“Now back to the studio.”
“Thanks Jeremy. Now a little history lesson. Mirconium. The planet with a lost future.
The early colonists probably couldn’t believe their luck. Mirconium is almost the twin of Earth. Continents, Oceans, a breathable atmosphere. Rain and rivers of fresh water. But the Real Earth has a ten-kilometre wide plutonium reactor at its heart, and that gives Earth its magnetic field, and that keeps the Suns radiation away from the surface.
“Of course Earth got its extra plutonium from the collision that gave Earth its Moon. All the heavier metals stayed in Earth and sank to its core, while the Moon got almost nothing. Mirconium was not so fortunate. There is no reactor at its core so there is no magnetic field. Without a magnetic field it was irradiated and sterile.
“But all that water and continental land surface was too good to go to waste. Investors built the orbital shields to keep off the solar radiation and make the surface habitable. Mines and farms soon flourished. The beautiful Capital City was built with a grid of kilometre wide avenues. More settlers flooded in sure of a great new life for them and their descendants.
“Of course they sought independence led by the poet, John The Revealator. And the accountant Elmore James.
“Well things did not work out forever. Probably Mirconium’s biggest fault is being too far off the main trade routes. Shipping costs are just a bit too high. But a series of over ambitious plans soon wasted what wealth there was. As the generation’s passed the planet grew poorer. The hunger riots brought military rule. The Junta brought stability but could not bring trade.
“The anti radiation shields began to corrode when there was no money to maintain them all. Nowadays the main continents are shaded, but the oceans are not. This has brought massive evaporation over the seas and massive condensation over the shaded continents. The resultant clouds help shade the people but at the price of almost continuous storms and rain.
“Food production is still too low and that is where the Junta began to cast covetous eyes on Al Banduq.
“The now famous slug farm was governed from nearby Mirconium before independence. But Al Banduq was the property of the Al Banduq Slug Company. A company registered on Earth. Its shareholders wished to remain under Earth rule and that was that. Mirconium protested and has continued to claim Al Banduq as its own lost territory ever since.
“At one point the Junta tried to buy the owning company and acquired 32 percent before a takeover of the remaining shares by Ted’s Uforex, the holding company registered in The United Planets. The Junta has recently tried negotiations with Ted’s Uforex to purchase the entire company. They looked to be quite successful till the UP Monopolies and Mergers Commission blocked the deal. That was a year ago and the Commission have still not given grounds for doing so.
“The growing unpopularity of the Junta may have driven them at last to invasion. The hope is probably to unite the people behind them and to show they are really trying to solve the high cost of food.
“There is in fact very Little Earth can do. Their last Mother Ship has been scrapped and the new Thunderbirds are not capable of operating far from their Earth bases. “Almost certainly old Mother Earth must again swallow her pride and accept this further small loss to the once Galactic Empire.
“Now, I dare say a lot of people are praying for a peaceful outcome to this dreadful affair. But what religion should you follow? Well there’s one new philosopher from The Schoffeleers Foundation who believes that we all believe in nothing. Is that right Mathew?”
“That is right. All religious thought follows a perfectly Darwinian evolutionary path.”
“Could you explain that Mathew?”
“Of course. In the beginning we were hunter-gatherers. We probably hoped rather than preyed. We hoped for food and so on. But like all the higher animals we also mourned the loss of loved ones. Mates, parents and children. And we had dead bodies to get rid of. At first we probably ate them.”
“Really I don’t think…. Well carry on.”
“Thank you. Then we
started inventing funerary rights. Treating the dead with dignity.
This is not so unusual. Elephants disjoint the skeletons of their
dead and only leave the skull behind. Quite primitive monkey mothers
are loath to let go of their dead infants, and so on. As we developed
higher thought processes we began to wish our parents or mates were
still with us to help and guide us. In our imaginations we believed
we could hear them talking to us. We invented graveyards and we
invented ancestor veneration. We prayed to our dead fathers for help.
Communities began to pray to dead leaders for help. As time went on
we had more and more dead ancestors. We sorted them out into ones to
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