This is another blog about the self-importance of man. We, all of us, feel the need to change nature, to coerce it, shape it with an anvil in our hand against the anvil of Mother Earth herself. We carve through desert and mountain, pave over valleys and rivers, marking a path in a direction that we know in our hearts is our destiny. The stars are within our very reach and one has to wonder if we will approach that with the same respect and reverence as we have the mighty Amazon. No, the truth of it is that we will commercialize it as best we can once the idealists have run through their bank accounts. Our hearts lead us to lands untouched, and our heads capitalize on what we discover. No doubt we could declare the collection of rocks floating between Jupiter and Mars a protected environment, and someone would be in there the same day with a mining crew looking for gold, platinum, and free-formed ferrite iron. Giant, belching, smelting ships would take the raw ore and produce fine metals, casting off the dross to the open wilds of empty space. Just as Lewis and Clark lived off the fat of the land as they crossed the plains in search of the mighty Pacific, humanity will no doubt create giant floating space-fairing habitats that consume everything of value in their path. These human arks would see these resources as part of their right and destiny, no doubt placed there specifically to help them. Faith would seem to be rewarded, and the sinner punished by the cold isolation of space. These massive ships, sent out to seek the stars, would eventually have their own culture and philosophy, as generations would live and die on board all in the service of reaching for the stars. My story is of Jacob just after his seventeenth birthday. A tall ad strong young man, he lives with his mother in the Poinsettas, a small neighborhood in the fourth section of ship near the smelting and recovery plant where his mother works as a structural engineer. His mother hopes to someday move to the redwoods of section 3, just to be close to her parents and the better school for Jacob.

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