X-Message-Number: 17491 From: Date: Sun, 9 Sep 2001 15:39:01 EDT Subject: Story time --part1_3c.111b2d56.28cd1f55_boundary Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Language: en Stories With Morals 1. Once upon a time (1405 AD) there was a Chinese emperor named Yung-Lo who decided that not enough people were paying attention to him. So he sent out great fleets, laden with soldiers, treasures, and minor bureaucrats, commanded by the eunuch admiral Zheng He. These weren't the pathetic, puny European caravels or carracks; the Imperial flagships were over 130 meters long and displaced over 1500 tons. Seven voyages were launched from 1405 to 1433. Their mission: to seek out new life forms and new civilizations, and force them to notice the Emperor by handing out valuable Ming vases. To boldly go where no man, well, where no eunuch.... well, on with our story. The first fleet sailed in 1405-1407 with sixty-two vessels carrying 28,000 men, and reached India, as did the second and third. The fourth voyage in 1413-1415 reached Aden and Hormuz on the Persian Gulf. A fifth voyage also went as far as Aden. The seventh voyage started out with 27,500 men and reached Hormuz again in 1431-1433. Chinese vessels visited far down the east coast of Africa and seven Chinese reached Mecca in Saudi Arabia. (Zheng He was a Muslim; he had been captured by Ming troops as a child.) The fleets brought back a giraffe for the Emperor; they also brought back a prince from Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) who hadn't looked sufficiently impressed. The fleets opened no permanent trade routes, planted no colonies, and spent a lot of resources impressing (and/or killing) Indian and African governmental officials. In 1433 the program was shut down, the shipyards' budget cut, and even most of the records of the voyages were destroyed. When the Europeans arrived in China in the 1500s bringing the benefits of opium and cannon, it was illegal for a private Chinese citizen to own a ship with more than two masts. 2. Once upon another time (1960) there was a powerful president named Kennedy who decided that not enough people were paying attention to him. So he sent out great rockets, laden with soldiers, scientists, and radioed bureaucratic advice (the bureaucrats themselves stayed home this time), designed by the former Hitler employee Werner Von Braun. These weren't pathetic, puny space shuttles (max payload 29 metric tons); the NASA flagships were over 120 meters long and massed over 3250 tons, with a max payload of 125 tons to low orbit. Three different classes of nuclear rockets (Orion, NERVA, and the highly radioactive yet less useful Project Poodle) were developed and tested, but not launched. Seven manned voyages were launched from 1969 to 1972 (six landed; Apollo 13 didn't due to an exploding O2 tank. Remember that it s bad luck to be superstitious.) Their mission: not to seek out new life forms and new civilizations (the US and USSR had already done that by broadcasting military radar signals across the cosmos in a sphere expanding at the speed of light.) Their mission: to seek out new rocks and new television images. To boldly go where many robots had gone before. The rockets opened no permanent trade routes, planted no colonies, and spent a lot of resources. In 1972 the program was shut down and three unused Saturn Vs thrown away, as were the never-flown nuclear rocket engines. Even the blueprints for the Saturn V rockets were destroyed. When the Earth-crossing asteroid 2009Denver arrived in 2020 and blew up North America, it was illegal for a private Earth citizen to own nuclear spacecraft (even with only one mast.) This was a vast disappointment to the Borg invasion fleet of 2079, as they found the planet wasn t worth assimilating. --part1_3c.111b2d56.28cd1f55_boundary Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=17491