Panspermia Deorum Read Online Free PDF

offered is in
another country. Personally, it wouldn’t matter to me if it was in
the middle of the Brazilian rain forest, but I have a family, and I
want to hear what you have to say. Who wants to ask the first
question?”
    There was an
uneasy silence.
    “Come on,
Elise, you must have concerns.”
    “I do, but I’m…
unable to just list them… as if I was on the way to the
supermarket. You’ve just told Gene and Sophie that they should
follow their passion, and I agree with you. Maybe you’ve forgotten…
I didn’t get to follow mine. Perhaps I wouldn’t have made the
grade, but I wanted to be a professional dancer. Your career was
the priority…the only priority, because it provided steady income
and gave us the freedom to start a family. Until I know where your
next position is based, I can’t even think about moving away… from
the kids and Geraldine.”
    “Fair point.
But take your mind back to 2021 when I joined NERO. I had a more
lucrative offer from another company, a privately owned
organisation. I took the moral stance that a respected world body
would be less political than one at least partly driven by profit.
I now know how naïve that was. The company is VB Aerospace. Volker
Brandt wants me to start working on eradicating this asteroid
threat as soon as possible. His headquarters are in Evry, at the
Guiana Space Centre. They also have offices in Washington DC,
Singapore, and Tokyo. It was originally named Arianespace, founded
in 1980, and ultimately its shareholders included Airbus Safran
Launchers, the French space agency CNES, and all European space
companies, representing 10 European nations. But, in 2020 funding
had decreased even more than that of NASA, and Volker Brandt bought
the facilities, but didn’t retain all of the employees. It was the
following year when he asked me to join his workforce.”
    Elise’s
furrowed brow preceded her outburst.
    “So, we… sorry,
you are talking of living in Guiana, America, Singapore or Tokyo?
I’m sorry, Julien, this is all a step too far for me.”
    Eugene relieved
the building tension.
    “How certain
are you that this asteroid will crash into the Earth? Will it
really kill everybody?”
    “To be brutally
honest, Eugene, I can’t be absolutely certain in answering either
of your questions. The details to which I referred in Osaka are
very important in my mind. For whatever reason, NERO didn’t allow
me to tell the conference that an impact was highly likely, even
after we’d discovered it had been deflected somewhere in our solar
system. I was supposed to omit the fact that it passed
within 22,000 km instead of the predicted 37,000, entirely due to a
clash with another object, which we hadn’t predicted.
Further extrapolation of this new trajectory gives a high
coefficient of probability of impact in twelve years from now. As
far as estimating how many people would die, it’s impossible to
tell, but the odds are that it will be an extinction event. The
last known threat of this type saw off the dinosaurs, but
miraculously, burrowing mammals survived. That’s the dilemma, do
nothing, pray, or get to work on a solution. We may not find a
solution or the asteroid may have another bump before it
returns.”
    “In that case,
Dad, somebody has to do something. If it’s you, so be it. It’s a
no-brainer.”
    “What do you
think, Sophie?”
    “I don’t really
get how you calculate these things, Dad, but if you thought it was
going to come by at 37,000 km and it would have but for a little
bump which pushed it like, a lot closer, you have to try and stop
it next time around. I don’t really want to think about it
anymore.”
    “Don’t ask me,”
said Geraldine, “it’s your family, Julien. Whatever happens, I’ll
be staying here.”
    Elise turned to
her husband and held his hand.
    “You must do
what you think best, darling. I won’t be coming with you. I’ll stay
here with Geraldine, if she’ll have me. The kids won’t then have