ISBN No: 1-4137-9324-X.  205 pages, illustrated with pictures. Target audience: Teens & young adult. Price: US$16.95

       A once carefree planet, with its distinctive globe of swirling white clouds and deep blue oceans drifted through the black vacuum, circling about a yellow star called the Sun. Its serene outward appearance of course concealed from view the true scale of catastrophic climate change, deadly diseases and complete technological collapse that presently loomed before its inhabitants.

       On May 1st, 2250, senior representatives from the world’s highest ranking authorities gathered at the Global Space Agency headquarters in Washington D.C. to conclude the Big Debate that had been raging for decades.

        In the first thirty minutes there was no clear consensus either way, as opinion still seemed divided between the financial burden of building such a large scale starship on the one hand against the potential risks if we lost our spaceflight capabilities in the impending global disasters, on the other.

        The US president, Joseph Lexington, sat on a highly elevated row of seats at the back of the briefing hall alongside other top officials from the United Nations, World Bank and the World Health Organisation, who were all listening intently to the raging debate.

        A rather tall, slim man with greasy black hair and wearing a governmental suit rushed into the briefing hall via one of the doors on the upper level of the auditorium. He took brisk steps to walk over to the president and seemed short of breath, as if he’d been running a marathon.

        ‘Sir, all hell is breaking loose out there and we’re calling an emergency press conference,’ he said in a highly urgent voice.

        ‘You mean the status of the South African blizzards?’ Lexington replied, in a half whisper.

         ‘No sir, it’s a lot worse. A tidal wave along the Pacific rim has reportedly wiped out two hundred thousand in eastern China - just in the past hour, sir.’

         Lexington turned to the distinguished guests sat beside him, made a brief gesture asking to be excused and left the auditorium in a hurry.

         Meanwhile, the debate continued to rage for the next two and a half hours.

          Lexington’s eldest son, Sebastian, had accompanied a climate study survey team to South Africa in an effort to closely monitor the Antarctic chilled stream that now devastated the region. Fully equipped with a mobile habitat, two military helicopters and ample expedition supplies, the eight-man crew had been stationed west of Johannesburg, on the southern edge of the Kalahari desert. Where the ground was once a large, arid to semi-arid desert covered in reddish brown sands for as far as the eye could see, on this night it stood under four feet of snow.

          The blizzards had been raging violently and non-stop for the past three days, and the men longed for a break. On this night the break had finally arrived, with the skies clearing from the west shortly after sunset. The full moon cast its brilliant silver light onto the white blanket of snow, and the landscape looked intensely dazzling for miles around.

           ‘Hey you guys, I’m going out to get some night air,’ Sebastian said to two of his team mates.

          ‘At this hour? Man, I’d keep an eye out for the hyenas if I were you,’ one of them replied, half jokingly.

         ‘No sweat. I’ve got this,’ Sebastian said, pointing to the ray gun in his trouser pocket.

         He was wrapped up warm in a hooded fur coat, padded with several layers underneath for insulation against the sub zero temperatures.

        Having walked a fair distance away from the cabin, he stood out in the sea of freshly fallen snow, admiring the surrounding night scene. Screams from a pack of spotted hyenas echoed through the forests in the distance. They were too far away to pose any immediate threats, he thought.

        Looking toward the west, he saw masses of fluffy white clouds race their way across the face of the moon, in the sweeping breeze. Shifting his gaze higher up toward the southern sky, he found a rather bright yellowish-looking star, not far from the group of four bright stars that made up the well known constellation of Crux, the ‘Southern Cross’.

        As he stood admiring the night sky, Sebastian heard the sound of boots crunching their way into deep snow behind him. Turning around, he felt somewhat relieved to see the leader of the survey team coming over to join him.

        ‘Alpha Centauri. The third brightest star in our night sky,’ the man said, peering toward the twinkling gem that had caught Sebastian’s eye.

        ‘It’s hard to believe that small point of light is currently the focus of so much attention the whole world over.’

        ‘Oh, absolutely. It always has been to some degree, although never as much as now. And your father has every confidence the Big Debate is going to conclude in his favour, enabling him to fulfil his grand vision.’

         Back at the Global Space Agency headquarters, the atmosphere inside the auditorium had turned intensely agitating, in a somewhat bitter political battle fought with words; agendas were widely divided and minds filled with suspicion.

         ‘Look, we see all these problems coming our way and yet we just sit around and do nothing?’ Said a proponent of the cosmic ark proposal.

         ‘The political will simply isn’t there. Countries in the far east just do not share your optimism for this project, they have far more pressing problems to deal with at home,’ said an opponent.

        ‘I say screw the far easterners. Beyond the Earth, we have searched every corner of our own solar system and so far we’ve found nothing more advanced than a few microbes swimming in the oceans of Europa. The nearest place beyond the confines of our home planet that has breathable air, is located at a comfortable distance from its parent star with oceans of liquid water, and in all probability is teeming with proper life, is New Earth at Alpha Centauri. I see that as a logical next target for permanent human settlement,’ remarked a rather knowledgeable proponent.

         ‘Yeah, only it’s going to take at least 50,000 years to reach that pinprick of light! Besides, have you considered the true financial cost of building such a gigantic vessel? It would be no less than the total world GDP multiplied by a factor of god knows how much,’ remarked one of the opponents. ‘Would you just look at the size of that thing!’ He said, chuckling whilst pointing to a 3D graphical animation of the giant, would-be starship played back on a video screen in one corner of the meeting hall. He was a senior official of the Chinese High Empire.

         Maxine Hathaway was feeling pretty uptight by now, and weary from all the hours of sitting there listening to such mind-rotting rubbish; her patience wearing a little thin. Are all of these people really so blind to the situation? Joseph Lexington was relying on her courage, more so than anyone else’s, to make the distinguishing mark that would settle this whole thing once and for all.

* * *

 Random Excerpts

        New Earth itself was first detected by NASA’s Earth-circling Terrestrial Planet Finder mission back in the mid-twenty first century. That discovery was immediately hailed as the greatest extra-solar system insight to have been ever acquired in the entire history of science. Advanced spectroscopic studies from the Lunar Far Side Observatory later revealed the planet to be virtually a near-twin of our own Earth, with oceans of water, a breathable nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere, and clear evidence of some seasonally changing vegetation.

         If granting mankind the ability to identify New Earth on the nearest cosmic shores beyond our solar system were to be god’s way of showing us an avenue of escape to aim for, then he certainly had set the challenge extremely steeply indeed. Alpha Centauri is a little over four light years from Earth. This may not sound that great a distance in the vastness of the wider cosmos, but translated into every day measure, the nearest island of light beyond our Sun is a staggering 25,000,000,000,000 (twenty five million million) miles away across the vast interstellar ocean of darkness stretching out beyond the orbit of Pluto . . .