Category: Document

From: Louis Corlin <lvcorlin@nasa.gov>

To: Randall Littleton <rmlittleton@nasa.gov>, Anthony Stanislawski <aystanislawski@nasa.gov>

Thanks for letting me take a look at your essay on the history of solar storm forecasting. One of the quickest ways to expand it is to dig into the history of the terminology, which derives directly from the nomenclature of tornado forecasting. It may seem unbelievable, but until the late 1940’s the National Weather Service banned the use of the word tornado in forecasts, believing it would spur panic. Only after an Air Force base was caught by surprise and a large number of aircraft were destroyed did this policy change.

I can also give you some specifics on radio procedure related to the on-air announcement of watches and warnings. Let me know if you’d like me to put you in contact with someone in the news department.

It’s easy to think of the Sun as something eternal, unchanging. And from a perspective at the bottom of Earth’s protective blanket of atmosphere, the day star does appear as an unchanging disk of light moving across the sky from east to west. Yes, from time to time it appears to be devoured and regurgitated by some unseen entity, resulting in darkness in daytime, but as humans began to observe the movements of the other celestial bodies in the sky, they began to realize that it was in fact the Moon moving before the Sun and casting a shadow. As a result, it became possible to predict eclipses and avoid the panic that had previously accompanied these events.

It was only when Galileo trained a telescope upon the Sun that it was discovered that, far from being a perfect disk of light, it is in fact marred by dark patches, which we call sunspots. Over time, it was discovered that these sunspots follow regular patterns, and by the beginning of the Space Age, it was understood that these markings are magnetic storms caused by kinks in the Sun’s magnetic field, and they appear dark only in comparison to the rest of the solar disk.

It was also the Space Age that made sunspots and their effects in the solar neighborhood of more than abstract scientific interest. Even before the development of modern radio astronomy, there was an awareness that sunspots had effects on the operation of telegraphs, as witnessed the famous Carrington Event. Even more markedly, radio transmissions were affected by changes in the charge states of the upper atmosphere both as a result of the Earth’s diurnal cycle and the Sun’s much longer sunspot cycles.

But as human activity began to move beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, it became increasingly necessary to take solar activity into account. Even the relatively primitive satellites of those first years could be affected by space weather, and the more sophisticated microminiaturized components only became ever more vulnerable unless they were specifically hardened against system-generated electromagnetic pulse from charged particles in the solar wind.

In retrospect, the first decade of human spaceflight was incredibly lucky. That was a period of relatively low solar activity, often called the Years of the Quiet Sun. It helped that those early flights, particularly those which went beyond Earth’s protective magnetosphere, were of relatively short duration, which reduced the odds that crews would be exposed to elevated radiation.

All that changed with Zond 12, which was returning from an aborted attempt at a lunar landing when a major solar flare occurred. The thin-walled Soyuz spacecraft was little protection against the charged particles streaming toward the Earth-Moon system, and while the cosmonauts were able to reduce their radiation exposure somewhat by reorienting their spacecraft to put the service module between themselves and the Sun, it may well have only delayed the inevitable. Instead of dying immediately of life-support failure or radiation sickness, the cosmonauts survived to die some years later of leukemia and other cancers.

Although the Soviet space program sought to keep this disaster under wraps, enough information leaked out that NASA undertook a major redesign of the Manned Venus Flyby spacecraft to ensure that the astronauts would be protected against all but the most severe of solar storms. In the following years, as long-duration lunar missions developed into permanent moonbases, radiation shielding was always a consideration. While the Apollo Lunar Module might be adequate for a two or three day stay on the lunar surface, stays stretching into weeks or even months should have some form of shelter, even if it was nothing more than a space large enough for the astronauts to sit, covered by a protective blanket of lunar regolith.

With the development of actual settlements on the Moon, it became customary to bury all structures under a layer of regolith. With an expanded presence on the Moon, it became possible to use more extensive excavating equipment and to actually build within mountain ranges and the rim walls of craters, as well as inside lava tubes and other types of natural lunar caverns.

But even with this natural protection, it is necessary to remain continually aware of space weather and the hazards it poses to both humans and machines. Even with the extensive use of robotics, it is still necessary for human beings to suit up and make EVA’s on the lunar surface to do things robots cannot. And travel between settlements invariably involve a measure of exposure to potential radiation hazard. As a result, we keep a careful watch over the activity of the Sun, and issue watches and warnings as necessary, much as terrestrial weather forecasters issue tornado and severe storm watches and warnings.

Even within the largest of settlements, we have shelters to provide a measure of safety against the strongest of solar storms. With adequate warning, we can suspend operations that expose personnel to unnecessary hazards, and if necessary, withdraw into these areas deep under the water reservoirs which provide additional shielding.

—- Ursula Doorne, PhD, Leland Professor of Astronomy, Kennedy University Tycho, notes for an article on solar weather in the Space Age.

From: Vitali Grigorenko <vigrigorenko@imkosmos.ru>

To: Autumn Belfontaine <ambelfontaine@nasa.gov>

Subj: Academician Voronsky

You are correct in being concerned about the reliability of the reports of Academician Voronsky having sequenced the genome of the diablovirus. Neither of the publications you cite are in any way considered reliable sources within the Russian Empire.

However, inquiries to the life sciences department here at Gagarinsk have resulted in rumint of some preliminary reports on such a project. While it appears there is evidence of some success, it would be very easy for non-experts to grossly over-estimate or under-estimate the significance of these successes in practical applications against the current crisis. As a result, it would be best at this point in time to avoid any public report of these results.

That being said, I would strongly advise you to keep open channels of communication with your own settlement’s life sciences people. They may be able to help you to form a clearer understanding of the significance of information as it comes in, or make available to you materials from the journals and other resources in their specialties.

The calling of a physician is to save lives and restore or preserve health. As such, our primary focus will be upon how we can give our patients the best outcome possible.

Unfortunately, there will also be times in which one cannot do all that one might wish to do. It may be the result of the hard limits of medical technology at any given time. It may be the limits of a lack of resources at that particular time, most often as the result of an emergency that leaves us having to prioritize the treatment of some patients over others. And it may be a matter of legal constraints, particularly when we are dealing with minors or other individuals who are not able to make their own medical decisions.

During what has come to be called the Great Outbreak or Great Sick, there were all too many situations in which legal issues constrained what we could do. This was particularly the case for those of us who were living and working in the various lunar settlements.

We had the obvious practical constraints of limited resources, since even the largest settlements — Grissom City, Coopersville, Gagarinsk, Edo Settlement, Shiloh — could not provide their medical centers with the full range of equipment that would be found in a dirtside Level I Trauma Center, or a specialist hospital for treating cancer or other serious diseases. There were some times where a patient who could not be transported back to Earth would have to be made comfortable while nature took its course.

With the disruptions of the diablovirus quarantines, these situations happened more often. Injuries that would’ve been survivable for someone at one of the larger settlements became a death sentence at smaller ones for the simple reason that those resources were not available where the patient was, and transporting the patient had become untenable.

Worse, we also had the situation of people with family members and friends dirtside who were in various difficult situations. Even when there were signed directives such as medical power of attorney, there was often little we could do to ensure that person’s wishes were carried out. It was even more difficult when we had reason to believe that a family member or friend on Earth was in danger, for instance, as a result of being forced into a risky housing arrangement by the closing of group accommodations, but the person making the inquiries about their safety did not have the necessary standing to qualify for release of information under privacy laws. Although it was difficult to tell them no in such emotionally charged circumstances, we had to prioritize the privacy of the individual in question.

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

In times of trouble, children make up a particularly vulnerable population. By law they are dependent upon an adult guardian to function in society. Generally that guardian will be a parent, or at least a close relative.

Even in normal times, a small number of children will have no parent or other close relative, or will be in such a dysfunctional family that their basic needs cannot be met. As a result, almost every polity has some mechanism for providing suitable guardianship for such children. Although most people think of this process primarily in terms of a foster home in which the child will reside, guardianship also involves such things as medical and financial decisions, which typically will be handled by a different group of people than those putting a roof over the child’s head and food on their plate.

In theory all the different aspects of the child welfare system work together smoothly to provide children with the best possible environment for them to thrive in the absence of their natural guardians (parents or another close adult relative). In practice, it often works more like a creaky and antiquated piece of machinery, simultaneously subjecting good parents to unmerited scrutiny and allowing other children to slip through the cracks.

A major societal disruption quickly strains these systems to the breaking point. In the case of the diablovirus pandemic, many children were suddenly left without functional adult supervision as their parents fell ill. Even in two-parent homes, many fell ill simultaneously, and often so quickly that there was no time to contact the typical substitute parental figures such as grandparents or aunts and uncles.

Worse, many of the foster parents upon which the child welfare system relied were also falling ill. As a result, child welfare departments began to take desperate measures to get children placed. People who were in the process of being screened as potential foster parents were simply fast-tracked, leading to red-flag situations being overlooked. In other areas, older teens were simply allowed to function as guardians for their younger siblings, even if they themselves were some months or even years short of their majority.

In some of the hardest-hit cities, schools that had been closed to stop the spread of the virus were re-opened as emergency children’s homes. Desks were cleared out of the classrooms, to be replaced by cots for the children to sleep on and perhaps small lockers for their possessions.

Needless to say, this open-barracks sleeping arrangement was less than satisfactory, and often resulted in serious abuses. Many of the staff were only very hastily vetted for reliability, resulting in more than a few individuals finding employment who should never have been allowed near children. But not all the abuse was at the hands of adults. Children are capable of being appallingly cruel, and in a situation in which the normal bonds and structures of society seem to be breaking down, the restraints that hold it back can quickly dissolve.

—– T Cartwright, “Child Welfare in a Time of Pandemic.” The Diablovirus: a Social History. Grissom City: St. Selene Digital Press, 2044.

We came to call it the Outage. Three days in which all of Shepardsport was effectively cut off from the outside universe as a result of malware interfering with our Internet connection. We weren’t totally cut off — we could get dribbles, the occasional text message or e-mail that slipped through, and even if the pilots flying in from other settlements weren’t allowed to come up to the main part of the settlement, they did talk with enough people in Flight Operations that we heard some gossip, enough to know that something was happening, and it was big.

But nothing that could’ve prepared us for what we discovered once IT dragged that piece of malware out of their servers and we were suddenly reconnected with the full flow of the Internet. Not just the sudden and explosive increase in the numbers of cases of what had been dubbed the diablovirus for both its severity and the two protein structures that resembled a devil’s horns. Until I got the AP and Reuters feeds back, I would never have expected food riots in modern cities. But a quick visit to the relevant news outlets’ websites showed images of people swarming trucks, literally tearing the trailers apart and looting the food inside. Pictures of police and even military forces firing upon the rioters, trying to break up the crowds of desperate people by any means possible.

It wasn’t a crop failure, or a sudden mutation of the diablovirus to infect livestock. Instead it was a failure in the distribution system. The food existed — but it was stuck in the field and the barns, unable to get to the people who needed it. Thanks to the Just In Time system, there was almost no food stored in grocery stores’ warehouses. Once workers at various processing plants began to fall ill, the wheels started coming off on the supply chain, resulting in vegetables literally rotting in the fields, animals having to be euthanized and burned or buried because the farmers had no fodder for them.

But even more disturbing were the accounts of riots and destruction against anyone and everyone who could be made a scapegoat. Some were the Usual Targets: Jews in much of the West, Chinese in Indonesia. But others came as a surprise: the riot in New York City that poured onto Wall Street and tried to storm the Stock Exchange, apparently blaming international commerce for the rapid spread of the disease. Or the attack on a small town in California’s Marin County, the home of a parapsychological research institution originally founded by astronaut Ed Mitchell. Apparently someone had taken it into their head that psychics’ “bad vibrations” were causing the disease, or that their work was Satanic, or half a dozen different notions that were offered to police interrogators by the rioters after their arrest.

It was as if we’d gone to sleep in a troubled but sane world, then woke up to find the entire world had gone mad. We knew the diablovirus could have digestive and respiratory symptoms, but could it also have purely neurological symptoms?

—- Autumn Belfontaine, “Shepardsport Pirate Radio’s Coverage of the Diablovirus Outbreak” from The Lunar Resistance: An Oral History. Carpenter Point, Tycho Crater: Kennedy University Press, 2059.

Hacking had its roots in the development of TouchTone dialing by Bell Labs. Because the system did not distinguish tones generated by the dialing telephone and tones generated by an external device placed near the handset’s microphone, it was possible to create a device that would enable a user to obtain free phone calls throughout the network. Although many of the original “phone phreakers” learned how to navigate this system by trial and error, it became vastly easier after an internal AT&T document was leaked (some said stolen, others said found discarded in a dumpster), becoming one of the first major examples of the perils of security by obscurity.

By the 1980’s and 90’s the rise of the Internet made hacking both more widespread and more publicly visible. However, as long as it was perceived as being mostly the actions of nerdy juvenile delinquents, concern about it was viewed largely as verging upon a moral panic.

Even the incidents of attempts to hack US military assets during the Energy Wars were not seen as a major threat, mostly because of the sheer ineptitude of many of the organizations involved. Yes, it was a threat, and security measures were quietly put in place to make it more difficult, but it was generally regarded as better to say nothing about it and leave the other side wondering whether they had been successful or were wasting their time.

However, it was during the Sharp Wars that cyberspace truly became a battlefield. The Sharp Wars were a civil war within an Information Age society heavily invested in technology, in which both the Administration and the Resistance were heavily dependent upon control of channels of information in their strategy. This was particularly true as the locus of resistance shifted towards the Moon. With the rise of Shepardsport Pirate Radio as one of the foremost information organs of the Resistance, the Flannigan Administration began to focus its cyber-warfare efforts on blocking its Internet radio streaming service, preventing US citizens on Earth from listening to Shepardsport commandant Reginald Waite’s dissenting views.

—- V. Taylor, “Cyber-war.” Battlefield Dynamics, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2055.

Disasters are frightening enough when you are at home, among familiar faces, people who know you and whom you know. It’s even more frightening to have an emergency strike while you are traveling, and suddenly find yourself stranded among strangers, who may well view you as an unwelcome mouth to feed in a difficult time. If you have money to pay your way, they may well charge you ruinous prices for ordinary necessities. And if your money should run out, what help you get may be offered grudgingly, even with a side dish of cruelty, like disliked or inedible foods presented as saved “just for you.”

It is even worse when you are told to return to a “home” that is not safe, and the authorities refuse to take your word, or even what evidence you can offer, and insist that you are the problem, not the people you’re expected to live with. When the initial quarantine orders turned into general “stay at home” orders, there were many people who found themselves in just that sort of situation.

Victims of domestic violence were one obvious group. Because most people recognized the danger of returning a person to a home occupied and controlled by an abuser, accommodations were generally made for such individuals to shelter in a safe location.

However, there were also some less obvious groups who did not regard themselves as able to return safely to their nominal homes. Many of them were living in academic dormitories and various kinds of hostels, especially for work-study situations, when the orders came through to clear these group living situations. Everybody had to go home, immediately, often with barely enough time to pack their belongings and arrange transport or storage if those did not fit into the typical personal vehicle.

Most such individuals had reasonably safe homes. Those homes may not have been the most comfortable, but they were not torn by violence, and they generally belonged to reasonably flexible people who were willing to agree to disagree, even with their adult children.

However, there were some whose parents or parent-substitutes were not known for such flexibility. While they might not be physically abusive to their charges, they could make life a Very Special Hell for a young person who had been briefly independent and become accustomed to making their own decisions and forming their own opinions. In many cases these opinions were at variance with the narrow range considered acceptable by Adult Authority in the household.

One immediately thinks of persons of atypical sexuality, but on the whole most of them were sufficiently plugged in with the LGBTQI+ community that they were able to find temporary accommodations with an accepting friend or mentor. It was the others who often fell through the cracks: neurodivergent people who had found the freedom to embrace neurodiversity, only to be expected to return to a home where the only acceptable mode of living was Indistinguishable From Neurotypical. People with interests that parents derided, particularly in the arts, given how society has often regarded artists as unstable and therefore suspect.

But there were also those who had simply used this time apart from their parents to explore political or religious philosophies, and who had examined the ones they’d been brought up with and found them wanting. To go home would be to have to choose between continual conflict with the authority figures in the household and living a lie in order to keep the peace, with all the stress that is involved in preventing any leakage of information to the contrary.

The US had its own particular set of issues in that regard, and curiously enough, it was not just with students in in the liberal arts. Given that the US cloning program had focused on highly successful people — not just senior political and military leaders, but also business magnates, inventors, athletes, and all the early astronauts — many of their clones were active and even prominent in a multitude of fields of endeavor. Young people in college or internships often had reason to develop contacts with these individuals, generally via the Internet, and had come to see them as people, not monsters. In some cases they had established romantic entanglements, sufficient to consider emigrating to the Russian Empire or to the Moon.

Now they were suddenly being expected to return to homes were clones and other Sharps were viewed as monsters, where it was not sufficient to condemn cloning and human genetic engineering as Frankenstein science if one did not also condemn its products as the fruit of a poisoned tree, forever morally suspect. Homes where their Internet access was apt to be monitored, where their devices might have to be surrendered for examination at a moment’s notice. Suddenly they were faced with the choice of whether to be true to themselves and face an unlivable home situation, or to cut off all contact with these individuals for the duration, even erase every document that contradicted the approved orthodoxy.

But given that the authorities to whom they had to appeal if they were to find alternate housing were all supportive of the Administration’s position, trying to claim that their home situations were not safe was apt to net them not merely accusations that they were making their own problems, but that they were the problems.

—– Virgil Gadsen, “When Home is Not Safe: the Unseen Crisis of the Diablovirus Pandemic.” The Diablovirus Pandemic: A History. Carpenter Point, Tycho: Kennedy University Press, 2034.