My media relations gaffe over the 4004 Accident was nothing to the Sularigen/Serenity Scandal that broke six weeks later.
On being re-tested, an earlier discovery, Catalyst 880, had provided another “elephant”, to use an old resource-industry term, for Titan to hand humanity. It turned out to catalyze the final stage of an anti-viral drug its marketers dubbed Sularigen, which in just two Earth-years became the active ingredient in 80% of the common-cold medicines sold in the Solar System—despite the major obstacle it faced early on and I’m about to tell you about.
I never checked what genius or team came up with the idea for that application, but he, she, or it tested the processes only under Titan Standard Conditions (TSC); they never got around to trying it under Earth Standard Conditions (ESC, formerly STP for Standard Temperature & Pressure). The biggest difference between the two is that TSC ambient air pressure is 1.5 atmospheres, and the extra is all nitrogen. This makes access to the surface safer and easier. For almost every room temperature chemical reaction, gaseous nitrogen is inert, having no effect on the reaction. So the Titanian testers never noticed what a lucky Earth chemist discovered five months later, the Serenity/Sularigen Serendipity: Under ESC conditions the now famous recreational drug Serenity was a small but lucrative byproduct of Sularigen production.
In case you don’t follow the periodic changes in Earth policies toward recreational drugs, for the last several decades in many countries the pendulum has been stuck in a strongly anti-Libertarian position. Even cannabis, a major component in the majority of state and national economies, is illegal in many places as a recreational drug. So Serenity’s very existence embarrassed the grandly-named Earth Drug Agency. (The EDA implemented policy for the United States of America, the European Federation, the South Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, and the Austronesian Alliance.)
Director Pedro Rowan of the EDA had made Sularigen the first drug in the Democracy for Drugs campaign he’d devised to break the power of the established interplanetary “ethical drug” companies. So for the first six months after Catalyst 880 was introduced to Earth, virtually any drug maker that applied for it got some. Then Serenity came into the picture, and the drug agency found itself in the position of being a major facilitator for a new designer drug. To make life even stranger on Earth, Serenity filled the cannabis niche more cheaply, causing a recession in that important industry. So the thousands of pot-growing and -processing people who were losing jobs formed an unholy alliance with the EDA pushing to eradicate Serenity. Catalyst 880 was put on the most highly restricted list, slowing production of the highly effective and increasingly popular Sularigen-based cold tablets. Predictably there were protests and even riots.
The EDA declared, truthfully enough, that “Titan had not been vigilant enough in its catalyst testing” and recommended sending Earth agents to oversee the work on Titan. The Titan Colony response was, in effect, “You’re welcome to send people to watch so long as nobody trips over them. We have a huge backlog as it is.”
But when the EDA whined that it was costing them billions trying to control Serenity’s spread, some politicians suggested that those billions should come out of the Titan Colony budget.
That wasn’t the end of the problem. Both Sularigen and Serenity were selling well and in demand, so when the EDA stopped supplying that market, the narcotraffickers and the so-called ethical drug makers looked for non-ethical sources of Catalyst 880. It turned out to be fairly tricky to clone, and members of our Testing Cooperative had the optimum combination of chemical expertise, access to materials, and willingness to screw Earth authorities. For a while that created a boom market for being an 880 smuggler; it seemed like the crew members and passengers on every ship leaving Titan for Earth were deluged with requests from smuggler wannabes to carry a crate of specially designed glassware for a top-secret commercial project, a package of drugs to save their mother’s life, an invention that “will make you and me both stinking rich when you deliver it to this distributor”, ceramic pots stolen from the secret Titanian Kilns, or whatever other con seemed either likely to work or fun to try.
To add fuel to the social fires, Serenity was not only entirely legal here but actively encouraged as a marijuana substitute. Being a pill, it bypassed the “Don’t smoke it, swallow it!” campaign to avoid cannabis causing fire hazard and air pollution problems in Titan’s contained environments.
Anyone could see that a thriving smuggling industry wouldn’t help Earth-Titan relations, but with the obstinacy of the EDA and the anti-drug community on Earth being reminiscent of their predecessors in the late 20th century, the Earthly demand overcame all our efforts to nip the Titanian supply.
The 2178 elections had brought a wave of conservative politicians into power in most of Earth’s major democracies. Mind you, I have nothing in particular against conservative politicians; some of my best friends are conservative politicians! But this bunch were a Deity-fearin’, Religious Text–thumpin’, “Think locally, act globally” variety who made hay off their constituents’ concerns about social disorder being caused by HX technology. They called themselves the International Earth First party—stole the name from that radical eco group at the turn of the 21st century—and they ran on, and eventually passed, moratoriums on Titan releasing new HX technology in their countries.
And in fall of ’78 they got the United Nations to establish an anti-Titan/HX moratorium Earth-wide. With the big countries throwing their weight behind it, that was amazingly effective.
Of course telling Titan it couldn’t distribute HX technology was like telling a steel company it couldn’t sell steel. It was our lifeblood, the key to all our growth. Without a market for HX technology, Titan Colony might as well go back to being a 200-worker backwater research lab! “It’s insane!” we screamed.
But even as we screamed, we began adapting to the loss of our Earth market. Like Titan, the other colonies had grown mightily as HX technology spread. Unlike Earth, they had no doubts about how greatly HX technology had made their lives better and they could see that the Earth First politicians were off in Cloud Cuckooland. Mars, with 11 million people, not only became our major market, but as the Moratorium Crisis lengthened they took on the role of middleman between Titan and Earth, so they prospered, too. We redoubled our efforts there and in the much smaller Moon market, and we even actively marketed in the Belt and on Mercury.
Nevertheless, the Moratorium Crisis caused a deep recession. Before the Siege, unemployment was perhaps 1 percent, so insignificant that nobody bothered to track it. When you came to Titan, there was always something to be done. Even the few part-time beggars lived comfortably—except during Lent, Ramadan, and some of the Jewish holidays, when they did even better by providing a welcome opportunity for personal almsgiving. Now, for the first time, there were idle hands on Titan. Before, everyone was a winner; now Titan had losers, too. The Titan Colony police force had to handle a major increase in economically motivated crime. Being Titanian, they ignored the homeless who enterprisingly squatted in newly empty facilities. But when feckless “human rights” whiners began clogging the main passageways, our cops quick-learned crowd control techniques and applied them effectively. Concurrently, rather than establish a dole, the government subsidized steerage-class emigration to other colonies and Earth.
The Crisis recession precipitated other social changes. We finally scrapped the Preliminary in favor of a finished Master Plan. And we became a lot more self-sufficient socially.
Up until then most Titanians had thought of some older colony or, more likely, Earth as “home”. You planned on sending your kids to Earth, Mars, or a specialty school on the Moon for their higher education. Advanced health care, retirement resorts, and advanced finance were also all Earth-led activities, with Mars in more or less distant second place.
Now we planned for a full range of schools, full-service hospitals, and a lot of other stuff we’d previously counted on Earth for. We set out to become the first exploiter of most HX technologies, manufacturing and distributing the finished product as well as licensing our research and development patents. Building for self-sufficiency and diversifying employment opportunities now looked worth the expense, even or especially in the new hard times.
Meanwhile, the Siege of Titan eroded, slowly and unofficially. Many people on Earth began realizing that their quality of life was slipping further and further behind that of the colonials. The Curse of Being Important turned into a Blessing of Being Important: As Earth-dwellers watched Titanians leading better lives because of HX technology, the Earth First politicians lost their thunder.
The many colonial retirees in Greenland chafed first and complained hardest, because they’d seen the difference first hand, not just in media. And they were rich enough that when they complained, other people listened. Starting in 2182, Greenland diplomats took the lead in getting loopholes inserted into the UN Moratorium, even while it slowly became less effective as now and again an individual government watered down its own moratorium, if any, and began ignoring the UN ban.
Along with the TC3 project our Inaugural celebrated a 2187 World Civil Court ruling that when Earth people and corporations directly finance a Titan Colony project, it is not subject to the UN Moratorium. That means the Moratorium has been pretty well sidestepped (the smart money is betting on formal repeal within the year) and Titan Colony is well on its way back to full-speed growth.
But we’re not there yet. A few countries still enforce their own moratoriums against all HX technology, and many others still have go-slow policies toward accepting it. On the other hand, Titan Colony is now more independent of Earth, psychologically as well as economically, even as the trade flow increases again.
Personally, I’m real happy to see this reconciliation happen. Titan needs Earth and Earth needs Titan. There’s a big Milky Way galaxy out there, waiting for us to explore and exploit it. Exploration and exploitation will happen much, much faster if the Solar System is all playing from the same sheet of music, not bickering and in-fighting. That’s the “Humankind Master Plan” I see now: Getting to Alpha Centauri and beyond.
We need to become a player in the stars.