8/23/12

The End is the Beginning
By Chad Bolling


My Grandpa was alive for the first part of our Sun’s death. Humans had an infinite life span back then too. Scientists had already learned how to use empty, unconscious, mature clones as vessels for the conscious of the dying.

When the sun expanded and turned into a red giant, it made the Earth uninhabitable and burned everything my grandpa had ever known. He and my Grandma were born on Earth. My Grandma died in a crash a couple hundred years before my family moved to Mars, where I was born a million or so years later. It seemed that even with eternal life, it was not possible to cure bad driving.

Humankind was well prepared when the sun turned into a red giant. We had already colonized Mars and began terraforming it in preparation for the next event which would occur millions of years after our dying Sun turned from a red giant to a white dwarf.

I lived, along with trillions of other humans, on Mars and in space stations. Our new red giant Sun made Mars a little warmer, not warm enough to go outside without protective bio-mechanical suits, but warm enough to help sustain life inside the millions of protective domes that were constructed on the planet’s surface. The heat from the red giant sun also allowed us to start terraforming Mars, in preparation for what some would call “The Final Event”.

The Final Event happened over the course of millions of years. Many scientists said it wasn’t possible and the human race was doomed to an eternity of traveling the universe in search of another planet like Earth. It was hard to tell if it was going to happen at first, but slowly, the temperature of our solar system’s gas giants increased as our old Sun’s size and heat decreased.

Lucky for me, and for the rest of humankind, the skeptical scientists were wrong. It was a popular belief for sometime that the gas giants of our galaxy were not big enough to sustain the amount of fusion possible to make a star. As smaller stars were discovered the skeptics became more hopeful. Until the miracle happened. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all became tiny stars.

I’m not quite sure how it happened, as I’m not a physicist. I do know this much though, it was not a big explosion that cause the new stars to be born. It was a very small implosion. A black hole device was planted in the center of each gas giant which somehow allowed the miracle of fusion to occur within each new star.

Mars is still terribly cold, but it has an atmosphere, and the newer clone shells are being engineered to withstand freezing temperatures. There is even talk about repopulating the Earth somehow, now that our old Sun is no longer cooking its surface. I just hope that one day I can step outside on Mars and feel its ground with my bare feet, like my Grandpa said he did on Earth.


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