The Premise of “Twins”

Effect on All Species

Earth’s Last Gasp

As our earth rotates giving us our minutes, hours, and days; and orbits our sun giving humankind every year. Time, the time we so carefully measure, is running out for our species as well as all other life forms on the planet.  Even now, the science, the irrefutable evidence, demonstrates how precarious is that balance of nature and human progress through technology.  In the popular literature, based in the preponderance of scientific evidence, several books have been a clarion call for changes in attitude, resource allocation, reducing the carbon footprint of fossil fuel emissions and striving for international cooperation before it is too late.  The Sixth Extinction, written by Elizabeth Kolbert, compares the devolution of our natural world to the cataclysmic changes of other epochs such as the Jurassic or Cretaceous.  The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells, essentially culls the scientific information to make the statement that it is later than anyone thinks.  Reading just these two books opens a plethora of other writings and scientific papers on the subject of climate change, exploitation of the natural world and worldwide indifference to – as former Vice President Al Gore stated – an inconvenient truth.

Lead Pollution Images Credits to: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/Pollution_g405.html

Effect On Habitation

The idea of an alternative planet for human habitation has been proposed by such entrepreneurs as Elon Musk and his quest to colonize Mars.  As the argument posed by Musk and others goes, if earth becomes unsustainable, find a new planet to plant the seeds of continuous human existence.  In 200 years, the earth will be a very different planet.  At the present rate of decline, coastlines will be so radically changed, great cities of the United States will be lost.  New York, Boston, Miami, New Orleans, on the east coast, and several on the west coast could be lost to the seas.  There is likely to be massive relocations of our own North American population as well as those of other regions of the world.  Even before North America is faced with this prospect, the Middle East, the coasts of Africa, India and much of Southeast Asia would experience devastation and human suffering – not to mention the loss of countless animal and plant species.

Denial of this truth will lead to an increase of threats to our planet, nations and homes.  Climate change will be undeniable when 80 percent of our population, living along coastlines and large waterways, are compelled to tread water in their own living rooms. If planet earth is in danger of becoming unsustainable for life in 2020, what will it be like 200 years; the time in the future when 3 starships launch into the distant stars as in The Twins of Demeter? 

Effect On Future Generations

The young boy above treads water in a slime covered sea. A future of a polluted earth that is beyond redemption gives rise to having an escape plan. It seems logical that this fiction about sending humanity in the form of embryos in stasis chambers to a habitable “Goldilocks Zone” planet several light years away makes the idea potentially acceptable if not feasible.  The starships must be self-sustaining and self-maintaining.  They must have the capacity for continuously developing energy to power the ships and their numerous internal technologies.  There must be some form of maintenance of the humans in stasis.  There must be gravity produced on board or there could be no long-term support for human health.  The demand upon the resources of the earth to build such a ship would be so taxing as to require collaboration from every industrial nation on the face of the earth.  Would this be feasible?  Would humanity be willing to find the resources for such a mammoth undertaking?

The Twins of Demeter accepts the idea that such an enterprise is not only feasible, it is a distinct possibility.  It is possible, not only to hedge the bet for the sustaining of human existence somewhere in the universe, it could be necessary for the motivation to rebuild planet earth no matter how injured, exploited and depleted it may become.