The Socrates Blog
July 29 and following Year 1
Making comment
After each blog there is an email connection to make a comment.
Within the bounds of the monitor's discretion, comments that are made adopting the character of another colonists will be published as part of the text and become part of the novel.
John's blog
30 July Year One
We have an emergency here. The nuclear reactor is malfunctioning and, if we can't get it under control, it will leak radiation. If that happens we will endeavour to vent it into the atmosphere -- and thereby contaminate all this new biological development we have started. If we can't ventilate it, it will kill us all or at least sicken us in a major way.
Everyone is working around the clock to contain the situation but if you hear nothing further from us you will at least know what has happened. It is too early to apportion responsibility but I sheet this home to the fact that for the past couple of weeks we have taken our eye off the ball.
Email a comment or response to John's blog 30 July
Samantha’s blog
30 July Year One
John's blog is not exaggerating. We are in a life and death situation here. I have put in place a continuous data stream back to Earth. Although we cannot get any help from there, the data may assist any further voyages. I disagree with John about our responsibility. It seems to me that there is a design flaw in the system that is affected by the additional gravity under which we operate. This has imposed wearing that the hardware was not designed to take. With our limited capacity here we are endeavouring to manufacture a new valve but it is touch and go, a) whether we can produce it in time and b) whether we can manufacture to the tolerances required. Furthermore, we don't know what else is being affected similarly. Our backup reactor has been fired up and is enabling us to shut down the main reactors so, if we survive, we can do a maintenance check.
Email a comment or response to Samantha's blog 30 July
Timothy's blog
30 July Year One
As you can imagine, the emotions here are tumultuous. Apart from the scientists and technicians working on the reactor, the remainder of us are helpless to do anything to affect the situation. I have co-opted Luke and between us we are endeavouring to visit every family and residential unit in the colony. Everyone is afraid. Our vulnerability, our dependence on technology and our isolation in time and space from Earth is hitting everyone as never before. I am keeping the chapel open around the clock with a team of volunteers.
What has captured our imagination is the sense that prayer is not confined by space and the speed of light but exists outside the space/time continuum. We know that there is a huge community of prayer back on Earth and though it does not know of our predicament, their prayer is instantaneous with us -- and we with them. This is an extraordinary new development to have arisen out of the crisis. Almost everyone is praying! There is no time when there is less than around 20 people in the chapel and what is almost palpable, even if it is only in our imagination, is that people are sensing something of being in tune, in an immediate sense, with Earth community. It could be said that this is just clutching at straws, but two thoughts strike me forcibly. First is the stark issue of whether belief in God touches ultimate reality or not. If it does, then this entire concept of prayer as transcending time and space and uniting earth and this star in instantaneous communion makes complete sense. The other thought is about the nature of hope. What I experience both in the chapel and as I move around among the people at large is that they are finding in faith -- and this is transcending all the conventional religious barriers -- a sense of hope rooted in a creative Spirit that is in some way directly related to our prayer. Even if one sceptically dismisses this as wishful thinking, the reality at this moment in this place is that people are finding that their tumult and panic is able to be managed and, underneath the tumult, a quiet spirit, a confidence, a hope that gives a sense of peace. Right now this hope is preventing the community tearing itself apart in anxiety. By giving power to prayer, most people at least think that they are contributing creatively to the crisis and that alone is important. My personal conviction is that there is indeed a powerful connection between events in the physical world and prayer. That is something to explore another time. At this moment, the important thing is that this is what is giving people hope and confidence and stealing the inner tumult.
Email a comment or response to Timothys' blog 30 July
John's blog
1 August Year One
It is just possible we may be able to solve a crisis in a quite unexpected way. Even while the manufacturing plant are working on a new valve, one of the engineers has come up with a brand possible solution, one which utilises the extra force of gravity here in a quite unique way. I can't say too much about it because the team will want to register their patents, but, if it works it will not only solve this problem but I can see a whole raft of areas in which the technology will apply.
Email a comment or response to John's blog 1 August
Timothy's blog
1 August Year One
I know it is premature to celebrate success and congratulate the engineers and it may yet prove a dead end. I also recognise that the connection with prayer and the Spirit is ambiguous. Yet it was not just my reaction but the sense of the people all around me when the news of a possible breakthrough occurred that behind the engineering team was a real power of prayer and gift of the Spirit. Taking nothing away from the design team, there was an instinctive sense of community ownership of the inspirational power that led to this development.
Email a comment or response to Timothy's blog 1 August
Freida’s blog
1 August Year One
I want to reaffirm what Timothy has just written but from another perspective. A short while ago I talked with the engineer who has come up with this solution. She is both excited and quite worried by the expectation that is surging through the community because of this solution has yet to be demonstrated and she is terrified it will prove a failure -- the anxiety is more focused on the community disappointment than on a possible failure itself.
Still, what she said to me was that, in addressing the issue of whether there was another possible solution when none initially was obvious, she was acutely aware of a sense of almost psychic are that surrounded her which she clearly connected with the prey. She said that her awareness extended to the prayer on earth.
The way she described what happened was eerie to me. She said she just opened a mind to that psychic awareness and then went to work -- and suddenly, she said, the solution was so clear and obvious she could not believe neither she nor any of the engineering team had thought of that or seen it before. Like Timothy, I am aware all of this is ambiguous and could possibly be explained in purely psychological. But with the psychology have operated without the 'spiritual' engagement? I, for one, doubt it.
Email a comment or response to Freida's blog 1 August
Timothy’s blog 2nd for the day
1 August Year One
There is a proverb from Earth -- "Make hay while the sun shines." The haymakers don't go into the science of how or why the sun shines but simply get on and do the haymaking, then celebrate simply the fact that the hay is brought in. Right now I don't care whether or not prayer has had a part to play -- and I can report (I am writing this very late in the day) that the new valve seems to be working -- if it is working as it seems to be, then we celebrate and give thanks. Other questions can wait.
Email a comment or response to Tomothy's 2nd blog 1 August
Luke's blog
3 August Year One
As Timothy noted, probably prematurely, the new valve has solved the problem and the main reactor is now ready to bring back into service. The relief throughout the community is tremendous. It really was life or death and has brought home to us all the fragility of our existence here and how impossibly distant we are from help or even advice and technical support.
While I am far from denying the possibility that prayer played a part, I think that perhaps too much is being made of this -- understandably because this was the part we all engaged in. However, part of my time during the crisis was spent in the engineering lab and what impressed me was their quiet organisational efficiency and application of method. There was no panic even though failure meant the loss of their own lives. Despite Frieda's comment, I did not observe any of the consciousness of "being prayed for" but simply a 100% focus on organisation and method as a way to carry them through the day. Maybe inspiration did play a crucial role, but without the organisation and method it may have meant nothing have come to nothing.
I stress this because, as became clear in our struggle over politics and authority, if our systems break down then we are in deadly peril. Everything rests on our efficiency in every department.
Email a comment or response to Luke's blog 3 August
John's blog
3 August Year One
I, for one, am exhausted. I have not slept for days and even now I am so wired up I cannot even lay my head down.
It may be pure fantasy but I draw a connection between the extraordinary explosion of organic life on the planet and what has just happened and the way it was solved. It is as if the umbilical cord joining Earth and this colony has just been severed and we are a new, fully independent life-form with a destiny intertwined with but separate from Mother Earth.
Email a comment or response to john's blog 3 August
Lu’s blog
4 August Year One
This has been an amazing period. We have seen a festival in which the majority of people joined together in celebrating (I recognise that there were some who did not) followed almost immediately by a sharp and seemingly irreconcilable division of the community into two opposing camps. Then, faced with shared danger to our lives, there was a coming together in a remarkable cohesion that transcended our division. The euphoria of the crisis resolved is still with us and last evening we had a 'street party' to express our relief and let off steam. Peoples who, only days ago, were at each other's throats (figuratively) were hugging each other.
That atmosphere of euphoria is still with us. I do not know whether it will last and change the state of conflict that had emerged or whether, when the euphoria evaporates, we will re-establish the battle-lines. Time will tell. Yet I sense that there has been a change. The reality of life here has come home to us forcibly and we all now clearly recognise that we can only survive if we work as one.
Email a comment or response to Lu's blog 4 August
Luke's blog
4 August Year One
I want to stand back and think about what has happened in relation to my role as elder. It was an experience for me beyond words to move throughout the community with Bishop Timothy, to experience both the elemental feelings and the extraordinary resource of faith and prayer, as well as witnessing the quiet efficiency of those charged with finding a solution.
Like what Lu has just written, I marvelled both during the crisis and during the party at how the fractures were so strikingly overcome when they seemed to have been tearing us apart. So I want to reflect on my experience. What struck me most is I moved among the people is that they were not looking to me for answers or nostrums or anything mentally profound. In fact, I felt I brought nothing at all to them yet it seemed that all that was needed was simply presence, being with them. I felt that I symbolised much more than I can express. One family captured this for me: as I was leaving them, feeling utterly inadequate, the mother commented that the moment I walked in the door there was a tangible sense of peace in the household. I didn't need to do anything. It was simply being there: she said it spoke that somebody or something cared for them and about them and that was all they needed. I have talked with Bishop Timothy about this and he reports the same response.
The other thing that struck me so forcibly is that when ever I went I was accepted without reserve, simply as elder. There were no barriers of different beliefs, ethnicity or cultures -- I experienced a sense of acceptance that transcended every barrier. Again Bishop Timothy reports the same. Lu has commented on the way the crisis transcended the division appearing among us: as I moved to the people I experienced not a single tremor of political divide.
I don't know where all this will leave the community as a whole but I know it has affected a profound change in me and in the way I am seen by the community. I am a long way from understanding the full implications of this but know that my life from this point will never be the same.
Email a comment or response to Luke's blog 4 August
Lu’s Blog
11 August Year One
We have all been very quiet bloggers these last few days. There has been a sense of exhaustion and retreat that has affected us all. The new valve is functioning perfectly -- we all held our collective breath for a few days, hardly daring to hope. Now this crisis is past we have the feeling of unreality. It is almost as if we're awaiting something else to strike us.
Email a comment or response to Lu's blog 11 August
Lu's blog
12 August Year One
Oddly, I am more concerned at this moment about the state of the people of the colony than at any point from the moment we left earth. I blogged yesterday about the sense of unreality and the lack of energy, and writing that increased my sensitivity as to what is going on, and I am quite disturbed. No one seems engaged any more, as if we had collectively decided we would die and now that we are not we have, momentarily I hope, lost contact with our emotions. Dinner last night was eerily quiet, like I've never experienced it in the community facility, with larger numbers than usual choosing to dine privately.
When I talk to people about this they shrug their shoulders, or pass it off with a platitude or a sarcasm. I did not encounter any one who had even bothered to read my blog of yesterday. What is happening to us? It scares me to think that this is more than just they psychological reaction that something organic or chemical has occurred that we have not detected.
Email a comment or response to Lu's blog 1 12 August
Samantha's blog
12 August Year One
What a load of crap and nonsense, Lu. Everyone is simply exhausted. I know I did not sleep for 48 hours and I'm still feeling like a zombie and all on the staff here are the same. We aren't dining communally because we just want to sleep. Even those not directly caught up in the crisis did not sleep much.
As for throwing out that all bullshit about there being something organic or chemical that we have not detected, you, as a leader, should have known better than to create a scare when there is no evidence to support it! Shame on you!
Email a comment or response to Samantha's blog 12 August
Luke’s blog
12 August Year One
I'm afraid I agree with the others, Lu. I know that for the past couple of days I haven't wanted to see anyone, my emotions drained completely. The only good thing about your comments, Lu, is that they have acted as a kick in the backside to us. Perhaps we needed a flare of anger to kickstart our systems again.
Email a comment or response to Luke's blog 12 August
Lu's blog
12 August Year One
I recognise being rapped over the knuckles and probably deserved it.
Timothy's blog
12 August Year One
I identify with the reactions of the others, but let's at least give Lu credit for observing and caring.
I think that as a total community and without a single exception, every one acquitted themselves with credit through this crisis. Of course we hail the engineering team, without whom we would all now be dead. But behind the team everyone functioned as if we were corporately a well-oiled and expertly maintained machine -- even those who had no active part to play except pray -- and I have already commented on that. This is particularly remarkable given that we entered this crisis in a state of relationship and leadership turmoil that could have exacerbated the physical crisis so that it got out of hand.
I think we have acquired something now out of all of this. I can't put my finger on it and it is probably too early to do so, if indeed there has been a change. It is even possible that Lu's observation about disengagement may be more acute than we have given credit for -- like the moment of disengagement of one gear prior to the engagement of another. This is only sniffing the breeze and there may be nothing in it but my overheated imagination.
Email a comment or response to Timothy's blog 12 August
Page Load: 334 msec