Fandom High School

"Good morning, class," a terribly black-and-white Kaidan said, his brow curving slightly in a paternal frown. "Today, we will be learning about SPACE and the FUTURE."

Oh, and he was also holding a pointer stick. In front of a blackboard. Which was full of pictures. "Now you may have gotten the wrong idea from this kind of pulp literature. Space is not a place of adventure! But it is a place of discovery."

He let the pointer stick hit the board. "One day, mankind might travel past all the planets, from Mercury to Pluto," he said, "But that can't happen unless the next generation applies themselves. And no, reading Ruck Bodgers is not the same thing!"

He nodded sagely at Topher. "My assistant will distribute several sheets of paper," he said. "Based on the literature you have read--" Not that Kaidan had actually been in any state to tell them to read anything recently, "I want you to conceptualize the future! Realistically. Draw the men who will shape space in the name of Queen and country!" He cleared his throat. "The first to finish adequately will get an apple to take home, so show your best work, and we may just defeat the communists in the space race!"

Yes.

...

Yes.

Students had been called down to the Danger Shop today. Stepping inside, they would find themselves face to face with the surface of a beautiful alien planet, all blue skies and green hills and large, vertically oriented towers in the distance.

It might have been Kaidan's way of wallowing in painful nostalgia.

"This is Eden Prime," he said, "A human world. It is what we call a garden world-- near-Earth gravity, an oxygen-rich atmosphere, a temperate climate - or something near it. Now, even for garden world standards, Eden Prime is unusually suitable for human life. Most planets... are not going to be anything like this."

He folded his arms behind his back.

"We talked about this a little during the astronomy section, but I thought it was time to include a little more detail. If you walk around, you're going to find examples of plots of land on a variety of planets that are capable of sustaining life. I suggest taking a partner if you do - the simulation is quite vast."

He glanced towards the ocean in the distance. "The Alliance utilizes a list of planet types. Garden worlds are one of them. Then there's Brown Dwarves, Ice Giants, Giant Jovians, and Pegasids: uninhabitable kinds of planets. Some of these are too hot. Some of them are too cold. Some of them have an atmosphere composed of gasses we can't breathe. Though don't get me wrong: that doesn't make then uninhabitable to all species. For example, the volus evolved to survive in high-pressure, ammonia-rich atmospheres. A planet that seems inherently poisonous to us seems like a paradise to them."

"What's more interesting to us as humans-- or at least human-like species..." He had no idea if he had aliens in the class, and after last semester's Victor debacle he didn't really want to make assumptions, "Is planets with, among other things, nitrogen/oxygen air mixtures that maintain a temperature that isn't too extreme one way or the other, and that stays in the mid-range on the pressure scale. Now, there's going to be more planets around that have a couple but not all of these characteristics. In that case, terraforming might be an option."

He guided the group into the next area, a barren land covered in rocks. "Rock planets can be very suitable for human life," he said. "Think Mars or the Moon. What they usually lack is a breathable atmosphere, but planets within the Rock classification tend to have at least some characteristics that make them potentially habitable. Likewise, we find a great deal of Ocean worlds-- that's to the east of here-- many of which have breathable atmospheres and decent pressure, but they may be too cold or too hot, and obviously we have to account for the lack of ground surface."

"And then there's desert worlds to the north - I don't think I have to explain those to you. They tend to be too hot, and scarce in water, which we humans kinda need to keep going." He smiled briefly. "But perhaps most tragic are what we call 'post-Garden' worlds. Maybe the terraforming didn't take. Maybe there was some ecological catastrophe. Actually, we think Mars might be a post-Garden world... anyway, whatever the case, it's a planet that once held life before something upset the balance of it all, and it all died out."

A pause. "You'll find one to the south."

He glanced in the direction where they came from. "That's the lecture part," he said. "Find someone you like and get exploring."

"Some of you I've seen last weekend, and some of you didn't come along," Kaidan said, sitting down behind the desk. He looked a little distracted. "Either way, I'm sure all of you have some opinion on species different from yourselves - whether it's about how you expect them to be like, or how you know them to be like. I figured today we could just sit down and talk about it for a while."

He scraped his throat. "We've only known of the existence of alien species since... well, around when I was born. At the start we were a little in awe of them, and at the same time, a little afraid. So was I, actually. And then one day, I had... a pretty bad run-in with one, and I realized they're not much different from us any of us. Some of them are good people, some of them are bad. Every species has its quirks, but it's not defined by them."

"Anyway, the floor is yours. Talk about it. Please."

"Today we're taking a small test on what we've been talking about so far," Kaidan said. He had a stack of papers sitting on his desk. Oooh, ominous. "Next week, we start our module on xenobiology and xenosociology. That weekend, I will also be hosting our field trip to the Citadel. If you'd like to spend some time with people not of your species, and get a look at what those species have built, here's your chance."

"It's all expenses paid, so you don't have to worry about anything. It'll be a fun opportunity."

He cleared his throat.

"But now for the test," he said. "You have the entire period to finish it. If you're done early, you can leave the class."

He nodded at Topher. "Your time starts as soon as the test hits your desk."

"Today, we're gonna be talking about where astronomy comes from," Kaidan said, "And we're going to look at some of the astronomical models we've been using for a long time."

"Astronomy is an old science," he said. "Back before anyone understood physics or chemistry, it was easy to look up into the sky and see the stars - to figure out that sometimes it meant something, like the way the stars reflected the seasons. There's proof that the humans of old managed to keep track of eclipses using elaborate structures. Chinese civilisation even managed to track a lot of irregular objects as they shot across the sky."

He stood up. "Aristotle, an ancient Greek, came up with an idea for an elaborate model of how the universe was supposed to work. Since humans could look up into the sky and see the stars circle past them, he decided that Earth had to be the center of the universe. The four elements dictated how that universe worked." He called up an image on the screen behind him, Earth in the middle, the other planets rotating around it. "Earth itself was stationary. These days, that sounds like a ridiculous idea. The Earth wouldn't have its seasons the way it does if it stayed put in the middle of the galaxy-- and I doubt we have enough gravity to keep all the other planets in orbit around us."

He pointed at the model. "The first to figure out that the sun was at the center of the solar system was actually a Greek, too, but his work was lost when Alexandria's library burned down," he said. He tapped the image, and it warped into a different version of itself. "Ptolemy then went and established another Earth-centric model, which wouldn't be dispelled until centuries later, when Copernicus observed that Ptolemy's model no longer fit the position of all the stars and planets in the sky. Copernicus established that the sun was at the center of the solar system..."

With a swipe of his hand, he put a list up on the board.

1. There is no one center of all the celestial circles or spheres.
2. The center of the earth is not the center of the universe, but only of gravity and of the lunar sphere.
3. All the spheres revolve about the sun as their mid-point, and therefore the sun is the center of the universe.
4. The ratio of the earth's distance from the sun to the height of the firmament (outermost celestial sphere containing the stars) is so much smaller than the ratio of the earth's radius to its distance from the sun that the distance from the earth to the sun is imperceptible in comparison with the height of the firmament.
5. Whatever motion appears in the firmament arises not from any motion of the firmament, but from the earth's motion. The earth together with its circumjacent elements performs a complete rotation on its fixed poles in a daily motion, while the firmament and highest heaven abide unchanged.
6. What appear to us as motions of the sun arise not from its motion but from the motion of the earth and our sphere, with which we revolve about the sun like any other planet. The earth has, then, more than one motion.
7. The apparent retrograde and direct motion of the planets arises not from their motion but from the earth's. The motion of the earth alone, therefore, suffices to explain so many apparent inequalities in the heavens.

"While Copernicus's work incited some controversy, it would also be used by countless astronomers after him," Kaidan continued. "Another big name is Tycho Brahe, who built the first astronomy tower and, more importantly, created a significant body of work with rights to astronomical observations. Fifty years later, the invention of the telescope followed, and we discovered something very, uh, impressive..."

He called up another image. "The Milky Way," he said. "Viewable to us on clear nights, a band of stars and galactic dust clouds. It was the first galaxy we ever truly saw, and, uh, that makes sense - it's ours." He tapped parts of the image. "It has a bulge and a halo, filled with old stars, and a disk full of young stars - including our own, Sol.

"As a result of all of this research, an astronomer called Kepler devised several common laws of planetary motion. Number one: orbits are elliptical, not circular." He called up a picture of the solar system and drew the lines. "Two, when planets are nearer to the sun, they move faster. And three, getting mathematical: If you know the period of a planet's orbit, in other words, how long it takes for the planet to orbit aroudn the sun, then you can determine how far away it is from the star itself."

He glanced towards the class. "From this point on, a lot of discoveries started piling up," he said, "The outer planets, comets, Einstein's theory of relativity... and the Doppler effect. All things we're going to go into later."

He scraped his throat. "Time for your presentations from last week," he said, "when you're done, there's some astronomical models for you to mess around with - they should have all the details."

Class was held in a regular classroom, no fancy stuff: just the holographic whiteboard Kaidan had set up, Kaidan's desk, a bunch of desks for the students and some maps of the galaxy at the back of the class.

"Hey," Kaidan began, sliding his eyes over the students present. "I'm Lieutenant Commander Kaidan Alenko. Welcome to, uh, Astro Sciences class. I know the title's a little clunky, but we're going to be covering a lot of different disciplines during this class."

Teaching. He still didn't quite have the hang of it; it didn't feel natural.

"We're going to kick off with astronomy, which is the study of celestial objects. That means... everything you can see when you look up at the sky at night, and a whole lot you can't. Planets, stars, comets, solar systems... even galaxies. It's the first field of science to be dedicated to the study of the universe-- we've been doing it for thousands of years."

He cleared his throat. "So that's going to be one thing we'll be doing," he said. "We'll also be covering xenobiology, the physics of space, and a whole range of other topics. It's gonna be mostly the basics for each of those topics - we can maybe go into depth in another class." He rubbed the back of his head. "Oh, and... at the end of October, I'm arranging a field trip for this class and anyone else is interested-- we're going to the Citadel, the hub of galactic society-- in my universe. Get you all a lesson on actual aliens."

Kaidan sat back in his seat. Right. Go on from there. "But right now we're just doing introductions," he said. "Name and class, and... tell me something about your experience with-- well, space." He realized as he said it that that was kind of... vague.

Thought about it. Took a breath.

"When I was a kid," he said, "Humanity... hadn't really gone very far beyond the Sol system. I remember looking up at the sky at night and wondering what was out there-- what we could find if we could just go a little further, you know? Would there be aliens? How would they live? Space... it seemed like it could be this amazing playground, this place full of wonder. I mean, imagine going... not just to an entirely different planet, but to a different system, meeting people who are nothing like you...

"And then we did," he continued, "We found the mass relay system and we explored the hell out of everything we could reach. And then the aliens came to us, the grand adventure... except as it turned out the aliens made laws and built cities and argued and traded... not quite like we did, but close enough. Not only that, but none of them ever looked out the window and went, 'Wow. We live in this giant, exciting, terrifying universe'... here I'd spent all my life wondering about what it would be like out there, only to find out that the people who already had 'out there'-- didn't even care about the view."

That had been something. He'd told Shepard once. Now he was using it here. Helping me again?

"But I still care about the view," Kaidan finished. "And about the dangers. And I think anyone who gets the chance should go off-planet, just once, to appreciate it."