The Day the Moon Blew Up

I 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 cities that would have saved many times more people.

Midway through the first unit, I basically decided they should have dug tunnels ten miles long, one mile deep at bottom, lay tracks, and just go full steam carting rocks out while digging massive caverns. They could move entire hospitals, schools, factories, labs, etc. into these places, store tons of food and supplies, lay pipes to connect to underground water supplies, set up parks, farms, and animal preserves using artificial solar lighting. Makes so much more sense to me than this nutty space station idea. And with gravity, access to minerals, oxygen, etc.

I love space as much as the next geek, but if you want to save millions of humans, you've got to dig.

IMHO, "hard SF" has developed as a term for books that have "hard physics", everything else like biology, chemistry, sometimes even mathematics is usually lacking.

As an example: The Cheela, the microscopic intelligent life forms in the more famous hard SF Dragon's Egg, are described like eukaryotes with an eukaryotic life style, but they're so tiny that they don't need any of the complex "inventions" of eukaryotes, for example, they wouldn't need any "plumbing" in the body since they're small enough for diffusion to deliver nutrients. IRC their DNA is triple stranded; DNA is double stranded so that it's more safe from mutations as you can always read the opposite from the opposite strand, if you had a second backup in the form of a third strand you would have no stable chemical bonds between the bases. Triple helices exist but these doesn't help with stability and are implicated in transcription. Edit: Similarly, there should be massive problems in the later communication because the Cheela shouldn't have a base 10 mathematical system as they don't have 10 fingers, you could still display it as base 10 but there has to be a conversion (see https://www.quora.com/What-does-one-mean-by-Every-base-is-ba... ).

Some not-so-hard science fiction on the same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csj7vMKy4EI

It's a reference to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. (In particular, what the band Disaster Area's songs are about.)

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 if I'd read Seveneves without ever having heard this comparison, I would have made it through to the part that makes you proud, but at this point I doubt that's possible.

Going to skip this one, and I'd suggest everyone else skip Childhood's End.