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Over the last few years it was getting harder and harder, even for large material rewards, to recruit those willing to fly to space for two to three years to collect the lichen that leaders were dependent on to prolong their life. Rumors began to circulate among the people that after returning from space all surviving recruits were placed under quarantine in special barracks where they were half-starved and forced to strenuously expel the ambrosia-rich air (that they had accumulated from the planet’s atmosphere or from the moss they ate) until they were dying from exhaustion and starvation.
Yet, ambrosia stockpiles were quickly ru
The Earth’s brass hats were continuously dispatching spacecrafts with geologists and botanists on board for outer space reco
1. To accomplish this task, a supercomputer must be built. It should be able to autopilot the spacecraft and manage the people on board, be capable of anticipating all possible emergency scenarios that could arise during the flight, and making decisions to above all else ensure the wonder-weed is successfully harvested, packaged and shipped back to Earth.
2. The return home should be without the miners who must be left behind under any pretense, even resorting to euthanasia if necessary. This would increase the number of rooms for storing the product and cut the deadweight in half for the trip back to Earth.
3. The return flight must include the spacecraft pilot (who may not necessarily be the commander) and three cryogenic engineers who would ensure that the temperature conditions in the refrigerating modules and the vacated cabins are conducive to successfully preserving the precious wonder-weed.
For two years, the programmers and designers on Earth had been racking their brains over this problem and, finally, built a supercomputer superior to all previous versions by a thousand times. It was called GASSOS, an acronym for a long abstruse name for the super brain of the spaceship – the Global Automated Science-based Spaceship Operating System. But the developers themselves – and the spacemen later on – began calling it just GAS for short, and the computer answered to this nickname with pleasure, accepting it as its proper name.
When installed into the starship, GAS could perform each of the ship’s tasks on its own without any human assistance. It handled all of the starship’s vital systems, charted and set the optimal course mid-flight, toggled on and off the mechanisms necessary to maintain flight, arranged meals for the crew, calculated the minimal daily requirements for air and water, and the controlled the temperatures in the cabins. It could even entertain its passengers with various lectures, songs, stories, jokes, and just have heart-to-heart conversations with them. It knew everything: about the crew, the flight to Hopus, the ship’s functional capabilities, the Solar System and all the stars humanity had studied. GAS’ developers had accounted for everything and programmed it in such a way so that it only obeyed commands from the Center; when it is out of communication range, it should work according to its preprogrammed directives – its main goal was to deliver Hopus’ wonder-weed to Earth. Everything else for GAS was secondary and expendable to the task at hand. Of course, all possible contingencies over such a long journey ca
While the problem of figuring out how to operate the ship during the long journey was solved, the developers still struggled to find a way to reduce the ship’s total weight to ensure the ship’s return to Earth while in accordance with the approved supplies requirements. The routine calculations for the necessary spaceship supplies were made by the experienced pla
Thanks to the on-board artificial intelligence, it was decided to down the size of the crew to half, and as for the miners of the wonder-weed, all of them were to be left on the planet, possibly euthanizing them (if there is no other method) so they can’t prevent the last working shuttle from taking off into orbit, where the mother ship is to be waiting for them at all times. During the flight to Hopus, the computer is to put all passengers onboard into hibernation for four years, supplying their sleeping chambers with a special concentrated gas consisting of all necessary nutrients while they are asleep. Trial experiments on prisoners had shown satisfying results – eighty percent of the subjects had survived after an almost two-year sleep, and sixty five percent of the survivors were still capable of doing the necessary physical labor. All these measures allowed reduce the load by three quarters and additionally double the ship’s payload of the precious cargo.