313 — Terraforming Mars, Part 7

The power of is: co-existence of the pre- with post-particles and the is-particles with the is-not particles that defines the near vacuum which is the present. The force that self-sustains it—the power of is—allows a wider 3-D volume of tempconciliation that now makes possible the coverage of much larger areas, not to mention wider epochs.

And which saved everyone’s asses in the present, at the expense of an uncertain future.

The solution in the math simply worked, but a hefty prize had to be offered for the one who could elucidate the steps in the math that derived the solution. While the world awaited the arithmetic reassurances that the present would be safe with the damn thing running, financiers and industrialists began murmuring. A profit motive began to itch the rich, and scratching seemed only natural.

Capitalism always wins.

Problem solved: do it on Mars.

Away from everyone and everything except, of course, everyone and everything on Mars.

Discouraging pundits never had a chance. Bringing back Martians from before to co-exist with the colonists promised too big a pay-off on the investment. Where the whole mission was financially faltering for its investors, tempconciliation and real Martians could more than turn it around.

There were those who argued that entering the past would change the future; they were argued back down, as it was only about the ancient Martians we were mucking about with; after all, their future, without our mucking about, was extinction. Hell, we’d be doing them a favor. What was all the fuss and worry about? When the first experiment was powered down, all of existence did not collapse like the doomsayers predicted. There were Martians to be found; to be yanked out of their own time into ours; to offer us God only knew what new products to offer the consumer constituency.

Temporal reconciliation, aligning a place with two times—true 4-D capture—simply awaited the construction of another ṺberCollider on Mars, which ended up being completed two years ahead of schedule in spite of a ball bearing debacle.

Just to be safe, the Chronarchy decided that tempconciliation should only lasso the last five years of the Martians’ existence. Whenever that was.