Are you a science fiction author?
Would you like to prevent angry rants by an obscure book reviewer based in Ontario? Here are some common errors in worldbuilding that I loathe and abhor.
Please avoid from now on. TIA. (Thanks In Advance.)
Stars Move!
The stars in our part of the Milky Way (with some notable exceptions) tend to be headed in the same general direction at the same general speed, but not exactly in the same direction and not exactly at the same speed. Over time, the distances between stars change. Today, our closest known neighbour is Alpha Centauri at 4.3 light years. 70,000 years ago, it was Scholz’s Star at as little as 0.6 light years.
This error does not come up often. It’s a timescale thing: stars move on a scale marked in increments like time elapsed since the invention of beer. That is a lot slower than plot, for the most part, unless your plot covers thousands of years. Still, if your novel is set in the Solar System a billion years from now, don’t namecheck Alpha Centauri as Sol’s closest neighbor.
Wil McCarthy’s The Fall of Sirius is set in part far enough in the future that the distribution of the local stars would have changed measurably. As I recall, his map of the near stars actually took that into account.
Massive Worlds’ Mass Is Useful
There’s an old saying in SF that “Belters learn to avoid gravity wells,” often said by Belters equipped with hilariously overpowered fusion rockets delivering delta-vees hundreds of times greater than any planet’s escape velocity. Under reasonable propulsion regimes, planetary gravity can be a useful resource. Flybys can provide free changes in velocity, while the famous Oberth maneuver allows rockets to get more oomph out of a given quantity of rocket fuel than a simple mass-ratio-based calculation would indicate. The bigger the world, the greater the potential benefit.
If you’ve wondered why so many space probes en route to somewhere other than Jupiter make a point of passing through that system—this is why. Much the same explanation is behind MESSENGER’s multiple flybys of Venus and Earth on the way to Mercury. Judicious exploitation of massive objects opens access to parts of the Solar System not otherwise easily accessible, and can provide substantial reaction-mass savings.
That sounds a bit dull but think of it this way: there are a limited number of massive bodies that provide significant potential for flybys and Oberth maneuvers. Limited resources mean the potential for conflict over control of them. Conflict means plot!
The next item is a ‘Blame Heinlein’ item so here’s credit where credit is due: Robert Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones is one of very few books I can think of that exploits the Oberth maneuver for plotty goodness when the Stones leave the Earth-Moon system. M. J. Locke’s Up Against It provides an example of an author using Jupiter (off-stage, in a minor, worldbuilding context) as a source of free delta-v1 .
The Utility of Orbital Kinetic Weapons Is Often Grossly Overstated
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress painted a vivid picture of an Earth battered by cargo canisters lobbed from the Moon. Alas, if one does the math, one notices that some things simply cannot work the way Heinlein has them work.
As long as the projectile collides with its target faster than about 5.5 km/s, the energies per unit mass involved will be as great or greater than chemical explosives. They will not, however, approach the 25 TJ/kg provided by our friend the thermonuclear weapon, not until one reaches velocities up around 7,000 km/s. Such speeds are an order of magnitude faster than any orbital velocities found in our solar system. Kinetic weapons working at orbital velocities should be viewed as cousins of the World War II-era Grand Slam earthquake bomb, perhaps, not nukes.
But what about the dinosaurs, you ask? Offing the dinosaurs involved dropping an object the size of a mountain on the Earth. There are objects the size of mountains available to drop on Earth…but it’s important to note that it would be hard to do this in any stealthy way. Which makes nonsense of some events in the Expanse series, and brings us to …
Stealth Is Difficult To Do in Space
A lot of energy is needed to move from one orbit to another. Rocket exhaust is bright. It is much brighter than the rest of the universe. Detection systems are getting better all the time. If asteroid droppers and droppees have comparable tech (and don’t have access to rules-breaking super-science, such as the ability to duck through a neighbouring universe2 ), the fact that conventional rockets can be seen by conventional telescopes as far out as Pluto means sneaking up on the other guy is going to be tricky. Throwing mountains at them without anyone noticing would be even more so.
John Lumpkin’s The Human Reach series embraces this. When ships are visible AU (and weeks) away, both sides will know full well the size and acceleration of the other fleet. This info is of little use to the weaker side if they can’t manage equivalent accelerations. All they can do is wait for their attackers to reach them….
Water Is Not Uncommon in the Solar System
It may be that writers are misled by conditions in the inner system, where extremely arid conditions prevail. The Moon, Venus, Mercury, and even Mars are essentially bone-dry when compared to Earth. On Venus, for example, water is as common as neon is on Earth. Anyone looking around the inner system might well conclude that the universe is essentially a desert. Certainly the writers of V and Battlestar Galactica did.
Water is composed of hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, and oxygen, the third most common element in the universe. It turns out a chemical composed of the most common element and the third most common element is not all that rare once one gets out past the Solar System’s frost line. If water ice is cold enough, ice in quantity can survive for geological eras. Hence Ceres has more water than all the fresh water lakes on Earth combined. Hence moons like Ganymede, Europa, Callisto, Titan, and Enceladus3 have internal water oceans. Water contributes a lot of the mass of the ice giants Uranus and Neptune. Anyone out in the asteroid belt or farther should be able to mine water galore.
Granted, it may be very cold ice and water has an insanely high heat capacity, so melting it may be a bother. But plots that depend on near or total absence of water in the outer solar system are just flat out nonsensical. Please do not inflict more of these on me. Thank you.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
[1]The boost to delta-v is not exactly free. One generally pays in time: either the extra time it takes the payload to reach the target world, the extra time it takes to wait for the right launch windows to open, or both.
[2]As seen in Glen Cook’s “Das Boot IN SPACE” novel, Passage at Arms
[3]Poor Io. Its geological history has left it without much in the way of water, and while it does try to compensate with impressive fountains of molten rock, it’s just not the same.
If we count close orbit around the Sun. Otherwise it’s orders of magnitude larger than an orbital velocities we will encounter in our Solar system.
Of course, any system like Procyon or 40 Eridani has an object in it sufficiently dense and massive to have really interesting potential in this matter.
Heh. “fission peace enhancement devices”
For me, one of the most annoying worldbuilding errors is treating all of Mars or the Moon or the Belt as a single, unified nation and culture. I see this over and over again — Niven, Heinlein, Total Recall, The Expanse, etc. But look at how European colonialism worked in the Americas or Africa. You didn’t have a single unified colonist nation, you had multiple rival nations colonizing different areas and competing with each other over territory and resources in the new land mass (and also committing systematic genocide against the people already there, but that part wouldn’t translate to colonizing the Solar System). Even when the colonies broke away from their homelands, the colonized land mass remained partitioned into separate nations based on language, heritage, etc. So in my main fictional universe, consisting of the novel Only Superhuman and the stories (all but one) in Among the Wild Cybers, the asteroid belt community (which I call Striders because “Belters” has been done to death) isn’t just one nation, but multiple rival subcultures that have developed differently based on the asteroids and regions they settled. They’re like Ancient Greek city-states, sharing a common identity only in contrast to outsiders but otherwise being fiercely individualist and mutually contentious. And though I’ve only been able to touch on it in one published story so far, Mars also has separate nations on it, some independent and others client states of Earth corporations, and they’ve gone to war with each other more than once. It’s not a single Mars fighting against Earth, it’s some nations on Mars that are loyal to Earth vs. other nations on Mars that have split from Earth. And even the loyalists may be loyal to different Earth nations/corporations and thus clash with each other. A more unified Martian republic does eventually emerge, but it takes decades of work to create and probably doesn’t include every nation-state on the planet.
Another common political worldbuilding error is the assumption that space colonies would be libertarian. I almost made this mistake in Only Superhuman, until I realized that space habitats would need to have their populations very strictly controlled in order to remain livable, so you’d be more likely to have authoritarianism than libertarianism. So I retooled the Striders to be very devoted to the well-being and internal order of their own habitat-states, but prone to mistrust and clash with outsiders. So more of a state’s rights/anti-federalist thing than a libertarian thing. (I recently read a really fascinating article in The Atlantic, “How Will Police Solve Murders on Mars?” by Geoff Manaugh, about how law and crime would work in space, and there’s a section talking about how authoritarianism could really get a stranglehold due to the leaders’ control over the very air their subjects breathed — shades of Total Recall.)
For me, one of the most annoying worldbuilding errors is treating all of Mars or the Moon or the Belt as a single, unified nation and culture. I see this over and over again — Niven, Heinlein, Total Recall, The Expanse, etc. But look at how European colonialism worked in the Americas or Africa.
On the other hand, look at how European colonialism worked in India* or Siberia or Australia. I agree that it’s a mistake to think that a colonial or post-colonial Mars would inevitably be a single nation, but it’s definitely a plausible outcome.
*Yeah, yeah, Goa and Pondicherry. Still.
You are closer to being right about the Belt – at least physics is on your side. If you work out the delta-V requirements to get from one asteroid to another asteroid, you find that they are far higher than the delta-V to get from an asteroid to Mars or the Jupiter system. (Jerry Pournelle, “Those Pesky Belters And Their Torchships”.)
But then again, political geography doesn’t always fall into neat lumps based on how easy it is to travel from point to point. History has a way of mucking these things up. Look at the British Empire for an extreme example; it’s terrible worldbuilding to have a single polity that is made up of a bit of China and a bit of Arabia and a huge continent on one side of the world and half a continent on the other side of the world and some random islands in the Atlantic. How is that believable? Polities should be nice and compact like China and Brazil and France! (What do you mean, they own Reunion and a bit of Africa?) If you want a unified Belter state, you can have one – as long as you make up a good reason for why it exists.
The “Just like Little House on the Prairie but without the implied genocide because there are no natives to kill” model of space settlement only works for the first few groups. After that, the choice is do the hard work someplace undeveloped or find a pretext to take someone’s stuff.
That’s a good Atlantic article, by the way. Thanks for the link.
One of my model for alternate asteroid belts is the West Indies Federation, or for that matter Gran Columbia: independence, after which existing internal divisions break the new nation into parts. For any Canadian, the history of the Federation is a path down which the Canadas could easily have gone. Or go, for that matter: secession movements in Canada go right back to the 1860s.
Intersection of gravity + water = nobody is going to bother getting water from Saturn’s rings. There are much easier places to snag water from than a place so close to Saturn tidal forces preclude the formation of large moons.
@4/ajay: The British Raj in India didn’t just happen. There was a lengthy period of competition and conflict between European powers, mainly Britain and France, for colonial domination in the subcontinent, which Britain eventually won. But it doesn’t really work as an analogy for Mars, say, because the Raj was ruling over an existing population that wasn’t too happy about it. And once that population won its independence, it did, in fact, end up splitting into two conflicting nations, India and Pakistan (or rather, the British forced that partition as a “resolution” to a conflict they had created to begin with). Also, India is a relatively small and isolated region, not a whole continent like Africa, or two like the Americas.
And yeah, it may be theoretically possible for colonial Mars to be a single nation, if, say, there’s only a single world government or megacorporation on Earth doing the colonizing. I just don’t think that’s likely. I also think it’s cliched. It’s all anyone’s ever done. It’s lazy and unimaginative to have one Mars nation, one Belt nation, etc. I find it more interesting to consider the underexplored alternative suggested by real history, a region being competed over by multiple colonizers and thus having multiple distinct nations within it post-independence.
By the same token, I didn’t want to do the same kind of “Belter” story that others have done before me; I needed something more original if I wanted Only Superhuman to catch editors’ and readers’ eyes. So a Belt community that was at odds with itself let me avoid the cliche of Belters vs. Earthers and/or Martians, as well as fitting the needs of a hard-SF superhero novel by giving me a setting where individual, non-state peacekeepers serve a necessary role due to the lack of a unified central authority to enforce law and order. Travel time is not an issue, since my Striders have fast transportation of various sorts, using a network of rotating-tether momentum transfer stations and habitat-mounted drive beams to accelerate and decelerate magnetic sails, as well as using gravity-assist maneuvers whenever they’re useful (avoiding problem #2), thus allowing them to achieve considerably greater speeds than they could from rocket thrust alone.
But the different regions of the Belt develop different cultures due to their conditions. Ceres is like New York and Chicago, the heavily populated industrial center, colonized first because of its abundant water and organics. Vesta is more like LA and Vegas, the desert made to bloom artificially, drawing people in initially for mineral resources but later for the social and economic assets that build up there — entertainment, gambling, crime, etc. The Outer Main Belt has its water and organics spread out widely among more small asteroids rather than heavily concentrated in one place like Ceres, so it favors multiple small, scattered independent populations and thus supports both more rural communities and more eccentric or dangerous fringe groups. And Pallas, an asteroid almost as large as Ceres and Vesta but on a more inclined, harder-to-reach orbit, attracts those factions that wish to avoid civilization and authority, making it sort of a pirate island, an enclave for the worst tyrants and criminals. And then there are the Jupiter Trojans, which are the next step after the Outer Belt, where the fringe groups and hardy pioneers eventually migrate once the Outers become too civilized. So much SF treats the Belt as just one physically and culturally monolithic mass, and I realized that was a missed opportunity. There’s so much potential for worldbuilding that gets ignored when writers just fall back on the stock assumptions.
@7/James Davis Nicoll: That’s sort of what happened with my Striders — they fought a brief war for independence from Earth, but their wartime alliance quickly broke down into internecine squabbling as they all went their own ways.
I don’t think “authoritarian” is quite the right term. Your classic authoritarians are really good at ignoring information that contradicts what they want to be true. In an environment that’s actively trying to kill its population, the sort of behavior will have consequences more lethal than on Earth.
“Regulated” might be better.
Of course, a corollary to the stealth issue is that stealth isn’t about not being seen, it’s about not being noticed. An inhabited system could be expected to have enough small “debris” (space junk, micrometeorites, errant meteors, etc) drifting around that sensors would constantly be picking up false-positives.
Solution: use a computer to filter out the “noise” before the living sensor operator needs to see it. In this case, stealth is just a matter of knowing what algorithms are in use so the computer doesn’t identify you as an object of interest. Stealth then becomes an arms race between more sophisticated and intelligent algorithms (and the rare humans who bother to learn enough about how things work rather than relying on pressing the magic buttons).
Resolution is also an issue; a large (and delicate) telescope staying relatively steady in Earth orbit will be more sensitive than the smaller, rugged version built onto a mobile ship that vibrates whenever the engines fire. Future-Hubble might be able to monitor a ship orbiting Jupiter, but another ship on its way to Saturn would just see Jupiter (and maybe a few of the larger moons if the light is right).
About stealth in space, it sometimes happens in a science fiction story or show that the spaceship captain would order the complete shutdown of the drive and all the electrical systems so that the ship could coast undetected, as if it were a submarine. This type of plot point disregards a simple fact: as long as you have humans on board, you need to keep the crew quarters in a livable temperature – i..e, above freezing point. But 0 Celsius is still 273 kelvin. The ship, freezing cold as it is for its occupants, would still burn like a torch to anyone pointing an infrared sensor at it.
Currently, NASA tracks about half a million objects in orbit around Earth, only about 20,000 of which are larger than a softball. Presumably, in a Solar System divided between the space faring nations of Earth, the Galilean Confederation, Mars, the Associated Bodies of the Asteroid Belt Excluding Those Jerks on Ceres, and Tim Hortons Coffee, Donuts and Heavy Industry LLC, detection technology will be even better and the various powers motivated to scrutinize objects closely.
That said, space combat in Bodacious Space Pirates generally comes down to whose ECM is best.
it doesn’t really work as an analogy for Mars, say, because the Raj was ruling over an existing population that wasn’t too happy about it
Well, yeah. But none of your analogies work either, for exactly the same reason. But if you’re committed to using European colonies as an analogy for what a colonised Mars would look like, you can have “lots of polities” – Africa – or “one big polity” – Australia – or “one big polity that used to be lots of polities” – India.
I also think it’s cliched. It’s all anyone’s ever done.
Not so: Red Dust by Paul McAuley. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. The Outward Urge, by John Wyndham. Lots of different Belt and Jovian polities in the Quiet War books.
detection technology will be even better and the various powers motivated to scrutinize objects closely.
Unless they get lazy. You can take a huge, noisy, radar-reflective aircraft and fly it all the way into the headquarters of the most powerful military on Earth, if you want, and even though they’ve spent (wild estimate) about $5 trillion or so in the last fifty years on technology designed to detect and destroy enemy aircraft, they still won’t be able to stop you.
Corollary to point #1: Stars move, but you’ll never be moving in such a way that you see them moving relative to each other as per the opening of Star Trek.
My own list also includes misunderstandings of the relative sizes and distances apart of planets, solar systems and galaxies.
Unless one’s clock is dialed way down. It’s sad to discover what one took for an FTL drive is in fact just slows the passage of time for the traveller….
Stellar motion might be a plot point in a portal network like the one in Mote in God’s Eye, where tramlines only form between stars that are comparatively close to each other. If the Empire has thousands of stars within it, the odds that tramlines are forming or breaking somewhere in the empire are probably not too bad.
Speaking of scale issues, there’s an Edmond Hamilton space patrol story where the evil aliens of the week want to recharge their comet by rubbing it vigorously on the Milky Way….
Well, on the subject of stealth, most of the books I’ve read that use it also have magic space drives, and an arms race evolved to detect and exploit said magic drives. So *not* using them becomes stealthy. It’s not that they can’t be seen, it’s that people aren’t looking in the right way.
See for example Weber’s Battle of Hades.
Sure, any spaceship will be warmer than the environment around it, but let’s face it – space is staggeringly big, and there’s an awful lot of nothing in between every something, even in an environment as small as our Solar System. Just look at how far apart the asteroids are in the Belt. Would you be using infrared to spot the metres long warm thing in front, or some form of particle detector to spot the tens of miles long wake of highly charged exhaust particles?
@10/James: Good point about authoritarianism. But you’d definitely need a regimented system where people couldn’t just go their own way and live without a central government, so the idea of space colonies as libertarian paradises is naive. I suppose any extreme political ideology would have to give way to hard pragmatism.
@14/ajay: I’m not “committed” to using European colonialism –on the contrary, my whole point is that there’s more than one possible way of approaching a story about space colonies. I don’t need to talk about the existing model because it’s already well-known. I’m offering my alternative as an additional approach to consider, not a replacement for it. This isn’t a zero-sum game. This thread is explicitly about challenging conventional storytelling tropes, so that’s what I’m doing.
And yes, okay, I did exaggerate when I said the single-Mars or single-Belt model is all that anyone does. It just feels that way to me sometimes, because I’ve seen it done so often.
@16/hoopmanjh: Even worse is when the stars in the background all move as a single mass, as if they were on a 2D sheet right behind the spaceship. This happened all the time with cockpit shots of Vipers in both the original and rebooted Battlestar Galactica. It made it look like the Vipers were constantly spinning in place rather than moving forward.
It’s true deep gravity wells can provide gravity assists as well as nice Oberth benefits.
Shallow gravity wells have their advantages, regardless. You can have delta V’s much greater than planetary escape velocity. But if your thrust to weight ratio is less than 1, you won’t get off the ground.
For example Hall Thrusters can have 30 km/s exhaust velocityy. Which would be great if local gravity field is on the order of millimeters per second. And such is the case for solar gravity in the Main Belt. However a Hall Thruster’s pathetic thrust would not be able to take a payload off the surface of Ceres or Vesta, much less get off a planetary surface.
If Ceres or Vesta had space elevators an ion rocket could dock with the elevator and thus cargo and passengers could move between the asteroid’s surface and the rocket. And space elevators are far more doable on places like Vesta and Ceres that have a healthy angular velocity and shallow gravity wells. Space elevators are much less doable on places like Earth or Mars.
TL;DR It’s perfectly fine for hard SF to be singing the praises of shallow gravity wells.
@9 And British colonialism in India evolved over the 200+ years of its existence. Up until the Great Mutiny in 1857 the East India Company, a private corporation, was effectively ruling on behalf of the British Government, including having its own army to enforce its rule. That changed after the Mutiny, when the Crown took over direct control. Even then, the British did not directly rule the entire subcontinent. There were numerous so-called “princely states” that were ruled by maharajahs whom the British treated pretty much as heads of state. They were quasi-independent in terms of local government but subject to overall British supervision with regard to their relationships with the rest of India. During the run-up to independence in 1947 there was much negotiation over integrating those states and their rulers into the new nation.
@10
Yeah. There would have to be some form of tightly regulated communal rules and allocations of resources to ensure social wellbeing in order to avoid the type of damage that a free for all could lead to. If only there were words for those kinds of systems?
I’m not saying low escape velocity worlds are not useful, just that there’s a use for high escape velocity worlds too.
I can’t remember the numbers any more and it’s no use looking on usenet but there was a discussion on rasfs that touched on sending stuff from Jupiter’s trojans to Earth via Jupiter. The good news: required delta vee way down. Bad news: takes much longer.
A foot note that got dropped before I submitted this piece: the other thing big worlds do that’s useful is collect impressive sets of satellites. Jupiter has been hording worldlets for billions of years. Poke around and who knows what you will find?
That works two ways though; it also means it’s going to take a lot of time to go somewhere, which increases the probability of detection.
It was shown a few years ago that using available equipment then, you could produce an infrared scanning platform that could scan the entire solar system in 24 hours and could detect something potentially interesting and worth a closer look with dedicated high-res equipment. Put up 2 platforms in opposing solar orbits, and that’s 100% coverage at any given moment. With two platforms with synchronized scanning patterns, that’s a maximum of 12 hours where you might not be noticed. Cruising through interplanetary space, there’s not much you can do in 12 hours, and if you can, that’s going to be so energy intensive everyone will notice.
Oh, hey, one other iffy bit of worldbuilding I see a lot: The assumption that firing a gun in a spaceship or habitat would be terrible because it would rupture the hull. Umm, spaceships and spacesuits face a routine hazard of being hit by micrometeoroids that can do damage equivalent to a bullet. The spacesuits the Apollo astronauts wore on the Moon were made with kevlar and other bulletproof materials (something that Doctor Who: “The Impossible Astronaut” got right, though I saw some viewers insist it was implausible). Presumably spaceship hulls would also be made to be meteoroid-resistant and thus also bullet-resistant. There could be a danger of a bullet hitting an important bit of equipment or ricocheting dangerously, but a hull rupture isn’t that great a risk. Or at least, it’s a routine, everyday risk that space dwellers would be well-prepared to cope with both in the design of their ships/habitats and in their emergency training.
Heck, honestly, the biggest problem with firing a gun in a spaceship or a compact habitat might be the noise. The sound of a gun going off in an enclosed space can cause permanent hearing damage. That’s part of why the guns in Only Superhuman use relatively quiet linear accelerators to launch bullets (at least in the print novel, though not in the audiobook). Although guns aren’t really preferred for close-quarters fighting because of the difficulty aiming and the risk of friendly fire, so in the cramped conditions of spaceship corridors, it might be more preferable to use hand-to-hand, knives, batons, or the like (which works out well for my superheroes-in-space stories, although ironically I didn’t learn that until after Only Superhuman came out).
There was a Baxter a decade or so ago where the protags decide the best way to flee the Galaxy Dominating Space Fascists Who By the Way Have FTL is to flee in a sublight generation ship of a design known to fail to avoid falling into terminal decadence every time. Step one involved zooming past Jupiter to get that extra 0.02% C for a trip whose cruise speed was something like 0.5 or 0.25 C. Sorry, sneaking past Jupiter, because the Galaxy Dominating Space Fascists Who By the Way Have FTL were based off Earth. Sorry, sneaking past Jupiter, because the Galaxy Dominating Space Fascists Who By the Way Have FTL were based off Earth, in a ship whose space drive was (if my calculations were right) visible from Tau Ceti. It was not my favourite Baxter.
Detection systems are getting better all the time.
There are limits to this set by physics: you can’t detect more photons than actually reach you from the rocket exhaust. Modern astronomical-grade CCD detectors are already operating at quantum efficiencies of 80-90%, which means they detect 80-90% of all the photons that fall on them, so there’s very little room for improvement. (You can still, of course, make your telescope wider, or integrate for longer periods of time.
Anyone looking around the inner system might well conclude that the universe is essentially a desert. Certainly the writers of V and Battlestar Galactica did.
And, I was amused to discover, the writers of Battle: Los Angeles.
To be honest, I think a book could fail on all five issues and still be considered harder than the majority of SF!
(sixteen minutes of increasingly vitriolic cursing)
Indeed.
… the fact that conventional rockets can be seen by conventional telescopes as far out as Pluto means sneaking up on the other guy is going to be tricky.
The somewhat annoying thing about the page you link to is that it mixes some discussions that partly recognize the nature of space backgrounds with simplistic, erroneous stuff like “The 285 Kelvin habitat module will stand out like a search-light against the three Kelvin background of outer space” or “Running the life support alone makes a starship stand out 300K hotter – for warm-blooded oxygen-breathers – than the background of space”.
At most wavelengths — particularly the IR or optical wavelengths most people assume one would be searching at — the actual background in space is considerably brighter than the 3K cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang.
The “PERMANENT AND PERFECT STEALTH IN SPACE” part of that page (by “Matterbeam”) demonstrates some awareness of this, but the writer has missed the fact that the background levels they’re using in their calculations are “cosmic/extragalactic background light”, which means an estimate of what the background sky would look like if you were outside our galaxy entirely (and not inside a stellar system). The reality is that there is a lot of optical and IR light coming from our own galaxy, and more coming from within our solar system — mostly the combination of scattered sunlight and IR thermal emission from dust particles commonly referred to as “zodiacal light”. They also mis-converted their estimate for the background, understimating *that* by a factor of 10; the net result is that their estimated detection distances are probably about ten times too large for the case of trying to detect things when you’re in the vicinity of Earth’s orbit.
So I remain a little skeptical about these “conventional rockets can be seen by conventional telescopes as far out as Pluto” statements, since I’m not convinced the proper calculations have actually been done.
hoopmanjh @@@@@ 16:
Stars move, but you’ll never be moving in such a way that you see them moving relative to each other as per the opening of Star Trek.
That’s a parallax effect: as you move through space, stars closer to the you will appear to move relative to stars further away. (The particular opening sequence of the original Star Trek makes sense if the camera is moving at some FTL speed and looking backwards. Admittedly, the opening sequence for Next Generation moves in an impressionistic fashion between different space scenes, so it doesn’t make as much sense.)
@13, the ABABETJC sounds like a lot of fun.
Michael Grosberg @@@@@ 12:
But 0 Celsius is still 273 kelvin. The ship, freezing cold as it is for its occupants, would still burn like a torch to anyone pointing an infrared sensor at it.
If it’s far enough away, you’ll have trouble picking it out from the diffuse glow of all the dust — in our solar system, in interstellar space, and in other galaxies — that’s at similar temperatures.
There’s a big difference about future colonization that I didn’t see anyone mention: transportation and communication speeds. The English colonies in North America were fairly separate and unified with great effort, while the Spanish colonies fractured heavily on independence. But we’re talking up to 1810, with 30 mile/day land transport and communication speeds. With a few satellites, people on opposite sides of Mars can talk in real time. I assume the air is too thin for airplanes but there are suborbital hops (very fast), trains (expensive to set up but pretty fast), or vehicles (10-20x faster than Earth colonial history.) And effective terraforming will take coordination.
That doesn’t mean it has to be unified, and if colonies are established by e.g. the US and China then there are strong political pressures to be separate. But the technology is different enough that I don’t find simple historical analogies convincing. The radius beyond which you can have neighbors you mostly ignore is a lot larger than it was.
Note that while Earth is still far from having a world government of the usual national kind, interstate warfare has gone down a lot, and ad hoc global governance structures to coordinate economic, environmental, and law enforcement concerns are abundant and multiplying. A solar system with easy interplanetary transport and private possession of high energy space drives will have similar incentives to cooperate if not outright govern.
OTOH a colonized solar system could produce conditions almost entirely unlike anything historical. For most of history communication went at the speed of transport, apart from low bandwidth beacon/semaphore systems, or rarely organized pony expresses. These days communication is basically instance but you can fly around the world in a day, or nuke a spot in an hour. A solar system can have communication in minutes or hours but transport in weeks or months; the closest analogy would be the decades between the advent of the electric telegraph and the advent of long distance air travel — so like 1850-1920. And with steam or clipper ships, not that great an analogy.
Stealth: hard SF stealth is difficult. Most settings have some form of FTL magic, which can give you a degree of stealth magic for free, depending on the mechanism.
Some authors go the other way with FTL: James White has a story where starships are visible lightyears away. Military organizations study decades old images to better understand old battles.
I wonder if this a good time to talk about the overlay between Science Fiction and Fantasy. Brandon Sanderson is a fantasy author but he often takes what he describes as a science fiction type world building approach.
To quote an interview he gave:
“To Sanderson, the biggest difference in worldbuilding for science fiction and fantasy is that science fiction takes what we have and tries to extrapolate what’s plausible. “Obviously not all science fiction tries to do this, but it’s an easy rule of thumb: take what we have, extrapolate the plausible. Fantasy works backward: take something that’s impossible, make it feel plausible.””
And you can see that in his world building of Roshar in the Stormlight Archive.
I
Tropes that can go away in fantasy include “horses that are indistinguishable from motorcycles”, and “Any version of Arthurian Britain where the Britons and invading Saxons somehow found time for civil engineering projects that would be challenging for modern-day nations.”
@31/PeterErwin: Yes, obviously it’s supposed to be parallax. Anyone who’s ever looked out the window of a moving car understands the principle; the whole reason they created that effect in TOS was because they knew audiences would understand it as creating the impression of movement. So I doubt that hoopmanjh needed that explained. The reason the effect is problematical is that parallax with stars that are light-years apart would only be visible as shown in TOS if the ship were travelling at several light-years per second, which would let them cross the entire galaxy in less than a day — so much for Voyager‘s entire premise.
@34/drs: Again, I’m not saying a multinational Mars is mandatory, just that it’s an alternative possibility that I find more interesting to explore than the usual monolithic Mars government. I just resist the tendency of science fiction to essentialize people by planet or region of origin — all Martians are one culture, all Klingons are one culture, etc. I’m always looking for the diversity within each population. How are Belt inhabitants different from each other? How are Vulcans different from each other? A whole planet, let alone a whole asteroid belt, is a huge place. There’s bound to be a multiplicity of factions and subcultures within it, whether they’re actually separate governments or something else. So I reflexively push back against the tendency of SF to reduce planetary cultures to monoliths. Too much SF depicts entire planets as having less cultural diversity than a single city block in Manhattan or London.
So when I cited the diversity of colonizing nations in America or Africa, I wasn’t saying “It has to happen exactly the same way in space,” because obviously it wouldn’t. I’m just using them as examples to illustrate the idea of a colonized territory having multiple nations within it.
If we’re talking about cities or nations in space as opposed to on planets, hill spheres seem like reasonable natural boundaries.
@39/tediousempire: I tend to think of Hill spheres as the planetary/lunar equivalent of territorial waters. The region dominated by the body’s gravity is also the region controlled by its laws.
Another one for me (again related to scale) is when borders between two interstellar entities are treated like a line drawn on a map, or even like the surface of a bubble.
At some point there will be an essay on the options available to SF authors who want to map significant parts of the galaxy, and how all of the options are in some way unsatisfactory.
@33, a double hull would also reduce the amount of thermal leakage. You’d have the spots where support struts touch both hulls, but that would be minimal compared to the entire surface. The inner hull would probably be laced with liquid cooling and most likely using a laser to vent out the heat periodically.
@41/hoopmanjh: On that subject, I always think of the animation from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos showing two interstellar civilizations branching out across space and intermingling with each other, less like two contiguous blobs than two different trees with their branches interlaced. It seems to me that the only territory an interstellar civilization could meaningfully control and claim as its own would be the planetary systems it occupied and the well-traveled space lanes between them. The rest is too vast and empty to be worth trying to police.
@44/CLB — Yes, exactly that.
EDITED TO ADD: Especially if you posit hyperspace or wormhole transit or some other form of FTL that doesn’t involve traveling from point A to point B in real space.
@40, there’s that, but also different locations within the same hill sphere have a more stable relationship with each other if we aren’t assuming very energetic drives. From Earth or close to Earth you can reach essentially anywhere in the Earth-Moon system fairly quickly on fairly short notice at essentially any time, which is very useful for things like disaster relief and routine trade. The same would be true for a dozen or more stations orbiting each other and the 5 km NEA they were mined from, but would not be true between that cluster of stations and the Earth.
Ooh, another one that occurred to me reading this thread; budget.
Just because something is scientifically possible doesn’t mean anyone’s willing or able to pay for it. Maybe this is less an “error” and more a convenient excuse for idiosyncratic technology in a setting.
@43
Just don’t point that laser at a planet, or allow some pesky plucky rebels to start shooting at your thermal exhaust ports.
The reason people always want stealth in space is that it makes tactics much more interesting. In any kind of combat, deceiving your enemy about your forces and intentions is a major part of tactical planning. But if stealth is impossible in space, tactics become trivial. Detect the rocket exhausts, calculate the accelerations and then the masses of the ships, use the masses to estimate the enemy forces, calculate the odds of winning, then decide whether or not to surrender. You’d hardly need human military officers at all, a present-day smartphone app could do it. One the other hand that sounds like a perfect setting for espionage, to find out what the enemy forces are before you can directly detect them.
@3 Check out the Mongoose printing of 2300AD for a totally balkanized future that arises out of the ashes of WWIII on Earth for a future that avoids the idea of a mono-cultures anywhere.
Shades of how asteroid deflection is handled in films (a desperate, last minute effort to nuke into debris a space mountain before it scours Earth clean) and how it might happen in real life (having noticed the Torino 8 rock a century and a half before impact, a small robot armed with a can of white spray paint is dispatched to change the rock’s albedo just enough to ensure a miss. The robot is monitored by a succession of increasingly low ranking technicians.).
Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two was the introduction I remember to the usefulness of gravity wells and Oberth maneuvers; I’d read about the Voyager slingshot flybys before, but 2010 was where it first really sank in (and the first place I remember that specifically mentioned the Oberth aspect).
Diversity is definitely good, and underused! I just wanted to note there are good reasons to have planetary or even system level governments.
Babylon-5 paid token note to the Narn having multiple religions Barrayar has multiple linguistic communities though they’re named more than seen. Bujold does have a few multi-government worlds (including Earth!), giving mercenaries something to do other than blockade wormholes. Later focus on Trantor did have a lot of neighborhood diversity.
I think Niven had the chirpsithra taking tide-locked red dwarf planets; humans could have enjoyed the yellow dwarfs if we got out there and someone else hadn’t taken them. Niven’s Outsiders don’t even want anything colder than Pluto and the puppeteers barely want to be in space at all. I think some authors have had interpenetration of rocky and gas giant species — Poul Anderson, Banks’s Algebraist?
OTOH the Culture, and Star Trek at least in the novels I read, have good enough interstellar sensors and speed that boundary surfaces actually make sense. Yes, they *will* see you trying to sneak across, four light-years away.
@@@@@James Davis Nicoll: Great column! Thanks!
@@@@@ChristopherLBennett – interesting – I’m going to have to check those out.
@53/drs: I think what I’m saying is, even if there is a planetary government, it’s likely to be a later-emerging union of multiple smaller nations, rather than the whole planet being a single colony that gains independence all in one go and remains a single unified nation from then on. I mean, I suppose that version is possible, but it seems that anything as large as a whole planet would be bound to have multiple factions that want to go their own ways due to differing beliefs or agendas, and so that if a single planetwide Martian colonial society were liberated from its Earthly masters and free to embrace the fruits of independence, then one consequence of that independence might very well be fragmentation, since there’d be nothing holding the different subcultures/factions together anymore. Or it might be that the colony would split into rebels and loyalists, and you’d end up with a situation akin to the US and Canada, one independent and the other still part of the empire/commonwealth. I’m not opposed to the idea of large, unified goverments — I just don’t think they’d automatically be contiguous with physical locations. Instead of a war between an Earth government and a Mars government, you might have a war between, say, an authoritarian empire that controls Eurasia and the northern hemisphere of Mars and a commonwealth of democratic nations in Africa, the Americas, Luna, and the southern hemisphere of Mars.
And yes, in Star Trek they do have the sensor capability to observe their whole border, but my point is that most of what’s within their territory is vast amounts of empty space, so why bother? It’s more practical to focus on defending the space around populated systems and space lanes, rather than wasting all that energy on emptiness. That’s not too different from how Earth nations governed and controlled their territories in preindustrial times. We’ve been conditioned by modern maps to think of territories as vast continuous blobs, but it used to be that territory was effectively more of a network of communities and roads, and a metropolis’s ability to enforce its military and legal power over the surrounding lands was proportional to their distance and the travel time involved. (Even today, those big colored blobs on maps are misleading. If you look at a map of the US’s population distribution, it’s hugely uneven — the eastern half is pretty evenly settled, but the western half has only a handful of sizeable population clusters until you get to the West Coast. And heck, look at Canada. Most of it is empty.)
Is there a logical Tor contributor to write Dear SF Authors, Cities Don’t Work Like That?
One of the little details that suggested the author of the Cassandra Kreznov books came from somewhere like Australia or Canada (dominated by a comparative handful of cities and with an excess of wilderness) was the way in which the main world in the series has one huge city, with all the efficiencies and benefits that suggests, and a lot of nothing, rather than endless planetary suburbia.
I understand it’s logical to have more than one nation on each planet, but it still surprised me when John Barnes did it in the Springer books. Maybe I’d just read too many stories with single-government planets. You’d think the cultural colonies would grumble a bit at having to share a planet.
@Gareth 57: IIRC, they had to because of either splitting the costs of settlement (exclusive rights were expensive) or two different slow boat expeditions arrived.
Gordon Dickson’s ‘Tactics of Mistake’ depicts conflicts between diverse colonies on Terraformed planets. That’s how the early Dorsai make their livings.
Bonhed @@@@@ 43 – Might work. But it would for sure at least increase the hull weight by 50% minimum, then you have the liquid cooling for the internal hull, so it’s probably closer to 100%. I’m not a rocket scientist, but that doesn’t strike me as a good idea because you haven’t increased the size of the fuel tanks and engines to keep it at the same performance as a vessel with a single hull, so it wouldn’t go as fast as something with a single hull. And as you increase the size of the fuel tanks and engines, you need still more hull and so it goes…
Unless of course you’ve got reactionless thrusters or sufficiently advanced materials sciences that might as well be unobtainium. In either case, we’re heading into space fantasy and I’ve got a slightly used Deathstar to sell you…
Couple of links that might interest you: Project Rho (aka Atomic Rockets) Detection in Space and Project Rho’s common misconceptions.
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Gareth Wilson @@@@@ 49 – Beg to differ. Triplanetary by SJGames is a board game based explicitly around these concepts and the tactics are pretty interesting. The tactics are less about being sneaky and more about getting your opponent to make a mistake – or helping them along in making one. More sophisticated players manage to box their opponents in by misdirecting them while playing the iron law of logistics. That game has long been a favorite of mine.
A planet that starts out as a small colony can easily grow into one big planetary culture. We don’t see that much secessionism in big countries like the US, India, or China. The UK made a drunken lurch out of the EU but even EU countries ravaged by the euro aren’t leaving. And the Martian colonies are likely going to be a single economy, and single ecology (what temperature should Mars be?) providing strong reason to stick together.
Also, I figure the American Revolution story is less likely than the British “let Canada and Australia go” story. Of course, that’s less exciting for novels.
On the flip side, I agree that a plausible near term future (pretending that colonization is plausible at all) has multiple Earth nations seeding multiple Mars (or whatever) colonies, thus providing multiple polities from the get-go. And it probably is under-used in fiction.
I’m just saying, I see good practical reasons to end up with planetary governance — or for unified planets to be better run than balkanized ones. At our tech and power level “live and let live” doesn’t work the way it does for scattered farmers (or Belters.)
You might want to look into the background of India’s Armed Forces (Special Powers) Acts.
@61/drs: “We don’t see that much secessionism in big countries like the US…”
Ummmm…. There’s a guy here named Abraham Lincoln who’d like a word with you.
“I’m just saying, I see good practical reasons to end up with planetary governance”
Oh, I’m a firm believer that world government is better. But as you say, it’s something a world would end up with. In my universe, Mars does eventually end up with a world government, but it doesn’t start out with one. My problem is with the assumption that it would start that way, that it would only ever be that way. My problem is with the all-too-common narrative where a monolithic planetwide colony rebels as a unit against Earth, wins its independence, and then becomes a monolithic planetwide nation that rivals Earth in interplanetary politics.
The closest historical example to how the human race might chose to organize itself for settlement in the Solar System off Terra is Antarctica, which is thousands of times more habitable than anywhere off the planet (breathable atmosphere, one gee, standard pressure, plenty of water, low transportation costs, and – arguably – resources that might even be extracted economically), and even after (roughly) seven decades of intense effort by all the major powers and more than a few minor ones, there’s no permanent (as in goes there and stays, much less born and raised) population.
However interesting the rest of the Solar System will undoubtedly be in terms of what human-tended research stations can find out vis a vis automated or remotely-piloted probes (orbital, landers, rovers, fliers, whatever), the most poorly realized elements of world building in SF are economics and sociology.
Mars ain’t a place to raise your kids, after all…
Yeah, why do we write SF? Just write essays then.
What you would call SF today will be Space Opera tomorrow.
Or they could remove the “fiction” part and call it Scientasy.
There are those who like to write possible scenarios within ‘reality’.
Others break through and unleash new realities
Medieval Europe is an example of “nations” that are not one continuous territory.
Put the ice in a black bucket and it will melt. Guaranteed.
Great article, James, and some very informative comments, too. Sorry I’m too sleepy to add anything helpful of my own. *g*
@56 Well spotted! Joel Shepherd is Australian. Good see someone can pick up on the cultural nuances of writers. Minor correction: it’s “Cassandra Kresnov” not “Cassandra Kreznov”.
I like the idea of getting stealth in space by subverting the other side’s sensors. I don’t know if it’s extremely plausible, but it should at least be good enough for science fiction stories.
The Hot Equations by Ken Burnside has more about stealth in space not being feasible, and also about the cost of changing the destination of a rocket ship.
To build human societies I think a new Rome would happen again. Only the rich who can afford to leave off-world would be considered commoners, while everyone else works for the Corporation and Military that provides a life for offworlders. Obviously, only the rich can afford to relocate as the means to do so requires their wealth. But in a society that prioritizes space settlements means that public institutions serve this goal. If you ain’t serving it then you are its target. Corporation and Military brings in anyone by force (pyshcogical and physical) for the betterment of settlers. Like the Roman slave system.
For the convenience of fiction Corporation and Military never becomes plural because examining too many of them becomes convoluted
@8 I would think that the rings would be a handy source of water for orbital facilities around Saturn. With ice from the rings, and volatiles scooped from the atmosphere of Titan, you would have a lot of handy stuff to work with.
@72/AlanBrown: But many of Saturn’s moons are made almost entirely of ice, and they’re much farther out of Saturn’s gravity well than the rings are. So it’d be easier to mine ice from them than from the rings, wouldn’t it?
The orbital velocity of Saturn’s rings is something like twice or more the orbital velocity of something in low Earth orbit and escape velocity is, of course, root two times that. Saturn has lots of dinky, low escape velocity icy bodies out far enough that orbital velocities are also small.
@71, not a good parallel. Rich Romans rarely relocated, they just bought up agricultural land, mines, etc. The state used to settle retiring soldiers in the provinces an arrangement welcome to both parties as the ex-soldiers became land owners and provided a body of potential soldier in case of local rebellion.
The big problem with colonizing the solar system is the lack of arable land to attract settlers. Mining or manufacturing jobs will have to be the attraction
The problem here is many Anglospheric SF fans basically have three, maybe four, go-to historical models: Rome, Dung Age Europe, Weird Hat America, and maybe the Raj. And a lot of the details have been buffed off.
The Moon is Harsh Mistress, for example, riffs on Weird Hat America (We’re Forming Our Own Band) but declines to adopt details like the rebels insisting the imperial power hand over people the rebels believe they own.
@71, to add to what Princess Roxana said: much of the Roman labor force, especially in agriculture, comprised slaves. The rich Romans largely stayed in the cities, as that was where a) their money was and b) that’s where the real opportunity was, not on the frontier. They may move out to the frontier as military governors, as that’s a good way to move up in the hierarchy, and a good way to get wealth, but then they’d move back to the center.
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If one looks at historical instances of colonization and emigration, it is not the wealthy elites who move.
@75/roxana: “The big problem with colonizing the solar system is the lack of arable land to attract settlers. Mining or manufacturing jobs will have to be the attraction”
Think The High Frontier. You can build artificial space habitats and create your own land. There’s enough raw material in the Main Asteroid Belt alone to build habitats equalling dozens or hundreds of times Earth’s entire land area. And you can spin them to get full gravity rather than having to adapt to low gravity. That’s the route I went in my universe — the Striders don’t live on the asteroids, they live on habitats orbiting the asteroids and built from their materials. Or habitats built by carving out small asteroids and spinning them up.
Although the whole idea of “arable land” may be obsolete in the future. Farming the way it’s historically been done on Earth is way too inefficient for space dwellers. Livestock agriculture in particular would be far too wasteful; it’s already really harmful to Earth’s environment, so the more controlled environments of space habitats could never sustain it. Spacers would probably either be vegetarian or rely on vat-grown/bioprinted meats. And for growing crops, hydroponic or aeroponic farm complexes would be more efficient and less wasteful of land and water than open fields.
Comparing the area needed to collect enough power to fuel human metabolisms with the actual area used by our incredibly inefficient systems for turning sunlight into food use is quite vexing. Say each human needs about 100 W, ten billion humans use 1 TW. Even if we’re limited to, say, 100 W/m^2 on average (because not every location is equatorial and it’s not always noon), we should be able to fuel everyone off 10 000 km^2 or a patch 100 km x 100 km.
Regarding hull rupture: this, and a number of related tropes assume that people who design inhabited pressure vessels — submarines, pressurized aircraft, and spacecraft — are stupid (I’m looking at you, the late Michael Crichton). They figured out the whole “not rupture from a little hole” quite a while ago. There’s an entire field, called fracture mechanics devoted to that sort of thing.
@81/swampyankee: I still find it amusing that Star Trek: Enterprise: “Minefield,” made in 2002 and set in 2152, showed Starfleet spacesuits advanced enough to have a liquid layer that automatically patched any suit rupture, yet Star Trek: First Contact, made in 1996 and set in 2373, showed that the only way Worf could stop his suit leg from leaking air was to tie a makeshift tourniquet around it. That’s what you get when the stories are told in reverse chronological order.
Then again, Starfleet has a history of forgetting useful technologies, like how seat restraints and security armor disappeared between the movies and The Next Generation, or how “Spock’s Brain” showed that standard uniforms had built-in heating units to deal with Arctic temperatures but The Wrath of Khan had the crew donning heavy parkas for away missions. And those were stories told in chronological order, so they don’t even have a good excuse for the regression.
@79, CLB, It’s not the arable land as such so much as the economic Independence that made that land desirable to so many people. My own ancestors, on my father’s side came to America to own their own land, having been tenants in Europe. We’ll have to find some comparable attraction to encourage the colonization of space.
And every time I watch The Force Awakens, it hurts my soul when they rush out of Maz’s place, look up into the sky, and see the Republic capital planet getting blown up.
(Actually, that brings up another one that’s more of an issue for visual forms of SF — planetary systems with way too much stuff in them, all way too close together, like when you look up into the sky and see five different planets each about the size of a hula hoop held at arm’s length.)
@83/roxana: There was an interesting theory proposed earlier this year that the reason Homo sapiens survived when other hominins did not is because we are uniquely driven to colonize ecological niches that aren’t naturally suited for our survival, compelling us to innovate in order to adapt to them. Which would confirm what Gene Roddenberry and Carl Sagan always believed: that exploring and expanding into new realms is what makes us human. We always find our way to new places sooner or later, no matter how risky or impractical it seems to the more cautious among us. We invent new technologies, new social norms, new economic systems that allow us to thrive in places we couldn’t before. Our whole history and civilization is an outgrowth of that imperative. It makes no sense to expect us to stop now.
Job opportunities in Spaaaace! :-D
hoopmanjh @@@@@ 84:
And every time I watch The Force Awakens, it hurts my soul when they rush out of Maz’s place, look up into the sky, and see the Republic capital planet getting blown up.
I’m particularly fond of how the SuperMegaDeathStar beams can start out moving slowly enough that Kylo Ren can watch them move out from the SMDS, then cross many light years in the matter of a few seconds, then apparently slow down right at the end so the people on the target worlds can see them coming before they hit.
@87 — And the way that it can branch out to hit multiple planets, moons & ships in the target system.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on the whole “Starkiller” aspect of the base.
Star Wars has never purported to be anything more than pure fantasy, a sword-and-sorcery samurai WWII Western race-car movie series with space-opera trappings. There’s never been a shred of plausible science in it to begin with. So the whole Starkiller thing, while it does kind of pull me out of the story, doesn’t bother me as much there as something comparable would in the likes of Star Trek.
@CLB: Two words: Red matter.
@90/hoopmanjh: Exactly my point. That kind of nonsense is less bothersome in a fantasy like Star Wars than it was in Star Trek. There are plenty of scientific absurdities in decades’ worth of Trek movies that annoy me (red matter is pretty much just a rehash of trilithium from Generations, and not nearly as stupid as the Genesis Device), but there’s no sense expecting any kind of science in Star Wars, a series that explicitly tells you at the start of every movie that it’s a fairy tale (“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”).
Yeah, given that X-wings swoop around like P-51 Mustangs I’m not expecting hard SF in my Star Wars or anything like that, but some things just take me out of the story more than they probably should.
@77:”The Moon is Harsh Mistress, for example, riffs on Weird Hat America (We’re Forming Our Own Band) but declines to adopt details like the rebels insisting the imperial power hand over people the rebels believe they own.”
Not to mention the Imperial Power believing that it’s OK for loyal subjects to own people…..
@91: ChristopherLBennett
A friend once asked me how to distinguish STAR TREK from STAR WARS, seeing as how both are decidedly on the “lite” side of the SF spectrum.. I said that STAR WARS could be converted into Tolkienesque fantasy with very little effort, whereas doing the same with STAR TREK would require a good deal of ingenuity.
@94/stacychadwick: Oh, they’re far more different than that. Besides the superficial aspect of both involving spaceships and aliens and having “Star” in the title, they’re hardly anything alike. Star Trek was conceived from the start as an adult science fiction series that was more grounded and believable than its contemporaries in SFTV, even if subsequent producers have been less prone to honor that. Star Wars was conceived as a space fantasy aimed at children and a nostalgic celebration of the genres George Lucas liked as a child. Lucas never even claimed that SW was science fiction. It was always meant to be a sword-and-planet fantasy in the pulp tradition.
Oh, also ST has always been a dramatic series with action elements, while SW has always been an action series first. ST looks to the future, SW celebrates the past. SW is, obviously, mostly about war stories, while ST has mostly not been (though the ratio of war stories has increased considerably since about 1995). I could go on. I like them both in their own ways, but they aren’t anything close to interchangeable.
@95: ChristopherLBennett
I agree. The ways in which ST and SW differ are almost innumerable.
Another point of comparison/difference that I’ve always liked (this one relies more on source material/inspiration)
STAR TREK: FORBIDDEN PLANET
STAR WARS: FLASH GORDON
MARS NEEDS ROBOTS
I think it’s extremely unlikely there will be a libertarian space habitat of any sort. More likely — especially with private space exploration — is space habitats as “company towns*.” One can get a lot of stories about this, as there have been quite as many revolutions attempting democracy as independence.
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* What better place for a company town? There’s no easy way out of a habitat, the company would own everything, even the air, and an anti-regulation government wouldn’t even try to see if basic human rights are being honored.
@@@@@ Christopher – The Space: 1889 RPG depicts Mars as having been colonized by a number of different rival European powers. (It also has native inhabitants.)
ChristopherLBennett @@@@@ 95:
Star Wars was conceived as a space fantasy aimed at children
It certainly became that; I’d argue that you can see that starting with Return of the Jedi. On the other hand, I have trouble believing that a movie (the original, aka A New Hope) which features: a) a close-up of the burnt bodies of the hero’s murdered aunt and uncle; b) scenes of the heroine about to be brutally interrogated; and c) the casual destruction of an entire inhabited planet is really something “aimed at children”.
@100/PeterErwin: Of course it was always aimed at children. I’m amazed how many people today have forgotten that. I was 8 or 9 years old when I saw Star Wars in the theater back in 1977, and I was right in the target demographic. Heck, when I was that age, my father would never have let me go to a movie that wasn’t appropriate for children. I remember how upset I was when he wouldn’t let me see Logan’s Run the previous year (though when I finally saw it uncut decades later, I understood why).
George Lucas wanted to make a Flash Gordon movie, an homage to the Buster Crabbe serials he’d enjoyed as a child, and to the larger genre of movie-matinee adventure serials, which were made primarily for children. You have to remember, most major science fiction movies in the ’70s were serious, dystopian, adult-skewing dramas like the Planet of the Apes series, Silent Running, Westworld, Soylent Green, Rollerball, The Man Who Fell to Earth, etc. At the time, Star Wars was something radically different, a pure, fun action-adventure in the spirit of old pulp fiction and comics and movie serials (which, yes, often had scenes of mass destruction or heroines being tortured by black-cloaked villains; it’s not the presence of such themes that makes something adult, but how graphically and disturbingly they’re presented, and a door ominously closing on Leia and a probe droid or Alderaan going up in a split-second gasoline fireball hardly counts as graphic). At the time, it was derided by critics for being so much more lowbrow, juvenile, and shallow than its contemporaries, but audiences of all ages ate it up anyway, because it was so much more fun and upbeat and uncomplicated than the dystopian dramas that preceded it. Sure, the bad guys did horrible things, but that was what made them bad guys, and the heroes still triumphed over them at the end and there was a nice, easy happy ending (except for poor Chewie not getting a medal).
Heck, Star Wars‘ popularity with children is the reason it became so successful. A huge amount of the franchise’s profits came from the toy line. Most of the character names and backstories that today’s SW fans can rattle off in encyclopedic detail were invented for the toys, since the characters were nothing more than background extras or puppets in the movies. And just to be clear, the ’70s weren’t like today when lots of adult fans collect action figures and toys. The only reason that happens today is because of the impact Star Wars had on fandom. At the time, toys were for kids, period. And toys were almost as important a part of Star Wars as the movies themselves. Just look at how popular Boba Fett became despite being practically useless on film. It was the action figure that made him important to fans.
And of course the kids who fell in love with the movies when they came out in the ’70s and ’80s grew up to become the lifelong fans of today and the creators of the new generation of movies and shows. It was because they discovered it as children that they became so devoted to it later on.
@100,
You’re looking at scenes of violence, which the US rating system for movies and much of the US zeitgeist considered, and continues to consider, absolutely acceptable for children. The entire merchandising issue, which was part of Star Wars from its first release, was aimed at children.
@101,
That said, I don’t think it was aimed at children, per se; it was an adventure movie, light on plot, with a bit of romance and clear good guys/bad guys, and plucky underdogs fighting a repressive regime. It’s the plot of thousands of movies that filled theatres from the early part of the 20th Century.
If only writers like Heinlein and Niven could have been better world builders, they might have really been able to make a name for themselves as SF authors…
@102/swampyankee: Of course most things made with children in mind are also made with their parents in mind, with the assumption that parents will watch along with their children. It’s family-friendly programming. And yes, what you’re saying highlights the difference between Star Trek and Star Wars. ST was trying to be a departure from the traditional norm of mass-media sci-fi made for children and families, from your Tom Corbett and Rocky Jones and Lost in Space, and to do SF in a more mature vein like the top adult dramas of the era, like Gunsmoke and Naked City. But Star Wars was just the opposite — it was trying to be a departure from all the somber, adult, dystopian SF movies of the ’70s and a return to the lighter, more family-friendly sci-fi adventures of an earlier, more innocent time. Gene Roddenberry wanted SFTV to grow up and act its age; George Lucas (and Steven Spielberg) wanted SF movies to remember the joys of childhood.
What’s bizarre to me is this attitude of modern fandom that there’s something wrong with the idea of a show or film being made with children in mind, that that’s some kind of insult against it. Of course it isn’t. A lot of the best entertainment out there has been made with children in mind, from the Looney Tunes shorts to Rocky and Bullwinkle to Batman: The Animated Series to Avatar: The Last Airbender. Only people who are insecure in their own maturity need to treat children’s fiction as if it’s something toxic, and unfortunately a lot of genre fans have that insecurity. For a long time, sci-fi and fantasy were dismissed as unworthy and childish by society, and so fans developed a defensiveness about their fandom and a need to insist that it had to be taken seriously. And that defensiveness remains even though it’s no longer needed now that SF/fantasy has become the accepted, respectable mainstream. It’s okay to just relax and have fun with our entertainment, and to be glad when it’s welcoming to children, because those children are the next generation of fandom who will keep it alive and active.
Heinlein’s interesting because at one point he did try to do the math [1], and then stopped. The dividing line between RAH books I might reread and ones I won’t unless paid is more or less the same as the point where he started winging it, although I think that’s just coincidental.
1: Of course, he never got Relativity.
One of my favorite Heinlein stories is how, when writing Space Cadet, he & his wife at one point sat down with giant rolls of butcher paper on which they were working out orbital mechanics (I believe it was for a transfer orbit?), came up with different answers, then had to go back and redo the entire thing until they both got the same result, all of which resulted in a one- or two-sentence throwaway mention in the book.
That’s exactly what I had in mind :)
Niven’s world building always had a considerable number of completely ludicrous details but the process of learning why, for example, Jinx and Plateau make no god damn sense leaves the reader better off.
Well, unless Jinx is a thin layer of rock, water, and air around a gigantic slaver stasis field.
@73, 74 Thanks for that feedback. I am pretty good at understanding navigation on the surface of a sphere, but a bonehead when it comes to orbital mechanics.
“Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away,” is the dead equivalent of “Once upon a time.” Evil emperor, evil powerful wizard behind the throne, an actual Princess, a lost Prince disguised as a commoner, loyal faithful servants, a White Knight on a trusty steed (plus trusty Squire), various good wizards, and sword fights.
Yeah, Star Wars is totally a fairy tale. And the massive marketing, the pajamas, the bed sheets, the toys, all for kids or the kids in us all.
I was in college when it all started, when science fiction went from Before Lucas (B.L.) to Anno Stella Bella (ASB), and the Bean Counters learned SF=money. It’s never been the same. I’m glad we have so much mainstream SF now. I hate that so much of it is crap. Sturgeon’s Revelation continues to apply.
I largely lost interest in SW after Episodes IV, V, & VI.
I was in grade school when Kirk and crew first showed up. I’d been an SF fan for many years by then, and it was love at first sight. I’ve since grown weary of it. 50 years is enough. And it hasn’t been worthy in a long time. Perhaps not since TNG. I’m all about Doctor Who these days (looking forward to the new The Doctor!).
And, point is, all three are “night and day” different. They may all share space travel and robots, but they couldn’t be more different in their approach to storytelling! (One key reason Star Trek died is that it lost its identity and approach. It’s just run-of-the-mill pop TV SF now.)
@101,
My family considered movies like Silent Running acceptable kids’ fare, until my younger sister ran out of the theatre screaming. She objected to them blowing up the habitat with the bunnies.
Water may be common (a point that has bothered me, too, about some SF), but as I understand it, gold isn’t. It requires the collision of two neutron stars to create gold; not even a supernova will do it.
And gold is nicely conductive, but doesn’t corrode, and it’s very inert biologically, so it’s a useful material.
Given the sheer expense of space travel to other systems, the idea of angry, hostile aliens showing up just to blow things up, or enslave us (or eat us), never made much sense to me. But a species that had used all their available material of some rare-ish resource might find it necessary to cross space in search of more.
And the need for resource is a key reason intelligent minds are able to treat other obviously intelligent minds as animals or otherwise irrelevant.
Which is the one thing about First Contact that gives me pause. I tend to equate high intelligence and rationality with morality (as Kant did). I tend to think any species that crosses space would be friendly and curious.
Unless they needed gold or iridium or whatever. Then we might be in trouble.
It all means an otherwise very cheesy movie, Cowboys &Aliens had a modicum of sense buried in it.
Earth has some useful properties: it’s enriched in a number of useful elements (in the sense that it’s not mostly H2 and He), various processes (many involving water) have concentrated some of those elements, and finally the place is overrun with fairly bright primates who will probably cheerfully dig stuff up in exchange for minor trinkets like FTL drives, Elder God repellent, and not having the surface of Earth heated to 10,000 K by a Nicoll-Dyson Laser.
(and of course Earth has a monopoly on stuff like chocolate, coffee, and opium.)
@110/wyrdsmythe: ““Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away,” is the dead equivalent of “Once upon a time.””
Or, closer to the point, “Long ago in a land far, far away,” also a common fairy-tale opening.
“I’m glad we have so much mainstream SF now. I hate that so much of it is crap. Sturgeon’s Revelation continues to apply.”
Sturgeon’s Law was actually a defense of mass-media SF. Theodore Sturgeon’s colleagues in prose SF looked down on television SF as a dumbed-down substitute for the real thing, and when one of them expressed surprise that he would lower himself to write for television because “90% of television is crap,” he riposted, “90% of everything is crap,” meaning the mass-media stuff is no worse, no less respectable, than the stuff they did in prose. It’s a refutation of the impulse to scorn mass-media entertainment, not an endorsement of it.
@111/PamAdams: Parents often fail to do adequate research before taking their kids to see a movie. I remember my surprise when I went to see the ultraviolent, R-rated RoboCop 2 and saw that two or three parents had brought their very small, 3- or 4-year-old children to see it. In retrospect, I appreciate that my father took more care to determine what was suitable for me and my sister to see, though it sometimes frustrated me at the time. (Though not always. When I was 8, our nanny let her disreputable boyfriend take us to a double feature of The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox and Mother, Jugs & Speed, and then to a bar. I was very uncomfortable the whole time. The nanny stopped working for us very soon thereafter.)
@112/wyrdsmythe: There is immensely more gold, iridium, and other precious metals in the asteroid belt than there is in Earth’s crust, and it’s enormously easier to mine from asteroids, because it’s much closer to the surface and doesn’t have to be dragged out of a planet’s gravity well. So no, there’s really no sense at all to the idea of a spacefaring civilization needing to come to a planet for mineral resources. (Keep in mind that in most of the universe, water is a mineral too. We just happen to live in a temperature range where it’s molten.)
@113/James: Aliens coming to Earth for our chocolate or coffee is a lot more plausible, though. Well, assuming their biochemistry and sense of taste are compatible with ours.
@@@@@64.
Do note, however, that there are no settlements in Antarctica, only bases.
Humans would fight viciously to defend our supplies of coffee and chocolate :-D But we’d definitely be open to trade.
> it’s enormously easier to mine from asteroids, because it’s much closer to the surface and doesn’t have to be dragged out of a planet’s gravity well
Unless gravity and hydraulic processes have created concentrated ores on Earth, relative to sifting through a mass of asteroidal rock and metal. Probably not true of iridium, where ours may come from a large meteorite anyway, but could be true of gold.
@117/drs: I think the difficulty of digging deep into the Earth’s crust, plus that of hauling it out of the gravity well (remember, Earth is the most massive solid planet in the known Solar System), would more than cancel out the benefit of having concentrated ores. Not to mention the quantity. You could strip-mine the entire crust of the Earth right down to the mantle and you’d still get just a tiny fraction of the total mineral wealth of the Main Asteroid Belt.
@114: “Sturgeon’s Law was actually a defense of mass-media SF. Theodore Sturgeon’s colleagues in prose SF looked down on television SF as a dumbed-down substitute for the real thing,…”
I’m sorry, I don’t think that’s right on several counts. Per Wikipedia:
The first written reference to the adage appears in the March 1958 issue of Venture, where Sturgeon wrote:
“I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud. Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. is crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms”
Wiki says Sturgeon first said this in a speech in 1951 and again in 1953.
(Sturgeon’s Law, from the story “The Claustrophile” in 1956, is that “Nothing is always absolutely so,” but that has been lost, and these days his Relevation is considered his Law.)
So I don’t see his point as defending mass-media at all, but as acknowledging the plain simple truth: 90% of everything is crap.
@114: “There is immensely more gold, iridium, and other precious metals in the asteroid belt than there is in Earth’s crust,…”
Do we know that for sure? Lots of rock, ice, salts, and such, but gold deposits as we have on Earth? I’m not geologist enough to know, but I thought processes in the mantle allowed it to collect.
Also, to what extent did heavier elements sink into the inner system? Does Mars have as much gold as Earth?
I honestly have no clue, but the deeper point I was trying to make is that resources only obtainable locally would be one reason to both see and fear alien arrival. That could be anything from exotic meats to cigars to rock music. (I just thought it was funny that Cowboys & Aliens had something that wasn’t totally ridiculous.)
I did read a story once about machine life that existed in the deeps of space and which viewed intelligent life as merely an organic process for purifying minerals and resources into concentrated areas… for easy mining by massive machines. We were just a kind of yeast to them.
Okay, clearly I was misinformed about Sturgeon’s Law.
But yes, there is plenty of gold in them thar asteroids. That’s where Earth’s accessible gold, iron, and other heavy metals came from in the first place. When Earth formed, all its heaviest metals sank into the core, and it was asteroid impacts (plus some volcanic convection) that replenished its crust with heavy metals. A single large metallic asteroid like 16 Psyche is estimated to have enough precious metals in it to crash the whole global economy.
https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/nasas-asteroid-mission-likely-to-uncover-mysteries-surrounding-the-origins-of-our-solar-system
https://www.space.com/2032-asteroid-mining-key-space-economy.html
You pulled me in with the bug meteor and then didn’t even talk about it…What gives?
@121/Kirshy: I think maybe that tied into the bit on orbital kinetic weapons.
Stasis fields don’t make Jinx work.
If the field is spherical with a spherical geopotential, the pointy ends of the layer slump or wear toward the middle, like a mountain does over time, resulting in a spherical planet.
If the field is prolate with a spherical geopotential, the layers slide or wear to the middle exposing shiny stasis-field pointy ends.
If the field is prolate with a prolate geopotential, the atmosphere and oceans don’t settle preferentially on the middle, and there’s no difference between the ends and the middle. If there’s been an environment for Bandersnatchi in the middle for a billion years, there can’t be a nice thin atmosphere near the ends for human Jinxian colonists.
Only one thing might save the scenario: a very recent displacement from an orbit nearer to Binary, so that the giant plateaux of Jinx haven’t had time to slump or wear. Say, within the timescale of a Puppeteer conspiracy? Why the Bandersnatchi didn’t remark on this catastrophe I don’t know.
Speaking of plateaux, Plateau suffers the same problem, and I also don’t buy the plateau on the pole of Mesklin, though I forgive Clement for the lapse.
16 Psyche is an asteroid? So that’s where the song title comes from.
You never know what you will learn here :)
16 Psyche is a song?
“asteroid” is the fourth autocompletion suggestion on Google for “16 Psyche”. “lyrics” is second.
It’s the title of Chelsea Wolfe song.
“That’s where Earth’s accessible gold, iron, and other heavy metals came from in the first place.”
I don’t believe you. For one thing you ignore the role of vulcanism, which brings metals up from the core; ‘mafic’, enriched in magnesium and iron, is a term used for basalts as opposed to granites, for example. There’s also that while pure metals may be dense and prone to sinking, their oxides and sulfides need not be. The wikipedia article on gold cites both mantle-origin and asteroid-origin theories. But on another page:
‘Hydrothermal vents, in some instances, have led to the formation of exploitable mineral resources via deposition of seafloor massive sulfide deposits. The Mount Isa orebody located in Queensland, Australia, is an excellent example.[67] Many hydrothermal vents are rich in cobalt, gold, copper, and rare earth metals essential for electronic components.[68] Hydrothermal venting on the Archean seafloor is considered to have formed Algoma-type banded iron formations which have been a source of iron ore.[69]’
@128/drs: “I don’t believe you.”
That’s uncalled for. This isn’t a personal or ideological debate, it’s documented science that you can easily research for yourself.
ChristopherLBennett @@@@@ 120:
When Earth formed, all its heaviest metals sank into the core, and it was asteroid impacts (plus some volcanic convection) that replenished its crust with heavy metals.
A somewhat more accurate description is that the “siderophile” elements — those prone to dissolve in molten iron — are the ones which preferentially sank into the core. These include things like platinum, iridium, and gold.
“Lithophile” elements (which like to bond with oxygen and are thus commonly found with silicates), on the other hand, remained concentrated in the crust, and are usually more abundant in the crust than their solar system average. This includes some of the heaviest elements, like thorium and uranium.
“Which makes nonsense of some events in the Expanse series, …”
I don’t think it did. Corey makes the point that if you lob asteroids at Earth or Mars, they will see them coming. But it’s like trying to stop suicide bombers on Earth: you can catch almost all of them before any harm is done. Corey’s point is very much that if you’re at the bottom of a gravity well, there are benefits (like an atmosphere), but you can’t dodge.
“That’s uncalled for. This isn’t a personal or ideological debate, it’s documented science that you can easily research for yourself.”
I was a geology/planetary science major, if many years ago, and I did some of that research thus resulting in the links in my post, which you seem to have ignored. The documented science doesn’t support your claim.
@132 The problem is the “you“. You don’t believe that–it has nothing to do with the poster. FWIW, I think you’re probably right by a slim margin. Certainly, asteroid impacts have provided a lot of our mineable metals, but so has vulcanism.
The number one world building ‘error’ in all scifi is the concept of scarcity of anything and the idea that it is scarcity ,not distance , that is the problem. The irony of the solar system is that everything is abundant, every element and mineral, but everything is vastly far away.
The fantasy of humans even to Mars is that it takes between 150 and 300 days in space to go one way. Slow doesn’t make good reading so every author ignores the distances unless their story takes place in a generation ship which means the story might as well be on Earth .
Without ignoring that “error” there can be no stories. The reality of using nonmagical handwaving tech for propulsion is that getting anywhere in the solar system beyond the moon takes years of sitting around doing nothing. Once you get anywhere, you have everything you need but you are stuck there. Not much story in that reality.
@134/siempre44: There’s nothing magical or handwavey about momentum-transfer tethers and particle-beam/magnetic sail propulsion systems that could accelerate ships at multiple gs and get them between planets and asteroids in a matter of weeks or less. It only seems unlikely if you cling to the outmoded assumption that a vehicle has to supply its own thrust.
Seriously, I love geeky articles like this.
@64, @115
Antarctica is a special case because there are international treaties in place forbidding pretty much any economically useful activity.
So you can’t really point to activity or lack thereof and human organizations on Antarctica as indicative of anything parallel that might happen on non-terrestrial bodies, except to the extent that some non-terrestrial bodies are covered by similar treaties.
The Moon treaty is similar. If you build a Lunar Colony out of native materials, you’re either going to violate international treaties, or you must share all you have with any other human who shows up, or you need to make sure you have a non-signatory national identity before colonization with the power to enforce your non-participation.
Some humans were born in Antarctica. Emilio Palma, an Argentinean, was born there. His mom was sent pregnant to the Argentinean base at the time during the military dictatorship, as they were trying to solidify their claims to the place. Chile retaliated by sending couples to Antarctica, to claim that their babies were both conceived and born there. IIRC, 11 people have been born in Antarctica, but most of them move to other places in the country as they grow up.
There’s a sixth huge worldbuilding error that’s very common in science fiction. Population density. Most often it’s having too much living space for the depicted density of inhabitants.
Planets are HUGE. Lots of surface area on any world that has a mass and gravity comfortable for humans. For Earth, there’s enough land surface to be divided into over 81 billion 2,000 square foot parcels. The entire human population of Earth could comfortably be housed in a single level building covering all of Texas. Last time I did the math there would be around 1,500 square feet per person. Take out space for walls, hallways, HVAC and other services, even some open park spaces and you’d still have 1,000 square feet each.
If you want each person to only have 500 square feet, and want to cover ALL Earth’s land, only four levels would be required. Bottom level for manufacturing, waste recycling, mining, all the ‘dirty’ stuff, and nuclear power. Middle two levels for living space, each with 50% taken for halls, walls, services, light shafts, public and commercial space. Top level and the roof for food production and solar power.
How many people? I don’t recall the exact figure but it’s well over a trillion inhabitants, plus various pets and livestock. I’ll leave it up to someone else to repeat the calculation.
In other words, any Earthsized planet depicted as being covered in 100+ level buildings had better also have a multi-trillion sized population, and some way to feed them all and handle their waste of all types. Otherwise every sapient being on Coruscant gets its own entire floor of those towering buildings. The space station in Randolph Lalonde’s “Spinward Fringe” series, described as having a walkable surface area half that of Earth, for unexplained reasons has the protagonist living in a literally closet sized apartment. The author provides no explanation about what it using up 90% of the space to require such cramped quarters.
@139/Gregg Eshelman: There’s also the sheer waste heat a planetwide city would generate. In Niven’s Known Space, the Pierson’s puppeteers moved their planets out into deep space, partly to avoid the risk of their star doing something cataclysmic, but largely because their planetwide cities produced so much heat that they literally couldn’t stay near a star without overheating.
Also, where would a planetwide city that’s all buildings and concrete and no trees or fields or oceans get its oxygen and food from? Presumably they could be manufactured artificially, but it seems more efficient just to let nature do it.
@139/@140 — Nonetheless, you can have my Trantor when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.