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Destination: Jupiter

clarkesworldmagazine.com

11–20 of 44 posts

Re: Destination: Jupiter

#11
post #6

Kind of hard for SF stories featuring organic life (i.e. humans) to be based around Jupiter because of the planet's incredibly strong magnetic field and hence killing radiation belts - like the Van Allen belts around Earth, but much worse. Probes to the Jovian system have to be heavily hardened.

If anybody is into sci-fi, I highly recommend The Three Body Problem series. I'm being very elusive here to avoid spoilers, but let's just say that there are some very fascinating challenging with establishing technology (and especially human life) around Jupiter, what with it's gravity, the radiation, it's moons, distance from the sun, etc. As a space nerd, those books were highly enjoyable

Re: Destination: Jupiter

#12
post #6

Kind of hard for SF stories featuring organic life (i.e. humans) to be based around Jupiter because of the planet's incredibly strong magnetic field and hence killing radiation belts - like the Van Allen belts around Earth, but much worse. Probes to the Jovian system have to be heavily hardened.

Well, life on Jupiter is possible, but "organic" life seems way less likely. "Organic" means carbon compounds, and there's not a whole lot of carbon on Jupiter.

Re: Destination: Jupiter

#13
post #5
post #2

It is always fascinating to see how much influence authors and scientists have had on each other throughout history. You sometimes see clear examples of how fiction fuels technology, and sometimes technology inspires fiction. As a writer who hasn’t been published yet, I find that most of my stories start by imagining where today’s science might take us next, though every now and then, I catch a glimpse of something t…

as a high schooler I took a summer class in “reading & writing scifi” offered by MIT Junction. it was very influential on my intellectual development and after that I focused myself on learning software and electronics, the only crafts I saw that could give me the power to pull parts of the visions into the present. a few weeks ago I started on a focused read of historical scifi, in chronological order, that had some…

> “The Master Key,” where a boy wise beyond his years rejects powers too advanced for humanity to adapt.

For those stumbling by- that's a 1901 novel by L. Frank Baum, who also wrote The Wizard Of Oz! Here's a synopsis: https://oz.fandom.com/wiki/The_Master_Key

Re: Destination: Jupiter

#14

Reading this post reminded me of another book I read a few years ago: Curious Moon [0]. It is written as a novel that teaches PostgreSQL by exploring the dataset of the Cassini orbiter around Enceladus, Saturn's moon. Highly recommended and fun read. [0] https://sales.bigmachine.io/curious-moon

Similar idea for intro to sql for people - https://selectstarsql.com

Re: Destination: Jupiter

#15
post #6

Kind of hard for SF stories featuring organic life (i.e. humans) to be based around Jupiter because of the planet's incredibly strong magnetic field and hence killing radiation belts - like the Van Allen belts around Earth, but much worse. Probes to the Jovian system have to be heavily hardened.

In case anybody’s interested, Malka Older has a really enjoyable series (two books so far) of short novels set on habitats in Jupiter’s atmosphere (so not breathable atmosphere, but also not vacuum). They’re solid mystery stories with fun characters and an intriguing setting. The first is called “The Mimicking of Known Successes” and the second is “The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles”.

Re: Destination: Jupiter

#16
post #6

Kind of hard for SF stories featuring organic life (i.e. humans) to be based around Jupiter because of the planet's incredibly strong magnetic field and hence killing radiation belts - like the Van Allen belts around Earth, but much worse. Probes to the Jovian system have to be heavily hardened.

Well, life on Jupiter is possible, but "organic" life seems way less likely. "Organic" means carbon compounds, and there's not a whole lot of carbon on Jupiter.

What kind of life are you thinking of?

Re: Destination: Jupiter

#17
The author of that article somehow managed to miss the most famous Jupiter story of all. Arthur C. Clarke's "A Meeting with Medusa." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Meeting_with_Medusa

That novella was so enduringly influential that noted SF authors Stephen Baxter (a collaborator with, and sort of heir to, Clarke,) and Alastair Reynolds wrote a very good sequel a few years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medusa_Chronicles

Re: Destination: Jupiter

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, life on Jupiter is possible, but "organic" life seems way less likely. "Organic" means carbon compounds, and there's not a whole lot of carbon on Jupiter.

What kind of life are you thinking of?

I have no idea! Maybe ammonia or methane based? Seems somewhere between unlikely and fantastical, but maybe?

Re: Destination: Jupiter

#19
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way, although I think technology's inspiration on fiction is stronger. Today's fiction, as you said, is simply tomorrow's science.

Thanks for your comment, that’s exactly what I was wondering about. For me, I actually tend to see things the other way around where authors often inspire tech. Example, engineers who watched Star Trek as kids and ended up designing the first flip phones. Sometimes we build things simply because technology finally makes them possible, and only later do we realize it’s straight out of a story we grew up with. Especial…

while i agree in principle, you seem to make it sound like without a science fiction story, some things would not have been invented. but i disagree with that. the thing is that science fiction is the imagination of humans of how the future could look like but new ideas in tech come from the same source. that is, while star trek may have predicted phones and tablets they were not invented because of star trek. they would have been invented anyways simply because it is part of the imagination of humans. just like multiple authors can come up with the same plot lines or settings, multiple people can invent the same tech.

science fiction represents the full breath of human inventiveness, and tech inventions the part that can realistically be built. in that sense the first airplane was also inspired by historical scifi

basically, someone has an idea, and either, like you, they write about it, or, if it is realistic enough, and they know how to do it, they set out to build it. and any idea that is written about but can be realized (and is practical enough to be useful) will eventually be realized. but ideas are cheap, and i feel we give far to much credit to people having an idea because a thousand others probably had the same idea, but only a few write about it and a few more are able to build it, while the remaining 995 stay silent and do nothing about it.

what makes scifi interesting is to predict inventions that at the time can't yet be realized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_existing_technologies_...

so i credit star trek not for inspiring the tablet, but for predicting it, and more so, for popularizing the idea. the flip phone less so, because the original communicator is just a wireless handset with a cover. very different from what a flip phone actually does. (you'll notice that the flip phone is not listed in the above wikipedia page, and even the tablet has been described more than a decade before it appeared in star trek TNG)

Re: Destination: Jupiter

#20
post #6

Kind of hard for SF stories featuring organic life (i.e. humans) to be based around Jupiter because of the planet's incredibly strong magnetic field and hence killing radiation belts - like the Van Allen belts around Earth, but much worse. Probes to the Jovian system have to be heavily hardened.

There's a fantastic Ray Bradbury short story from 1948 called "Jonah and the Jove-Run" that I hardly see referenced anywhere. It's about Jupiter being the next frontier after colonizing Mars and the complexity of navigating the asteroid belt on supply runs.

It's a great quick read. Though it hardly attempts the sort of scientific justification as in The Three-Body Problem.

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