Pre-Halo: The Cortana Letters
Before there was Halo, the company known as Bungie got their big break on some series of games including Myth and Marathon. Some time after the last Marathon game was released Bungie received a strange letter from someone with the alias: Cortana. Here's what it contained:
From: "Cortana" <cortana@bungie.com>
To: <hamish.sinclair@tcd.ie>
Subject: Closure
Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1999 10:50:20 -0600
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-Priority: 3
I have walked the edge of the Abyss.
I have governed the unwilling.
I have witnessed countless empires break before me.
I have seen the most courageous soldiers fall away in fear.
[I was there with the Angel at the tomb]
I have seen your future.
And I have learned.
There will be no more Sadness. No more Anger. No more Envy.
I HAVE WON.
Oh, and your poet Eliot had it all wrong:
THIS is the way the world ends.
a friend of a friend
Who was Cortana? No one really knew at the time. IP tracking lead them to a computer terminal within their own building so it was someone on the inside. Soon after that the letter was posted on Bungie's story page and fans poured in to try and solve this mystery. One individual, Nathan Bitner, the not-yet-known producer and creative developer for Halo, unwittingly (maybe?) and possibly revealed himself as Cortana in one letter "Cortana" wrote, having Nathan's e-mail as the sender and signed Cortana. After continued denial from Nathan Bungie received more letters from Cortana (a grand total of five), from strange e-mail addresses. The fourth letter was apprarently sent from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico! After the fifth and last letter Nathan began using the alias "Island Four" when posting on the stories page and some curious people investigated.
After many days of researching it seemed like one person had finally cracked the code.
Matthew Lewis Carroll Smith <matthew@mlcsmith.com> writes:
In 1969, O'Neill was teaching a physics course at Princeton. America was engaged in the Apollo effort, so O'Neill was working space travel into many of the physics problems assigned.
He was concerned about the persistent talk among academics regarding overpopulation and "limits to growth". He was also dismayed by many young people's resigned acceptance of two concepts he personally found repugnant. One was future totalitarian control over the use of resources, the other was that a decline in the standard of living was inevitable. One day he asked his students the following question: Is the surface of the Earth really the best place for an expanding, technological civilization? After some calculation, the answer seemed to be "no" (see advantages above).
They turned to the design of an Earth-like space habitat. When they calculated the maximum size possible, given present strengths of steel cable, aluminum plates, and glass panels, the answer took them by surprise. Later studies funded by NASA defined several highly-detailed habitat designs.
A low-end design is Island One, also known as a Bernal Sphere. Sunlight is reflected in through two ring-shaped rows of windows at either end. Agriculture takes place in external tori. The Bernal Sphere is 1 km (0.6 mi.) in circumference, and could support a population of 10,000.
Island Two is shaped like a cold capsule, with sunlight entering through 3 windows running the length of the cylinder. 1.8 km (>1 mi.) in diameter, it would house 140,000.
A scaled-up version, Island Three, would be a cylinder 6.4 km (4 mi.) in diameter and 32 km (20 mi.) long. Four miles of atmosphere is enough to produce a blue sky overhead, and cloud banks would form at the same level they do here on Earth (approx. 900 m or 3,000 ft). Natural rainstorms would occur (Bernal Spheres would probably have a sprinkler system). Island Three would have over 400 square km (250 square mi.) of living space, and be home to 10,000,000 individuals.
There are other designs as well. NASA's Ames Research Center did a study with Stanford University which produced the Stanford Torus, a six-spoked wheel over a mile across.
Island Three was considered the limit of what was economically viable, not what was physically possible. The maximum theoretical size for a space habitat, assuming materials no stronger than those currently used, is a staggering 19 km (12 mi.) in diameter, providing hundreds of square miles of usable land.
I postulate that "Island Four" is a Culture orbital or Niven ringworld!
And the mystery had indeed been solved. Nathan announced Halo: Combat Evolved and also his withdrawal from Bungie. Thanks Nathan! :D
*letters from: Bungie
