For a World in Flames

"IC 405?" asked Max. "Are you sure?"

"The Flaming Star Nebula. Yes, I'm sure. I need to see it."

"Okay," he replied. "It does seem appropriate." And then, as an aside, he added, "You know, you could just stay here."

It's true. Earth, it seems, is in flames. The Northern Hemisphere, anyway. Right now. The upside-down half gets its turn to burn again in another six months or so.

Wildfires in Spain and France have driven over 300 thousand people from their homes. And I can't write fast enough; over the course of preparing this post the number of people displaced by the fires has grown to 330,000. Weather conditions right now are not relenting and the situation could get much worse.

Drunk with rage, the fires are headed on a scorched-earth search for wine in Bordeaux.

Firefighter Captain Nicolas Braz told AFP news agency that the fire had created "its own winds - complete with whirlwinds", adding it was "erratic and unmanageable".
– BBC

The final day celebration of the Tour de France, with its sprint around the Champs-Élysées, was truncated so security forces could be deployed to the fire zones.

In Spain, tens of thousands have evacuated from around Madrid and Ávila. Wildfires have claimed over 500 square miles of land so far, already 100 square miles more than the normal yearly average.

Fires in Scotland's Cairngorms National Forest have burned for 10 days, sending smoke down to choke Aberdeen.

As I write, Europe just set a new record high temperature.

On this side of the Atlantic, Canadian wildfires are reprising their greatest hits from 2023. Fires in British Columbia alone have displaced 20,000 people from their homes. Burning boreal forests are billowing smoke, spreading across Canada and the Eastern seaboard of the US.

The smoke has pissed off the Grand Poobah who demands reparations for this "invasion."

We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable.

Remember when invasions were earth-bound caravans of migrants from the South? Now they are wind-blown smoke plumes from the North. Mobilize the military along the border! Well, not the military, I guess, but tariffs! Tariffs on Canada – a.k.a taxes! – levied by the whim of the Grand Poobah on you and me. Tariffs are clearly the answer.

This embarrassing temper tantrum, of course, is just the Poobah Pot calling the Canadian Kettle "BLACK!"

Here are the air quality numbers and wildfires in the US as of July 26, thanks to AirNow:

Perhaps the Grand Poobah should levy tariffs on Oregon and Washington State.

Three separate fires near Spokane, Washington, destroyed close to a thousand structures, with families fleeing the flames. In Utah two helicopter pilots were killing in a crash while fighting wildfires in National Forest land. The fires prevented rescue teams from getting to the scene.

“When we first got there we could see two different plumes of smoke, one from the crash site, one from an active fire coming towards us,” Sevier County Sheriff Nathan Curtis said.

There was even a small 108 acre fire not too far from Max and me, the Taylor Hollow fire, which started on July 5 and burned for 3 weeks. Even this relatively small forest fire took a lot of resources:

The terrain is steep, rocky and difficult to access making progress slow. There are a total of 108 personnel assigned to the fire. This includes three 20-person fire crews and 34 firefighters and support personnel, a 5-person crew supporting a Type 1 helicopter, and 9 engine crew members supporting 3 Type 6 engines.

Fortunately, our skirmish is over. The National Interagency Fire Center declared the fire 100% contained late this afternoon, July 26.

But clearly, these kinds of resources can't be scaled to the mega-wildfire sites in the Northwest. Especially when the Grand Poobah, who clearly doesn't like smoke, particularly Canadian smoke, fired Forest Service firefighters by the gross. But it's all okay now, according to the Forest Service, they're fully staffed. Hey! Look over there! (And, please, not at the 4 firefighter deaths in the recent Colorado blazes or the two pilots in Utah.)

"You could try screaming into the Void," said Max. "Or the Abyss, I forget which works best ."

"You gaze into the Abyss, Max. The Void is for screaming."

I approached the Void.

"WE'VE BEEN FREAKIN' SCREAMING FOR DECADES!!! IT'S GREENHOUSE GASSES CAUSING GLOBAL WARMING DRIVING CLIMATE CHANGE. WE'RE ALL GOING TO BURN! YOU FREAKIN' IDIOTS!"

A faint, fading echo came back, "IDIOTS … Idiots … idiots … idiot ..."

I took that as a positive; it is rare for the Void to say anything at all.

"I notice you edited that interview," said Max.

"Gently," I nodded. "For length and clarity."

IC 405 is an emission and reflection nebula located in the constellation Auriga, the charioteer, approximately 1,500 light-years from Earth. The roiling, billowing red nebular emissions in the banner image up top are from hydrogen molecules ionized by the intense radiation emitted by the star, AE Aurigae. You can spot AE Aurigae sitting right in the middle of the image, the bright blue-white star with the four diffraction spikes, a twinkle caused by the telescope optics. The dust and gasses farther away are not ionized, but the light of AE Aurigae is reflected off of them creating the gray smoke-like streams spilling down the foreground and wafting away from the star.

The overall appearance is that of a central bright star, igniting flames around it and generating sinuous smoke trails curling away into the darkness of the night sky.

If you were traveling at the speed of light, it would take a little over 8 minutes to go from Earth to the Sun. At that rate, it would take roughly 5 years to cross IC 405; that is, the width of the Flaming Star Nebula is over 63,000 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

That's a lot of real estate. A lot of flame.

A suitable meme for the consequences of our climate arrogance.

We headed for a small exoplanet, called "Aesopsfaira," orbiting in the "habitable zone" around a main sequence star somewhere in the region of IC 405. The habitable zone is just that, the span of distances from a star at which temperatures on a planet are compatible with liquid water. A zone, in short, given other requisites like an atmosphere, a zone compatible with life.

Global warming was a "hoax" on Aesopsfaira. A hoax, at least according to the billionaires of the "Extraction Industries Sector." And they, the billionaires, were all that mattered. They bought the politicians in all the major parties, who collected the money as campaign donations for their elections, "Burn, Baby, Burn," and then paid back those bribes at $10,000 to the dollar in tax breaks, deregulation, and fox-in-the-hen-house oversight.

They bought up all the channels of communications, all the print, all the teleport, all the transmitted communications, and provided a steady stream of propaganda promoting their "clean. beautiful, dependable" energy. An energy dug out of the ground and burned. Killing or disabling the diggers, first, and then anything that depended on breathing, eventually.

Scientists and citizens alike had warned of the dangers of unchecked greenhouse gas pollution. For a generation at least. It was dangerous and made no sense, they argued, given that AE Auriga, plus their own home star, provided all the energy needed for life and commerce. The technology was all there and well developed. Individuals were already using it.

But the billionaires were having none of it. You can't monopolize sunlight, they reasoned. They couldn't restrict solar, charge for its excavation, processing, and delivery. They couldn't manipulate the price over natural disasters, wars, and cartels. Solar would kill the golden goose that burned the world and lined their pockets, increasing their power and influence.

The climate collapse, the catastrophe, would never arrive, they told each other. Anyway, they would be long dead if it did. When it did. Caring not at all for the plight of their children and grandchildren and generations yet to come. Generations that wouldn't come because of them.

And so, monopoly ruled. It was a "Golden Era" they claimed. The color of flame. And it became hot. And it became dry. Hotter and drier. Wildfires raged half the year, wiping out whole communities, spreading smoke, adding even more greenhouse gases, and stirring up flaming tornadoes of boiling heat that left nothing behind in their paths.

The Flaming Star Nebula does not sport an "M" number like the Lagoon Nebula, M8, and many of our other destinations. That's because it was not one of the ixnay-on-the-comet objects cataloged by Messier back in the mid- to late-1700s. The nebula was diffuse and faint enough that it could hang out unnoticed until the development of astrophotography in the late 1800s. As is frequently the case in science, the appearance of new technology enabled multiple observers to pluck the same new string at roughly the same time.

The Flaming Star Nebula was first discovered on March 21, 1892 by Johann Martin Schäberle from photographic plates made at Lick Observatory up on the summit of Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California. It was independently identified by the German astronomer Max Wolf and Hungarian astronomer Eugen von Gothard that same year.

In 1895 the nebula made its way into the Index Catalog of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars, "IC" for short, as number 405, thanks to John Dreyer who was summarizing recently discovered deep sky objects that didn't make it into his previous New General Catalog (NGC) of 1888. The NGC and IC catalogs have both held their own over the ages, with rare updates, and there sits our nebula as IC 405 to this day. It is uniformly known as the Flaming Star Nebula, which is a perfect fit, but I couldn't find the first use of that nickname.

Max set us down on a high plateau overlooking an expansive valley, extending outward toward more substantial mountains in the distance. Smoke filled the air and the acrid smell of wildfires was inescapable. You could taste it. The view from the plateau revealed a burnt landscape, decked out in various shades of charcoal. Patches of flames could be seen erupting and retreating throughout the valley.

In the distant city, a glass ballroom stood, illuminated by lamps, under a smoky sky. Space shuttle limousines were bringing dignitaries to the ballroom for music, dining, and dance. A celebration to toast the government acquisition of a 26% share in DeepSouth Drillbit, LLC, which was exploring new natural gas wells in the Northern National Forest, despite its corporate name. It was a celebration on the Emperor's birthday. A celebration oblivious to the encroaching wildfires.

Nearer, spread out across the plateau, were thousands of spaceships of various shapes and designs. Modest sized ships, they were decorated with personalized graffiti, and meant to carry their owners to the nearest stars.

"Welcome, Max," said a voice. "You're in time."

The deep voice came from a diminutive, square-blocked figure standing next to us. A mismatch between voice and speaker. His name was Adin. He was bearded, with scruffy gray hair, and wore a robe of purple cord, a type I couldn't identify, cinched at the waist. A cluster of others, similarly attired, gathered around our telescope, surrounding Max and me.

Out along the plateau, tens of thousand more could be seen standing by their ships in small groups. Waiting. These were the Aesopins, descendants of a people who began their evolution hundreds of thousands of years ago.

The spaceships were bootleg, I learned.

Decades ago, all the factories had been taken over by autonomous generative AI robots, leaving the people themselves without meaningful work and the profits all going to the billionaire oligarchs. Most ordinary Aesopins subsisted by black-market trading and covert agency. Ostensibly taking meager government handouts, faking the paperwork to document work requirements, they had spread out into their own encompassing communities. Since the Department of Labor Statistics had long ago stopped publishing any statistics on labor, they were pretty much unobserved and unseen.

Eventually, the Aesopins discovered that the genAI robots were all talk and no thinking. The factories ran smoothly as long as nothing unusual happened. Nothing that hadn't happened before. If it was in the training set, everything was cool. However, when something did go wrong, that something could stay wrong almost forever because nobody was paying any attention to the robots, since they were autonomous after all.

One day Andus walked into one of the genAI factories that was in the business of making military drones for the weekly war schedule. He wore an old salad bowl for a hat. He was wearing his shirt on backwards, with his tie on forward. His slippers were on the wrong feet and reversed, his toes scrunched into the heal compartments. This was uncomfortable, Andus later confirmed, but "anything for science."

"You are very unusual," said the Chief Engineer genAI robot.

"Here," said Andus, and handed the robot some blueprints. "Please stop making those drab drones. They're boring. I want you to start making these spaceship transports instead."

"Hmm.." hummed the Chief Engineer.

"You can ad lib the specs however you like," added Andus, "Just make sure they fly safely, OK?"

The Chief Engineer hummed some more, and then suddenly hummed up one full octave.

"Fun!" he said. In monotone.

And from that day forward the military drone factory began turning out every conceivable configuration of personal spaceship, hundreds at a time. Each one slightly different.

Word spread among the other genAI communities of autonomous robots. When the Chief Engineer robots at other military drone factories got wind of this gig, they were so sick of exploding drones that they too began to design and build their own spaceships. Pretty soon there were spaceships for any Aesopin who wanted one. And the Extraction Industries Sector billionaires were never the wiser.

The only close call came when Andus went to collect the very first spaceship to take for a test flight. Just as he got in the cockpit, a clutch of Intergalactic Celestial Enforcement troops blocked his way, pointing guns and light sabers at him. They demanded his papers, and what the something he thought he was doing, immigrant scum, etc.

"Oh, this? Uh, this is a self-deportation machine. I'm about to self-deport," he said. And added, "It will be the best self-deport ever. In about two weeks."

The ICE agents were well and truly pleased with this explanation. It fit with the mission and didn't require them to do any work at all. They wished Andus a pleasant trip and let it be known among the ICE troops not to bother the self-deporting Aesopins with their self-deportation machines.

Andus' explanation was not far off the mark.

Now, the nations of Aesopins and their bootleg flights were spread out across the plateau. Thousands in formation. Waiting.

Waiting for a sign.

A sign that would signal the start of their journey to the Bifurcation.