Rose brings his whole family to view the wasted Earth, recorded and preserved in videos available to the colonists in the station’s AI. The AI is an encyclopedic computer system containing all relevant information and history pertaining to the now defunct Earth, as well as “vids” of the catastrophic environmental situation still unfolding on the planet’s surface. As Earth succumbed to a global war brought on by environmental calamity and rampant economic disparity, families like the Roses fled disease, famine, ecocide, and war in a “hairbreadth escape,” as Rose’s pre-teen son Noah observes when the Colony’s history is recounted to him and his fifteen-year-old sister, Esther. Isaac Rose’s intention in showing his children the charred remnants of a nearly-dead terrestrial habitat is to head off the kind of sentimentality to which some of the Colony’s members have been inclined in the years after their flight. He sneers at their “homesickness” for a broken planet and sees this focus on the past as a weakness. Rose feels no such sentimentality—no connection to the physical Earth or even to reminders of nature itself. In fact, Isaac views the AI as an “umbilicus” tethering the colony to a dark and dangerous history (he admits only to his wife Susan “I don’t like it…I don’t like to look down”).
“Because most people aren’t willing to trust reason…For a hundred years anybody willing to look at the world rationally has been able to see what’s happening: resource exhaustion, population explosion, the breakdown of government. But to act on a rational understanding, you have to trust reason. Most people would rather trust luck or God or one of the easy fixes. Reason’s tough…Reason’s the compass that brought us through.”
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