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What all concerned deduced in their meetings or individually at Breakfest ( which The Encyclopedia Galactica notes is : "A meal served on many planets usually after a long sleep period and before a longer waking period that is high in Carbohydrates, Sugars and Protein; is usually accompanied by a beverage of a stimulatory nature and is meant to provide sustained sustenance to beings for four to six hours."
The Hitchiker's Guide to The Galaxy is not read at Breakfest as it is always assumed that such a meal can happen at any time or while in the shower and may and will include anything within hand's reach and should include alcohol, coffee, cigarettes, and anything in a Box or Rectangle that is less than four days old.) that the best thing in the World would be to leave it.
The problem of course was Money. Space is very expensive and the Cost to send a Man into Orbit completely naked and without either cellular telephone or oxygen (The two things those on Earth need most) is One Hundred and Ninty-Three Thousand Pounds Sterling at Nine Hundred and Thirty Pounds Sterling to the Pound Weight or roughly the same price per square foot of a Penthouse in London ; and that only if you can also pay for the other Forty-Nine Thousand and Eight Hundred Pounds of Lift weight and The entire Penthouse.
Time on the other hand was found to be much less expensive and as affordable as a nice flat in a better part of New York (an American City that bears little relation to Her English namesake : one is inland, The other coastal, One has a thousand and seven hundred foot tall Skyscraper the other a more than a thousand and seven hundred year old Minister : accounting for all the previous building on that spot).
Thus was formed a Plan. Since Plans must have names or at least a Number this plan was given the incongruous and unlikely name of Plan QM Sagan which stood for Quantum Mechanics and Dr. Carl Sagan : it is the goal of almost every scientist and many people to have something named after them : whole universities are built on this concept. This however was not one of those things most people would wish to be identified with as the Plan smacked of Mad Sciencism and had a patent lack of skepticism or so those in United State Department of Energy thought when informed of it.
Time it seemed was not something given much thought to by Energy and so the Plan was put away.
* **
Fast-Forward : a phrase that entered your Oxford English Dictionary with the wide availability of Video-Casette Machines and a curious device known as The Walkman (engineered by Sony a Japanese Company when it was discovered by them that small headphones were possible with small magnets and small magnets were possible with elements known as rare-Earths and rare-Earths were possible due to the hard work of the much smaller Quantum Mechanics and the even smaller Girls of their sub and sub-sub atomic Universe who still remained un-recognized or noticed despite the formation of several committes and a nascent Labour Union by them) which could be used while walking but was more often used while sitting or lying down on a couch or bed : a few decades during which as usual things simply got worse.
There is a saying in many parts of the Orion Nebulae that when things get worse they can only get better : former or current President of the Galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox (depending on whom you ask, and when, and whether an arrest warrant has been issued or quashed) is known to have quoted this saying once with the additional note that "then you know, Man, they get worse again until you climb into a Bottle and that's Why." At which point he suddenly left the podium he was speaking at and was not seen again for seven days. He returned to that same podium after those seven days, long after both those sitting in the seats, in front or behind the dais, and those recording and televising the event had left and speaking into the unplugged microphone said "You just have to discover it for yourself." It is not known if this was in addition to or tangential to the prior speech.
Hope was neither lost, present or accounted for but simply a by-stander to the dramas that unfolded in the background of a World awash in the ignorance of its impending Doom sometime in the twenty-first Century.
-Coral Anne Dawn