Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 20:14:33 -0400 (EDT) From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl@KeithLynch.net> To: WSFA members <WSFAlist@KeithLynch.net> Subject: [WSFA] Re: Constructing Realsitic Solar Systems Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist@keithlynch.net> "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl@KeithLynch.net> wrote: > But, once again, there's no plausible way a solar system could have > gotten into that state in the first place. Unless you postulate > feats of massive engineering. "Barry L. Newton" <bnewton@ashcomp.com> wrote: > . . .And no serious writer would ever consider postulating any such > nonsense. It does seem unlikely. A race capable of planetary scale engineering would be much more likely to build a ringworld, Dyson sphere, or Alderson disk. Planets are inefficient. 99.99% of the mass is used only to keep your feet on the ground -- something centrifugal force can easily do instead. That mass has the side effect of making access to space needlessly difficult. And a planet's high ratio of volume to surface area results in heat buildup, which causes destructive volcanos, earthquakes, and tsunamis. Also, more than 99.999999% of the sun's energy streams uselessly off into interstellar space, not intercepted by Earth or by anything else, ever. A properly re-engineered solar system should be able to comfortably support a population several billion times earth's present population, and to do so for at least several billion years. Possibly a million times longer, if they can turn their sun into a black hole and get energy by dropping things into it. And, of course, there are at least a hundred billion other solar systems in the galaxy for them to use, and at least a hundred billion other galaxies. And that's just the resources we already know about. And doesn't even count the mysterious dark matter which outweighs everything else put together, the newly discovered dark energy, or zero point energy. And there's no particular reason individuals should not be able to live as long as their civilization. Imagine how nearly caught up you'll be on your reading after a trillion eons or so. The only advantage of a solar system consisting of planets is that it can occur naturally. If a civilization is at a level where they only have "minimal artificial aids" with which to view continents on other worlds, they probably aren't quite up to planetary engineering yet. Who needs fantasy? I prefer science fiction -- the literature of things which could actually happen. There's enormous potential in the known laws of physics, and in plausible extensions to them. We don't need to go beyond them for good stories any more than we need more than 88 notes on a piano, more than 26 letters in our alphabet, or more than 52 cards in a deck. -- Keith F. Lynch - kfl@keithlynch.net - http://keithlynch.net/ I always welcome replies to my e-mail, postings, and web pages, but unsolicited bulk e-mail (spam) is not acceptable. Please do not send me HTML, "rich text," or attachments, as all such email is discarded unread.