“I mean excited,” John altered his statement.

“Yes, I’m excited,” Elara responded, then tethered herself to the chamber, released the outer door lever, and pushed the door open. She instantly felt intimidated by the vast blackness sparkling with distant, tiny stars. From her viewpoint, she could see the space station’s habitation module, their living section, and part of the solar arrays that provided the electricity to sustain the station’s life support system. The station appeared small and fragile, a speck of dust against the immense emptiness of space.

With adrenaline coursing through her veins, she leaped outside. The sensation was overwhelming and immensely satisfying. She skillfully manipulated the controls of her Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), activating its tiny jetpacks, and spun around until she faced the Earth. Although she had seen the planet from the station’s portholes, viewing it from outside the station, floating about 400 kilometers above sea level, was mesmerizing. “My God, it’s so beautiful,” she exclaimed involuntarily.

“It’s a breathtaking view, isn’t it?” John said over the comms.

“Yes, it is,” she replied, filled with awe.

“This view of Earth never gets old. I wish the industrialists who are actively destroying our planet for a little extra profit could come here and see it from this perspective—to understand how fragile our beautiful planet truly is. Earth is our home, the only place we can live. Yet, for personal gain, we are actively harming it,” John said while monitoring Elara’s movements.

Elara replied, “I see your point, John.”

Elara was on duty and had a job, so she reluctantly turned her gaze away from the mesmerizing swirl of the emerald green and deep blue marble-like globe, navigating toward the solar arrays using her MMU’s controls. With John’s help, she quickly located the damaged solar panels and began her meticulous assessment. Although the space station was orbiting the Earth at a staggering speed of 28000 kilometers per hour, Elara felt as though she was utterly stationary, suspended in the silent void of space as she focused on the damaged solar panels below her.

Three individual solar panels, each measuring one square meter, were severely damaged, likely due to a collision with high-velocity space debris—probably discarded technological junk from previous human space ventures. Two additional panels showed signs of partial damage caused by debris as small as grains of sand. Despite their tiny size, the incredible speed of these particles, combined with the motion of the space station, allowed them to pierce the solar panels with the force and precision of bullets smashing a car’s windshield. To evaluate the extent of the damage, she initially concentrated on the panels with less damage, carefully assessing whether they could be salvaged or if all the panels needed complete replacement.

The monotony was interrupted by a peculiar sensation that made her mind flurry. Soft as a whisper, a gentle, barely perceptible breeze lightly brushed against her right arm, causing a slight shiver. “Impossible,” she dismissed it as mere imagination. She was encased in a pressurized suit 400 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, with no atmosphere capable of generating a breeze. The thought that her suit sleeve might be punctured and losing air filled her with concern. To reassure herself, Elara glanced at the digital readout on her wrist to check the oxygen level and the suit’s pressure. The readings were regular, and her spacesuit’s integrity appeared intact. She once more dismissed it as mere imagination and returned to her job. But the sensation intensified as if she had held her arm before a spinning fan. Her breath became shallow, echoing loudly in her helmet. She quickly checked the readout on her wrist again, which showed nothing unusual. “Is this monitoring device faulty?” The thought crossed her mind, triggering a wave of panic. If her spacesuit were leaking, she could lose pressure and die in a few minutes, if not seconds.

Before she could say anything, John came on the comms and asked, “Is everything okay, Elara? I noticed your high blood pressure and heart racing dangerously fast.”

“I can’t breathe!” she nearly shrieked.

“Why’s that? I don’t see any pressure drop. Your suit’s pressure is stable.”

“The life signs monitoring device must be faulty. I feel a constant breeze against the skin of my right arm,” Elara said in a voice filled with panic.

“Abort! Abort the mission, Elara,” John shouted over the comms. Although his monitor didn’t indicate any issues, it was better to be safe than sorry, so he asked Elara to abort the mission.

Overwhelmed by panic, Elara pushed herself away from the solar arrays and attempted to return to the airlock. However, with her impaired concentration, she lost control of her Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), which made her spin around violently, intensifying her panic. “I can’t do this!” she yelled desperately.

“Elara, calm down. You can do this. You’ve trained for situations like this,” John replied.

“I’m losing air. I’m going to die,” she said, her voice barely intelligible.

“Elara, if you’re losing air, it’s not that serious; otherwise, you would have already died.”

Elara’s sobbing was audible through the comms; she was experiencing a panic attack.

“You can do this, Elara.”

But Elara wasn’t in the right mental state to hear him; panic clouded her judgment.

“Lieutenant, take a deep breath and regain control. This is an order,” John said with authority, understanding that soldiers in shock would respond better to commands than rational conversation. Their intensive military training aimed to condition soldiers to follow orders.

“Yes, sir,” Elara replied weakly.

“Lieutenant, listen to me carefully. Take control of your MMU and return to the airlock ASAP. This is an order.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. After several failed attempts, she regained control of her Manned Maneuvering Unit and slowly but steadily moved toward the space station hall and the airlock. Seeing the hall grow bigger through her helmet’s visor boosted her confidence. “I’m getting closer,” she said joyfully.

“Keep going, Lieutenant, you can make it,” John said authoritatively.

Elara involuntarily laughed as her hand touched the airlock handle. It was a great relief; she was saved.

“Lieutenant, slowly push the lever down and open the airlock’s outer door.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, pushing the lever down.

Standing in the airlock chamber boosted her confidence. She wasn’t going to die alone in Earth orbit. The hiss of air filling the room was the sweetest music to her ears, reassuring her of her safe return. When the inner door of the airlock opened, John, the station commander; Martina, the Italian astronaut and biologist; and Sergey, the Russian cosmonaut, were there to help her. Until then, the readout had shown no faults in her spacesuit. They quickly assisted her in removing the suit and carefully checked it. It appeared intact, but a pressure test would be needed later. Martina handed her a warm drink and said, “Please drink this; it will make you feel better.”

“Thank you,” Elara said, happily sucking the warm drink—hot chocolate—from the container’s nozzle.

When they helped her remove her undergarment, Martina discovered a spider in the right sleeve of her dress. “Where did this spider come from?” she asked.

“This is a space spider,” Sergey teased.

Martina quickly grabbed the spider and transferred it into a sealed glass container. “On the previous mission, the crew researched spiders’ ability to produce silk webs in zero gravity. This one likely escaped from their container.”

“So, all this drama is caused by this ugly spider?” Elara asked.

“It appears so,” John responded.

“It felt like a breeze brushing against my arm,” Elara said.

“The station should be bug-free, so you didn’t expect a spider to be in your suit, which is why your brain interpreted the sensation of the crawling spider on your skin as a breeze—like a breeze brushing against your skin,” Martina explained.

“How do you know? Who told you this?”

My head nodding to the roll of papers stuffed into my pants pocket.

“This article is scheduled to automatically release to the American public tomorrow morning. Go ahead – read it. When the country learns of what you’re planning, every person with a firearm is going to head to that airbase. And when they can’t get on the shuttle, they’re going to make sure it’s destroyed. I can prevent this information from releasing. All I’m asking for is a seat.”

The memory haunts my heart. That my last act in the capacity of a profession I once thought meaningful was one of blackmail unsettles me. And this, to cast my lot in with the men and women I was prepared to cast to the dogs as traitors to humankind. But then I remember the void, and my fear unseats my guilt. I have tried, in these past two weeks, to stare into the dark abyss that must be death, and reconcile my mind to the thought of non-existence. I have stared into the interminable blackness, the unadulterated silence, the endless absence of consciousness. I have imagined eternities upon eternities unfolding and the very blanket of time beginning to tear, and through it all, the complete darkness of consciousness that is death. The idea is nauseating, and my mind rejects it like an upset stomach does food. And so I flee, at any cost or disgrace, from the darkness that pervades our atmosphere and speaks of the true darkness on its heels.

When I reach the gates of the remote airbase, my old vehicle whirring with exertion, I flash the badge they issued me and drive past the soldiers manning the gate. I park and trudge into a small command center a half mile from the launchpad. My two-feet-by-one-foot-by-one-foot trunk weighs heavily in my arms. Some eighty individuals linger inside, holding hushed conversations or staring silently at the floor. I see the president looking pointedly away from me. A woman near the door points me to a small bay where an electric buggy is idling, hitched to a cart laden with boxes identical to mine. I pile mine on top. I spend the next hour sitting in a plastic chair, wondering what I ought to do, say, and think in my last hour on earth, and reaching no conclusion.

The time has finally come. The immense rocket boosters and attached passenger shuttle is ready for takeoff, and we are ushered outside and towards the boarding tower by the engineers who, inexplicably, are willing to remain behind to guide our transport away from earth. 8 a.m., and the sun is well above the horizon. I wish the storm had not abated before my last view of the sky. Had it not, I could almost believe that this blackened atmosphere and ashen sky are the gloom of thunderclouds. Perhaps the rain would ameliorate the acrid taste of the charred air. We are climbing the tower and beginning to board. I weep for the ashes in my lungs – all that is left of D.C., Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles; of Orlando, and Cape Canaveral, and Huntsville. I weep for the millions of terrified unfortunates cast instantaneously into the abyss of death. I wish the rainclouds would return. Instead, the unfading cloud of detonated cities hangs poisonous and rainless upon the air. Where this cloud lingers, death will follow. It is smothering the sun and chilling the earth. They say it will bring the demise of all crops, and that remaining mankind will starve to death in a year.

We blast skyward towards the interstellar transport that is to take us to a new earth. We reach the transport and successfully transfer over from our shuttle. I find my seat and avoid looking out the window, down towards the smoking earth. Our ship begins its final journey, and I rise from my seat to join the queue waiting for the minuscule restroom. As I do, a stack of gray containers buckled to the wall catches my eye at the back of the passenger hold. I exit the line and walk to the homogeneous assembly of boxes. I scan the printed numbers until I find number seventy-two. What idiot brings a box of dirt into outer space? Yet I know why I did. This box contains earth, rain, and a seed of life. That seed is the offspring of an organism that lived with purpose, a purpose fulfilled in this seed. It is an organism that lived its mortal life with purpose and that will die without pain. Yet why do I pine for eternity while squandering the mortal life I have? Why is the seed of eternity planted in the heart of a mortal man?

Hurtling towards the newborn Terra Nova colony where my new life will begin, I wonder whether the sting of death will be duller in this new world. I wonder whether the future of non-existence, just as inevitable in the new world as the old, will ever reconcile with the irrational certainty in my heart that my consciousness must persist beyond death; that the being of my inner self must surely be eternal.

ANSWER: China could successfully united multiple languages under one Language Mandarin due to numerous reasons

1) Around 95% of the languages in China belongs to the Sino-Tibetan Language family and therefore it is obvious for people to accept Mandarin the most spoken language as a common language throughout their country.

Reference Picture: Distribution of Language speakers in China that belongs to the Sino-Tibetan Language family

2) 90% of the people in China belongs to the Han Race and therefore it is easy for them to successfully unite the people residing in the country.

3) Chinese Emperors for hundreds of years have used Early Mandarin as the official language and therefore it is familiar to the people for hundreds of years.

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However, when we examine this subject from the context of India it evident that the cultural differences between North India and South India is HUGE when compared to China.

Explanation

Gujaratis in India are happy to accept Hindi as the National Language because both Hindi and Gujarati belongs to the same Indo-Aryan Language family.

However, majority of South Indian would NEVER accept Hindi as the National Language because South Indian languages belongs to the Dravidian language family and Hindi belongs to the Indo-Aryan Language family.

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Summary of the Analysis (China vs India)

CHINA

1) 95% of the people speak a language that belongs to the Sino-Tibetan Language family

2) 90% of the people belongs to the Han Chinese Race

3) Early Mandarin was a common language used by Chinese Emperors for hundres of years

INDIA

1) 75% of the people speak a language that belongs to the Indo-Aryan Language family and around 20% of the people speak a language that belongs to the Dravidian Language family.

2) Hindi was NEVER used as a common language by Kings in South Indian states before the 20th century and it was introduced to South Indians for the first time after 1950.