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From the perspective of an astronaut who likes blue, the Earth has become only more beautiful in the last century and a half.
Yet most people wouldn't take what has happened as an improvement, unless they are the type who wanted to live through a slow-motion reenactment of Noah's Flood without an ark.
My name is Felix Byrd. I'm an astronaut, but that's not quite as glamorous a job as it was back in the mid-20th century. The pay is great. The view of the Earth is still spectacular, though changed by its surface now being 89 percent covered in water. But there are no other perks, except escaping the constant humidity.
Remember reading in history about San Francisco before the sea reclaimed all but the tiny tropical islands that used to be its hills? Remember reading about its the mild winters and cool, foggy summers? That's the weather of everything near the poles now – the northern parts of North America, Greenland (which has really been green since all that ice melted off), the solid parts of Northern Eurasia on the north side, and what's left of the tips of South Africa and South America – the islands where the capes used to be. Oh, and what's left of New Zealand – not much – and South Australia too.
From the San Francisco Islands down, it's basically like Houston was before the entire South by the Gulf of Mexico was swallowed up by the sea – hot, sticky, getting worse as you approach the equator. You get situations where even the Mojave and Sahara Plains are sticky and humid because there is so much more water and it is much closer. But hey, life is about trade offs. The deserts are blooming again across the world, and boy do we need them to bloom – almost all of the world's fruits and vegetables now come from the old deserts, now easily irrigated.
What people don't understand about massive sea rise: it also means your rivers have nowhere to go when the tides come in. So, the sea has encroached from outside, the fresh water is encroaching inside the continents, and if you have a big bay where those meet – like say, the San Francisco, Chesapeake, or Hudson Bays – what you end up with is massive land loss extending well inland. The same goes for areas like the Great Freshwater Sea, which used to be known as the Great Lakes. They merged for good 32 years ago. So much for Chicago – gosh, I wish I was old enough to remember that place!
Now if that were the only problem, we who have survived could adjust to that. Siberia and Canada and Greenland are fine wheat-growing areas now, and the Great Plains of the United States grow a great deal of rice. Commercial fishing stopped a long time ago; there's enough to go around, as is seaweed, to a point.
To a point. First, we've had to spend eighty years getting our plastic problem somewhat under control.
See, it was all out of sight and out of mind way back when … all those plastic bags, and six-pack rings, and straws, and old toys, and cartons, and containers, and baskets, and bits of plastic as the bigger pieces of plastic started to break down. All that was out of sight and out of mind until the sea came to us, and the rivers dumped out on the new deltas much further inland, and all that trash started coming back mixed with what we were going to have to eat and drink to survive.
Which is where I come in. Plastic has been banned, but we spent a century on Earth putting it in the ocean and in landfills and cities that flooded. Can't do that anymore; there's nowhere on Earth for all that trash. In 2090, they thought about the moon, but, with sea level up so high, any kind of bulk added to the moon's gravity might do things we couldn't even survive.
So, instead, mankind devised a plan that all surviving nations at last agreed to. We now take the endless junk we have to get out of the water before it comes ashore or further pollutes our food supply and ship it off to the largest trash incinerator in the Solar System: the sun itself.
Welcome to the life of a Sunburn Scavenger pilot, also known as a “trashtronaut.”
I only get into space about once a month. I've got waterside duties like everyone else. I work out of the Cascadia port range; the sea now comes up to the lower Cascade foothills in Oregon and Washington. Most of my piloting life is spent near shore, from the old Pacific coasts from Alaska to the San Francisco Islands.
The tragedy of plastics; they biodegrade very slowly. No matter how many layers of soil are on plastics when an area is flooded, that stuff is coming up, eventually. Plastics float, and will float until the world ends. We literally laid a huge layer of plastics in terms of litter along the old coasts in the 20th and 21st centuries. Thus, now that water has submerged all the old coastal cities and towns, the constant wave and seismic action along the Pacific Rim shakes loose tons and tons of plastics weekly.
Plastics left by people who once lived along the old coasts would soon choke out the new coasts, but for pilots like me. I get up at 4:30am every day, and am on my route every day by 5:30, following the current lines from the submerged cities and towns back to the source, and picking up plastics along the way.
Not that I personally handle anything of the sort. My near-shore vessel is just a big vacuum cleaner with impulse power packs. I scout an area with trash in it, I fly down, hover over the water, and vacuum up the surface. The water goes back out – it's kind of pretty at sunrise or sunset, like a fountain of wine coming out of the side of my vessel. Plastic floats, so it stays behind and is vacuumed into the compression chamber.
I can hold ten tons of plastic in the compression chamber before going back to base and dropping my block off for processing. If I don't get it all on the currents flowing around what used to be the old cities, then I go to the “burial sites” themselves.
Sunburn Scavenger isn't just waiting around for plastic to float to shore, of course. Our salvaging arm, Sunburn Salvage, is actively doing cleanup in concert with Cascadia Waste Mitigation Services. Talk about job security: the cities left so many kinds of dangerous waste that it will take centuries to get them safe for the waters they are now in, and safe for both the new coasts and the surrounding oceans. Depending on where you are, it's a little bit of everything: plastics, rubber, chemical slurries, nuclear waste, you name it.
I deal only in non-radioactive plastics, and by the time the sun rises and I'm over, say, where the bulk of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose used to be, they have my cargo already piled high on the San Francisco Islands. The same thing is true over Seattle's old site, or any coastal town of any size.
I mention the San Francisco Islands because the Third Big One hit on the Hayward Fault just five years after the Fourth Big One hit on the San Andreas Fault to the west. People, let me tell you: Earthquakes will get the plastics popping! The Great Bay of California would be absolutely full of plastics working their way up if the Cascadia post of Sunburn Scavenger didn't allot a great deal of its manpower to the region.
I do get up around the Canadian and Alaskan coasts about two days a week. The new coasts are blessed that the old coasts were never as thickly populated as those of Washington and southward, so, the local sea scavengers have things under control, and I basically just do pickups of plastics to take to Cascadia for processing.
I have a lot of Native friends up there, who have retaken a lot of the land too close to the new shore for the old settlers to be bothered while the fear of further sea level rise is ever present. They tell me that the work we are doing is making a difference, because they are no longer catching fish whose bellies are full of plastics. That gives me hope, and, the simple way the Natives live fits in well with adapting to the natural environment.
The Good Book says the meek shall inherit the earth, and I suppose we are seeing it now. Not that even the Natives are happy, but those that survived the long centuries of doing things the European American way are now flourishing, and the rest of us are trying to learn from them. No chance of a second few centuries of genocide; the water has turned the clock back, and as it took Squanto for Europeans to learn how to survive in North America, the Native American retains indispensable knowledge to keep heads of every hue above water.
Still Tide, one of the local chiefs, is one of my good friends. He said that the old cultures are so old that they have stories of when the waters came upon the earth and receded, and that the ways of how to live in the transition time are still somewhat available, even though his ancestors crossed the Bering Strait the last time it was dry, many thousands of years ago.
“The point is, Fisher Bird [what he calls me because of my work], what was dry is now wet, but that has happened before. What is wet now can also become dry again, but it will be many centuries before that change can come. Keep doing what you are doing with Sunburn Scavenger. You are putting little pebbles into a future in which the earth and its people can live better than they are now.”
Little pebbles to a better future. Or, sucking little plastic bits out of the ocean by the ton, but, I've digressed again.
My job is a lonely one while working near-shore, although I see my colleagues on breaks between runs. There isn't a lot of down time on the job, earth-side, because there is just an awful lot of plastic that has to be collected and processed, and it is coming to the new shores 24 hours a day. When not in space, I work an eight-hour run five days a week, plus a low-tide run added three times a week. It's just me and my vacuuming vessel, all that time, talking shop on the CB radios – yep, here we are, late in the 22nd century, and we're still using trucker frequencies – with fellow pilots.
Every shop has its jargon. For example, there are no SNAFUs, FUBARs, or even messes in Sunburn Scavenger jargon. There are boilups, deathcaps, bad melts, and slow bad melts, instead. A boilup, technically, is when an area of plastics all breaks free of the bottom of some big water at the same time and comes to the surface. It's not uncommon, but still, it's the kind of thing that, if you're already carrying nine tons of plastics, it's the last thing you want to deal with – except, of course, for a deathcap, which technically is when a very large area of plastics is displaced and comes up like that.
A deathcap is a special kind of sudden, bad situation, as deadly as the white mushroom it is named after in the Santa Cruz coastal forests. It is caused usually by some trash collector who, decades past, overloaded their collection vessel and either sank or crashed, the trapped cargo finally returning to the surface when the hulk of the vessel has rusted enough to release it. It also can be caused by some warehouse or manufacturing location that nobody bothered to take the plastics out of before the location was permanently submerged. The plastics come to the surface when the windows, doors, or roof at last rot away.
Technically, a deathcap also owes its name to what can happen when a ship runs into one – like birds in the old airplane engines, a deathcap mistaken for a boilup has enough plastic in it to mess up ship engines and rudders. This is deadly for two reasons. Shipping is now really the only business in the world; the seas are bigger but more crowded than ever. That's why we have flying collection vessels now; too easy to get run over in the coastal fogs still around Cascadia in a little ten-ton cargo thing. A crippled ship close to shore is subject to the same dangers in that same fog.
The other problem: the sea has swallowed all the easy coastal inlets. The shores are all cliffs worn away out of the sides of mountains. If your ship loses steering with the tide coming in or a storm behind you, your ship is going up against the sides of the mountains in short order. Ship captains are trained to sail around any and all boilups, but folks are in a hurry and “it's just a little one” have been the famous last words of many a sea captain around Cascadia.
So: in the colloquial vernacular, a boilup is just one of those problems that pops up in life that can usually be dealt with successfully if people stay out of their feelings and get bilge done. Oh – bilge – that tank in your collection vessel that does the microscopic filtering of water in your collection vessel before jetting the water back to sea, and thus is full of plastic sludge at the end of the day that has to be dumped out.
A deathcap is the kind of problem that people create that not only can destroy them, but a great number of people around them. The term is applied to politics and industry a lot, like “that policy is going to be a deathcap for Cascadia, ten years in the water [as opposed to 'down the road', since every ten years, the end of another road is in the water anyhow].” The term is also used when you can just see someone about to run themselves into a situation that is too much for him or her: “You're about to head full speed ahead over a deathcap, friend.”
That leaves the two kinds of melt. A bad melt is one of those cases in which the plastic sent into orbit to move on from there doesn't quite make it, and falls back into the atmosphere, melting, burning, and reeking toxic gas all the way down, and then needing to be collected again. Thus, colloquially, a bad melt is anything done incompetently – “So-and-So is trying to do X, but with his skills it's just going to be a bad melt.”
A slow bad melt, on the other hand, is the colloquial term for the melting of the remaining ice caps at the poles, and further colloquially used as “that whole situation is just a slow bad melt, and it's going to come to the flood eventually.”
We are all living in the slow bad melt, in reality. That's life on Earth. The only beauty to it is still to be seen from orbit … or at least, that's what I thought until today.
One week of the month, I'm an astronaut. I keep up my training in the evenings after work and on the weekends to be ready. “Fly high, Fisher Bird,” Still Tide always tells me, and I appreciate that.
Space travel – the ideas were so happy and bright in the 20th and early 21st centuries. I would have loved to live then, when the International Space Station was more than a waystation for “trashtronauts” to arrive and wait for rockets filled with tons of plastics due to be loaded in their space vessels.
Plastic is petroleum, leveled up. A lot of industry on earth is now leveling it back down to fuel for rockets to get the rest of the plastic into orbit so we “trashtronauts” can load it into ships that our ancestors dreamed of in the 1950s and 1960s. We have impulse drive, and warp drive is not far away, but developments in that field have been stalled by the necessity to use what we have to keep the human race from drowning in not only the rising water but also the pollution in those waters.
The spaceships we use are capable of getting to Mercury and back in three hours – not that I have ever seen Mercury except from a distance, but I have to get inside its orbit in order to drop my load when I'm piloting. The cargo bay holds 100 mega-tons of plastics and the rocket that will send that plastic on its last journey. My job is to drop that load, turn on the rocket, and assure that it is on its way. Then, back again to Earth's orbit for another load – three loads a day for six days, then, back to Earth.
The other nice thing: space flight is not a one-person job. This is when I get a co-pilot, or, get to be a co-pilot. I've actually preferred being a co-pilot in this last year, especially when my best friend Felix “Fish” Johnston is the pilot.
I was talking with Fish as we were doing our loads for the day – he always has on great music, and had on something new his jazz trio has just come out with.
“What's that, Fish – that's nice right there!”
“That's the title track for the album, Byrd – Super Blue. I was just thinking of the Earth, how it is now, unlike the way it was.”
“Yeah,” I said, and I felt the sadness at that moment, as bad as it ever gets for me.
“Tell me something, Fish.”
“What's happening, Byrd?”
“You ever think about just plunging on down into the blue down there from here, and letting it all be over – or, just taking the load all the way to the sun in person, and just getting out of all this?”
Fish did a double-take at me.
“No wonder you've been co-piloting a lot this year,” he said. “That's a deathcap thought for a pilot to be having.”
“Yeah, I know, Fish, but I know I can talk to you.”
“The answer is in the music. Just listen to that music for a few minutes while I check the load weight, and think about what you are hearing, and the history of jazz, and about me, with all my gorgeous chocolate self.”
I had to laugh at that. Fish is a great-looking African-American man in middle-middle age, dark chocolate skin, salt-and-pepper curly hair, and a huge smile. When he plays the saxophone, everybody listening just floats above their troubles – we're all like plastics, but better.
That's what Fish was telling me.
“Look, Byrd, my people float. Ain't no way in the world I, knowing my family history as I do, would think about ending my life as a bad melt. Look down there, right below us – that's the old west cost of Africa. My family was taken from there in chains and moved on over to right down there – that's where the old islands and old east coast of North America used to be – to survive the 16th, 17th, 18th, and half of the 19th century as chattel slaves. We survived the rest of 19th century and half of the 20th under Jim Crow laws that made us scarcely better than slaves, and during that time we produced half of the inventions that made up what was then the modern world, and all this great music you hear me playing.
“We all float, man. We're still here, living in a half-drowned world in which racism went on and drowned too, because finally folks figured out that humans need every hand that can help. It wouldn't have ended any other way. There's still prejudice, but racism drowned, and I was born after it drowned and I wouldn't change anything for anything in the world.
“We get up every day in a world in which everybody, red, yellow, black, and white, works together sincerely and totally because we finally realize we have no choice. We get up every day in a world in which everybody in the world is safe from mass violence, because we can't afford to kill each other over race, color, or creed any more. I made it, Byrd. So have you. There won't be anyone looking for revenge on you just because your people are from the drowned parts of Europe. The world is super blue, man, and it's sad what we have to do to keep living here, but it's also fantastic.”
I've been listening to Fish's trio on their new album all evening, and writing, and looking out of the porthole at the Earth. It's all super blue, all right, like a sapphire almost completely dug out of its earth, a jewel you can see is better than it was.
Maybe Fish is right. I'm not a big student of history. Yet I do know that the only wars humans are waging now are with the floating leftovers of our wicked past, and for our own survival. I've never known anything else. Yet Fish might be right. What would his ancestors, and mine, and everybody's have given to finally arrive in centuries of peace on earth between all human beings?
The dream of mankind, painted in watercolors … super blue.
I guess I need to stop complaining, huh?
Photo Credit: George Prentzas on Unsplash