Explorer Program: A History

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The Explorer class ships were the pinnacle of space travel. Twenty years earlier, the space-warp drive made inter-solar distances trivial. We sent missions to Mars, to Jupiter’s moons, to Venus; we even visited Pluto. The Solar System was all within our reach. Then we reached further.

The Explorer Ships weren’t going out a mere ten or twenty light years. The nearest target was four hundred and fifty-six light years away. Rough estimates were the ship would arrive after twelve to fifteen years Earth relative time and crew would experience a few weeks. The exact formula to determine time dilation was variable based on gravity waves and dark-matter density.

The program was conceived as a three-year mission to catalog and explore exoplanets. Explorer ships would be sent out on spiraling paths to explore star systems we could only dream of seeing before. Three years for the crews of the ships. Relative Earth time would be a couple of centuries, still far less than the few millennia it would take with only light speed travel.

When we sent probes to nearby stars with our new space-warp drive we encountered a limitation. The first probe went to a star ten light years away and arrived within a few days. It would take a decade for the probe to transmit any data it collected back to Earth. The obvious fix was to simply have the probe return to the Solar System before transmitting its data. However, having the Explorer Ships return after every star system they explored would hobble the program; at least doubling Relative Earth Time for the crews.

The Explorer Program was stalled until there was a breakthrough. Using a modified space-warp drive we figured out how to pinch two tiny points of space together and transmit across the bridge. It required a sender and receiver to make the connection but once made communication was instantaneous. The program went forward and within seven years the first exploration reports of planets hundreds of light-years away were received. It was the golden age of interstellar exploration.

Then the decline of Earth began.

I was born at the right time to explore the universe. Twenty years later and I might never have made it off the planet or been shuffled to a random colony. Twenty years earlier and I might have been too old for the program or had a family. By the time I had completed my training, the first ten Explorer ships had launched. I left Earth on the fourteenth ship.

We arrived at our third star system and could not initiate contact with Earth. Several hundred light years and twenty-eight years from Earth, we were suddenly cast adrift. For two days we sent the carrier wave, sitting in shifts at the comms panel, waiting for the returning gravimetric pulse to fold space and a human voice to speak to us. The commander decided to make a short five light year jaunt out of the system we were in. This had the benefit of passing a few months of Earth Relative time in minutes for us. This time Earth connected

The Earth Space Agency had been an international organization since before my birth but some legacy facilities had been in use from their NASA days. When the second nuclear missile hit East Texas, the main communication hub was lost. No one knew who had launched the first missiles but the U.S., Russia, China, and France had launched retaliatory strikes at their best guesses.

The Explorer communication outage had lasted several months while the political situation threatened to boil over into a full-scale nuclear war. We never got the full story of who talked who down but a shaky peace was enacted. We returned to the system we had just left and carried out a standard planet survey and a surface survey on a semi-habitable planet. The air was thin but breathable, liquid water on the surface, simple-celled photosynthetic organisms similar to algae.

Two months later of our time, we arrived at the next star system and learned human life on Earth was becoming unsubstantial. The nuclear exchange of a decade ago had accelerated global temperature increases. Within a century humanity would be struggling to survive.
Escaping to the few outposts and colonies on other planets and moons within the solar system was not a sustainable option. Despite several being economically stable, most relied on the Earth for manufactured goods and a portion of their food. Humanity needed to evacuate as many people as possible to exoplanets that could support Earth life. The Explorer Program was retasked with finding planets to send colony ships to.

The crews of the Explorer ships hadn’t expected to return to an Earth they would recognize and now we didn’t expect to return at all. By the time our mission ended, Earth would be abandoned and the worlds we discovered would be home to new branches of humanity.


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Gillian Reviews Power Rangers

Power_Rangers_(2017_Official_Theatrical_Poster)

Power Rangers is the reboot movie of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers tv series.  It presents a slightly darker and grittier version of the Power Rangers but not as dark and gritty as the “fan-made” short film that came out a couple years ago.

The plot is simple: a group of kids gain superpowers and must defeat the evil enemy.  While I liked most of the characters, they weren’t the characters I knew from the series.  They are present in name but with different backstories and character traits.  There’s a little shuffling of races to avoid matching with their ranger color and the cast ends up slightly more diverse because of it.

My main nitpick with the movie is that the five kids have no connection with each other or reason to work together until the film says they have to.  I rewatched the first episode of the tv series after watching the movie and I buy those kids as a superhero team more than the movie’s kids.  They’re all friends and supportive of each other and just nice kids.  I’ll admit the show is a little rough to watch twenty-four years later but the characters are the rock of that show.

On to the costumes.  I did not like the design of the armor.  I get they were trying to avoid referencing the tv spandex too much but the low rent, bio-techno, Iron-Man look isn’t good.  The color scheme is inconsistent across the armors with some having patches of white and others having shades of their primary color instead.  It’s a nitpick but it bothered me as a fan of the old show.

The zords were honestly hard to look at.  They looked like rejects from a Transformers movie.  The mastodon zord had six legs for some reason.  I did like that they had a chance to fight separately which they rarely did in the show.  The Megazord was something of a let down since it wasn’t made from combining the zords in Voltron-esque sequence and instead combined offscreen into a giant robot that looked like the five robots had been melted down and recast into a man shape.  Easily the most recognizable sequence from the show is the zords combining and it gets cut out and turned into a non-reveal since it was a foregone conclusion that they would be combining their zoids.  Another nitpick from a fan of the show.

In fact, lots of things bothered me about the movie as a fan of the show.  The movie is a fine superhero movie but is a below average Power Rangers movie. I will admit I came very close to tears during the emotional climax of the movie. The characters aren’t my Power Rangers but I’m in my late 30’s and the movie was aimed at a younger demographic.

Rating 2.5/5