SLIDE 8.
A billion years
later, the Earth lies frozen and fallow, its atmosphere packed down
to snow and nitrogen vapor in the chilly wilderness beyond Neptune.
This was never part of the natural
destiny of the homeworld, but it is only a temporary state—for in
another ten million years, the endlessly cycling momentum shuttles
will crank Earth closer to the sun. Fifty million years after that,
the Reseedings will recommence, from the prokaryotes and algae on
up; but in this era, the Stasis want the Earth safely mothballed
while their technicians from the Engineering Republics work their
magic.
For thirty million
years the Stasis will devote their timegate to lifting mass from
the heart of a burning star, channeling vast streams of blazing
plasma into massive, gravitationally bound bunkers, reserves
against a chilly future. The sun will gutter and fade to red,
raging and flaring in angry outbursts as its internal convection
systems collapse. As it shrinks and dims, they will inflict the
final murderous insult, and inject an embryonic black hole into the
stellar core. Eating mass faster than it can reradiate it through
Hawking radiation, the hole will grow, gutting the stellar
core.
By the time the Earth
drops back toward the frost line of the solar system, the
technicians will have roused the zombie necrosun from its grave.
Its accretion disk—fed with mass steadily siphoned from the brown
dwarfs orbiting on the edges of the system—will cast a strange,
harsh glare across Earth’s melting ice caps.
Replacing the fusion
core of the sun with a mass-crushing singularity is one of the most
important tasks facing the Stasis; annihilation is orders of
magnitude more efficient than fusion, not to say more controllable,
and the mass they have so carefully husbanded is sufficient to keep
the closely orbiting Earth lit and warm not for billions, but for
trillions of years to come.
But another, more
difficult task remains . . .