Triton (a song, of sorts)

MarkH

I've been playing with FieldScaper. Also using the Model 15.

Lyrics below.

What folly has put men so far beyond reach?
In perpetual twilight where, for the dark-adapted eye, Neptune's pale arch is the only blue sky.

It is the coldest place ever found, and remote.
A gargantuan remove by human standards.
Four hours at the speed of history, a decade at the speed of man.

A round trip, in principle, half a lifetime long.
But reality has no principles, a truth overlooked by the deranged logic of ambition, adventure, conceit and commerce.
In the name of science, but in the face of reason.
Just this side of suicide.

The arrival went almost to plan, the epitaph will read.
The only casualty, the means for return.

A colony, de facto, until the last person dies.
No glass-walled science fiction utopia, but a fleshy barnacle on Triton's methane-dusted shoulder.

And with the serenity of distance, Neptune hangs majestically overhead.
The Hellish cauldron of carbon oceans lashed by supersonic winds and diamond rain blurred to a marbled, milky sapphire.

But there are no heads turned skyward.
The men toil beneath shanties built from blocks of frozen Nitrogen, mining water ice and rocket fuel.
And when they lay down to sleep, they dream not of sapphire but of turquoise, emerald and jade.