The Freedom - Bring Solar System To Life

Part 6 - Grass Grows Over Bones

PART SIX – GRASS GROWS OVER BONES

Time is the greatest healer. It covers even the deepest wounds and helps life grow back.

Ana Himaliova

It is the year 2300, day 0, according to ISA's universal time. 42 years have passed since Ana Himaliova died. Even her successor, Viviana Cruz, retired in 2293 and died in 2297. The ISA has a new supreme leader. Everything keeps going in the way Ana set things in motion, with the ISA being a strong transport company carrying most of cargo and passengers within the Solar System. Many more people left the Earth and went to space. The ISA is working now on colonizing and terraforming planets around other stars.

How does the Solar System look like? How does the world look like? It is a dynamic place, with plenty of space colonies spread all over and the new blue marbles offering home for many people. Sometimes, the blue marbles are approaching the population limit, beyond which their local ecosystems might be endangered. Not willing to endanger their ecosystems and willing to expand their domains, some states are paying for terraforming projects around other stars. At the same time, rich corporations are doing this too.

It looks like not far in the future terraforming will become cheap, up to the point that it will be affordable to many more people.

MERCURY

The planet Mercury is most famous for its equatorial desert.

· Diameter: 4879 km

· Solar constant: 6.575

· Void temperature: 334 C

· Population vs population limit: 62 vs 111 million

· GDP vs GDP per capita: 1511 million vs 24.375 CC

· Extraplanetary commerce: 6.82% GDP

· Currency: Mercury Credit, 1 CC = 40 MeC

· Democracy index: 81

· Corruption index: 19

Mercury (or Mercury Free State) is a state that controls the planet Mercury and its surrounding space up to its Hill sphere. The state does not control Mercury Space Station and the two largest cosmodromes on the planet with their adjacent facilities, which are owned and operated by the ISA.

Climate. Mercury is a planet dominated by harsh temperature changes. The planet is well protected by a thick solar shield made of micro helium balloons, which float at 8 to 10 km high and block around 80% of sunlight, allowing heat to escape during night. However, because the planet experiences a long day-night cycle, it witnesses hot days and cold nights. Temperature variation between day and night is about 50 degrees C. As micro helium balloons deflect more light at the poles compared to the equator, the poles tend to be cold and ice-covered.

The equator is mostly a desert, with temperature raging from 75 to 130 degrees C, which makes life for most living organism impossible. The equator is dominated by powerful storms, winds that achieve speeds over 300 km/h and occasional rains that sterilize life.

Temperate regions see temperature variations between -25 and 30 degrees C, with regular snow during nighttime and droughts during daytime, with plenty of rain in the evening, a rain that turns into snow during the first part of the night. In the morning, snow melts, feeding the rivers in the area and providing water needed for settlements.

There are warmer parts of the temperate region, where hot wind from the equator blows towards the poles. In these regions, temperature only occasionally falls to freezing point, but reaches up to 50 degrees C at noon. These regions are mostly deserts.