Remnant Population

Remnant Population

An entertaining little tale about an old woman who sneaks off into the woods to avoid being loaded onto a ship and transported to another world. Now she's alone in her abandoned village and she likes it just fine. Naturally, this blissful state of affairs can't continue indefinitely or we wouldn't have much of a story. That's not true, you could probably make a story out of it, but it wouldn't be this story.

This is set sometime in the future when the human race has explored and settled numerous exoplanets. They must have been at this for a while if they have found numerous planets that are suitable for human habitation. I'm thinking gravity would be the gating factor. Much less than one gravity and they wouldn't be able to hold onto an atmosphere. Much more and people are going to struggle to walk around, and walking around is one our of prime occupations. Sunlight might be nice, but we can make light. Air would be nice, but we can make air. Hostile alien life forms can incinerated. However, you would really have to be hard up for real estate to make Terra forming a bare rock worthwhile.

Once we figure out how to build a spaceship that can travel interstellar distances, we could start mass producing them and launching probes to thousands of planets to take a close look to see if they are someplace we might like to live.

A spaceship large enough to transport enough people and material to establish a colony would need to be the size of an ocean liner. You might be able to get used to living in confined spaces with a few  thousand of your best buds, but after a few years of that, the sight of a zillion square miles of unoccupied land could be a powerful attraction.

P.S. Ursala's quote at the top of the cover makes more sense with the prefix 'im' attached to 'probable'.