Text!

AP Gov'tment Paper

I must do my AP Gov'tment paper
a good grade would indeed make me caper
but now I am bored
and I say "oh Lord,
please make my teacher henceforth be a vapor!"

Cliffs

The shining spires rise endlessly from their base in the shimmering watery plains, finding their ends only in the faraway tips of the clouds. The cliffs just behind them glint and sparkle with the windows of the town, and the air rings with the cries of the vendors in the market on the large, flat outcroppings which form the basis for the expansive public spaces. Nothing, however, strikes the eye so much as the ships in the harbor. The wooden outcroppings are denser the closer you get to the bottom, and grow out like an enormous horizontal forest as the town collides with the unpredictability of the sea, in the most important part of the whole society, the focal point from which all the many markets, stadiums, and ampitheaters sprouted - nothing was so important as this nest of planks, wharfs, and platforms which constituted the whole random assembly of the harbor. The wooden forest of the town cannot compare to the forest of masts, hidden in the white clouds of their sails, clustered around the base of the cliff so tightly that the wharfs themselves are invisible among the hubbub.

A Brief History of Space

Spaceships are a common sight now - how else would we travel throughout the solar system? We have also seen the rise, fall, and phoenix-like rise of space stations for habitation. It is thus important to know about the beginnings of this staple of our modern world - or at least, it is an interesting mental diversion. In the 1920's, the first liquid-fuelled rocket was built and launched - a primitive mess of pipes built by Robert Goddard. All it managed to do was fly for a few seconds. Nothing, by any standards - modern or ancient. However, it was a giant leap from the former methods of propulsion - propellers. Goddard must have had no idea what kind of a world he was ushering in. Do any early pioneers know what they are creating? Did da Vinci ever imagine that helicopters would one day fill the skies with their thwop-thwop-thwop? Did the Wright brothers ever believe that they were creating the basis for a planet-altering phenomenon of globalization? But I digress. Advances in liquid fuel propulsion were largely put on hold (besides a few more experiments by Goddard himself) as the world was wracked by a global economic depression. When world war two came around, and primitive, barbaric Earth was rocked by the first use of atomic weaponry, we had the first inkling of an idea of how it might be important to look beyond our air-filled atmosphere and into the black void beyond, which had formerly been locked securely away in the void of our mind. Sadly, our first thoughts of the starry emptiness were warring thoughts that we might drop bombs on each other from that untouchable distance. We wanted to weaponize space. We are lucky. It never came to that, but instead, the space race between the United States of America and the CCCP remained largely detached from the bulk of the so-called "cold war" itself. We made vast leaps and the USA won the pride of being able to say it was the first nation to put a human on the moon. This time was far and away the period of greatest expansion in the first century of space exploration. As the fear of nuclear destruction slowly melted away, the world moved on, and with it the progress towards the future of transportation moved out of the public eye for a time. Later, in the 1990's, the International Space Station was a great movement forwards towards the future, as many countries joined together to further science and space exploration. Interestingly, the USA and Russia, formerly the CCCP, cooperated at this point to further the cause - just as previously they had fought to further the cause. After the turn of the century, USA's NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) funded the X Prize competition. This was what really got the whole deal going. The X Prize competition was a contest, with a million-dollar prize (approximately 50 thousand credits, adjusted for inflation and the conversion of money) for a commercial or privately-owned spaceship to get out of the atmosphere. The winner was SpaceShipOne. The X-Prize was followed by a series of similar prizes, such as the Space Elevator prize, won by a team from MIT. These all furthered the effort to get into space, by creating the kind of enthusiasm in people which only comes from competition. The real advances came in the 2010's, when the president of the USA, mirroring JFK's pledge at the beginning of his term, promised that there would be a base on the moon before the end of the decade. Despite the seeming impossibility of this task, the intellectual cream of the society rose to the task - undoubtedly still jubilant at the long-awaited end of the war in Iraq (now Greater Arabia) and managed the construction of a semi-permanent habitat on Luna. Now, you must remember that this "settlement" was nothing by our standards. It was a jumble of greenhouses on the light side of the moon, several habitats, and a landing pad. Nothing like our moon bases today. However, it is the most important part of the entirety of the history of the space movement. Without the first moon base, there would have been no safe place to collect radioactive samples (brought up in pieces) for the construction of the first nuclear-powered space ship. Such vehicles had been dreamt of before, but never constructed by international treaty. It was deemed too dangerous, for the risk of a vehicular malfunction, which might rain radioactive debris down across the Earth. With a safe collecting ground, a nuclear-powered rocket was constructed, and used to propel people on the fifth manned flight to Mars, and the first which brought realistic prospects for colonisation.

Alien Attack Script