Sea of Tranquility

Breaking from the third-person narration used in previous chapters, Gaspery becomes the first-person narrator here. He compares the end of Earth (the end of our sun) with smaller endings on Earth. Gaspery’s friend Ephrem, an arborist, told Gaspery a story about an ending. Ephrem took his four-year-old daughter to a cemetery (to look at the trees) and encountered the grave of a four-year-old. His daughter mentioned how it must have seemed “like the end of the world” (104) for her parents. Ephrem never visited the cemetery again.

Gaspery turns to a discussion about how the moon colony was the first step towards establishing colonies further out in space. These Far Colonies would be a place for humanity to continue living after the Earth’s star dies, stated the president of China in a press conference about the first colony. Gaspery and his sister Zoey discuss how the moon colony is a prototype and how the Far Colonies have been populated for almost 200 years.

This chapter begins with a description of the moon colonies. Colony One was built near where Apollo 11 landed, in the Sea of Tranquility. It was popular due to the flooding and extreme heat on Earth, and Colony Two was built quickly thereafter.