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Bad World
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by Warren Ellis
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Bad Space I sometimes wonder how the apocalyptic minds behind mad cults somehow manage to conjure such prosaic and stale dooms. The Heaven's Gate crowd genuinely irritated me with the dullness of their lunatic proposition, that there was a spaceship hiding behind Hale-Bopp ready to whisk them all off to a land of blowjobs and soma. It's a terrible old sci-fi pulp hackjob of a transcendental ambition, isn't it? Yes, it's possible that this, as a reaction to the suicides of dozen of people, is not the most helpful or the most sensitive that a person could expected to be. But it's a bad old world. No, I was disappointed by Heaven's Gate. They could have been much more interesting. Especially since they plainly had access to current-day scientific materials. Their claim of a vessel behind Hale-Bopp stemmed from photographs taken by the University of Hawaii and the Japanese National Observatory, which purported to show such an object in the comet's proximity as it zeroed in on Jupiter. These shots turned out to be fakes, but nonetheless it shows these people had an interest in current space science. And current space science has far better opportunity for mad thinking. I mean, if you're looking for either safety or doom from the stars, think about this; the Pioneer space probes are slowing down too fast and no-one knows why. Pioneers 10 and 11 are moving out of the solar system and into interstellar space, and they're losing speed much, much faster than they should be. Any maths attempting to explain away the hard deceleration falls short of the actual numbers by at least a factor of five. This doesn't seem to speak of Doom too strongly in and of itself, but compare it with the article next to it in today's edition of the Fortean Times… Lawrence Schulman, a physicist at Clarkson University in New York state, thinks he's worked out where dark matter is. Dark matter is supposed to make up 90% of the universe but no-one can detect it yet. Schulman suspects dark matter could be accounted for by the remnants of stars from the future, falling backwards through time. He thinks, in fact, that the universe is dotted with regions where time runs backwards. Regions that are relics from future time, where the expansion of the Universe has stopped and is now collapsing back into the Big Bang's opposite event, the Big Crunch. So if you want to form a mad cult tomorrow, here's your doomsday scenario. The Pioneer probes are decelerating faster than they should, in our perception, because they're approaching a region of reverse-time immediately adjacent to our Solar System. And it's moving closer. Which is why flares came back. Warren Ellis
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