Most of my crew, besides the general, were through with their war tasks and were developing ideas of their own for the Moon base or overseeing (micromanaging is more like it) some of the manufacturing. Sara and 'Becca had been spending most of their time together. Jim and I figured that they were just collaborating on how to improve the manufacturing process for the mini ECCs. The process was slow—perhaps they could make it more efficient—thus shaving off a few days of the wait.
Al and Anne Marie and a couple of regular military girls that they had befriended focused on integration issues of the Moon base. They seemed very excited and enamored by the idea. I've said it before and I'll say it again; if I had the power, I would grant Al a doctorate in Aerospace Engineering and predate it by a year or two. I felt the same way about Jim and 'Becca as they were going through the doctoral inquisition. We used to have a saying: "You will never graduate until you can convince your committee that you know that you will never be as smart and enlightened as they are and that you will forever be in their debt and can never imagine a way to repay such a deep debt." Such is the way of American higher education.
Did I forget to mention the fact that Al and Anne Marie were spending an inordinate amount of time together? As Tabitha has always told me, I'm dense about these things. Hell, I didn't even realize Jim and 'Becca were a thing until they decided to get hitched! I think I'll just keep my nose out of that one. Or as we say in the South, "Damn, I ain't gittin' my dawg in that fight."
Several weeks had passed and I was getting a little bored. Most of my work was complete. The field coils were finished, but with no ECCs to power them, they were just a lot of scrap superconductor. I spent some of my time helping Tabitha analyze intelligence data "down the hall." When I was being a fifth wheel to Tabitha I would give her time off by just hanging out in the break room and watching television.
I got caught up in the Senate hearings deposing the NASA administrator as to why we hadn't detected the meteors before they struck Florida and Colorado. Why had NASA not done its job, the Senate wanted to know? As I listened to the hearings, the current administrator of our nation's civilian space agency held his ground.
"Well, Senator," he began, "for years we have begged for a budget to watch for Near Earth Objects, or NEOs. And we have received one. The budget has been roughly three million dollars per year. That is enough money to run one telescope, for about an hour a day, about three hundred days a year. If we got lucky and the meteor just happened to be in the minuscule percentage of the sky that we were able to cover with that one telescope during that hour during one of those days, well yes Senator we should have detected it."
Even though the problem facing the world right now wasn't due to a meteor threat, the NASA administrator was right. We're, in the first place, not seriously looking for threats from space. In the second place, we have no developed way to defend against them. I remembered seeing some movies back near the end of the last century—or near the beginning of this one, I forget which—about asteroids hurtling toward Earth and brave astronauts flying up on modified Shuttles or some such nonsense and destroying them with one nuclear weapon. That was silly then; it's still silly. Asteroids and meteors are bad enough—they aren't intelligent.
What if the threat from space was intelligent? Well, if they got here, then they must be far superior to us. We wouldn't stand a chance. If they showed up and said, "We are the Borg. Your uniqueness will be added to our own. Prepare to be assimilated. Resistance is futile." If that happened, we would absolutely be fucked. No polite way to say it. No amount of nuclear weapons could help. Hell, I'm not sure that warp weapons would help.
And a race as advanced as Star Trek:TNG's Borg might not even be the worst case scenario. What if a race showed up in our past and tricked us into worshiping them? Say, perhaps the race had wings and wore a shiny bubble around their heads since they didn't breathe our atmosphere. They could use their technology to perform so-called miracles that would convince us that they were deities. By every version of the word we would be screwed even worse than with the Borg. At least with the Borg it would be over quickly and we'd go down fighting. With these deities they could trick us into fighting among ourselves for thousands of years. Then they could, for some reason, leave our planet, leaving behind no evidence that they were ever here. We would continue to fight about them amongst ourselves for millennia and we would never know what really happened. If they showed up now claiming to be angels of the lord, at least some of us would stand up and flip them off. But you better believe that many more would jump on the fiery chariots of these creatures and help them slaughter us in the name of the very vain, loathsome, and petty Almighty.
Presently, there are no Department of Defense or Civil Defense measures in place to defend against such an attack, or at least none that I know of. Hell, people know for a fact that there are asteroids and meteors and we have no contingency plans for them. Why develop plans against aliens? After all, the SETI folks have everybody convinced that aliens are far advanced dope-smoking Utopians who will one day email us the cure for cancer.
Yeah, they might do that. And as my great aunt Meg is so fond of saying, "And if a frog had wings it wouldn't bump its ass on the ground when it hopped either."
I believe in statistics. The universe is a damn big place. Statistically there should be just as many aliens out there that want to eat us as there are who want to feed us. A lot of the Pasadena and Boston intellectual crowds would have you believe that intelligent aliens would have evolved beyond war. Then, I guess, we ain't intelligent.
Politics and the battle for resources will exist no matter how evolved a society gets. I always find these Hollywood science fiction shows humorous when they say things like "we don't have money in the future." If one guy wanted to build a new football stadium at the bottom of the sea and one guy wanted to build a new hospital downtown, which do you think would get priority and who gets to make that decision? Unless there are infinite resources, sooner or later a similar decision must be made in any resource-limited society. So, of course, the football stadium would get built. There may not be paper money in that society but the decision itself becomes the money and is just as valuable. If the aliens have infinite resources then they must live outside our universe since it is finite in size. Ha, so take that Utopians!
Sorry; I digressed. We should have contingency plans just as we do for earthquakes and floods. At any rate I was thinking these things as I watched the hearings. I knew we now had a contingency for meteors and asteroids though nobody would ever know it. I watched and thought, "Just convince Congress to let you look Mr. Administrator. We'll knock 'em out of the sky if you find them."
Warp missiles could easily be used for defense against meteors, but we could never tell the public that. What could humans have done without warp technology? Nothing maybe. I have always been a big fan of building a mag-lev catapult on the Moon that could throw big rocks very fast. The amount of money that we spent on intercontinental ballistic missiles would almost pay for it. We could do as much damage to ourselves with it or more. We could also throw swarms of rocks at incoming NEOs until we have altered their courses or broken them up into small enough pieces as not to destroy the Earth. Needs more study, but could be viable. Now that we have warp the point is moot.