Teens Writing for Teens, the 5th

[FONT=&quot]Math is the scariest thing in the universe. That isn’t a joke. Math destroyed Hiroshima, San Palo, Vicksburg.[/FONT]

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Parametric said:

I enjoyed maths so much that I seriously considered doing a maths degree, but I let my older brother put me off - he was in the process of failing his maths degree at the time.

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Math is the scariest thing in the universe. That isn’t a joke. Math destroyed Hiroshima, San Paulo, Vicksburg. Math killed my parents.


I don’t know what my parents were doing on the Elevator at that instant. They might have been on a tea break. They might have been building. They might have been joking. They might have been thinking of me.


The Elevator orbited at three kilometers a second, and hung thirty thousand kilometers above the surface of the Earth. The hijacked shuttle weighed half a ton and was going ten kilometers every second.


I saw the flash from my window, a wink in the corner of my eyes. I almost missed it, because my window was dominated by the video of my girlfriend, Sarah.


Math is the cruelest thing in the universe. Math described the reality of space travel, out of the comforting visions of spec-fic shows. We don’t have anti-gravity. We don’t have fusion engines or warp drive or anything that could get around that one simple problem: [FONT=&quot]Δvo = sqrt[ (G * Pm) / Pr ][/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]Oh, don’t look at me like that. This is child’s play up here. The change in velocity required to get into orbit is equal to the square root of the gravitational constant of the universe times the Earth’s mass divided by its radius. [/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]That comes out to a lot of fuel. A lot of energy. A lot of expensive parts and high paid scientists and technicians, and factories. A single kilogram of luggage costs more than I made as an apprentice mucking out algae vats in a year. And, despite what they say about spacer girls, I weigh a lot more than a kilo. Sarah weighed more than me, and she worked on a farm and earned even less. [/FONT]


I’d been watching the Elevator come together since I was old enough to remember. But when I met Sarah online, I stopped watching it enviously, like the monster that stole Dad and Mom every month. I started watching it with a drooling anticipation I’d formerly reserved for porn-vids. The Elevator promised a wonderful solution to a cruel equation.


Then, in a single flash, it was gone.


And that’s where I want to start you, because you’ve never been up here. You’ve grown up in a city, on a farm, in an arc, and you might think you know inhospitable, but you don’t know crap. You’ve grown up on the one thing that matters, the Earth. Surrounded by an atmosphere, protected by a magnetosphere, with enough mass to hold you down tight, with a sun that’s just far enough to keep you warm without burning, but close enough to not freeze you.


That’s why you have to understand. Right now. Math is scary and math is cruel, because math describes space, and space does not just let you grow up there. It grabs you and it etches itself into you and never ever lets you go.
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This is where I’m going to start.[/FONT]

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