All of our history is wrong!

.........................................................................................................................................................................................
(Present day)

I said, not really surprised. I had suspected as much actually. Journalism you know.

“Of course it is” she said sadly "History can be traumatic. Some times the bad parts are glossed over,sugar coated or completely edited out. History is always written by the winners of conflicts. Most of the time most of the losers of those conflicts die. The dead have no say. Later, when the ‘winners’ die or fall from power,the account is revised to say whatever the current narrative deems that it should say, then later, when the narrative changes again, it always does, history is revised again.......again, and again. The process repeats itself over and over and over. Yeah, History is pretty much a lie agreed upon’, as one of your warlords is said to have once said, but that’s history...so who knows if it’s true?”

“I’ll give you an example. I could give you hundreds. You may have heard of the tower of baw- baal?”She asked

“Yes” I said "it’s the story of how the many languages came to be. Lemme see. A quick check on line....hmmm...yeah..here it is. According to the story, a united humanity of the generations following the Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating eastward, came to the land of Shinar (Hebrew: שנער‎‎). There they agreed to build a city and a tower,tall enough to reach heaven, this angered God, thus he confounded their speech so that they could no longer understand each other and scattered them around the world.”

“That’s pretty twisted” she said "the way it really happened was that the tower of baw-baal was an orbital tower. Some of your Science Fiction authors have written about them. Arthur C. Clarke for one in his book, The Fountains of Paradise..and Charles Sheffield in his novel The Web Between the Worlds ( we’ll get back to some of his other concepts later) ,there were many others. It was but one of many gateways to space”

“Space?” I exclaimed. “You mean.....! "

“Yes” She said "I’ll get to that too. Let me finish about Baw-Baal. . A consortium of clans had merged their resources and know-how to build and operate it. It had been lifting freight and people into low earth orbit for thousands of years. Everything was working fine until, as your version says, Gawd was angered and claimed it would work more efficiently and less expensively under central management. HIS management of course. You’ve heard the story a thousand times. Rage against ‘monopolies’ and ‘robber barons’ exploiting the ‘people’.... yadda yadda yadda.”

“As a matter of fact I have” I said.

“How’s that working out for ya?” she sneered.

“Not well.” I admitted.

“It never does. It didn’t then either” She said “to make a long sad, sad story short, as you said, the Gawd-Gang screwed the pooch big time. It didn’t end well, but what actually happened didn’t fit the ‘narrative’ so...”

“The big lie” I nodded.

“Yup...they stood the story on it’s head, and threw in the part about languages just to be mean. The only thing even half right about it is the name...and that’s been distorted.” she said "on a brighter note. There was and still is a vast civilization beyond earth.”

“You mean the other planets? " I said "Like Mars?”

“No silly.” she disagreed. "Planets are over rated. We live in the asteroids, throughout the solar system.”

“What do you mean ‘through out the solar system’? " I asked.

“Your astronomers estimate that there are two million asteroids in the main belt that are larger than a half mile in diameter. Do the math. The little ones have a surface area of three square miles.” she said.

“I don’t have to ‘do the math’. That’s a LOT of area, but wouldn’t we see you if you live on the asteroids? We have telescopes.” I asked.

“Not ON the asteroids.” she repeated. "In them. Many of them are hollow now. We live on the inside. We also have very good camouflage.”

“Your scientists say there are two million asteroids Half a Mile or larger in diameter.” she stated. "IF you , Do the math, at minimum that would mean six million square miles of living space. But don’t forget, a great many are much larger than that. 4 Vesta for example . It’s dimensions are 360 miles the long way, 285 miles the short way... it’s rather cylindrical shaped. Odd that?” she teased "I’ve been there. We made it slightly cylindrical to increase the space in the high G area when it was spun up. It’s very pretty inside. With an internal surface area of almost 450 thousand square miles...there’s plenty of room. There’s even enough room for weather. The flying is marvelous too.”

“Flying?” I blinked

“Quintessinal wings” she said "We use them for recreation in the zero-gee area down the center of the cylinder...”

“I get it...” I said "Centrifugal force. Gravity on the walls....none in the center. ‘Out’ is down, ‘In’ is up. I been to an amusement park that had something like that when I was younger....MUCH younger. "

“Very GOOD” Then she said "For reference...how big is Texas?”

“I dunno” I told her

“About 269 thousand square miles” she grinned.

My jaw dropped.

“But wait.” she teased “There’s MORE. Up until recently YOUR scientists said that Ceres was an asteroid, then they changed their minds and called it a minor planet. That means they didn’t count Ceres and the other minor planets in that count. Ceres, the minor planet, is much larger than Vesta, the asteroid. Ceres is large enough that it has enough gravity to collapse it into a sphere. It’s diameter is 587 miles. That would give it an internal surface area of over a million square miles... a third the size of the united states. It’s large enough that a sphere works just fine for us. The cylindrical shape isn’t needed so we didn’t mess with it...on the outside.”

I was dumbfounded. I actually knew this because such things interested me, but I’d never had it explained to me in these terms.

“But that’s not all?” I realized.

“It’s certainly not” she agreed. "the 2 million estimate is pathetically small. It discounts the Kuiper belt which is 20 times as wide and 200 times as massive. Your astronomers admit to it having over 100,000 objects in it. That is a ridiculously tiny estimate.”

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