Category: Document

As the diablovirus pandemic progressed, it began to put strain on all aspects of society. Not only did it overwhelm medical facilities, it also began to break down other fundamental services.

One of the first things to break down was the supply chain that brings merchandise to stores, from the corner convenience store to the big-box mass merchandisers that anchored strip malls all over the US. The phenomenon is familiar on a smaller scale in any region that gets large-scale natural disasters. After a hurricane or a blizzard, shelves will often be empty, especially of food and other necessities of life, for several days while roads are cleared so trucks can bring in fresh supplies.

However, in this case it wasn’t just one region. It was everywhere at once, which meant that there wasn’t slack available to restore stock levels. Worse, it wasn’t just a problem of trucks not being able to get through impassible roads. In many cases, there simply weren’t enough drivers available to keep the trucks moving. Casualties were high among truckers, at least partly because they have a tradition of not letting mere illness get them down, so they tried to force their way through the early symptoms. In the process, they also infected many of their fellow drivers, as well as the support personnel at depots and truck stops around the nation, further intensifying the breakdown of the transportation network.

In addition to the obvious shortages of food, toiletries, pharmaceuticals and other ordinary necessities, fuel soon began to run short. Initially the problems were masked by the reduction in the level of driving ordinary people were doing. However, it was only a matter of time before other kinds of fuel began to run short. For instance, fuel for backup generators began to disappear, right about the time many coal-fired and oil-fired power plants began to have trouble getting fuel.

Coal was generally delivered directly to the generating stations by train — but locomotive crews were also being stretched thin as a result of the pandemic. Even worse, many of the coal mines were having trouble keeping all shifts staffed as more and more miners called in sick. Some of them would return to work, but far too many did not.

As a result, many of the coal-fired generating stations had to either shut down altogether or run at reduced capacity — and the oil-fired power plants that would normally pick up the slack were running out of fuel oil, with little or no hope of getting supplies in.

This led to what would previously have been considered unthinkable in the US — widespread rolling blackouts as electric utilities struggled to keep at least some power flowing. And with shortages of fuel to power emergency and backup generators, even essential services could not maintain electricity. Hospitals went dark. Refrigerators and freezers in grocery stores failed, resulting in enormous amounts of food spoiling and having to be discarded.

Even water treatment and sewage treatment facilities began to fail. In urban areas of the US, people had come to take the availability of clean water for granted. Intelectually they knew their water bills paid for the pumping, purification and distribution of the water that came to their taps, but few people really thought about the logistics of this process. Even during power outages, water came on when they turned on the tap — until the day it didn’t.

At that point, things began to get truly desperate. Without clean water, basic sanitation began to break down. Without those fundamental systems, the shining modern city soon began to descend into a horror of filth more akin to an ancient or medieval city, further exacerbating the death toll of the diablovirus pandemic.

—– JS Reinholt, essay for civics class.

From: Reginald Waite (rwaite@nasa.gov)

To: George Waite (gwaite@waiteassociates.com)

Subject: Checking In

I’m hoping this missive will reach you reasonably quickly. Steffi tells me that connectivity on Earth has taken some hits, but that it should be possible to make the necessary hops (the advantage of e-mail being a store-and-forward medium).

Right now we are in reasonably good shape. We’ve had some problems, mostly of a technical nature, but we’ve been able to resolve them one by one.

However, with all the reports coming in from all over Earth, I cannot shake the sense that we stand on the edge of a precipice. I have no idea how deep the fall may be, or how hard the landing, only that we will be looking at some very difficult times ahead.

There’s a saying in military circles: “Amateurs talk tactics, armchair generals talk strategy, but professionals study logistics.” At Annapolis our instructors credited it to General Robert H Barrow of the Marine Corps, but since then I’ve also heard it ascribed to Omar Bradley and several other historical figures going back at least to the Civil War.

During the Energy Wars I was aware of our CBG’s resupply operations, but my direct involvement was quite limited. My duty as a pilot of a F-18 Hornet was to take the war to the enemy, not to track gallons of JP-8 loaded and consumed.

Had I remained active Navy, I probably would’ve dealt more extensively with logistics as I rose through the ranks and took on responsibility for larger units. However, NASA chose to exercise their option, and I accepted their invitation to become an astronaut.

It was when I took command of Shepardsport that I truly became aware of the importance of logistical issues. Even before the Expulsions vastly increased our population, I had to deal with the maintenance of our vital supply lines and the management of our consumables. Obviously, the sudden influx of additional population made those balances all the more critical.

When the diablovirus outbreak began, there were the usual hiccups of any time supply lines are disrupted by an unexpected event, whether it be natural or human-caused. As the crisis progressed, our focus necessarily narrowed to our own situation on the Moon, and it became easy to let our view of things on Earth slip out of focus.

As a result, when I received the news of severe issues in the US trucking industry, I knew that we were looking at a major humanitarian crisis in the making — and there was very little that we on the Moon would be able to do about it.

—- Reginald T. Waite, Capt. USN. Oral history record, “Shepardsport During the Diablovirus Pandemic,” Kennedy University Tycho.

Most of the time having a good overview of the situation is a good thing. However, there are a few situations in which being able to see all the problems in the system can actually be detrimental, for the simple reason that it overwhelms a person, leading to a perception that a solution is impossible.

In this sort of a situation, the best thing to do is to focus on fixing the immediate problems. This way you buy yourself time to solve the other problems, while avoiding overwhelm and resultant despair.

As the diablovirus pandemic proceeded, this sort of situation was a serious risk. In many parts of Earth, basic utilities such as electricity, water purification and sewage treatment had broken down altogether — which assumes that the region in question even had those services to begin with. Even basic civil order had broken down in some of the worst-hit regions, with people fighting among themselves on a tribal basis.

For the most part, these were regions where civilization had always been a thin veneer over a tribal culture, often further hampered with traditions of amoral familialism. With little or no general trust, people could not make those random associations that enabled people in general-trust societies to pool resources, both physical and social, to build on what they had managed to preserve.

Even within societies that were generally high-trust, there were often pockets of low-trust communities, where people would just as soon stick a knife in a neighbor’s ribs and take his stuff than work with him to piece together solutions. In the US and Western Europe, many of these problem spots were found in areas of urban blight. The question of whether low-trust communities produced blight or blight produced low-trust communities is one of those chicken-and-egg questions that historians and sociologists will be arguing about for decades to come.

What we do know is this: the level of general trust in a community is the single most useful predictor of how a given area will be able to marshal resources and to address the problems of recovery in a disaster situation. And the diablovirus was no exception. In fact, it can be argued that general trust was even more important, for the simple reason that there was so much that needed to be done. People had to be able to trust that non-relatives could be relied upon to handle various aspects of recovery, rather than using them as a means of enriching oneself.

—- William Robert Hearne, Col., USAF (Ret.) “Reflections on the Problems of Disaster Recovery,” An Oral History of the Diablovirus Pandemic, Kennedy University Tycho Archives.

In the earliest days of lunar exploration, the astronauts brought all their consumables with them. Food came in the form of dehydrated meals which could be reconstituted by injecting them with water, a byproduct of their spacecraft’s fuel cells. Although these meals were a substantial improvement over the earliest space foods, which the Mercury astronauts squirted into their mouths from packets resembling tubes of toothpaste, they still left much to be desired in terms of palatability. Furthermore, the necessity of lifting every gram of mass out of Earth’s deep gravity well made it less and less practical the longer missions became.

By the time of the Phase B prep mission for the Venus Flyby, it was obvious that there was simply no way to carry a year’s worth of food with the spacecraft. Because the Phase B mission was still in Earth orbit, albeit much higher altitude than the Phase A mission, it would be possible to resupply them via automated spacecraft. However, to do so for the actual Venus Flyby would require the automated spacecraft to be launched into solar orbits that would intercept Aphrodite. While this was feasible, there was the risk that a launch failure would result in the astronauts facing starvation.

As a result, it was decided to have the Phase B astronauts run tests on the possibility of growing at least some of their own food. Much to the scientists’ surprise, it turned out that plants actually handled microgravity better than the astronauts who were raising them. Several species of edibles actually flourished in the Ishtar spacecraft, to the point they ended up supplying a reasonable amount of the astronauts’ diet near the end of the mission.

When the American moonbase was set up, the planners knew from the beginning that long-term occupation would require not only a closed-cycle environmental system, but also in-situ resource utilization, including using lunar materials to grow a substantial amount of the astronauts’ food. Given the constraints on pressurized volume and on astronaut time, even these early lunar farms were designed to maximize the yield per unit volume and relied heavily on automation, including but not limited to automatic drip irrigation.

As processors, chipsets and software improved, the robots involved in agriculture became steadily more capable. However, the complexities of dealing with living things are such that fully autonomous operation was almost never possible, requiring at least some level of teleoperation.

—- O. Jespersen, Agricultural Robotics and the Space Race, Grissom City: St. Selene Digital Press, 2028.

Movies and television have made us familiar with the trope of the tiny community maintaining a level of technological civilization by scavenging and repairing their various devices, even repurposing parts of other technologies. However, while such efforts can create visually striking sets, it is highly questionable whether such measures could actually succeed in practice, particularly over the long term.

No matter how carefully one conserves and stretches one’s resources, eventually all machinery fails. And the more sophisticated one’s equipment, the more difficult it is to repair when one’s supply of spare parts runs out. A village blacksmith might well be able to handcraft replacement parts for a steam engine, but fabricating a replacement circuit board for a robotic delivery system is far more difficult.

As the diablovirus pandemic progressed and manufacturing and transportation systems began to unravel, the lunar settlements were faced with the question of how well they could sustain themselves in the absence of replacement parts from Earth. On a world where even the most basic sustenance required sophisticated technological systems, there wasn’t the option of falling back to a lower level of technology.

Even a decade earlier, such a situation probably would have left the lunar pioneers with little choice but to put their systems on standby and return to Earth. However, in the years leading up to the Expulsions, there had been an increasing emphasis on reducing the dependence upon expensive spacelift out of Earth’s deep gravity well in favor of the utilization of lunar and asteroidal materials. This included a shift to supplying the largest settlements with the tools to produce the tools rather than shipping a continual stream of spare parts “uphill.”

However, there were still limits to how much could be produced locally, particularly in relation to “surge capacity,” the ability to replace a large number of damaged pieces of equipment in a relatively short time. And with the Sun entering a period of increased flare activity, there was every reason to be concerned about EMP effects on vital electronics, particularly as related to solar panels and communications equipment that were necessarily located on the surface, where they could not be shielded with lunar regolith.

—- Kennard Redmond, Memoirs of an Engineer on the High Frontier. Grissom City: St. Selene Digital Press, 2055.

The solar wind is perhaps one of the most poorly understood astronomical phenomena, at least in the general populace. This stream of charged particles from the solar corona spreads out throughout the Solar System, and is believed to extend well beyond the Kuiper Belt. This volume of space is known as the heliosphere.

The point at which the solar wind meets the interstellar medium is known as the heliopause, and is believed to be a region of great turbulence. Because the Sun follows an orbit around the central black hole of the Milky Way galaxy, the heliosphere is not a true sphere, but rather a shape more like a comet. The region of the heliosphere in the direction of the Sun’s orbit is compressed by its collision with the interstellar medium, while the trailing parts of the heliosphere extend like a wake.

Popular misconceptions about the solar wind are heavily influenced by early science fiction, especially space operas in which space is treated like an ocean. Although the solar wind is an important contributor to space weather, it does not drive solar storms such as flares or coronal mass ejections the way atmospheric winds drive hurricanes or mesocyclones on Earth.

—- Rand Littleton, response to essay question on solar wind, Introduction to Astrodynamics.

There is a saying that trouble never comes as single spies, but entire espionage agencies. That is, that you seldom have only one problem. The first problem puts a strain on the weak places in your systems, which then cause additional problems. Sometimes this is a rapid failure cascade, but often it is a sort of slip-slide into oblivion.

We see both types of expanding trouble in the Big Sick. For instance, a number of countries appear to have had rapid breakdowns of their public services when relatively small numbers of key individuals fell sick. These situations show a strong correlation with two key factors: 1. heavy dependence upon a few key technical experts as opposed to a generalized level of technical competence throughout the population and 2. weak social trust beyond the immediate social circle of extended family, clan, or tribe.

By contrast, in countries in which familiarity with advanced technology was widespread throughout the culture, and in which trust tended to be generalized, failures spread slowly rather than catastrophically. When someone fell ill, there were enough people with some of the necessary knowledge that equipment could be kept running, and people trusted them to work with this valuable equipment and not steal it to enrich their own families or clans.

As a result, communities with a high level of trust were able to patch together solutions that kept things working far longer. Instead of a catastrophic failure cascade, they experienced a slow deterioration as solutions became increasingly patchwork, like a garment that has been repaired so many times that it becomes difficult to find solid material to attach further patches.

—– Randall Littleton, essay answer in Civics quiz

Solar storm watches are often compared to tornado watches, but in many ways a solar storm is more comparable to a hurricane. For instance, a solar storm affects large regions, even whole worlds, rather than a single settlement. In addition, there is a period of time when the mass of charged particles can be seen inbound, which allows for some emergency preparations similar to boarding up houses and evacuating communities.

But one of the biggest problems with solar storm forecasting is the continuing uncertainty about the mechanisms that drive them. As a result, there are times when even senior solar astronomers disagree about the proper interpretation of solar magnetic field activity, and thus the probability of additional solar storms after a strong flare or CME is detected.

This situation creates an ambiguity about solar weather that can often be even more of a strain on the people who are affected by it, especially settlers on the Moon and Mars, but also people working in orbit. While people who live and work up here have to be able to make their peace with risk, ambiguity is something that is inherently stressful. Not knowing from hour to hour whether conditions will be safe for vital activities, especially when one is accustomed to accurate and reliable weather forecasting, becomes extraordinarily stressful.

As a result, we soon learned to watch for signs of unusual stress among the settlement population whenever we had an extended period of unsettled space weather, and particularly when our experts in the Astronomy Department were not in agreement with astronomers on Earth. Given the close quarters in which we were all living, it didn’t take long for support staff in the sciences to pick up the senior scientists’ uncertainty and pass it throughout the whole community.

—- Barbara Bhin Thi Thuc, MD, Col. USMC. Memories of a Frontier Physician. Carpenter Point, Cycho Crater: Kennedy University Press, 2044.

Thinking back, it’s interesting how deeply certain periods are seared into one’s memory in such clarity that they seem to have happened only yesterday. Some of them are pretty much universal: your first kiss, the first time you get laid. Others are more personal. And then there are the ones that are shared by a whole generation, like the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, the first Moon and Mars landings, the fall of the Soviet Union.

For us, the Expulsions had been the big Defining Moment. We all knew where we’d been and what we were doing when the word went through that we were being sent to Shepardsport. And all of us can remember that moment when we heard about the destruction of Luna Station, of the Kitty Hawk Massacre. Especially those of us who’d just gotten up here — the first thing that went through our minds was that could’ve been me. Just a little difference in the schedule of flights and we could’ve been one of those kids getting their names inscribed on the Wall of Honor.

After Shepardsport adapted to this sudden increase in its population, things pretty much settled into a pattern. Life actually started to become ordinary for us. We had our work, our training, our teaching responsibilities, our mandatory exercise hours. And when we didn’t have something scheduled, there was always studying to do, or class preparation for whatever we were helping teach. So it wasn’t like we had a whole lot of time on our hands to go oh wow, I’m on the Moon. And we really didn’t have a lot of time to brood about the tensions with the Administration, unless our work responsibilities related directly to it.

And then the Great Sick came along and suddenly everything was changing — but it was down there, dirtside. For us, the biggest change was the pilots being confined to the port facility down in Innsmouth Sector, so a whole bunch of classes had to be rearranged so that either they could teach by teleconference, or someone else took over.

But there was always the awareness that it was out there, and we had to make sure it didn’t get in here, because if it did, there was no way to keep it from sweeping through the whole settlement. Up here, we just live too close together. Even keeping the pilots in the port facility was probably not a sure shot, because they were still having some contact with other port facility staff who went home at night to their apartments up in Dunwich Sector.

So there was a continual low-level sense of menace, of being a tiny and very fragile bubble of safety, at a level that we hadn’t felt since we first got up here and were super-aware that we were living on a world where everything that sustained life, down to the air we breathe, had to be provided and maintained by an intricate system of technologies. But it was something you could put out of your mind if you weren’t particularly close to any of the pilots or had family still dirtside. After a while the immediacy of the threat started to fade, and life went on.

And then the solar storm alerts started coming through. It’s something you prepare and train for, just like we prepared for hurricanes back in Houston, and people up in the Midwest and Great Plains prepare for tornadoes. Watches and warnings, regular drills where we all had to go trooping down to the storm shelters under the settlement’s water reservoirs. But you usually figure that the Sun will hock one hairball and that’ll be it. This time the Sun’s magnetic field was doing some seriously weird things, to the point that even the solar astronomers weren’t sure how long the danger was apt to last, and NOAA space weather forecasts were outdated almost as soon as they went up.

I was working on a project for one of our resident astronomers, and half the time I was in her office, she’d be on the phone to colleagues all over the Earth-Moon system. People over at Grissom City, people at JPL who ran the big solar observation satellites, even people in Jerusalem and Tokyo and Moscow. Sometimes she’d even get e-mails from Mars, since there’s no way to have a realtime conversation with that kind of light-speed lag. So I was getting a ringside seat on a whole lot of uncertainty, and that was when I started really feeling like we were under siege.

—– Spruance Del Curtin, “Remembering the Diablovirus Outbreak” from The Lunar Resistance: An Oral History. Carpenter Point, Tycho Crater: Kennedy University Press, 2059.