Xiled

How can anyone rationalize the vast emptiness, the dense endlessness of space? Not without going insane, the human mind has limits. It is just a fragment of dust compared to the enormity of time and space, incapable of comprehending the magnitude of scale. A mind created over a comparably small passage of time and space, made of a jumbled-up mixture of chemicals and molecules shaped haphazardly as a silent witness. But, in terms of the timescale of the universe, that is no time at all. Certainly not in terms of the age and simple nothingness of the universe. Space a frontier without horizons; void of reference points creating a mindless bile of awe and panic; no sedative will ever dissolve. Only looking out to planet earth, and the orb of the sun so bright, glaring defiant in the nothingness of space and time. Both orbs are never hidden and yet there is the miracle of planet earth protected by its atmospheric layers. Protection against the void, the nothingness and vacuum that is space.

If molecules, and the soup of chemicals represent nature; and nature abhors the vacuum of space; never at peace until it can find the elements within the universe to initiate the stirring of life. Where before there was timeless nothingness stretching in every conceivable, measurable direction.

“Prisoner 1057, face the screen for identification, and place both hands on the handles to check out your vital signs.” A voice crackled from somewhere and invaded the privacy of the pod; it violated the small private silence. Except for the constant bleeps and pinging from the various instrumentations, the underlying mood of the confined space was artificiality. A sterile spheroid attached to a cable. An environment bubble placed in the middle of nothing, the overwhelming vacuum of space. It looked like any space capsule accommodating a life form against the cruel environment of space. The feeling inside the small spheroid was full of claustrophobia, based on the contrast between the vast faceless, the endless void of space, compared with the tiny artificial confined environment of the pod.

There was a human being inside the pod. Prisoner 1057.

Without the day and night light reference points his body experienced on the surface of the planet, time became a blur. Missing the light exposure, his internal circadian clock stopped. Sleep came in short bursts of subconscious demands, where the subconscious started to blur with his waking conscious, to bring him to a zombi like trance. Where once there was a strong division, the curtain disappeared between reality and the unreal world of fragmented dreams. His mind, like the internal walls of a house started to erode and collapse inwards, washed away by floods of watery visions, which appeared as jumbled thoughts and memories. Any sensible notions became increasingly difficult to remain above the waterline of reality.

Thinking became laboured, it hurt. What remained were basic motor actions, and the basic ability to control important life sustaining apparatus inside the pod. Such as the umbilical like chords for nutrition, liquid food and water administered by tubes, and similar umbilical-like tubes for body waste.

This was imprisonment in the world of Tsiolkovsky’s invention named the skyladder.

Life on planet earth had reached a crisis point with overpopulation, one of the concerning side effects of this future society was the handling of crime. The administration heavily penalized any forms of anti-social behaviour. Instead of penalizing or punishing the perpetrators with capital punishments, as life was considered precious, imprisonment was organized in a skyladder pod around 22,000 miles above the surface of the earth.

Human space exploration had been restricted for decades, but with the increasing overpopulation problem on the planet a solution was sought by the possible migration of human beings to other planets.

The skyladder was constructed as a huge elevator to an equally huge space station. The cables used a strong high tensile carbon-based material which was far stronger than steel, and twice as flexible. The multiple long cables ran from Earth to heights of space – thousands of meters of cable. Instead of firing into space energy inefficient rockets to build a space station, the cables are used to pull up the same materials, at a fraction of the cost used by those energy rich rockets and without any residual pollution.

Amazingly the skyladder idea was born in 1895, when Russian rocket scientist and pioneer of astronautics, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, suggested using cables in space yet attached to the planet earth.

Once the initial problems of figuring out what to attach the cable onto in space. The answer came with satellites placed in geostationary orbit. Geostationary orbit is a special distance from Earth where objects stay in one precise spot overhead instead of orbiting around us. The location point in space for this anchor point was around 22,200 miles above the equator. From the beginning, using small satellites, which later evolved into huge space property were built, and more supporting cables were used in the continued construction.

The use of sky ladders created the next generation of space exploration as it became a far easier and quicker method to reach outer space, especially with the enormous amount of supplies required for space exploration.

The long and sturdy cables are dropped down from the space stations in orbit and become anchor points. The space station itself could move higher in orbit and was only dependent on the length of the cable, which acted as counterweight to remain in the right place. In steady geostationary orbit, gravity kept the cable taut; above it, centrifugal effects did the same job.

The cable is anchored on the ground and allows unlimited access to the vastness of space. Humankind for the first time in their existence is no longer trapped in the earth’s protective yet restrictive atmosphere. The anchor points were constructed all over the planet, some on top of high mountains, and other examples attached to floating ocean vessels.

The skyladder uses a ‘climber’ to pull the payload up the cable. Nowadays payloads in excess of one per cent of the mass weight of the cable, with the cable likely to weigh hundreds of tons, are pulled safely and gradually into space.

Prisoners in their tiny individual pods are part of an experiment to collect data on prolonged periods of deprived freedom, intentionally put under extreme psychological conditions. The loneliness of deep space exploration requires experimental conditions, and imprisonment pods are part of the research for planned deep space voyages.

“Prisoner 1057 has reached a dangerous state of hallucination, let’s start to pull him into the multiple confinement area.” Said the Superintendent looking at the data on the screen.