"Wil McCarthy - Boundary Condition" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCarty Sarah)

Boundary Condition by Wil Mccarthy

Very old and very new ideas can come together in unexpected ways ...

We saw in the vale below us a whirlwind beginning in the road, and shewing itself by the dust it
raised. Riding close by its side, I tried to break this whirlwind by striking my whip frequently
through it, but without any effect. The circular motion was amazingly rapid. I accompanied it
about three quarters of a mile, till some limbs of dead trees, flying about and falling near me,
made me more apprehensive of danger; and then I stopped, looking at the top of it as it went on,
which was visible for a very great height above the trees.

тАФ Benjamin Franklin, 1755: "To Peter Collins"

0.
Space, Near Future

Death comes upon us in surprising ways. If it didn't, we'd arrange to be somewhere else, right? And in
the wake of death we find an obsession with time. When did this happen? When did it start? How long
have I got left? But whose time should answer these questions? Whose calendar and clock?

On a space station in low-Earth orbit, there are no easy answers. The Sun comes out every 90 minutes
and stays for 47 before sinking back behind the limb of the blue-green planet below, and the station
passes through 25 different time zones along the way. For sanity's sake, Russian stations set their clocks
to Moscow's "Charlie" time, three hours fast of Greenwich, England. The Chinese are synched to
Jiuquan's "Foxtrot" zone, and the handful of truly international stations are on Universal or "Zulu" or
Greenwich Mean Time. London, in other words.

Where death comes upon Americans in space the situation is more complex. If you work for NASA, you
log absolute time in two zones at once: Zulu and Romeo, which might stand either for Cocoa Beach
where the rockets actually launch, or possibly Washington, D.C. where the checks are written. It hardly
matters, because the routing of voice and telecom through Building 30 at Johnson Space Center makes
these outposts a mobile extension of Houston, Texas.

The Air Force stations, on the other hand, like to keep it simple. It's Zulu time and metric units, never
mind where you came from or where you think you're headed. And for some reason, the two fledgling
space hotels тАФ little more than boxcar-sized inflatable hot dogs тАФ follow the military paradigm.

On the other other hand, should you be lucky enough to work for the National Weather Service тАФ
a.k.a. "Not Wet, Sir" if you like them or "Nitwit Circus" if you don't тАФ you live on Sierra time. That's
Omaha, Nebraska, son, and don't you forget it. The spaceplanes take off and land on the runways at
Eppley Field, and the tracking network is headquartered just seventeen kilometers south at Offutt Air
Force Base. Even the checks are written locally; between its subscription-only news network and its
weather control services, its multimedia archives and its growing tourism business, NWS is officially
self-sustaining, and may soon be handing a surplus back to Uncle Sam.

In olden times it was glamorous hereabouts to be an aviator, or to work for the railroads, or even
(strange to imagine it!) to be a humble letter carrier for the Pony Express. For now it's the men and
women of the Weather Service тАФ most especially the Stormbreakers тАФ to whom these envies accrue.
Thousands of hopefuls move here every year with the dream of signing up, though fewer than twenty are
accepted.