Visions

These stories, by seventeen talented international authors, illustrate widely diverse visions of the life and death conditions humans will face while living and traveling far from humankind's home world. Many things will change, in the far-off future, but human nature, most likely, will remain the same. The same joy and sorrow, resolution and conflict, reward and greed, comfort and fear will motivate the distant descendants of present day Earth and drive humans forever forward in the race to immortality. From the Sun to the borders of the Solar System, Visions III: Inside the Kuiper Belt looks at the ways humankind will explore. After the Inner and Outer Planets become part of the known and inhabited systems, humans will venture outward, to the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud, laying claim to everything within the System's boundaries. Beyond Neptune, at the edge of the Solar System lies the doughnut-shaped ring of objects known as the Kuiper Belt. Each one smaller than Earth's Moon, the Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) include chunks of ice, asteroids, planetoids, and the dwarf planet Pluto. According to scientific theory, outside the Kuiper Belt, the Oort Cloud surrounds the Solar System like a giant, invisible snow globe, so vast that even traveling at nearly a million miles a day, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft will take 300 years to reach the Oort Cloud and 30,000 years to exit the other side.