Throughout many people's lifetime, every human will have to face hard decisions one way or another. Each day a person lives through, they will face a big or small problem one way or another somewhere throughout the day. Some of these decisions can be either big or small. Going to war with other countries is one example of making big decision that can possibly endanger the world. In the story Cold Equations, written by Tom Godwin, the main character John Barton, is faced with a difficult decision to jettison a teenage girl out of a spacecraft. John Barton ends up jettisoning the girl. The idea of ejecting a human being out of a tiny spaceship is unrealistic in the eyes of many. Even though that the plot seems impractical, the author is telling us that everywhere we go there are always difficult calls and tasks. The only way John Barton could have saved Marilyn Cross, the teenage girl, was to shoot her humanely.
John Barton has been ordered to deliver a fever serum that is needed to cure six people in a camp. “The fever is …show more content…
One solution to the dilemma is to lose some of the ship’s weight. The only problem with losing the ship’s weight is that there is barely anything to lose besides a chair, his blaster, and the serum. “h amount of fuel will not power an EDS with a mass of m plus x safely to its destination” (Godwin). John could shoot his blaster at the chair and blast it into tiny pieces, but it depends on how much ammo he has to destroy the chair. Another possible solution is for John to turn off the ship’s engine and still go at the same speed, according to Newton's Laws of Motion. If he positions the ship to go to his destination and turns off his engine, he could possibly arrive to his destination on time. The problem with this solution is that if he were to go near a planet, the planet’s gravitational pull can lead them off