Description
What is the price of progress?
What do a CEO and entrepreneur, a paleontologist and naturalist, physicists, engineers and special operations teams along with a water mine on Europa and Jupiter have in common? The answer is a goal to travel faster than light, colonize the stars and, most of all, survive among the dinosaurs.
Mankind is on the threshold of establishing its first colonies on other stars. One company, GraviDynamics, has led the way with first their discovery of near instantaneous communications and now a star drive. GraviDynamics has already launched a starship using its proprietary interstellar drive pushing it to the Sun's nearest neighbor. This marks a major goal for the researchers but they still have one big problem: contrary to the predictions of their models, their ships refuse to accelerate faster-than-lightspeed and colonization, even at the speed of light, would require hundreds of years.
The researchers are convinced that the problem is in the design theory for their StarShip Drives and they only need to fine-tune the models. This presents another major problem since the tests must measure the universal constants of the universe at least 50 million years in the past or the future.
Nodal Convergence records the experiences of Mark Nolen, Matthew Zoeller and the 322 scientists, engineers, soldiers, women and children — explorers all — and their quest to propel mankind to the stars. The research team uses their Argos starship to set up a Cretaceous Era research station on the shores of a tropical inland sea in an area sixty-five million years in the past that today we call Texas.
The crew discovers a tropical Earth without seasons and of unexpected beauty. Then the humans encounter the dinosaurs — not the slow, leather-covered reptiles of paleontology but the perfected product of a hundred million years of evolution. Their experiments soon find that the seeds of one species' extinction harbor an unanticipated opportunity for the ultimate survival and continued evolution of the human race … if they can survive.