Humanity's Last Hope

The year is 2471, at this point in time, Earth is suffering from overpopulation and has been depleted of many of its resources; Climate change has caused animal populations to die and rising sea levels have completely destroyed some cities. These monstrous problems motivated the major countries of the world to set aside their political differences and allocate all their remaining resources and talent to help solve Earth's disastrous problems. These countries founded a new government so that the entire world is under one government to be better organized with dealing with Earth's major issues.  This new government has been working with a private space company, Graham's Aerospace Research Company, to help combat these issues on Earth. This private space company was founded by Trillionaire, Matthew Graham, originally as an asteroid mining company (which is how he acquired his insane wealth) but has since been putting his wealth into colonization of the Moon and various satellite bodies in the Kuiper belt, terraforming Mars and Europa for future colonization, as well as stabilizing Earth's runaway atmosphere to help restore balance to the environment to help animal populations (1, stock setting). 

This leads to the current situation (2). A team of researchers are investigating a dwarf planetary body, named KBB196, deep in the Kuiper belt that could potentially be habitable. The crew is on their ship, "Sagittarius 12" approaching KBB196, they are currently 7.11 hours from arrival.

"Hey Captain Janson, can you go over landing protocol for KBB196? I know it is a dwarf planet with some rather unusual atmospheric composition and I want to make sure I program the quantum computer landing system right for when the descent rockets have to turn on."

"No problem Marcus, the, albeit very thin, atmosphere of KBB196 is mainly composed of Methane, CO2,  Nitrogen and Oxygen, with trace amounts of Carbon tetrafluoride gases and Sulphur compounds. This is unusual because normally, this far out, especially being in the Kuiper Belt, a dwarf planet shouldn't have this much methane or carbon dioxide in its atmosphere. What you'll have to do is program the computer so that it turns on the afterburners once we get through the methane part of the atmosphere so that way the rocket doesn't ignite any of the methane and destroy the ship. The methane is in the upper part of the atmosphere so we won't have to experience as much deceleration once we clear it. So program the landing pod to safely get us down there, once you do that, we will enter our life-support pods and be put under for the landing. After we land, we will be woken up and do some data checking and surveying to then begin our mission. "

"Thanks for letting me know, I'll get on that."

"No problem, remember crew, we are here because we have to see if this planet has any signs of life. We have to collect samples for the lab,  Commander Harper, that is your job, you're the crew botanist, elaborate on that."

"Right, so, as Captain said, I am the crew botanist, and it is my job to make sure that all samples collected remain safe and preserved and also that we are completely sterile so we do not introduce any earth bacteria or microbes to the environment of KBB196. We are going to be landing near a basin that is said to have trace amounts of water in it as well as be near a river that has flowing liquid methane. Chances are, there is some microbial life. This is not some mission that some people made a movie about centuries ago called The Martian (3, allusion), this isn't science-fiction (genre 4), remember, this is real, so we have to take extreme caution in our actions and treat it as a serious manner. We are determining whether this place could be a place humans could live."

The crew mechanical engineer, Yinsen, spoke up, "So what if there is no evidence (5) of life? How will we convey this data to the public? I'm not trying to have an argument or anything, but we don't know if there is life on this planet."

"You're right," Commander Harper said, "but, remember, we have to do all we can to support our statement that this could be a worthy place to live. Human lives are at stake. If we find no data (6) that says this place is habitable, we have to find data that supports it would be feasible to terraform it. It's about the delivery (7) and the editing (8) of said delivery; no matter what we find, we just have to make sure that the public buys into it. As centuries ago, a famous man once said, 'ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country (9, antimetabole).' In this case, our country is Earth, and what we are doing for it involves trying to save the people on it."

The crew biologist, John, spoke up, "What Commander Harper said. But as a generalization (10), by simply reading (11) or using efferent reading (12) the mission outline of KBB196, since we are the audience (13) for whom it was meant, you could see that we are here on scientific inquiry that has big implications."

Commander Harper replied, "yeah, what John said. That's (contraction, 14) a confirmation (15) of our mission: we are here on scientific inquiry with big implications. It is not an understatement (16) that what we are doing is important, but, no need to make it some hyperbole (17) of purpose. The planet is like the moon of Saturn, Titan: It is an isolated wasteland (metaphor, 18) and our mission is as serious as a cat finding food in some desperate time (simile, 19).  It's about survival--life or death of the human race. Our mission can be thought of as a symbol (20) for how courageous and inventive humans are. We are on the edge of the solar system seeking to save the human race after all."

Captain Johnson alerted the crew: "Alright everybody, enough discussion about our mission. Marcus is done with coding the computer for the landing system, Get in your pods, we have a long day ahead of us approaching."

--TO BE CONTINUED--