Life on a neutron star (2004) | Hacker News Reader

Life on a neutron star (2004)

daviddarling.info

81 pointsche_shr_cat20 comments

I love these books (Dragon's Egg and Starquake). Robert Forward isn't great with the human characters, but they're only in a handful of scenes. He really brings the cheela to life, and the speculative physics is outstanding.

I remember some wit commenting that the strangest aliens in science fiction were the human characters in a Robert Forward novel...

Despite the clunkiness of the writing, I really enjoyed Dragon's Egg.

One aspect I thought was fascinating was how they solved the problem of getting a probe (relatively) close to the the neutron star without it being torn apart by tidal forces.

also Flux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_(novel) by Stephen Baxter

That also adds the interesting aspect of weaponized neutron stars...

For those who haven't read Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence novels, a weaponized neutron star is actually fairly tame as far as weapons go in that series.

Before this, there was Mission of Gravity, by Hal Clement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_of_Gravity)

He even wrote an article about the creation of his high-g planet, featured in Astounding SF in 1953.

The protagonist of "Mission of Gravity," Captain Barlennan, is one of my all-time favorite SF characters. Wonderful book.

As a kid, I read Hal Clement. He was lauded as one of the few authors to write aliens as alien. They had different goals. This was refreshing after so many 1-dimension aliens, or aliens who were just humans in a different guise.

Actually even as a kid I didn't think he'd gone far enough. Sure they had different outlooks. But fundamentally there weren't as different from me as some other people I knew. I was wishing for an alien that thought completely differently - different morals, different logic, different cultural blind spots and esthetics. Not just different solutions to obstacles they found, which they could explain in perfect western logic.

And also, when they got to that cliff and made a hot-air balloon to ascend, I was appalled. The balloon was described as round, which in the crushing gravity gradient would have torn itself apart. It should have been pancake-shaped or cigar-shaped to reduce the pressure differential from top to bottom, to something that the fabric could reasonably have withstood.

Several of Stanisław Lem's works feature truly-alien aliens, to the point that the reader and probably even the author have no hope of comprehending their motives.

"If a lion could speak, we could not understand him."

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/245

> I was wishing for an alien that thought completely differently - different morals, different logic, different cultural blind spots and esthetics.

"Solaris" by S.Lem

In case you're curious... Isaac Asimov wrote an introductory essay 'The Second Nova' (1974) for a volume of collected stories by Stanley G Weinbaum. This is what he said about Weinbaum's first published story, 'A Martian Odyssey' (1934):

"Weinbaum was the first, as far as I know, to create extraterrestrials that had their OWN reasons for existing.

He did more than that, too; he created whole sense-making ecologies."

It's a really great story! Most of Weinbaum's science fiction is just brilliant.

Wouldn't enormous gravitational pressure on the surface of neutron star essentially make it extremely flat (as in nearly perfect elongated sphere)?

According to this article by David Darling, any surface irregularities ("mountains") would be no more than 5 mm in height.

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/N/neutronstar.html

Charles Horowitz estimates 100 mm.

https://www.space.com/6682-neutron-star-crust-stronger-steel...

They can also have 'seas' of hydrogen pulled off a partner star if they're in a binary system. The resulting occasional thermonuclear explosions might make it a bit of an unpleasant place to live though.

The novel occurs on a free-roaming neutron star that has stabilized enough due to its isolation to permit life. Along with the open question of whether "nuclear chemistry" is possible, it would certainly be an open question as to whether it is truly possible for a neutron star to ever stabilize enough for life. I don't think it's much of a spoiler since it's right in the title... the second one, Starquake, centers around a neutron-star quake that happens to the Cheela civilization. Neutron star quakes are so devastating that the human ships and the humans are quite badly shaken up, merely being in orbit around a neutron quake. (Imagine satellites being destroyed because of a quake on Earth. We're very low mass, we don't think of things like that. Though I'm sure we can tell the differences in some trajectories from quakes and seaslides.)

That seems interesting:

> If you were to hold that empty teaspoon just one yard above the star's surface and drop it, it would strike the surface at 4.3 million mph.

E.g. about 2 million m/s, c is 300 million m/s.

Yes. A character falls to their death off a "cliff" that would be imperceptible to humans.

Another striking feature from the novels, not mentioned in the article but hinted at in the illustration, is the extremely strong magnetic field, creating an easy direction of travel (parallel to the field) and a hard direction (orthogonal to the field). The relative difference is so extreme that most cheela spend their lives just going back and forth, only running into other tribes when they're forced by circumstances to travel in the hard direction.

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