“What if, when you die, your consciousness goes to that other universe?” he asked. “That’s the question I am working on—at least, in my free time.”
“Yeah, but, that would have to be just speculation, right? There’d be no way to really find out.”
“There could be a way,” he said. “Theoretically, it should be possible to create a wormhole through. However, trying to make a wormhole from this universe to that one would take more energy than humans are likely to have for millions of years. My thinking is this: If this is true—if the information from our experiences is imported into this neighboring universe, then it must be pulled from that side, rather than pushed from this one; and the attendant wormhole must be like a valve—easy to open from that reality, very, very hard to open from this one. So what I want to do is, when the passage might be open, send a small probe through.
