$('#ArticleDropUpshareHolder').remove()The Day the Moon Blew Up
41–50 of 115 posts
Re: The Day the Moon Blew Up
#42>Seveneves belongs in the subgenre of hard science fiction, which means it emphasizes scientific accuracy. Everything adheres to physical laws, so unlike Star Wars, no one travels anywhere near the speed of light. A pity then that a little basic chemistry eluded both the writer and the critic - there's no carbon on the moon. Rather difficult to support humans, and carry out feats of biotechnology, without it...
There's some carbon on the moon. Rock samples are reported as having on the order of 100 ppm carbon [1]. That means that the amount of carbon in a human body is found in 100 m^3 of lunar soil. So if you extract all the carbon from the top meter of regolith, you could cover the moon with humans on a 10 meter grid spacing.
[1] https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a15/LunarSampleCompendium15265....
Re: The Day the Moon Blew Up
#43A couple of fun things hidden (or not exactly) in this video: There's no missing a couple of Neal's swordfighting buddies at 1:07. Wondering where the camera stand is? Look for its reflection in the window behind Bill at 1:52. What car did Bill drive to the meet-up? Probably not the Model X. My money is on the Porsche 959 shown at 2:17. (It's also a safe bet that the meet-up actually began at the Burgermaster, since…
The Model X in the video has a WA license plate "7EVES", the title of the book. Since Neal lives in Washington, it makes seems to reason that it is his.
Re: The Day the Moon Blew Up
#44The first third of Seveneves is a real gut punch. The only other world-ending story that comes close in terms of emotional impact for me was Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End". Stephenson manages to show humanity in all its realistic messiness but still leave you proud -- on balance -- that humans mostly get our act together in a desperate attempt to preserve a seed of life and culture.
> The first third of Seveneves is a real gut punch.
I found the first two thirds of it to be pretty depressing to the point where I didn't really enjoy the whole book that much. I wish he'd just kind of jumped right into the "future world" bit and made some references to what had taken place when the moon blew up.
Re: The Day the Moon Blew Up
#45The first third of Seveneves is a real gut punch. The only other world-ending story that comes close in terms of emotional impact for me was Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End". Stephenson manages to show humanity in all its realistic messiness but still leave you proud -- on balance -- that humans mostly get our act together in a desperate attempt to preserve a seed of life and culture.
Stephenson can really bring a world to life, and apparently, snuff it out too.
Re: The Day the Moon Blew Up
#46A couple of fun things hidden (or not exactly) in this video: There's no missing a couple of Neal's swordfighting buddies at 1:07. Wondering where the camera stand is? Look for its reflection in the window behind Bill at 1:52. What car did Bill drive to the meet-up? Probably not the Model X. My money is on the Porsche 959 shown at 2:17. (It's also a safe bet that the meet-up actually began at the Burgermaster, since…
I used to work at that BurgerMaster when I was in high-school!
Re: The Day the Moon Blew Up
#47I greatly enjoyed some of Stephenson's other works, but I was actually a bit disappointed with Seveneves. The narrative is well crafted, but unfortunately I just got stuck on the whole space ark concept and couldn't suspend disbelief enough to continue. Maybe someone else can explain why it made sense to focus on an orbiting refuge, right in the path of the Moon's fragments, rather than dig a bunch of underground cit…
Well...... You'd clearly be right if you were looking at a timeframe of a few years, or a few decades, or maybe a century or two.
But if you successfully establish a long term presence in space, you've got access to a lot of resources. If you're stuck in a hole in the ground for 5,000 years, and the surface is considerably more hostile than space, I think there's at least a colorable argument that space is the way to go.
Spoilers for the end of the book follow.
As it happens, remnants of humanity survive in space, underground, and underwater. This was the part of the story that broke my suspension of disbelief. I just couldn't really buy the end-third societies. It's like Stephenson couldn't get his mind around how long 5,000 years actually is.
Just as a for-example, language: In 3,000 BC, there might have been an unknown language that we designate proto-Indo-European because we don't actually have any texts that reference it. Proto-Indo-European might have begat another language that is still so ancient that we can only guess at it that we designate proto-Germanic which begat a family of West-German languages that begat Old English that begat Middle English that begat modern English.
Meanwhile, in 7,000 AD, apparently they speak a light pidgin of modern English that's pretty understandable to modern English speakers.
I get Stephenson's argument for why his far-future cultures are so directly related to the action in the first two thirds of the book, I just can't quite buy it.
Re: The Day the Moon Blew Up
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why wouldn't gates drive a tesla x?
Bill might well drive a Model X and any number of other cars -- his daily was an armored mid-90's Lexus LS for many years -- but if there's a Porsche 959 parked at the south Kirkland Burgermaster, the odds are overwhelming that it belongs to Bill. This because only 345 Porsche 959's were ever built, and none were eligible for import into the US. That is, until Bill made himself instrumental in the passage of the show…
Gates owns a silver 959. This one:
Re: The Day the Moon Blew Up
#49The first third of Seveneves is a real gut punch. The only other world-ending story that comes close in terms of emotional impact for me was Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End". Stephenson manages to show humanity in all its realistic messiness but still leave you proud -- on balance -- that humans mostly get our act together in a desperate attempt to preserve a seed of life and culture.
I found Childhood's End an extremely unpleasant read, and so that comparison makes it hard for me to even think about reading Seveneves. It was just so depressing, taking the concept of isolation to such an extreme it felt abusive. Or maybe I shouldn't have read it while isolated myself (literally living and working in the middle of nowhere without transportation and minimal contact with anyone I was close to). Maybe…
I read Childhood's End over 20 years ago but from what I recall I felt it was just an awesome book. I do not recall it being particularly depressing.
Re: The Day the Moon Blew Up
#50Note to future VR directors:
Don't do edits, and God don't change the default orientation of the camera! I know that goes against against 127 years of cinematic history, but moving the camera's default focus seriously confused my spatial awareness. I've turned so I can see them both, but oh no now I'm outside on the street, and now I'm back inside, but suddenly I'm rotated 60 degrees.
If this wasn't VR, it would t matter but in VR, it's putting the audience on teacup ride.