Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm fine with the google definitions.
What are they?
google "what is libertarianism".
Where did all the starships go?
341–350 of 369 posts
Re: Where did all the starships go?
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
"lightweight probe" and "self replicates" don't go together. Nanobots are just as much fantasy physics as FTL is.
Nanobots are fantasy? Nobody told your cells or bacteria I guess. We have an existence proof right there.
Show us how to build machines, create factories, mines, chip fabs, etc., smelt steel, and so forth out of those bacteria and cells and you might have a point.
Re: Where did all the starships go?
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
"But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real." No, it just has to be grounded in something consistent and if the book starts by explaining the mechanics of the world(or is in a world with known mechanics), a detective story very well can work.
It can’t be too different from what people are familiar with. So it has to be consistent with itself and with reality.”It’s like our reality except …” but the except part (faster than light travel, mind reading, time travel, dragons, magic, etc) can’t get arbitrarily complex or unreasonable or the reader will be lost or confused.
"can’t get arbitrarily complex or unreasonable or the reader will be lost or confused."
Indeed, but that is always the challenge of a writer. But if you introduce magic in your story, and you do it in a way to show the limitations and what is roughly possible, then you can give hints later, if there was a murder with the help of a magic trick. But I actually think I only ever read one detective fantasy story
https://www.der-spurenfinder.de/
(just in german as far as I know)
It mostly works, but in one instance there was a surprise fantasy ability, that I could have not guessed before. But the actual murderer in the end, there were enough hints that gave them away despite magic, as the skills were explained and then you could combine.
Re: Where did all the starships go?
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are many others Now that Musk led the way, sure. People laughed at Musk when he started out. > NASA Has sent a handful of probes out, only a handful because they are so costly. Now NASA can send out legions of them. There was a previous discussion here about why only one JWST was made and launched, at a cost of $10B. We all hope and pray it doesn't break down. Now with Musk's rockets we can launch lots of the…
NASA's work has been reduced to a "handful"? What is the point of writing that? And there is far more to cost of missions and their hardware than launching them. How much of JWST's cost was the launch?
> NASA's work has been reduced to a "handful"?
NASA has launched about 200 probes since the 1950s. That's maybe 3 probes a year.
> What is the point of writing that?
Building one-offs is extremely expensive, meaning few will be built.
> And there is far more to cost of missions and their hardware than launching them. How much of JWST's cost was the launch?
Cost goes down dramatically when you build a twin. Maybe even by 90%. And then you get twice the science done! After all, twin Voyagers were made and launched, and twice the science indeed happened. Makes you wonder what we'd have learned if the twins had more siblings!
For contrast, 9600 Starlink satellites have been launched.
Re: Where did all the starships go?
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s well understood that the expansion of the universe is not “due to general relativity”. General relativity does explain some details of that expansion.
The equations of general relativity fully model the expansion of the universe, so you’d need to explain what you mean.
The expansion of the universe is largely due to the impulse provided by the Big Bang. General Relativity does attempt to explain some details regarding what’s happened after the Big Bang, but provides no insight into the Big Bang itself. Nor does it offer insight into Dark Energy, a concept that Einstein opposed.
Re: Where did all the starships go?
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were cars before the Model T, but only for the rich. Ford made cars affordable for everyman. That changed everything. There were books before Gutenberg, but only for the rich. His printing press made them cheap enough to print newspapers. That changed everything. Before Bessemer, making steel was extremely expensive and rarely one. With the Bessemer Process, vast quantities of steel could be cheaply made. That…
And now travel to Mars is affordable for everyone! Oh, wait, no it's not.
I think we can agree that the current cost of going to Mars is currently unaffordable. The first step is to reduce the cost of launch, and that's proceeding well.
Re: Where did all the starships go?
#347I speculate that a lot of sci-fi reflects the cutting edge of science and technology at the time it is written. For well over a century a lot of that frontier was transportation: and we got "Around the World in 80 Days" and "20000 Leagues under the Sea" and then a lot of books about space. We also got "Canticle for Leibowitz" and other post-apocalyptic books out of the age when nuclear weapons and energy was top of m…
My favourite part of a Canticle for Leibowitz is the manual auto regressive model the old monk is using to recover damaged books. I remember reading the gpt2 paper and thinking hang on...
I just re-read Canticle after decades. It's startlingly well written, at least the first two parts. Head and shoulders above most 50s pulp. A masterpiece really. It was assigned reading in my high school. I wonder if anyone under 40 reads it anymore
Re: Where did all the starships go?
#348The starships left with the optimism. In the 50s there was a greater demand for stories with an unconstrained vision of the future where growth and expansion amount to flourishing. Later generations that lived in the excesses of growth saw it as the source of an intensifying dystopia. They stood athwart history and demanded decelleration. Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Escaping sidewa…
> Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer.
Although remember that Neuromancer, despite kicking off the generally spaceship-free cyberpunk genre, did have spaceships and even orbital cities!
Re: Where did all the starships go?
#349The starships left with the optimism. In the 50s there was a greater demand for stories with an unconstrained vision of the future where growth and expansion amount to flourishing. Later generations that lived in the excesses of growth saw it as the source of an intensifying dystopia. They stood athwart history and demanded decelleration. Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Escaping sidewa…
Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology. Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way). We also do…
Acceleration at 1g lets you get to another galaxy in a single human lifetime (although earth will have been swallowed by the sun by the time you arrive). Relativity is pretty counterintuitive.
Re: Where did all the starships go?
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
Three Body Problem in the book set the alien world in Alpha Centari, which is not a three body system. Even a cursory analysis at the time of writing would have ruled out Alpha Centari. It was shockingly bad research.
Alpha Centauri is a triple star, even if it is not the kind of three body system depicted in that story (mainly because one of the 3 stars is much smaller than the other 2, so it orbits stably around them like a very big and distant planet). While the triple star Alpha Centauri does not have mass ratios between its stars that are compatible with the story plot, I think that ignoring this technical detail is a much le…
Proxima orbits at a great distance from the inner pair of stars, around their center of mass. Proxima is also a small red dwarf star. This layout had to have been well-known by the time the book was written.
This is perhaps similar to the pursuit of "unobtainium" in Avatar.
Both just seem lazy.