SLIDE 7.
After two hundred and
fifty million years, the continents of Earth, strobe-lit by the
mayfly flicker of empires, will have converged on a single
equatorial supercontinent, Pangea Ultima. These will not be good
times for humanity; the vast interior deserts are arid and the
coastlines subject to vast hurricanes sweeping in from the
world-ocean. As the sun brightens, so shall the verdant plains of
the Earth; but the Stasis have long-laid plans to deflect the
inevitable.
Deep in the asteroid
belt, their swarming robot cockroaches have dismantled Ceres, used
its mass to build a myriad of solar-sail-powered flyers. Now a
river of steerable rocks with the mass of a dwarf planet loops down
through the inner system, converting solar energy into momentum and
transferring it to the Earth through millions of repeated
flybys.
Already, Earth has
migrated outward from the sun. Other adjustments are under way,
subtle and far-reaching: the entire solar system is slowly changing
shape, creaking and groaning, drifting toward a new and more useful
configuration. Soon—in cosmological terms—it will be
unrecognizable.