My first Science Fiction novel,Inside Out, follows seven travellers on their way to Triton, and mention is made of a broadcasting station, OCN (Outer Circles News), which might be highly informative, but it has little appeal to residents of the Inner Circles of the Solar System (Jupiter inwards), because they don’t necessarily want to be informed, when it comes to Outer Circles affairs.

In the next instalment, Making Waves, out now, OCN becomes more significant, though it is now renamed Ocean Waves. It aims to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but it is still faced with the same problem: how to alert people to events far away, when they don’t want to hear.

This is a state of affairs that applies on Planet Earth now, just as much as I predict it happening, across the Solar System, in 250 years’…