Centrum Broadcast Radio: 45th of Solstice, 304 PCU

As the Avalon Expedition departs the Tantalus Cluster, CBR Reports on the growing catastrophe of the Great Famine.

Check out this Patron-Exclusive Anthology short, written by Daniel Orrett and Gabriel Fonseca, and performed by Paul Albertson and Anjali Kunapaneni.

Featuring Sound Design by Kevin Madden and Assembly Editing by Larissa Thompson.

Thank you all for your continuing support.

Fair winds!

Full Transcript:

Announcer:

News and tunes at your tempo, Centrum Broadcast Radio.

Sefton:

Good evening, I’m Oliver Sefton, you’re listening to Centrum Broadcast Radio and this is the news at six bells.

Mixed emotions across the Assembly today as the long-awaited Avalon Expedition finally embarks from its moorings in Cardeus Brink. Now en route to the mysterious region known by cartographers as CDC-41-Gamma, the expedition fleet employed a prototype Drift Gate to travel over 3000 Light Years in a matter of minutes, and is now far beyond the reach of any detection or communication system.

Following the last-minute retirement of acclaimed astrophysicist Doctor Sadavar Edric, the position of Expedition Director has fallen to Edric’s adopted daughter and colleague, Doctor Elizabeth Ancelet. Having worked closely with her father in the development of the Avalon project from its first inception, Director Ancelet was quickly approved by the project’s international selection committee, but she remains a relative unknown to the public, and such drastic changes to the project’s command structure so soon before departure have been seen as vindicating by many of the expedition’s detractors.

In order to supply its many personnel for the duration of the expedition, the Avalon fleet carries a huge consignment of foodstuffs, fusion fuels and other critical resources that have been pooled from mandatory donations sourced across the Assembly, Union and Freehold in the last four years. These collections have been met with violent resistance in some of the most deprived regions, and have worked to undercut a number of attempted sustainability projects.

I’m joined by Professor Leticia Sandreen from the Henshall Institute for Higher Learning, Leticia, welcome to the show.

Sandreen:

Thank you Oliver, I’m glad to be here.

Sefton:

Perhaps you could shed some light on the effects of the Expedition’s collection programs.

Sandreen:

While it’s true these collections have caused no small amount of unrest, I think it’s worth reiterating that for a number of seasons now, experts have been in agreement that Tantalus has now passed the point of recovery in our resource ecosystem.

The many local and national initiatives towards resource growth and sustainability simply won’t have time to run their course without some kind of temporary injection of resources to maintain the population while we finish implementing them.

Sefton:

So, what exactly is being done then? For years now the scientific community has been saying we’ve passed a “point-of-no-return”, yet now we’re buying time for “sustainability projects” to fix the issue…?

Sandreen:

Well, that’s because these are two different- connected, but different things. What we were referring to when we would mention the inevitable “point of no return” was the moment when the Cluster’s population would grow above its carrying capacity. We’ve crossed this point around thirty years ago. Now we are dealing with the aftereffects of that in the form of massive shortages, and carrying out damage control as best as we can.

Sefton:

Dr. - sorry for interrupting - you mentioned “carrying capacity”; do you mind explaining to the folks at home what it is?

Sandreen:

Not at all. [Thinks for a moment.] To put it simply, carrying capacity is a concept in the study of population dynamics - it is the maximum number of individuals that an environment can sustainably support. When speaking of human populations, many different factors go into it and it is hard to get precise numbers, but a ballpark estimate can be reached.

Sefton:

So it essentially communicates how many people can exist at one time? If that’s the case, how have we managed to climb above it?

Sandreen:

Oh, not exactly. It’s a subtle difference - it’s the maximum sustainable population. There’s nothing stopping a population growing above it, but when it does, there’ll be more individuals than there are resources in the environment to sustain them all and, eventually, the population will see a massive decrease in numbers until it falls below the carrying capacity once again. In the case of our cluster, even though we’re seeing shortages in many different sectors, our main bottleneck is food production. The population of Tantalus has grown so large that there is simply not enough arable land currently for us to produce food for everyone - and while it’s hard to know for sure, our best estimates are that, so far, 35 million people have already died as a direct result of the famine, with at the very least twice as many dead due to adjacent effects of malnutrition, such as weakened immune systems.

Sefton:

That is a grim state of affairs. Tell us doctor, if things keep going unchecked, what kind of scenario could we be looking at?

Sandreen:

[She hesitates for a moment] … Considering that many of the worlds in the cluster are reliant on external manufacturing or goods brought in by trade for their continued sustainability, when people start succumbing to the famine in greater numbers, our logistical networks could be compromised by critical workforce shortages. If that happens, we could realistically be facing the collapse of entire worlds.

Sefton:

Entire worlds…? Do you think you could give us a number, Doctor?

Sandreen:

[Uneasy] If such a scenario comes to pass, we could be seeing the deaths of fifty to eighty percent of the cluster’s total population.

Sefton:

That is quite a number.

Sandreen:

Yes, which brings us back to the sustainability projects. One of the ways to increase the carrying capacity is via technological intervention - increasing efficiency of crop yields, minimizing waste, optimising recycling systems and logistic structures - that all allows us to sustain more people, but implementing these measures takes time - time we had when we started warning Tantalus decades ago, but we’ll need to make up for now. And while we are implementing said projects, we need to keep enough of our population alive to avoid the worst-case scenario.

Sefton:

Thank you, for your time, Doctor.

In spite of its reportedly vital role in putting an end to the ongoing famine, the Avalon Initiative has been met with frequent criticism from all corners of Tantalus, with many feeling they’ve been “left behind” by those chosen for the Expedition Fleet. It has been reported that at least one civilian vessel in the Cardeus Brink system was sighted making an unauthorized run through Edric’s Gate as the Expedition was performing its transit.

The whereabouts of this rogue ship are unknown, but Gate Traffic Control has informed us that its entry vector during transit was such that it could potentially have survived the many-thousand lightyears trip.

We’ll return to our segment on the Avalon Expedition following the daily shipping reports, but first Travis Lock’s latest hit; Love Me Once Again.