No, we don't learn much else about this Invasion Timetable over the rest of this 615-page book.
Crown gives the chair to the King's Own Astrographer, a Captain Roke, who explains that they were taking a look at a planet called "Earth" by its inhabitants, a "humanoid planet" like "Planet Manco" and "Planet Flisten." I have to stop here for a moment to boggle at the term "humanoid planet," which would suggest a celestial body shaped like a human, why Voltar doesn't qualify as one despite being inhabited by beings that can easily pass for Earthlings, and why it's "Planet Blank" instead of just "Blank."
Anyway, Earth's not Voltar's next target, but we're strategically situated as a future supply base for the invasion of "this" galaxy, and once Voltar scouts noticed that we were firing nukes at each other, the aliens started to monitor us more closely. But the Captain-Astrographer complains that the cadets' reports didn't do a good job of describing the situation on Earth, which Hisst and Gris know is due to the Apparatus editing said reports. So the Crown unwittingly bypassed the Apparatus entirely by sending its own survey under a certain combat engineer, which is why Gris never caught the resulting document.
The aliens aren't pleased with the data. "The present inhabitants are wrecking the planet! Even if they don't blow it up first, they will have rendered it useless and uninhabitable long before the invasion called for on our Timetable!" And this is what convinced me to power through Mission Earth - the thought of L. Ron Hubbard trying to deliver an environmental message.
Endow the Apparatus sockpuppet attempts to question these claims, but Roke has a fifteen foot chart with statistics and figures on it, and the Astrographer has personally verified all the projections and conclusions. He rattles off facts: our ocean's oxygen level has gone down 14% in the past century, excessive sulfur content in the atmosphere is leading to global warming (I think listing Hubbard as a global warming activist would actually hinder environmentalists), and our magnetic poles are wandering... huh. I'm pretty sure that last one's not our fault, or even all that dangerous.
"What it means," said Captain Roke, putting his hands on the dais table and leaning toward them, "is a double threat to that planet. One: they are burning up their atmosphere oxygen at a rate that will cease to support life long before the planned date of our Invasion Timetable."
Alright Wikipedia, let's check this... "Human activities, including the burning of 7 billion tonnes of fossil fuels each year have had very little effect on the amount of free oxygen in the atmosphere." Well that's reassuring. A Google search brought me to this PopSci article that explains that "even if we were to burn another 1,000 billion tons of fossil fuels, we would only decrease the oxygen in our atmosphere to 20.88 percent,” but warns that "the effects that action would have on the environment—more particulate pollution, hotter temperatures—would be far worse than oxygen depletion." Not quite as reassuring.
As for Roke's other point:
"Two: the planet has glacial polar caps and the increase of surface temperature, combined with wandering polar caps, could melt these and cover the bulk of their continental areas with water, making the planet almost useless."
I'm somewhat confused by these "wandering" polar caps. So what, is the "cold" part of the Arctic going to migrate into mainland Canada, letting the ice at the top of the world melt? What the hell does magnetism have to do with temperature?
As for the Waterworld scenario: HowStuffWorks has an article addressing rising sea levels, and I found a 2005 paper that, though dismissive of the idea that humans are behind this "global warming," at least humors everyone and runs a worst-case scenario. The author concludes that if all the ice melts we'd see some changed coastlines (eventually, because humans could never alter the environment within a few short decades), but we might see a net gain in habitable land - though he warns that desertification and whatnot might not make all this land as habitable as we'd like. In any event, a second Great Flood is not gonna happen, unless you happen to live in the Netherlands or the Carolinas.
In conclusion, Hubbard is about as good a scientist as he is a storyteller.
So all the Council members are dismayed, and Gris in particular is worried sick about how everything "was going to recoil on Section 451 - me - like a firebomb," which is an odd alternative to "blow up in our faces." Gris can see no way out, none at all, as the chapter ends, which ensures that next chapter a way out will be found.
Back to Chapter Six
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