The Partially Fictious Travel Log of Madeline Ray: Day 6
The wonderful M (whom I am staying with at this point in my journey) and I began the day with the Lions of Discovery leading us to the spacetime port. From there, we took a few short trips to various destinations in Earth's solar system.
First we visited the colony on Luna, which has recently begun setting up a habitation, primitive space port, and solar farm. Mainly they were working on the space elevator and setting up the liquid mirror telescope. I met a few members of a certain Corporate Interest who were digging around for helium 3, but, obviously, they refused to speak with me on the matter. In this photo, you can see Earth faintly in the sky toward the horizon. (Hard to believe that in a few hundred years Madame X will set up her massive crime syndicate in this place.)
From Luna we journeyed to Mars to do a little rock climbing. Pressure suits sure have improved since Earth's early days of travel! There was a strong focus on terraforming Mars, which, while history shows did indeed happen, made both M and I question certain aspects of scientific ethics. This is interesting to me, because my own research revolves around human subjects research that holds ethics as a central theme. In fact, Dr. K and I have presented on the topic in professional fora and I have several ethics papers sitting in my queue to be written. But back before I started working with human subjects, when I was interested in robot brains, topics regarding ethics never came up during the course of my studies. Are there IRB-like entities that monitor research that does not involve human or animal subjects? What are the ethics of machines, atmospheres, and space-mirrors? Our experimentation and exploration with the intimate are necessarily tangled with the animate, connected to us and the living world around us, there will always be impacts and effects, particularly unanticipated ones over time.
After stopping off at an asteroid to refuel, we took a brief jaunt out to Europa (which anyone who knows me well knows I can go on and on about nigh endlessly, along with sister-moons Io and Ganymede), but at the point in time we visited no one had yet discovered the alien life that would become so important later to the Terran system's expansion into deeper space.
M and I returned to Earth then, and walked home. Along the way, our path was protected by Ravens.