Essay Questions

What is SPACEGUARD?

On September 11, 2077, a meteorite crossed paths with Earth and the result was the total destruction of several cities, the loss of the Venice forever to its fable canals, and the deaths of more than half a million people. A secondary consequence instigated by all that devastation was the launching of a program designed to repurpose all the knowledge previously gained from building weapons designed to kill people in other countries into killing meteorites. And so, an actual use for missions to Mars was finally found: building an advanced radar system capable of finding asteroids and calculating their orbits to determine any potential collision path with Earth with enough advanced notice to prepare a defense strategy. That program was named SPACEGUARD.

What is Rama?

The spaceship at the center of the narrative is not originally thought to be a spaceship. The scientists working in connection with SPACEGUARD simply could not conceive that the distant object initially catalogued as 31/439 is anything other than a chunk of organic matter aimlessly zooming through space. Why? Because the dimensions of 31/439 would simply be too mind-blowing to assume it is anything other than just another piece of some heavenly body that broke off and managed to escape into the vast beyond. Imagine if you got a call from a friend who told you go outside because a car the size of cruise ship was about to drive past your house. What are the odds you would actually expend the effort to stand in your yard and wait? Some things just exist so far outside our own limited experience of perspective that it just isn’t worth the effort to take it seriously. Such is the situation involving Rama. Even though it violated some pretty hard-and-fast rules about asteroid behavior, it was not even worth the time to imagine it could be anything other than naturally formed organic material.

Why is the spaceship called Rama?

That it is not initially imagined to be a spaceship is essential to answering this question. As you may have noticed, naturally occurring pieces of organic material out in space are surprisingly uniform when it comes to their names. Mars, Jupiter, Uranus: names of mythological Greek or Roman gods. The problem here, of course, is that there are far more celestial objects than there are Greek or Roman mythological figures combined. And so by the time object 31/439 was discovered by SPACEGUARD, the list of available names had worked its way to another collection of mythological deities: the gods of Hindu. Rama was next on the list, in other words.