Category: Document

The diablovirus pandemic hit a world psychologically unprepared for such enormous death tolls. In the century since the Spanish Flu, medical advances such as antibiotics, widespread vaccination, and public health measures such as greater sanitation and improved sewage disposal led to an attitude that such events were henceforth a thing of the past. Humanity had disease under control, and while there might be localized epidemics as familiar viruses mutated to spread more widely, no disease would ever cut such a wide swath through the population.

As a result of this psychological shift, the earliest signs of the severity of the diablovirus were often overlooked or minimized. Stories of high death tolls in the back country of several Asian nations were chalked up to poor sanitation procedures allowing rapid spread. Even when the reports came in of entire villages being found empty, many commentators assumed that the inhabitants had simply decamped in search of treatment, rather than lying unburied in the beds in which they died from want of healthy people to proivide even supportive care for them.

Even when the Maydays started coming in from the Gloriana and other cruise ships, many people assumed that the high numbers of sick and dying were simply the result of so many people being packed into a relatively small space. Furthermore, many of the passengers would be older, often with various chronic conditions that could be managed with medical care, but which compromised their ability to fight off an illness. While the losses were regrettable, they were not seen as anything presaging any great danger for the general population.

It was only when the outbreaks began to move beyond obviously vulnerable groups and started hitting large numbers of people in the prime of life that mindsets began to change. Finally people at all levels from senior decision-makers to ordinary workers had to confront the idea that no, modern medical science did not have epidemic disease under control, and yes, modern civilization could be confronted with a disease that swept through it like fire through dry grass upon the steppe.

Even then, it was some time before the gravity of the consequences began to sink through, particularly in relation to the vulnerabilities of a highly-interdependent society to cascading failures as the loss of so many critical workers brought the Just In Time system to a halt.

—- NV Grigorenko, “The Diablovirus Pandemic as a Game-changer” in History and Psychology, Fall 2028.

One of the most shocking revelations of the diabolvirus pandemic was the discovery of just how fragile some of our largest cities actually are. There had been some awareness of this problem for years, but most simulations had focused on supply-line breakdowns. What would happen when the trucks of food, fuel, and other essentials stopped arriving at stores all around a major metropolitan center?

However, there was another critical element that all of them had overlooked: social trust. All too many of the people doing this modeling had simply presupposed the sort of social trust they were accustomed to in their comfortable suburban and academic communities. They assumed that everyone would feel confident that government agencies could be relied upon to provide services, and to do so impartially.

What we found was that social trust is not evenly distributed throughout the country. Far from it, while some areas were able to carry on through informal arrangements, each neighbor confident that other neighbors would do the right thing without needing to be watched over, others devolved into a brutal and cynical rule by local strongmen who would provide essential services, at the price of self-abasement from those under his protection.

This latter situation should be distinguished from the phenomenon of leaders spontaneously arising from a group in a time of emergency. The latter almost always arise from a general recognition of their abilities in the area of organization, and will cooperate or step aside as soon as normal civil society reasserts itself. By contrast, many of these local strongmen regarded themselves as a replacement for government bodies and officials, and often refused to work with government officials, even going to the point of resisting police agencies who tried to come in to restore order.

—- J. Parkinson. “The Phenomenon of Warlordism in American Inner Cities” in The Diablovirus Pandemic: Social Effects. Carpenter Point: Kennedy University Press, 2038.

With supply lines disrupted by the pandemic, it was inevitable that the lunar settlements would eventually run out of supplies of something that was difficult or impossible to fabricate locally. Even after nearly two decades of building in-situ resource utilization programs, there were still a number of vital items for which they remained dependent upon supplies from Earth. Generally, these were items that required specialized technologies to produce, or which were not used in sufficient numbers to justify development of lunar manufacturing capabilities.

The normal procedure was to maintain a stockpile of spares, particularly of items for vital equipment, that was considered sufficient for typical usage patterns. As spares were used, they would be replaced by shipments from Earth, but their presence in the settlements would provide a buffer for emergencies.

However, this system presupposed that resupply from Earth could be undertaken well before the spares in stock would be used. That is, it could cover a small disruption in spacelift, such as bad weather at the launch site that might prevent a cargo spacecraft from being launched until the next launch window.

The diablovirus pandemic was a disruption at an unprecedented level. Although launches never were completely suspended, supply lines from the manufacturers to the launch complexes were disrupted at multiple levels. Many companies shut down assembly lines or even entire factories, whether their industries were viewed as “non-essential” by government bean-counters or diablovirus-related absenteeism reached such levels as they simply could not maintain the staffing necessary to do the work.

Even if the items in question were being produced, there was still the problem of getting them from factory to launch site. With so many truckers out from the diablovirus, transportation companies were prioritizing food, medicine and other obvious essentials for cargo space in their vehicles, which meant such items as low-temperature bearings for cryo-pumps or high-temperature rocket engine parts often got left at the end of the line.

There were several cases in which small but critical items were picked up by NASA personnel at the factory and then driven by personal car to Kennedy Space Center, sometimes arriving only hours before the launch window closed and being carried aboard the spacecraft by an astronaut rather than loaded as cargo.

As the pandemic proceeded, even these makeshift methods began to break down. As a result, it became necessary for the various settlements to develop their own ability to make these items, even if only in small quantities and with far less efficient methods than the normal techniques. Given that the alternative was apt to be the slow degradation of vital technologies to the point their settlements became unable to sustain life, they could no longer afford to let the perfect become the enemy of the good enough.

Shepardsport, which had been innovating in stretching equipment far beyond its intended use lifetime, was the first to take these measures….

—- S. K. Wyszynski, “Improvisation and Survival on the High Frontier,” Building for Resilience. Grissom City: St. Selene Digital Press, 2074.

From: Fred Hearne <fthearne@sweetwaterfarms.com>

To: Bill Hearne <wrhearne@nasa.gov>

Sorry to take so long getting back to you, but we’ve been rather busy, and I know you’ve got worries of your own, so I didn’t want to burden you with our problems.

So far, we’re coping well enough, although I’m becoming more and more glad that Dad insisted we kept the capacity to raise our own grain, hay and silage, unlike some of our neighbors who went to buying all their feed. We may be running low on concentrates and supplements, and we’ve been having trouble getting resupplied, but at least we’re able to feed our herds.

The milk truck’s still hit and miss. From what the driver said the last time he did show up, the dairy is having trouble keeping their equipment working, and they’re having to dump milk half the time. It doesn’t help that jug delivery is getting spotty, so even when everything’s working OK, they’ll run out of jugs to put the milk in.

You really don’t realize just how interconnected everything is, how the whole country is like one huge, finely-balanced machine that depends on everything working like it should, until it starts breaking down. And from what little TV and radio news we can get, it sounds like a whole lot of things are breaking down at once. The TV stations around here are only broadcasting a few hours a day now, and even those are uncertain. Most of the radio stations are managing to stay on the air, but there’s an awful lot of time when they’re pretty clearly just put a bunch of music on and let it run.

I wish we had the bandwidth to listen to Shepardsport Pirate Radio, but out here in the middle of nowhere, we’re still trying to get decent broadband, and half the time we have to fall back on dialup.

I can’t even remember when we were inside a proper church. We’ve taken to getting together with the boys at each other’s places for a sort of home church, like we’re back in the catacombs or something. It’s better than nothing, but it’s still not the same as driving in to town and sitting in a pew in a proper church.

I hope I haven’t burdened you too much with our problems. Take care, and write back to me when you can.

As populations migrate and disperse, we find that the part of the population which moves to a new location is almost never a representative sample of the entire parent population. Instead, we find that only certain parts of the parent population are represented in the daughter population. Over time, those differences become accentuated until the new population becomes markedly different from the original.

We are most familiar with it in biology, but it also holds true in human populations. When a group of humans leaves their homeland, the people in the migrant group represents only a subset of the original population, and are often self-selected for certain temperaments and interests as well as skill-sets.

For instance, the English settlers of the eastern seaboard of the North American continent shared a number of characteristics that were not so widely distributed among those who remained in England. These characteristics, particularly a tendency toward contrarian views and attitudes (many of them had been religious dissidents in a time and place in which religious conformity was considered a sign of political loyalty), almost certainly contributed to their growing conflict with the Crown in the years following the French and Indian War, which ultimately led to the Revolutionary War and the formation of a new nation that rejected monarchy and kingship as foundational principles of governance and founded a Republic that would spread across a continent and establish the first footholds on other worlds.

Another example of this phenomenon is developing in humanity’s expansion into the larger Solar System. In societies in which women were able to enter any occupation they were physically capable of, rather than being confined to the traditionally feminine occupations, they have typically been a small number of the total members of those occupations. Although this disparity has often been regarded as the result of women being made unwelcome in traditionally masculine professions, self-selection appears to be a significant factor. Far fewer women either have or are willing to develop the single-minded dedication to operate at a professional level in the most demanding fields, particularly if it is incompatible with the needs of childrearing.

However, given that most of the women who entered the astronaut corps and who made up the populations of the early settlements are self-selected from that portion of the female population who do have that single-minded dedication to their professions. Although some have carved out time for having a family, particularly as artificial uterine environments are becoming increasingly available, these women generally have fewer children that women following paths that give them greater flexibility in relation to family obligation.

As lunar and Martian settlements are growing larger and more robust, we are seeing women from a wider variety of backgrounds joining the permanent population of these communities, particularly now that dependents without specialized training can accompany scientific and technical support crew. However, they do not represent the same proportion of the population as we find on Earth, even in cultures that strongly encourage women to pursue non-domestic careers.

In a society with only natural reproduction, it would be probable that over time natural selection would tilt the balance back toward women who prioritize the domestic life, simply because they will have more children than women who put their careers first and give family a carve-out. However, the development of the artificial uterine environment by the former Soviet Union as part of their Cold War cloning and human genetic modification program has irrevocably altered that dynamic. Particularly as nanotechnology becomes ever more sophisticated and reduces the risk involved in the collection of viable ova for in vitro fertilization and gestation, women have more options, and can reduce the trade-off between career and reproduction, which will have effects on the psychological makeup of future generations.

—- Martha Long-Caudell, “Women, the Workplace, and the High Frontier” in Population Genetics and Space Settlement. Carpenter Point: Kennedy University Press, 2028.

One of the biggest challenges for the lunar and Martian settlements during the diablovirus pandemic was mental health. While the isolation produced by travel times served to protect the settlers from physical contagion, it bred a variety of mental issues in the susceptible.

While it is true that space travelers had to undergo rigorous physical and psychological evaluations, these had become steadily less and less severe as space travel became more routine, especially in the case of those going to the Moon. The Expulsions added an additional wrinkle, since Expulsees were rarely rejected for anything but the most gross of medical problems.

As a result, the stress of being aware of the crisis on Earth (thanks to light-speed telecommunications) yet unable to offer any substantial aid even to friends and family built up steadily as news grew worse and worse. Furthermore, when communications began to break down, people were left wondering whether loved ones were not responding to texts and e-mails because their local cell towers and Internet routers were down, or because these individuals had fallen ill with the diablovirus or met with some other misfortune. This information void could often be even worse than knowing that a close friend or family member was ill, even on death’s door.

On the whole, the transient population (individuals who were on short-term assignments and thus had more primary ties with persons on Earth than those in their local community) found the situation more difficult than the long-term and permanent resident population. However, even among the permanent settlers, there were enough people who had maintained strong ties with friends and family on Earth that questions about hose individuals’ well-being was intensely distressing.

This situation was complicated by a culture drawn from the “right stuff” attitudes of the early astronauts and reinforced by the military traditions of the pilot-astronaut community. The pressure to remain stoic in the face of this nightmarish uncertainty was particularly intense for anyone in a position of authority, which could be difficult for civilian science department heads and committee chairs, and particularly for dependents who were increasingly been given permission to accompany personnel in the years leading up to the pandemic.

For many people, the pressure made itself known through dreams. Particularly in settlements that used advanced telemetry in the monitoring apparatus for their life-support systems, it was possible to detect changes in the frequency of REM sleep, and of heart rate, respiration, and skin temperature of residents in sleeping quarters without intrusive sensory apparatus. This data often proved far more accurate in detecting sleep disruptions than self-reporting of nightmares, insomnia or other issues with sleep.

However, medical personnel often had limited options for dealing with these issues. Although sedatives could force the body to sleep, they could not provide normal sleep-rhythm cycles, which could be almost as damaging as the insomnia they were supposed to treat. And while there were drugs that could reduce the severity of nightmares, they did so by disturbing normal REM sleep, which could be as disruptive to mental functioning as the sleep disruptions themselves.

Fortunately, the most severe cases were generally rare. By and large, most Lunans and Martians were able to maintain a satisfactory level of job performance even with the deleterious effects of the stress resultant from the omnipresent threat of the pandemic, both personally in the case of a breach of the quarantine procedures which protected space travel, and more broadly in the potential of civilization breakdown on Earth if too many skilled workers were lost to sustain complex technological civilization.

Every event has its own rhythms. In the case of a pandemic, it begins with uncertainty and fear. In these early stages, we see only the worst cases, and have no idea what proportion of actual cases they represent. Especially if it is a new virus, like the diablovirus, nothing is known about how contagious it may be, the methods by which it spreads, or any of the other parameters by which one can determine how best to deal with it.

As a result, public health agencies will almost invariably either over-react or under-react. Furthermore, the direction in which they err is almost invariably determined by the last major disease outbreak. In effect they are like generals preparing yet again to fight the last war.

As the course of the pandemic proceeds, early assumptions will often prove to be inaccurate, perhaps even wildly so. At this point, the authorities have choices to make. Will they alter their messages to fit the new data, or will they insist on sticking to their original messages and policies even after new discoveries have invalidated them?

There can be multiple reasons for a decision to persist with an official line that is based upon superseded science. Yes, fear of losing face in the eyes of the general public can be a real issue, particularly in cultures heavily invested in the notion that Authority Does Not Err, but it is certainly not the only one. Some authority figures can be worried that going back on one’s advice will end up sowing confusion, quite possibly leaving people unsure who they should believe. And some can believe that, if the existing advice is not actively harmful, it is better to avoid changing it unless the need to update is pressing.

In the time when mass media was entirely broadcast, with an effective monopoly of a small number of media sources over the information being broadcast, the argument of avoiding confusion might have still held some water. However, by the early twenty-first century, the monopoly once held by major newspapers, radio and television stations had broken down. People were as likely to look to well-known independent bloggers as to national networks for their news.

As a result, major media outlets following the old policy of soft-pedaling new information that contradicted their earlier messages actually ended up damaging the very credibility they were trying so hard to preserve. In the case of the diablovirus, many people became so uncertain as to what preventive measures would actually work that they would end up persisting in useless ones that felt comforting while ignoring ones that actually worked but failed to conform to their intuitive sense of how things ought to work.

—– Helen Cherwell, essay for Intro to Broadcast Media, Shepardsport, 2033.

One of the biggest problems in uncertain times is to avoid unnecessarily raising false hopes. Much like the “cry wolf” effect of warning of perils that fail to materialize, it can lead audiences to tune out the source, believing it to be too unreliable to give credence.

However, the loss of trust in the reliability of a source of information is not the only risk involved in raising false hopes. Unlike bad news, which is a warning of things to be endured, good news can be perceived as a promise of a good thing to come. As a result, when it fails to materialize, the audience feels not only disappointed but actively betrayed.

Yet at the same time, official sources need to be able to maintain the morale of the populace. Particularly in difficult times, positive news can often make the difference between people’s willingness to make an effort on something that does not immediately benefit them, and putting out only the minimum effort. By knowing that some things are becoming better, they can believe that their efforts are accomplishing something positive, something that will benefit them in the long run, even if it appears at the moment that things are becoming worse.

However, if the hope they are offered should prove overly optimistic, or even outright wishful thinking, it becomes dangerously likely that people will feel they’ve been had, that they’ve been tricked into wasting their time to someone else’s gain, rather than working for everyone’s benefit.

We see this during the Energy Wars, particularly during major reverses. Small victories, even the rescue of an escaped POW, were given considerable air time on the home front as morale boosters. However, there were several noted cases in which the situation was portrayed as being far more heroic than was in fact the case. As the true situation came out, a disillusioned audience even turned against the very heroes they’d cheered only weeks before. In some cases, there were demands for harsh punishment, often of the participants in the rescue rather than the media personalities who exaggerated the heroism of the people involved.

—– Autumn Belfontaine, paper for journalism course, University of Minnesota, 2012.

Even before Roy and I became engaged, I had some awareness of what being a Navy officer’s wife entailed. Of course a good bit of it was dated, from reading about the early astronauts and their families, along with a ton of historical fiction set in World War II. So by the time we got married and headed off to Pensacola for his flight training, a lot of the stuff I read about was ancient history. No, I didn’t need calling cards, for the simple reason that formal visits were ancient history. I had some business cards made up when I started looking for freelance assignments, and those worked just fine for what few meet and greets we had down there.

When he got shuffled off into the reserves and put into an airlift squadron, I didn’t think a whole lot about it. He already had his civilian pilot’s license, and it wasn’t that hard to get the necessary jet endorsements to get a job flying for a civilian cargo carrier. In fact, what Roy was flying for them was fundamentally the same airframe, just without the military gear and with corporate livery instead of camo.

Except then the Energy Wars started and his unit got activated. Suddenly I got tossed into a very different situation than what I’d experienced in those last halcyon days of peace. Being based right outside Washington DC had been neat in peacetime, especially going to visit the museums and historic buildings that I’d seen so briefly during the 4H Citizenship Focus course the summer before my last year of high school.

Now we were all too aware that we were in a war zone, that the national capital would be a primary target. Which meant that the military community suddenly became a much larger part of my life.

Sure, I’d met the wife of Roy’s commanding officer when he first reported to his new duty station, so I knew she was an older woman and came from a multi-generation Navy family. But as long as his unit was still on the “one weekend a month and two weeks a year” program, it was pretty much a formality. I saw her a few times at family events for the squadron, but otherwise I had my own life, working for a local silkscreening shop.

Everything changed when Roy’s squadron got their orders to the Middle East. Suddenly I was pulled into the whole officers’ wives’ club thing far more deeply than even at Pensacola. So fast I nearly drowned at first under the rush of expectations.

I do want to make one thing clear: Mrs. Holtz never “wore her husband’s rank” or otherwise usurped authority that was not hers. But she most definitely expected all of use to do our part, and had no qualms about calling us at any hour of the day with a request (which was in effect a command) to go help the family of another member of the unit. There’s the typical “take a casserole over to so-and-so’s house” request, but she’d picked up that I’m an artist, so she didn’t send me a lot of them. My cooking wasn’t bad, but she had enough other women for that job. Instead, I got called on to set up for all the parties. A lot of birthday parties, especially for the younger kids, but we also had parties for the whole squadron’s dependents, especially on holidays.

And she instituted a system of meetings, where we all came over to her house every week to go over things. It wasn’t quite the level of the tea parties and bridge parties I’d read about, with everyone in gloves and those cute little hats you see in the old pictures. We’d dress up a little, but a lot of us wore slacks rather than skirts.

But we were all very definitely aware that we were part of the home front, of the tail that supported our forces on the fighting fronts. It wasn’t just how we’d always start every meeting with the Pledge and the “Star Spangled Banner,” and end them with “God Bless America.” There was an awareness that’s hard to describe, that you really have to experience.

—– Lily Correy, Memories of the Energy Wars, unpublished memoir.

There’s a lot of ruin in a nation. Adam Smith, the father of modern free-market theory, is said to have responded with this remark when told that General Burgoyne surrendering at Saratoga (one of the early acts of the American Revolutionary War) would be the ruin of the UK.

As it turned out, the UK not only survived the loss of her North American colonies, but went on to build a second colonial empire that would last into the twentieth century. She would fight two world wars, stand against incredible odds when it seemed all hope was lost, and even in her diminished state after decolonization would remain a desirable destination for both tourists and immigrants well into the twenty-first century.

The diablovirus pandemic of the mid twenty-first century became a demonstration of just how much ruin nations could absorb before coming apart. To be sure, many began cracking almost as soon as the first outbreaks reached their major population centers. Politicians fled the capitals in favor of the major cities of wealthier nations, where they hoped to be protected against infection. Other wealthy people fled to estates in the countryside, and without leadership, the populace began to fracture along the lines of tribe and clan.

In many cases, these countries were never really “nations” in any practical sense of the world. Their territories had often been drawn as so many lines on a map by colonial powers who had decided an enemy’s territory should be broken up, or it behooved them to shed their own colonial empires which had become both economic and political liabilities. As a result, there was no real polity corresponding to the territory, and often as not these paper countries combined warring factions while dividing previously existing communities. Most often they were held together by force, often by one or another strongman who typically favored his own people at the expense of rival groups. Without the threat of the force of arms to keep the various factions cooperative, these countries soon fractured. They were the ones with the empty villages, the ones where power generation failed quickly, even in the cities.

Where civil society had deeper roots, people pulled together instead of apart. Although many pundits worried about how several decades of immigration from the former colonies might have diluted Britannia’s spirit of keep calm and carry on, by and large people in the UK behaved in ways that their forebears of the Blitz would have been proud of. There were some defectors, some opportunists, particularly in certain neighborhoods of the larger cities in which integration with the larger society was weak. But for the most part, neighbors found ways to help one another while minimizing interpersonal contact. Critical workers continued to go to work, even when it involved exposing themselves to contagion.

We see similar stories across northern Europe, and in Japan and South Korea. All of these are relatively small countries with a cohesive national culture and deep traditions, to the point of being insular. They’re the sort of countries where the grandchildren of someone who brought home a foreign bride are often regarded as at least partly alien to the culture.

However, this cannot be taken to imply that only nations of a blood-and-soil tradition are able to maintain social cohesion under this level of stress, because we also see the pull-together response in the US and many of the other English-speaking nations that are the product of extensive immigration. In fact, we can often see down to the neighborhood level where we have cohesive communities and where civil society has broken down, just by looking at which areas pulled together and which devolved into warlordism.

But as the situation progressed, even cohesive communities could do only so much in the face of increasing shortages of the resources that make modern technological life possible. When trucks could not bring in essential supplies of food and fuel because there simply were not enough truckers to drive them, situations became truly desperate. This was particularly true in regions that were heavily dependent upon fuel oil for electrical generation, and thus for the maintenance of water and sewage treatment facilities, all of which are critical for keeping a modern city running.

Even so, in some areas we see people with knowledge and skills stepping forward, jury-rigging solutions to problems as they emerge and hobbling things forward, while in others people simply give up and resign themselves to enduring the privations…

—- JN Sorensen, A Study in Social Cohesion Under Emergency Conditions, (Doctoral dissertation), Kennedy University Tycho, Carpenter Point, 2044.