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尊敬的马斯克先生，
作为地球公民的一员，余对您的移民火星开拓地球文明疆域的宏伟蓝图非常欣赏。近闻您有意加速移民火星的计划，但窃以为在您目前所公开的为火星移民所做的准备工作中还欠缺极为重要的一环，那就是在太空修建飞船组装车间以及太空船坞。
一支远赴火星的飞船舰队的出发点不应该是具有强大引力以及空气阻力的地球表面，而应该在地球引力较小而且是地球大气层之外的某处。为此，您需要在外太空的某处修建一个太空船组装场 （Spacecraft assembly yard， SCAY），并在其附近修建一个太空港口（Spacecraft Harbor， SCH）。
您可以将太空船的部件分批送到太空船组装场，然后就像过去人们组装空间站一样地在那里组装一个超大的太空母船。这样一来，您就不必担心如何用超大的火箭将该飞船送入太空的问题。另外，这个超大的母船一方面可以携带比地面发射的飞船上所能承载的更多的燃料，另一方面却只需要比从地面发射所需的小得多的推动力便可出发驶向火星。在这个超大的太空母船中，您还需要携带几个较小的飞船，以便到达火星的近地轨道后，人们可以搭乘小的飞船登陆火星。
相应地，您就需要在太空飞船组装场附近修建一个太空港口。来自地球上的人们需要先分批次乘坐小的摆渡飞船从地面来到太空港口，然后登上大的母船。人们也可分批次将需要运往火星的物资从地面运送到港口，在那里再将物资移到母船上。
以您的睿智，我相信您很快会意识到如果你要想实现移民火星的远大宏图，不论加速还是不加速，我上面所建议的建造太空船组装场和太空港口都是根本绕不过去的必须的步骤。没有这一环节，您的火星计划就存在着导致无法真正成功的严重缺陷！假如未来几年里有另一个团队出来和您竞争，而他们有太空船组装场和太空港口，您却没有的话，那么很显然您是无法与他们竞争的。
此外，太空船组装场和太空港口的建设将改变您的著名的“火星移民单程票哲学”。第一批火星移民们不必再带着此去无归日的悲壮情怀踏上征程。当第一批移民们乘坐小飞船登陆火星后发现周围的环境不尽人意，可以暂时先回母船休整一阵再做打算，实在不行，可以整队人马乘坐母船先回地球。相信作为你们的母星的地球人民会象迎接凯旋的英雄一样欢迎你们回来，过几年做足了准备再踏征程。但这一切的前提是：您需要先建成太空船组装场和太空港口，从那里才可以有驶往火星的超大母船。
至于应该选择在哪里建造太空船组装车间和太空船坞，如何建造太空船组装车间和太空船坞，以及其它的相关工程技术问题，我相信你那里有很多可以做出合理选择和优秀设计的顶尖专家，我就不在此班门弄斧了。作为一个搞哲学的，我只是给你提供一个战略性的思路，望能对您的火星计划有所裨益。
祝您的火星计划早日成功！
戴榕菁（Rongqing Dai）
========
相关链接：
Dai, R. (2019). New Aliens. Retrieved from: https://www.academia.edu/108902847/New_Aliens
New Aliens
Rongqing Dai
Prelude
Over the past century, we have been impressed by the hostile aliens in the movies; they will occupy our planet, enslave our people, and even eat our flesh. But in the real future, the aliens that would attack Earth could be part of us......
***
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, "Boom." Right at the end of the countdown, the blazing flames erupted out of the bottom of the carrier rockets, the colossal body of spaceship Mining 1 steadily ascended into the crisp blue skies, and the audience in the launch site T burst into a loud acclamation. In the meantime, this footage instantly beamed around the world.
The mission of the spacecraft Mining 1 was to drag a 300 million ton asteroid, named as XX, into an orbit between Earth and the Moon. Five years ago, an amateur astronomer came across XX. Since then, several members of the International Space Club (ISC) have launched asteroid probes to explore its mineral composition and found that 90% of its mass is rare earth ores urgently needed on Earth. To avoid wars between its member nations for the rare earth minerals of XX, after months of bargaining, ISC made a decision about a year ago that it would send a spacecraft to drag XX into an orbit between Earth and the Moon, so that a mining team of the ISC could easily land on XX later on to conduct regular mining activity for the need of its members according to the agreed quotas.
After a year's preparation, it finally came to the preselected optimal launch day for the northern hemisphere in 2090. To most viewers in front of the TV screens all over the world, what kind of deals had been struck among the ISC members were not their concern at all; what made them excited at the moment was the prospect that, for the first time, humans could drag an asteroid back into low-earth orbit for the purpose of mining. Major media networks all announced that they would follow the entire story to the end; hence, undoubtedly, this would be one of the hottest topics on dinner tables and social media in the coming months around the world.
***
Early in the morning of the launch day of Mining 1, a bald eagle was hovering in the skies above a private space base at 500 kilometers away from the launch site T, curiously looking over the gigantic saucer shape craft on the open tarmac. It was the New Aliens, a flying saucer in the color of light blue with a diameter of 100 meters and a height about ten stories. Trucks and luggage carts were busy running between the saucer and the cargo section of the terminal building of the base, loading containers of goods and customer luggage onto the saucer.
The terminal building was at a few hundred meters from the saucer, no boarding bridges extending out of it like in commercial airports. A line of golden lettering "EARTH STATION OF MARTIAN RESIDENTS" was erected on top of the overhang of the terminal's main gate facing the tarmac.
From the outside, the terminal appeared to be a four-story building, but inside the building there was a seven-story underground castle. This place was originally an abandoned missile silo, and was later built by a real estate developer into a so-called doomsday bunker castle that could withstand a nuclear war. In the middle of the third decade of the 21st century, Donald Marsque, the AI tycoon who led the first generation Earth immigrants to Mars, purchased this bunker as well as the surrounding 100 square miles of desert, and then turned it into a base to accommodate the flying saucers travelling between Mars and Earth.
Over the course of a couple of generations, the elite migrants recruited by Donald Marsque from Earth and their descendants had turned their settlements on Mars into the most advanced tech hubs in the solar system, and the distance between them and Earth had become their best security barrier against the infiltration of earthlings. On the surface, with all that they deliberately showed to the earthlings, they seemed to have kept pace with the development of the Earth civilization, but covertly they had long left the Earth’s people behind in fields such as quantum computing and artificial intelligence. Accordingly, with the help of the regular visiting engineers from Mars, the underground castle of this Earth Station of Martian Residents had already become one of the most advanced high-tech hubs on Earth.
On this special day when the people across the whole Earth were excitedly celebrating the launch of Mining 1 to catch XX, the flying saucer New Aliens would also complete its last mission of bringing new migrants from Earth to Mars. This was not a sheer coincidence, but intentionally prescheduled. About an hour before Mining 1 was launched, the crew members of the New Aliens and hundreds of passengers began to step out of the terminal building. Some boarded the shuttle bus waiting at the gate of the terminal, and some others rather sauntered together towards the behemoth that was higher than the terminal building.
In the meantime, four men in their early thirties stood in front of a large TV display in the King’s Room at the bottom of the bunker, watching the real time broadcasting of the launch of Mining1. A lanky one of the four was nervously checking his mobile phone from time to time.
As it entered the countdown, a stout man with a thick beard on his face asked, "Is everything fine, Steve?"
"Everything is perfect, Bill," the lanky man replied.
All four men then began to laugh loudly, with a hint of weirdness in the laughter.
After seeing Mining 1 left the ground, Bill asked, "Elliot, is there anything that we need to worry about before we leave here?"
"The first thing I did this morning was to double check if everything is fine and I don't see any problem," the man named Elliot replied.
"Sounds good!... Now we can leave this planet as well." Bill then said to his bodyguard Jeff, "tell them, we are coming now."
"Sure," Jeff responded, and then walked aside to communicate to Bill’s squad of bodyguards on the ground.
Strictly speaking, all these four men were not earthlings although they did carry the genes of earthlings and thus look like earthlings. They were third generation Martians, and all born on Mars. The man named Bill was the grandson of Donald Marsque, the founder and the current king of the Martian kingdom. Both Steve and Elliot were Bill's personal assistants, and also the best AI masters and top hackers in the Martian kingdom. A few months ago, they came to Earth with two very special missions. The first one was to bring back more new migrants from Earth. Contrary to the previous open selections of new migrants to Mars according to strict intellectual and physical requirements, this time they quietly reached out to the closest loved ones of those who were already Martian residents, and persuaded them to go to Mars. Although they claimed openly that this special invitation was based on humanity consideration, among Bill and those three men, they privately called these potential new migrants as the "last Earth migrants to Mars." Their second mission would sound much sneakier: hacking into the operating system of Mining 1 to see if they could do something with it…
A few minutes later, Bill and his three men came to the ground, and then the convoy of Bill and his men, including his squad of bodyguards that was waiting on the ground, left the terminal for the flying saucer. When they arrived in front of the New Aliens, the senior management staff of the Earth station had lined up before the boarding stairs to see them off. Bill glanced at the line and wanted to say something, but then changed his mind. He went straight onto the saucer, without shaking hands with those people, including the station director. Steve, who was behind Bill, could not bear to see the station director embarrassed in front of his subordinates, so he walked to shake hands and have some words with him.
"You know how to contact me, right?" Steve asked.
"Of course," the station director replied with gratitude.
"The most important thing for you is to guard the underground castle carefully. Don't let spies from outside get into it."
"Of course," the director replied.
"I have changed the password to get into the underground, but you can contact me to ask for it if you need to enter it in emergency."
"I will," the director replied.
......
Soon after Bill and his entourage all boarded, the flying saucer rose silently and then quickly disappeared into the blue sky...
***
One and a half months later, Mining 1 finally reached the XX asteroid. For several days in a row, all crew members and passengers on the New Alien were as excited as the billions of earthlings on Earth, watching the astronauts of Mining 1 put a special net onto the entire XX asteroid, and attach it to Mining 1, and then steer Mining 1 towards the direction of Earth and the Moon, in order to settle it onto the designated orbit between Earth and the Moon.
During those days, Bill spent most time watching the broadcast of the event in his King's cabin with Steve, Elliot and Jeff. When seeing Mining 1 set off its journey of going back, Bill asked Steve, who was nervously checking his mobile phone, "Is everything fine?"
"Everything is perfect," Steve replied. Then all four men laughed out loud as they did in the bunker of the Earth Station of Martian Residents, and the laughter still sounded weird. . .
***
Another month passed quickly. One day when Bill was about to go to sleep according to the scheduled normal rules on the flying saucer, he heard a knock at the door.
"Yes?" he answered.
"Steve and Elliot want to see you," Jeff replied outside the door.
"Send them in," Bill said, and then added, "You come too."
"It changed direction and accelerating towards Earth," Steve and Elliot said in unison as they entered the room.
"Mining 1?"
"Yes," Steve replied.
"Isn't it supposed to be tomorrow?"
"There was a minor error in our estimation because we missed an acceleration process that occurred while Mining 1 dragging XX," Elliot replied.
“When did it start?” Bill asked.
“It should be half an hour ago, but we did not notice it,” Elliot said.
“Excellent,” Bill uttered, his voice filled with excitement.
He rushed to turn on the satellite TV, and a male news anchor from an earth channel appeared on the screen, who was almost screaming, "What the heck is going on here? How could Mining 1 suddenly change its direction and speed up towards us? Is it an alien attack on Earth?"
Bill switched to another channel and saw a discolored anchorwoman speaking in the same frightened tone, "Mining 1 and that 300 million ton asteroid are approaching Earth at a speed of 80,000 miles per hour. It will enter the Earth’s atmosphere in another 30 minutes. Our communication with its crew has been completely blocked mysteriously. At this moment, the leaders of the major powers of the world are holding emergency defense conferences to discuss countermeasures. So far, no country seems to be confident of stopping this sudden attack."
"So exciting," Jeff exclaimed.
"Can they stop it?" Bill looked at Steve.
"Not a chance." Steve replied, "according to our calculations, even if there is a severe combustion when entering the atmosphere, XX will still carry at least 100 million tons of mass at a speed of 60,000 miles per hour. No missile can stop it. "
"Not even by laser?"
"Neither." Elliot cut in and explained, "XX is of course traveling much slower than light, but much faster than the search speed of their laser transmitter radar. And even if it is hit by a laser beam, it can't be destroyed before it hits the ground. What's more, the shockwave it would produce once entering the atmosphere could destroy all defense facilities on the ground."
“Wonderful,” Bill said.
“There is one thing…” Steve was about to say something, but stopped.
“What is it?” Bill looked into his eyes.
“I…I received a text from the director of our Earth station asking for the password to enter the bunker,” Steve said.
“What do you guys think?” Bill stared at those three men, but Steve lowered his head, Jeff turned his eyes to Elliot, and Elliot looked back at Bill without saying anything.
“Do you think they would have more chance in the bunker?” Bill asked Elliot.
“It’s supposed to increase their chance of survival if the impact spot is very far.” Elliot explained, “But unfortunately, it seems the impact spot of XX will not be very far from our Earth station.”
“How far?”
“It’s hard to say right now, but will be less than a thousand miles,” Elliot replied. “Besides, even if they could survive the hit when hiding in the bunker, it’s hard for them to survive the aftermath of the hit.”
Bill hesitated for a couple seconds and then said to Steve, “Give him the password and wish him a good luck. That’s it, say nothing else.”
“Sure, I will do it now.” Steve turned to send a message back to the station director.
Bill then uttered to Elliot and Jeff, “at least we give them a chance.”
At that moment, the intercom phone rang. Bill pushed the button and there came the voice of the captain of the saucer, “there is a commotion throughout the whole vehicle, because passengers are all watching the news from Earth reporting that XX is rushing towards Earth at a speed of 80,000 miles per hour. Many women have begun to cry. ”
After exchanging glances with the other guys, Bill asked dryly, "What is the situation observed by our own radio telescope on this craft?"
"Our own telescope also confirmed that XX is sprinting towards Earth at high speed," the captain replied.
"I see," Bill said, and commanded, "Please broadcast to ask everyone to stay calm and not to panic. In addition, send guards to each deck to maintain order, ten guards on each deck. Tell them not to leave their posts until receiving further orders."
"Yes. Please consider it as done."
"Wait." Bill stopped the captain as he was about to hang up, and then asked, "If XX hits Earth, will it affect this saucer?"
"It should not. We are now 15 million miles from Earth. At most, we may be disturbed by some electromagnetic waves."
"Okay, you may go now."
"Yes."
After hanging up the call, Bill asked, "Anything new?"
"Several spacecraft orbiting to patrol around Earth have tried to go after XX, but none of them can catch up," Steve replied.
……
Half an hour later, all the channels from Earth went black. Bill hooked up the video to their own radio telescope that was used to watch Earth, and then saw dazzling glow of red light flashing over Earth. . .
After several seconds of silence, he remarked lightly, "a civilization of a few million years is over."
"Will the king feel sad?" Elliot asked.
"That's what he wants," Bill replied. "Now the entire solar system belongs to our kingdom."
"When are we going back to Earth again?" Jeff asked.
"A few years or a few decades later," Bill replied. "The dust and radioactivity caused by the impact will not go away soon. Besides, the Earth needs to recover itself. When its natural ecology returns to the state of tens of thousands of years ago, we can move the entire Martian kingdom to Earth; after all, there are more resources than our planet."
……
Four decades later, thousands of Martian residents in a fleet of flying saucers led by their newly crowned king, Marsque III, arrived in Earth. They landed in a vast green prairie in the northern hemisphere, where used to be one of the most prosperous urban area on the planet, and now there is no trace of the lost last civilization.
Postlude
Hopefully human civilization will not end in this way...
2019-12 written in New Jersey