[quote=“msuggitt, post:13, topic:74669, full:true”]
The list items under “biology” and “space and cosmology” read like all the reasons we actually never will leave Earth in any kind of physically colonizing sense as we’ve come to hope for.[/quote]
I’m sure we’ll colonize the solar system. Interstellar colonization is a LOT harder.
[quote=“msuggitt, post:13, topic:74669, full:true”]
From microbiome incompatibility…[/quote]
Check out Encounter with Tiber by Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes. It’s one of the few Science Fiction books I’ve read that covers this.
That’s the right use, isn’t it? It’s the worth of [22 screens], therefore the apostrophe goes after the S. To put it before would definitely be a mistake. I suppose you could also write it as “22 screens-worth”, with the hyphen optional, but I think that apostrophe is cromulent.
I’m sure we’ll colonize the solar system. Interstellar colonization is a LOT harder.
Famous American astronaut returns to Earth after living 340 days in zero-g…skin hurts (no given reason), bone-loss (how much tbd), has to be carried to an armchair and swarmed by medical staff, and more to come eg. changes to the eyes, immune system, etc. So spaceflight looks a lot like getting the shit kicked out of you. Not the colonization we collectively bought into with golden age sci-fi …that persists to this day…with the caveat that there exists a trope within the genre that accepts when you leave earth you will change and may not be able to return. How do you colonize the solar system with millions of health-compromised?
I’m all for Homo Sapiens Martianis, or Homo Sapiens Orbitalis… success meaning, what, a thousand generations to adapt and change? Two? Ten? 100? All I can hope for, in my lifetime or my great grandkids, is to fully cover the solarsystem with science platforms and maybe have some wok done on a small, multi-century interstellar probe.
I wish Musk all the best in his retirement lodge in Planum Argylis.
Check out Encounter with Tiber by Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes.
I read EWT when it came out and continue to use it as a mental reference, actually. Useful and insightful.
My first reaction to Firefly, when I caught a minute or so of it while some friends were watching it, was, “someone took the whole ‘space western’ description of Star Trek waaaaay too literally.”
It didn’t help that it was the train robbery episode.
Wasn’t until years later that I finally sat down and watched the whole season. My loss…
That’s in zero-g. It’s a bit like saying that colonies in North America are impractical because of the dreadful conditions on a 15th century sailboat. A colony - whether on Mars, a Cloud Nine floating in Venus’s atmosphere or a rotating space station - is going to have gravity.
Sure, there’s some unknowns regarding lower gravity. A colony means raising children. And that means bone growth. We’re optimized for doing this at one Earth gravity. We’ve only barely experimented with this at zero G, and we have no idea whether the Moon’s 1/6th or Mars’s 38% gravity would be enough. Which is why Mars is a better bet for colonization than the Moon.
But even for the Moon, science fiction has featured enormous rotating carousel structures on the lunar surface to provide earth-normal gravity for pregnant women and young children. (Isaac Asimov’s “The Gods Themselves” for example.)
My first reaction was to the Firefly universe itself: Enough planets that even fully terraformed planets could be forgotten… Asteroids that smugglers could walk around on without spacesuits… cartography unaffected by orbital mechanics so that one planet is always just the other side of the Reavers from another planet… “Hey,it’s Rocket Robin Hood’s universe!”
My first reaction was to the writing: When JMS was producing Babylon 5 and Crusade, he was posting stories about the process and experience to Usenet. For Crusade the suits back at the studio headquarters kept sending him stupid demands. More violence - “We want this episode to start with a fist fight.” More sex - “This main character - we want him to be a sexual explorer and have sex with every alien race he encounters.” A big reason it was cancelled was that he fought many of the dumber demands.
With Firefly it seems like Joss Whedon took every sleazy studio demand for violence and sex, made them work, and made them work WELL. One can see sleazy studio execs demanding “We want this character to be a prostitute. With the occasional lesbian encounter.” And Whedon simply nods, writes it in, and adds a lot of humor.
And then got saddled with a bad time slot and a screwy airing order.
Now that I think about it, Asimov and others actually brushed the Cowboy/SciFi thing fairly often in a lot of older stories. It tended to get a lot more play in stories oriented towards younger audiences, or anything with a colony on Mars.
'Course, the most obvious example that comes to my mind isn’t exactly what I’d call “Space Opera”, but the “Lucky Starr: Space Ranger” series was pretty much pure Cowboy/SciFi.
If you feel like wasting a day or two browsing lists, TV Tropes has been compiling these clichés for about 12 years now: http://tvtropes.org/
Fighters like the X-wings (and Han would likely have done this for the Falcon as well) have a speaker system installed that simulates noise as an audible warning of an enemy’s position so that the pilot doesn’t have to constantly watch his display to see where an enemy fighter is.
"It's so... black!" said Ford Prefect. "You can hardly make out its shape... light just seems to fall into it!"
"That," he said, "that... is really bad for the eyes."
It was a ship of classic, simple design, like a flattened salmon, twenty yards long, very clean, very sleek. There was just one remarkable thing about it: it's sole purpose was to fly into the sun to provide spectacular effects for a rock concert.
The blackness of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell how close you were standing to it.
"Your eyes just slide off it..." said Ford in wonder.
I was going to suggest measuring blackness of wedges in “Disaster Area’s”, but Procol Harum’s seem to roll of the tongue better.
