SLIDE 9.
Four and a quarter
billion years after the awakening of consciousness, and the Milky
Way and Andromeda galaxies will collide. The view from Earth’s
crowded continents is magnificent, like a chaos of burning diamond
dust strewn across the emptiness void. Shock waves thunder through
the gas clouds, creating new stellar nurseries, igniting millions
of massive, short-lived new stars; for a brief ten-million-year
period, the nighttime sky will be lit by a monthly supernova
fireworks display. The huge black holes at the heart of each galaxy
have shed their robes of dust and gas and blaze naked in ghastly
majesty as they streak past each other, ripping clusters of stars
asunder and seeding more, in a starburst of cosmic fireworks that
will be visible nearly halfway across the universe.
But Earth is safe.
Earth is serene. Earth is no longer in the firing
line.
The Long Burn is by
far the largest program of the Stasis. Science Empires will rise
and flourish, decay and gutter into extinction, to provide the
numerical feedstock for the Navigators. The delicate task of
ejecting a star system from its galaxy without setting the planets
and moons adrift in their orbits is monstrously difficult. Planets
are not bound to their stars by physical cords, and gravity is
weak; innumerable adjustments to the orbits of all the significant
planets will be required if they are to be carried along. The mass
flow of Ceres alone will not suffice. Rocky Mercury has already
been dismantled to provide the control mechanisms that keep the
necrostar’s accretion disk burning steadily; it’s Venus’s turn to
supply the swarming light-sail-driven mass tugs. A brown dwarf ten
times the size of Jupiter will fuel the rocket, an entire stellar
embryo pumped down to the blazing maw in the course of a million
years.
Galactic escape
velocity is high, and escape velocity from the local group is even
higher. The Long Burn will last ten thousand centuries. Each year
that passes, the necrostar will be moving a meter per second
faster. And when it comes to an end, the drastically redesigned
solar system will be racing away from the local group of galaxies
at almost a thousandth the speed of light—straight toward the
Bootes Void.