The Impending Disaster

Do you remember where you were when you heard about the asteroid? Do you remember what you were doing when you heard the Earth was going to die?

I was a freshman in college, and I’d been sleeping peacefully, dreaming about… well, that’s none of your business. But when I woke up, I noticed my roommate was gone, even though it was early morning. They usually slept until noon. I wandered out to the common room groggily, and found everyone in our suite gathered around the TV, hanging on every word of a news broadcast.

Long range telescopes had sighted a fast moving asteroid a month ago. It looked like it was coming from the general area of the Sagittarius constellation, but it didn’t seem to be in line with any particular star. There had been nothing to worry about at first. Sure, it was headed in our general direction, but there’s so much space in space, it would miss us easily. Except, the astronomers and astrophysicists kept working and figured out its trajectory and where the Earth would be when it finally got to our area of space. At the rate it was approaching, it would be here in 4 years, and it would be perfectly in line to smash into the Earth. It was big enough to completely obliterate our planet. It was so massive, even throwing every nuclear weapon from every country would not make a dent.

I remember the frenzy of the next few days. Lots of panic. Lots of guesses about what would happen. Lots of bravado that the people of Earth could beat anything. Everyone had an opinion about it. Everyone everywhere suddenly became an expert in astronomy, astrophysics, theology, philosophy, or mechanical engineering. For weeks everybody talked and nobody listened. I just quietly changed my major from World History to Astrophysics. This was the biggest thing to ever happen in the history of the Earth, and I wanted to know more about it.

At first, the astronomers thought Jupiter could save us. The giant gas giant has so much gravitational force that it pulls asteroids off course and sometimes even into itself. It’s like a gigantic bodyguard for the inner planets. The scientists did the calculations again, predicting Jupiter’s orbit. It would be on the other side of the solar system by the time the asteroid came in. It would have no effect at all. We were still doomed.

The Earth went into overdrive. We had 4 years and we intended to be ready. World summits brought together not only the leaders of the world, but also the top minds. Agreements were made, plans were put in place, and the Earth as a whole had a singular direction for the first time in history.

Seemingly overnight, the governments of the world changed so the scientists and top minds had more of a say than the corporation owners. New technologies sprouted like dandelions in Spring. We managed to make stable, usable nanobots and microbots, and reliable AI to run them. They had tiny power generators that used the atomic motion of molecules to make power. We cracked the secrets of non-chemical spaceship drives. Then labs worked around the clock and managed to make fusion power stable and able to produce thousands of times more power than it took to generate the fusion reaction, even using common deuterium.

After that, traveling faster than light speed fell into place. We’ve been working on warp bubbles for years. These are devices that can actually compress space in front, and expand it behind, making a bubble where the limit of light speed doesn't apply. And with the fusion engines, we finally had a big enough power source to make it work. We went from sub-light to 3 times FTL (faster than light) in just two years.

We sent a probe out at 3FTL to inspect the asteroid, and we were stunned at what we found. It was not an asteroid of ice and rock. It was something manufactured. The asteroid was made up of six obelisks that had smooth sides and were six sided. They were held together by massive amounts of ice and frozen gasses. The obelisks were huge, much longer than they were wide, and our telescopes had only seen the front of it. This made the total mass hundreds of times more than we had originally thought.

Projections showed the six almost planet length obelisks hitting the Earth dead center, splitting it open like a bullet through an apple. The question of us being alone in the universe was undoubtedly answered. We were not, and our neighbors hated us.

But wait, the projections were wrong! Or rather, they weren’t complete. Earth would be in the position we had thought it would, but Mars would be in front of it. Now it looked like Mars would be the one impacted. The asteroid would break Mars apart, sending the fragments spilling in every direction. And a large portion of those fragments would come toward the Earth at ridiculous speeds. The Earth would still die, just a little later.

As the asteroid got closer and we could see more detail, both from telescopes and from additional FTL probes. The front part of each obelisk came to a fine point, and the forward half seemed to be made of nickel-iron alloy. But it got stranger. The probes scanned deeper, and the inside of the obelisks were not the same as the outside. Inside the front half of each was a layer of magnesium, then phosphorus, frozen hydrogen, followed by layers of nickel-iron, lead, and gold. The back fourth of each was some sort of black substance, but we couldn’t figure out what. And we couldn't scan through it to see what was deeper inside.

We got out into the solar system and started using the microbots to repurpose the asteroid belt. At first we thought we could just put a bunch of huge asteroids in the way of the obelisks, but we couldn’t get things that massive to move far enough in the time we had. We couldn’t even make anything big enough out of the asteroids. So we sent robots to break the asteroids down and manufacture ships. Maybe we could make enough ships to make a difference.

We developed super powerful lasers that were powered by fusion generators. We made a plan to cut the obelisks into tiny parts that we could then drag away with our newly made warp bubble drives. The lasers were made, and we developed huge warp bubble drives. But there was no way to make any of it powerful enough, or in enough bulk, to handle the massive obelisks coming in. Not in the time we had. Also, the most powerful laser we could make could only get a few feet into the iron alloy parts, and it couldn’t affect the black substance at all.

We developed advance after advance, but we just couldn’t figure out a way to stop or deflect the obelisks that wouldn’t make the situation worse. They were so massive that we couldn’t move them. Any explosion would break apart the ice holding them together, but not alter their course. Even if we found a way to chop them up, the pieces would still obliterate anything in their path.

Then more bad news came. We’d been concentrating on the incoming asteroid, and hadn’t been looking around for others. A scan found a second massive asteroid, hurtling through space from the opposite direction, aimed directly at Mars, and timed to hit just when the obelisks would. Mars would be crushed between the two. Our sister planet would be shattered into a million pieces that would then rain down on Earth. The projections showed many, many of the pieces hitting the Earth and ending all life many times over.

With FTL space travel now possible, colonization was now a possibility. But of course, only for the select few. The top 1% richest people hired their own scientists and sent out a tiny probe ship to the Alpha Centauri system, 4 light years away. There are 3 stars in the system, and even though Proxima Centauri has an Earth sized planet in the habitable zone, the star is fairly dim, and the planet is tidal locked. Centauri A is about Sol sized, and the probe found there was a perfect planet orbiting it. The planet had a molten core, deep liquid oceans, and only 1.2 Earth gravity.

The 1% group funded other research and cracked the secrets of stable cryostasis. Then they used microbot technology to farm asteroids to make several huge spaceships, fitted with FTL engines. They announced they were setting up a colony on Alpha Centauri A's planet. Probes had found no life, but the planet was perfect for terraforming. They gathered plankton and bacteria to start the life process there, and start converting dust into soil. They gathered plants and animals, sea creatures, insects, and tons of sea and pond water, rich with amoebic life. They sent the bacteria and plankton out first to spray across the planet and start the conditioning process. Super hardy plants were sent in a slightly slower ship that would arrive a year later. Then the lichens and simple plants would take hold in the soil and oceans and start converting the atmosphere.

They programmed robots to prepare a small section of the planet first, to live on while the rest was being terraformed. And since they knew that atmospheric conditioning would take a hundred years, they would stay in cryo sleep until it was done. They had gathered enough food and supplies to live on for years while they set up farms. It didn’t matter that it made drastically less food for the rest of the world. The world would be dying anyway, and we wouldn’t need it, right? Plus, they were rich and could bribe the farmers and manufacturers before the rest of the world even got a chance to protest.

In the final days before impact, the 1% gathered their families and boarded their ships. At 3 times light speed, it would take them about a year and a half in cryo-sleep to get to Alpha Centauri. When they arrived they would stay asleep for a hundred years while the plants and the robots made the planet livable. Humanity wouldn't die out. It would be a hard life, but it was better than dying.

All productivity around the world stopped. There was a rash of suicides, and cults sprang up, planning elaborate death rituals. And as one, the human race held its breath.

The obelisks were almost to Mars when the other asteroid came zooming up at 1/8th the speed of light. By this time, we had analyzed its contents and found that it was mostly water, with pockets of frozen nitrogen, a lot of carbon dioxide, chlorine, and a few other gasses. And it was almost the size of the planet itself.

The giant ice asteroid sped toward the helpless Mars. Just before it hit, the colony ships left. They had waited until the last second to see what happened, but with death imminent, they wanted to be away from the blast zone. They disappeared into the void of space, with enough fuel for a one way trip to Alpha Centauri.

And the asteroid missed.

It was pulled just barely off course by the gravitational force of the sun and missed Mars by only a hundred kilometers, actually scraping by its thin atmosphere, shearing off huge slabs of ice that turned into gas and water vapor before even hitting the ground. The expanding air slammed around the planet at 3 times the speed of sound.

The Earth erupted in cheers. A moment later, the cheers were silenced when the ice asteroid hit the obelisk asteroid, and everything exploded in slow motion.

The ice of both asteroids was flung forward, toward Mars, in fragments that were relatively tiny, but only compared to how they started. They were a few tons each, rather than the planet sized chunk they started as. They rained down through the thickening Martian atmosphere, partially burning up before hitting the surface. The massive amounts of frozen gasses and ice burned up in the atmosphere and made the atmosphere even thicker and hotter. The thicker, hotter atmosphere then burned up more and more huge chunks of ice and gas that fell just minutes later. In just twenty minutes of this barrage Mars went from being a freezing planet with a thin atmosphere to having a boiling hot hell-storm with air twice as thick as Earth. The whole planet was engulfed in sand and rain and ripping winds.

The obelisks had been slowed significantly by the impact of the other asteroid, but they hadn't stopped. They kept going toward the planet, but now they were splitting apart. The previously perfect formation of obelisks was drifting recklessly. The lead one impacted Mars at a slight angle, stabbing down into the crust of the planet. It was so long that a large part of it was still outside the thin atmosphere. As Mars’ planetary spin swung it sideways, the end hit the front sections of the next two obelisks. The hit straightened the first one, so it was now stuck into the planet at a perfect right angle to the planet, but it sent the second two obelisks tumbling through space. They both completed a full spin and then hit the planet too, but not where the first had hit. Obelisks 2 and 3 hit perfectly at the north and south poles.

I was at home with my family, glued to the live news coverage. For a long moment there was absolute silence. None of the news reporters or scientists at NASA said anything. But eventually, after a breathless minute or so, one of the leading astrophysicists hesitantly said, “So… as it turns out… it is quite possible… we won’t die… I think.”

Our living room erupted in cheers. All of us screamed and cried and danced and hugged each other. The whole world celebrated for days. The death cultists quietly faded to obscurity. And we all remembered the rich 1 percenters that were going to spend a hundred years in cryo-sleep, just to find out that they hadn’t needed to. And we laughed. We thought about sending ships out to Alpha Centauri, but we ultimately decided not to waste the scant resources their trip had left the rest of the world.

During the next 18 hours, as the planet spun, the remaining three obelisks hit equidistantly around the equator, so that now there were giant spikes at all six points of the globe. The scientists did a quick calculation on the amount of the obelisks still showing, and they said that, assuming the obelisks remained intact, they would have penetrated so far down they reached the solid core of the planet. They were so long that they still had hundreds of miles exposed to space, outside the Mars atmosphere. Mars now looked like a humongous pin cushion.

Then it was time to pick up the pieces. We all went back to work and our regular lives. We used the scientific advances of the last four years to clean up the pollution in Earth’s air, land, and oceans. We advanced cloning to the point where we could reintroduce plants and animals that had gone extinct, as long as we had a decent genetic sample. And I went back to college, now working on my Master's degree.

We thought it was over. Earth was safe, Mars was stable, and everything was ok. But it was just starting.

Mars now had a thick atmosphere filled with carbon dioxide, water vapor, and nitrogen. The planet cooled after the initial onslaught of the asteroid impact, but the thick, carbon dioxide rich air caught the sparse sunlight and warmed the planet, keeping it hotter than Earth. The water vapor swirled around the planet in huge storms, dumping millions of tons of rain onto the surface, which was rapidly turning into lakes and rivers and oceans.

“Can you tell me why the new Mars atmosphere won’t last?” my teacher asked our class.

I said, “Solar wind.”

“Correct, but incomplete,” she said, then pointed to the know-it-all Jacob in the next row. His hand was up and waving, even though we were in a graduate level college class and no one had to raise their hand to speak. “Yes? You have the answer? Why is solar wind a problem?”

“Mars has no magnetic field. The Earth’s magnetosphere protects us from the solar winds, deflecting it so it can’t deplete our atmosphere. Without the magnetosphere, the next solar storm will shave off a good portion of the gasses. A little of it has been taken off already.”

“Good answer, but do you know what causes the magnetosphere?”

“The molten core,” I answered. “The middle of our planet has layers and layers of molten iron moving past each other, creating magnetic fields.”

“Correct,” our teacher said, smiling. “And here’s one of the interesting things that causes this. There's more than just iron and rock down there. There are all sorts of elements, including hydrogen. And part of the movement of the core is caused by these elements getting sorted out. The heavier elements are migrating toward the center, and the lighter elements, like hydrogen, are migrating toward the surface. And as far as we can tell, Mars has a solid core because it already sorted out its elements. There’s nothing to move.”

“Ummm… don’t be so sure of that,” a voice said from the back. Everyone in the classroom looked back to see Violet watching something on her phone. At first we were all annoyed that she was watching her phone during class, but then she turned up the volume, and we all heard the breaking news.

More unmanned probes had been sent out to Mars and they were scanning it every way they could. And they were now getting readings of a magnetic field coming from Mars’ core. It was weak, but it seemed to be increasing. Our scientists were theorizing that the impact of the obelisks must have compressed the planetary core so much that it became molten. The magnesium and phosphorus in the tips of the obelisks would have heated up first, melting the rock and metal around it. The frozen hydrogen would have become liquid, and then gas, tried to expand, and been compressed back into a liquid, or possibly even a metal. That would have heated things up even more. And all the gravity would keep pressing the obelisks farther and farther inside the planetary core, increasing the pressure and heat until the entire inside of the planet would become molten.

The impact of the obelisks had done other strange things to Mars. The obelisks and ice-asteroid had pushed it so hard that the orbital characteristics changed. To give you an idea, Earth has an orbit of 365 ¼ days, a day of 24 hours, and a tilt of 23.5 degrees. By contrast, Mars, which only had .3 of Earth’s gravity, had an orbit of 687 Earth days, a day of 24 hours and 37 minutes, and a tilt of 25 degrees. But all the extra mass of the pillars and the asteroid had increased the mass, and the gravity was now somewhere around .9. The massive metal towers sticking out of the planet had slowed its rotation, so it turned once every 23 hours and 45 minutes. And the tilt of the planet had changed from 25 degrees, to just 22.6 degrees.

But that wasn’t even the biggest change. Since the planet had slowed in its orbit, that made it orbit slightly closer to the sun. The orbit around the sun had been 687 days, at about 1.524 AU. From what the scientists could calculate, Mars would now settle into an orbit of 438 days, which is 1.2 Earth’s orbit, or 1.2 AU. This brought it much closer to the sun than it had been, well within the habitable zone.

For a year after that, the giant pins in the pin cushion got shorter, pressing farther into the core, melting, adding to the mass of the planet. As the inside of the planet got hotter, the magnetic field grew. The Martian crust split apart, making mountains and valleys that hadn’t been there before. The entire planet increased in size, and we were afraid that the whole planet would break apart.

Gradually the changes slowed, the quakes stopped, and the obelisks stabilized. And then the massive obelisks broke. Not like you would expect, at the middle, but all along the length of them. They turned into massively long strands of metal spaghetti, still bound together, but definitely separate.

Some of the inside strands got shorter than the outside strands, getting sucked into the planet to add to the now fully molten core. The scientists theorized that these inner strands were the iron, lead, and gold that the probes had detected, and that they were now adding to the upper layers of the core, or bleeding into the mantle. They would help keep the core layers moving for a billion years or more as they migrated down to the center, and the lighter elements migrated back out to the mantle.

Around a year and half after the first impact, the tops of most of the obelisk strands were inside the atmosphere. Then the spaghetti strands separated, bending out over the Martian landscape. As they bent, they shed blocks of the black material from the tips of each strand. Each of the blocks were around ten miles across. They slammed into the surface of the planet but didn’t break. Soon the area for thousands of miles around each obelisk, or former obelisk, was littered with midnight black cubes, spotting the planet like someone went way too heavy on the pepper.

After the strands lost their heavy black tops, they straightened up a bit, and then spent the next year being slowly consumed by the increasingly molten core of the planet. But there were several strands that stubbornly refused to shorten. Six strands, at each of the six points on the globe, stayed in place. Impossibly long, the tops of them were still well outside of the growing atmosphere. And we wondered why those strands were different.

The planet was almost habitable now. The molten core produced a strong magnetosphere, which protected the new nitrogen and carbon dioxide atmosphere from being shaved away by solar wind. The planet had grown to almost twice its previous size, making it still smaller than Earth, but only just. The high density of carbon dioxide made the air unbreathable, but it created a greenhouse effect that kept the planet warm. Frequent rain ran down the mountains and made rivers. The mysterious black cubes gathered in sunlight from the breaks in the clouds and converted it to heat so well that our explorers couldn’t come within miles of them. Altogether the planet had average temperatures of 10℉ hotter than Earth.

Where the obelisks once were, now there were just holes, with the few remaining strands still sticking out of them. The holes were mostly made of melted nickel-iron, so the rain that fell in them didn’t seep into the ground. Over time they filled with water and became massive lakes.

And then the purpose of the remaining strands became clear. Over the past two years, those remaining 36 strands had stayed relatively straight. But now they started to bend farther and farther. And then just like the others, the tops broke off in large chunks. But instead of the chunks making it to the Mars surface intact, these burned up in the atmosphere. But our sensors showed they didn’t burn completely. The outer shell burned up, and then the inside kind of dissolved. It just… dissipated into nothing. This happened over and over as more chunks fell off the strands. One of our probes zoomed in and caught some of the material that was falling into the atmosphere and brought it back to Earth for people to analyze.

As suddenly as it had started, the strands stopped shedding the top blocks. Now they were about half the size they had been. There was still about 40 miles of strand sticking up in the air.

When the probe got back, our scientists examined the material it had captured. And again the Earth was amazed. The strands had dropped massive amounts of beneficial bacteria, protozoa, simple plants, algae, and molds. Everything that a planet needed to sustain life and produce soil and oxygen. There were soil bacteria that would eat rock and convert it into dirt. There were cyanobacteria that would convert massive amounts of carbon dioxide to oxygen. There was simple ocean plankton, and tiny lichens and mosses. All of these were similar to what we had on Earth, but seemed to be more voracious than what we had, and they had a strange cell structure. They also grew at an alarming rate, spreading across the land and oceans in months.

We sent more exploratory missions to the surface and everyone was astounded by how different it looked now. The sky was full of clouds, the air was thick with moisture, there was green moss and algae everywhere, and the oxygen levels, while still low, were rising steadily.

The satellites picked up something happening and Mission Control called the explorers back to their ship. They blasted off and hung in orbit, watching the final destruction of the obelisks. What was left of the remaining strands started to just dissipate, creating a thick cloud of dust that spread out over the whole planet. The dust blocked the sun, cooling the planet quickly. The chill air and the settling dust made it rain even more, which pulled excess moisture out of the air. After a few weeks the dust settled onto the ground, and there were clear skies, and even the beginnings of ice caps at the poles.

The explorers went down again and found the surface now covered with a thin layer of loose soil, packed with organic material, beneficial microorganisms, and high concentrations of trace elements. It would be perfect for planting anything from crops to trees. It was predicted that the frequent rain would wash the soil off the mountains and it would build up to a thicker layer in lower areas. It wouldn’t be deep enough by itself for deep tree roots, but we could pile it in areas to get it thick enough.

It didn’t take us long to follow up on the evident invitation. We couldn’t tell if the senders of the obelisks had conditioned the planet for themselves to live on, or for us, but in the absence of anyone else, we had to assume it was a gift.

We got mission after mission sent over. We seeded insects and worms into the soil, and plants of all types on both land and in the oceans. We established colonies of bees and other beneficial insects to help the plants, and transplanted small sea creatures and fish into the oceans. We seeded the lichens, mosses, and algae of Antarctica to the areas around the cooling Martian poles, where the relatively warm water and air let it flourish quickly. We seeded tropical plants and insects to the areas around the equator, and desert plants and animals to areas where it seemed like it would be dry. We spread hardy plants everywhere, and followed up by introducing more species of insects, small birds, mice, and other small animals.

We were careful and allowed each type of organism to thrive before introducing the next, competing type. With near perfect conditions for life, it didn’t take long to have small areas that looked almost like Earth, and the rest of the planet building towards being paradise.

The initial voracious life that had come with the obelisks started to die off. It seemed like they thrived in the high CO2 conditions but couldn’t tolerate high oxygen levels. All the bacteria, the funguses, molds, plankton, and lichen just gradually faded away, adding to the soil, and leaving only our transplanted plants and animals. We judged that the bacteria had eroded a layer of the Martian rock 2 feet thick, leaving in its place rich organic soil.

The air pressure and CO2 levels were both higher on Mars than on Earth, and those helped to keep the average temperature of the planet up. But the increased plant life not only produced enough oxygen to make the air breathable, but it was steadily converting the CO2 and lowering the percentage. As the CO2 percentage lowered, so did the temperature. Then, the black cubes suddenly collapsed. They just blew away in clouds of black particles that we later identified as pure carbon powder, which was a fantastic amendment for soil. Without the black cubes to help capture sunlight the ambient temperature dropped even more. Our scientists predicted that Mars would eventually equalize to only about 1℉ warmer than Earth.

It was a hope for the future. We continued to seed more and more complex life there, and grow crops, and build civilization. There were farms and towns and eventually huge cities. I finished my doctorate of astrophysics at Olympus Mons University, the first of many schools on Mars. I was part of the first wave of exploration, traveling farther out into the galaxy, using newly developed engines that went 500x light speed. It was an exciting time to be alive. We knew we weren’t alone in the universe, our neighbors apparently loved us, and we were anxious to meet them.