Why send only 56 people to explore a huge planet? I used to get that question a lot, mostly from kids who grew up in teeming cities and cut their teeth on Third-grade research projects in collaboration with peers all over the Sol system. For them a team as small as ours was almost unthinkable. The answer is easy: physics. Rare materials limit how many ships we can build, exponential energy costs and strength requirements limit how much mass they can carry, and temporal offsets limit how quickly we can reuse them. If our ship had disgorged us immediately and headed back to Earth it still would have returned 18 years after it left. Despite our common desire for exploration and desperate thirst for knowledge, travel to other stars is a feeble trickle.
Actually our crew is one of the largest so far, and it's not nearly enough. We can barely scratch the surface of an entire new world in the limited time we have. So we have to work smarter. All of us are cross-trained in a second specialty. In addition to ethology I'm also qualified in ecology -- specifically ecophysiology -- so I'm a kind of an honorary member of Shor's team, and I'm Mingrui's "opposite." That means that if anything were to happen to her I'd take over her responsibilities. As long as she remains as doggedly competent as she has always been I merely get to act as her sounding board from time to time.
My opposite is Evo. Evo nu-Volfmura is 24, making her the youngest member of the expedition. She's also an e3 prototype: e301.11ipn if that kind of thing impresses you. She must be ambitious to have made it this far and yet I find her .. unserious. A Ph.D. at 22 takes a lot of work, which I've never seen her capable of. She seems to think that every problem can be solved easily, as if all discovery was just a matter of figuring out the trick. If anything were to happen to me I despair what might become of my research program, not to mention the Tanzen.
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