Author name: gardensofhansen@hotmail.com

UFO AND CUBESATS Many years ago I was at a drive in movie theater with some friends waiting for the second feature to start when we saw a lighted object in the sky. At first I thought it was a reflection of some other light source, but I could never figure out what it really was. Reflecting on this periodically I consider the many sightings of UFOs and the various explanations from the idea of secret US air force experiments to alien life visiting our planet. Today I was reading an article about CubeSats “miniature, agile and cheap satellites” https://www.yahoo.com/news/cubesats-tiniest-satellites-changing-way-123230465.html that have been developed for low cost exploration of our Solar System and galaxy. This started me thinking about how we have been exploring Mars, with more expensive but similar unmanned units that allow us to explore parts of the Solar System that would still be unattainable today. Next month we will be launching the Europa Clipper if all goes well to study a moon of Jupiter that may hold life sustaining water. Now putting these two thoughts together, if there is alien life thriving on a planet or planets around other stars, and if they are as curious as we are, how would they explore the galaxy? It seems logical to follow a similar path for exploration. This or these alien civilizations, if smart enough to have stellar and interstellar space flight would certainly be bright enough to realize that they can explore more space for less money with unmanned satellites, than with actual manned missions. This line of thinking leads me to the conclusion that unmanned exploration from beyond our solar system would be much more likely to be conducted in a manner similar to how we are now exploring our own solar system. It may not be as adventurous or exciting as science fiction stories I have written and am writing, but it is a much more likely answer. With that in mind do we have secret government projects and knowledge based on UFOs that have crashed on Earth. I have no idea, but it does make the case more likely.

In excerpt 5 of Demeter we find out why Ryder and his friends have been kidnapped, or rather conscripted. Rebecca raised her hand and asked, “So you’re taking us to teach us the truth so we can restore the original vision to Earth?” “Sadly, no,” Miss Li replied. “Earth was lost for millennia. The war between the galactic arms has continued all this time. The focus within the Orion Spur is on the three systems containing the way stations, rather than developing planets. Even self-sustaining ships need refueling and repair, so control of the way stations has always been critical to the battle between the arms. In this sector of the Spur, Demeter is the way station that was controlled by the Per-Sian League for several centuries. About eight hundred years ago, the Sagittarius League began the process of retaking Demeter, which has changed hands several times over the millennia. As you can imagine, the logistics of a military campaign covering thousands of light years is difficult to maintain.” Mr. Small interrupted. “The shift in power in the region has always been more of a battle of logistics than a battle of ships. The last actual battle I was involved in was about sixteen years ago, and that was more a skirmish than a real battle. I remember I thought I was a goner when Shadrack and his brother swooped in and—” “Roger! No war stories!” Miss Li interrupted, staring sharply at Mr. Small. She turned to Ryder and his friends. “Once he starts telling war stories, he doesn’t stop.” Joel looked at Miss Li, “What is logistics?” “It’s the process of moving personnel and materials from the staging area, in this case the Sagittarian worlds, to Demeter. Not only do they have to move ships, but they also must have all the supplies needed to support those ships. Of course, the navy itself is easy, they had control of the second station, Haumeah and could build forces there. But typically for every thousand fighting men or women, you have another thousand support personnel. The Sagittarians began exploring a less expensive means of supporting the invasion of Demeter.” Mr. Small took over, with millions of stars and tens of millions of planets in the proximity of Demeter, the Sagittarians began looking for potential developing world’s where they could recruit their support staff. Having studied the archives I know that they spent over a hundred years looking for viable candidate worlds and in all that time they found a total of two: Earth and Cryella.” “Cryella?” Cynthia queried. “We’ll talk about Cryella and the Cryellians another day,” Miss Li continued. The Sagittarians rediscovered Earth as it searched for potential colleagues. We were not advanced enough to approach as partners, so they began conscripting people from Earth, or Terrans, to help retake Demeter nearly eight hundred years ago.” “Wait a minute. You mean we’re draftees?” asked Randy, with ire again sounding in his voice. “Well, in a manner of speaking, yes,” Mr. Small responded. “However, if you read your agreement for the “year abroad” program, you will notice that it clearly states that you ‘will have a culturally enriching educational experience and be provided the opportunity to offer service in your host community. Your host community is Demeter, and I guarantee it will be culturally enriching. You also signed a confidentiality agreement, that prohibits you from discussing details of your experience with outsiders. We’re very serious about that.” “You mean you would kill us?” Joel asked defensively. “You’ve been watching too many science fiction movies,” Miss Li said. “No, we wouldn’t kill you. But it is relatively easy to discredit anything you say and make you look like one of those UFO nuts. Of course, not all of them are UFO nuts. Several of the most vocal ones actually served a year on Demeter.” “On the bright side, you will learn a lot,” Mr. Small added. “Twenty-five of the richest people in the world are our former students. Many technological breakthroughs going all the way back to Leonardo da Vinci can be attributed to experiences on Demeter. Our foundation has also helped over a hundred of our alumni become heads of state. The experiences you have on Demeter are better than any college degree you might earn.”

The silent film era had a number of outstanding science fiction movies, but I am more interested in the syfy films of the talkie era. Considered by many to be the best science fiction film of the 1930s, “Things to Come” (1936) has an eerie accuracy regarding the following hundred years. It predicts a second world war, but suggests that it lasts decades. This is an interesting film to watch from the perspective of what did Wells get right, what was wrong, and what was just off a few years in his efforts as a futurist. H.G. Wells struck again with “The Invisible Man” actually filmed in 1933. One of two films suggesting that science inevitably runs amuck. This is a very watchable film, and mesmerized me as a pre-teen, while black and white was still the standard on television. The other film that is a classic for science running amuck and the panic that often ensues by the unenlightened is Frankenstein. I always thought of this more as horror, but science is fundamental to the story line. The heyday for square-jawed Buster Crabbe was in the 1930s and the movie serials. Serials were produced in much shorter form, usually 20-25 minutes for each episode, which inevitably ended with a cliffhanger. In the 1950s and early 1960s these 1930 serials were often used at the beginning of Saturday matinees to hook young viewers into coming back to the theater the next Saturday whether they liked the main feature or not. Buster Crabbe starred in two of these serials portraying both Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, produced by different studios. The main difference in the stories and the actor was the color of his hair: blond in Flash Gordan and dark haired in Buck Rogers. Classified as science fiction, although I’m not sure why, is the classic 1933 King Kong. It s a great movie and stars Fay Wray, who dated my father-in-law before she went off to Hollywood. It is a great movie, but I still quibble about calling it science fiction. One more film I’ll mention that has made the list is “Air Hawks” (1935). The film includes Ralph Bellamy and Wiley Post, but is most interesting to me as it creates an EMT device (although its called a death ray) but interesting twist on a future weapon. Okay, the 1930s weren’t great for science fiction movies, but there are a few worth viewing to see the path those films have taken. I have omitted some such as sequels “Son of Frankenstein” and one that I don’t really fits no matter how I twist it, “The Wizard of Oz”

I was asked recently about world building when I write my stories. How do I come up with an alien world? Right now I’m working on a new novel where part of the action takes place in Enceladus (a moon of Saturn). Another part will take place at a base inside a moon. Reflectively, Demeter is also a world inside a world or dead planetoid. Paragon is the one setting I have used so far that is more of a traditional surface world. Enceladus fits well into to follow-up story I’m writing as a follow-up to Salt of the Earth (not yet published). The current science makes it an interesting potential setting as we have discovered that Enceladus has a vast ocean under a frozen surface. So reading science articles about what is happening in the Solar System awakens my creative juices on “what could it be like”. The model for Demeter was the asteroid in our Solar System, Ceres. If you think about mythology it makes some sense that the Greek God for Agriculture is Demeter and the Roman God for Agriculture (lifted from the Greeks) is Ceres. Ceres is a large asteroid in the Asteroid Belt about 1,000 km in diameter. It is like a very small, very dead planetoid that is seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Demeter likewise is set in a desolate, but strategically valuable point in Orion’s Spur. It is a light year away from any Sun. To put this in perspective the Kuiper Belt 2.0 is about 90 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun. (Note: If you’re not familiar with the term AU it is a unit of measure that is the distance of Earth from the Sun.) One light year is 63,241 AU. Using Ceres as a model, and thinking about such stories as “Journey to the Center of the Earth” I started thinking about the problems I had with the concept of Jules Verne’s story based on science. The interior of Ceres became a challenge. The interior world of Demeter was not natural, but a matter of terra-forming. This occurred over an undefined time. Some of the mysteries of Demeter is who formed it in the first place? How was it discovered considering its remoteness. The war that surrounds Orion’s Spur had been going on for over 10 millenia. The root cause of the war is a thing of legend. Even who built the buildings and infrastructure is a point of contention. This part is revealed to be more of a surprise to the protagonists, although there is enough foreshadowing that it is not a major surprise to the readers. In Chapter 7 we get our first glimpse of Demeter: Demeter looked like a small planet, although Ryder knew that it had a diameter of only about half the size of the Earth’s moon. For him, it would be better to think of it as a large asteroid. It was basically round, although elliptical like an egg might be more accurate. The surface was heavily pockmarked. In fact, there seemed to be craters inside craters and then more craters. It was very uninviting, increasing Ryder’s sense of foreboding and concerns. The world of Demeter edges on paradise from a topographical perspective. It is primarily a large ocean world, supported by ice fields on the polar region of the interior of the world. As the eco-system is artificial, the systems are maintained through technology. It rains every night, but the days are always clear. The lighting inside the world is created through technology in a world that is a natural geode that has been terra-formed. There are numerous green islands, but the bulk of the population resides on what would be the sides of the world with what appear to be mountains, but is actually the inner wall of the planetoid. Ryder and his friends get their first glimpse of the interior of Demeter after traveling through a number of locks From the side portals, they could see the sheer face of a mountain wall rising on either side of the lock. As Ryder followed the line of the jagged obsidian cliffs that rose out of sight, he saw patches of chartreuse vegetation struggling to survive on the glassy surface. The sky was difficult to read. They could not see any clouds, but it felt hazy as if twilight were approaching. It was obviously daytime for this world, but Ryder could not locate a central source of the light. As the Pegasus continued to move forward and exit the final lock, a pale aqua surface mirrored below. It wasn’t until a large creature of some sort broke the surface that they realized it was water. “The Sea of Demeter,” … Once I had created the world of Demeter, I worked to explain how the world could possibly work? How could you keep it warm? What about atmosphere? Gravity? Weather? Agriculture? How did you feed the population? Why even bother? Now for the downside of world building. It takes away from the action. I’ve been told that the first book is a great story, but a little slow in the first half of the book. That is unavoidable from my perspective to set up a good story with a good world that has its own uniqueness, its own alienness, its own mystery. Books 2 and 3 of Orion’s Spur focuses more on action as the world is already constructed. Books 4 and 5 take us to two new worlds and cultures. Does the story slow? Not so much as we have a point of reference already developed in Book 1.

In the 1960s I eventually moved on from Robert Heinlein’s juvenile science fiction to his YA/Adult Science fiction. One of my favorite novels during this period was Starship Troopers. I was certainly moving into my military science fiction fandom era. I even considered ROTC in college (my dad talked me out of it… said I’d wind up in the stockade as I wouldn’t follow orders… he was probably right). Starship Troopers follows a young man through coming of age. He was a spoiled rich kid, and things look dim until the “Bugs” attack Earth and affect his own family. The storyline connects citizenship with service. Not a bad notion. It did limit citizenship to military service, but frankly I think some sort of volunteer service between high school and college would be a good idea. Sadly, Director Paul Verhoeven took it well beyond service turning it more into fascism, and giving the political views of Heinlein a negative twist. It also turned an excellent movie that could have approached “Edge of Tomorrow” for a more animae type version that served RoboCop well but not this particular story.

When I was in elementary school we thought of the solar system as being the Sun and nine planets including: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Mercury. We also learned that there was a mysterious ring of asteroids between Mercury and Jupiter called the Asteroid Belt. We also knew that there were some moons out there around some of the planets. We never discussed yet another belt, the Kuiper Belt. The Kuiper Belt is no secret but there was no thought of it existing until after Pluto was identified in 1930. In my own mind the Kuiper Belt is like the asteroid belt but further away and of necessity bigger as it surrounds the solar system starting about 30 AU from the Sun (an AU is the astronomical unit of measure of the average distance of the Earth from the Sun). Putting this in perspective, our fastest man-made probe travels at roughly 430,000 miles per hour. At that speed it would take nine days to reach the Earth from the Sun. It would take that same ship 9 months to travel to the edge of the Kuiper Belt. So what’s in the Kuiper Belt? Again something I wasn’t aware of when I was younger was that the Kuiper Belt might seem to be a good sized junk yard if it was on Earth. It has trillions of objects, but thinking in terms of something of size, it is estimated that there are over 100,000 objects over 62 miles (100 km) in diameter. In our Asteroid Belt they have discovered about 200 objects of that size. Of course the Kuiper Belt covers a lot of ground. Remember AU? It is about 100 AU in diameter. So what we know so far about the solar system is pretty limited, with knowledge of the Kuiper Belt only being in our history for less than a hundred years. Now they have discovered a second Kuiper Belt even further out. What do we know about it? Not much yet, other than it is out there. We know there is a sizable gap between Kuiper Belt 1 and Kuiper Belt 2.0 and it is between 70 and 90 AU from the Sun. The number of sizable objects, if we extrapolate from Asteroid Belt to Kuiper 1 Belt, would suggest millions of sizable objects and even more icy objects.

It was a fun day for me. I was interviewed about the Orion’s Spur series and Demeter today on Alternate Futures podcast. In addition to talking about the books we discussed what the future might look like, and why more people aren’t interested in going into space. It should be available in mid-October.

SyFy – Excerpt 4 follows Ryder and friends on their trip to Europe. Rebecca Creer noticed some unusual issues as they were boarding their airplane at O’Hare International Airport. This excerpt takes our characters to a rude awakening. Two hours later, he put down his book and looked out the window. It was nice to be able to have the window seat for a change. They had passed over the last of the landmass. They were now crossing over the Atlantic. Off to the side, he saw another plane that looked a little more familiar in style than their own. He thought they were awfully close, as he could make out the plane ID, J-773. Wait a minute, he thought, the tail of our plane was J-773. That’s when things really started to get strange. The ping of the announcement system went off, and the pilot’s voice came back over the intercom. “Please be sure that your restraining devices are firmly in place. We will be accelerating in one minute.” Miss Li got out of her seat, as did Mr. Small, and checked everyone’s restraints. “Looks good up here,” called out Mr. Small. “We are clear back here as well,” responded Miss Li. After the teachers were reseated, Ryder could feel the pressure as they accelerated and angled sharply upward. The crushing sensation continued for several minutes, and Ryder’s ribs started to ache. The sky began to turn purple, then finally black, and for a moment, Ryder thought he was passing out. The stars, I’ve never seen them so bright, he thought. Wait a minute, what are we doing up here! He then panicked and tried to get out of his seat. The securing system was locked. They were trapped!

An article recently caught my attention, and it has reemerged several times now. It is about the idea that Earth has multiple moons. Another version of the story suggests multiple quasi-moons. Great click bait, but what does it all mean? It kind of depends on who you ask. For purposes of this discussion, let’s refine the term as a large object that orbits a planet. Okay, that is interesting, we have millions of satellites and space junk orbiting our planet, so are they all moons? Let’s add to our definition that it needs to be naturally occurring. Within our solar system, all classified moons are rocky. We do have planets that are mainly gas giants such as Jupiter, but defined moons in our solar system are all rocky. What about size? Let’s see, the smallest classified moon in our solar system at this moment is Deimos. It is roughly seven miles in diameter. There are some objects now being referred to as shepherd moons in Saturn’s belt that may be classified as moons that are even smaller. When I think of a moon I start with Earth’s moon. The moon is 2,159 miles in diameter. By comparison, Pluto (no longer classified a planet) is about 1,476 miles. Mercury, which is classified as a planet is 3,031 miles in diameter. So, the Moon is pretty close in size to be categorized as a planet. But it is not because it is locked into orbit around a planet… Earth. Let’s get back to the quasi-moons of Earth. Quasi-moons can rotate around a planet. We have seven identified quasi-moons that have elliptical orbits around the Earth. The largest of the quasi-moons that has been identified is Kamo’oalewa or 2016 HO3. It could be as large as 328 feet in diameter and has a fairly stable orbit. Another quais-moon that was recently discovered is 2023 FW13, about the same size as Kamo’oalewa. What is the difference between an asteroid and a quasi-moon. That’s probably the better question as these large rocks really are nothing unusual when considering asteroids. The main difference is that they orbit around the Earth as we both orbit around the Sun. Some of these quasi-moons will stick around for thousands of years, others will wander off if another gravitational source disrupts our partnership. For me, the question now is the storyline for another good science fiction story. One is rattling around in the back of my mind. I just can’t make up my mind if it’s a novel or a short story.