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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

In fiction

(unmentioned in wikipedia article) There's a golden age of science fiction story whose author I don't recall that had a story hinging on surviving the crushing pressure of Jupiter's atmosphere.

While putting it forward that no material could withstand a differential pressure of

(Jupiter pressure XX atmosphere) | (Human necc. 1 atmosphere)

a (fictional) solution was proposed of staggered shells, each reducing the pressure by 1 atmosphere (the amount required for a vacuum airship).

I'll throw it out there for anyone to chase up or recall the story name + author.

This reduction in stages notion is mentioned in the above article and it does prompt the question of whether a modern honeycomb material could be fabricated as a thick walled shell about a ballon shape with interior vacum and pressue reduction staggered through the honeycomb.

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ChatGPT thinks the story you’re referring to is “a meeting with Medusa” by Arthur C. Clarke [1]

The plot summary on Wikipedia doesn’t mention the staggered shells, but it does sound like this might be right [2]

1. https://chat.openai.com/share/476fb915-6037-47dd-8c06-095fd2...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Meeting_with_Medusa

Damn good chance that was the one, it fits my reading timeline and I had a lot of Clarke (and my other "Golden Age" authors) - and the staggered shell for pressure reduction could very well by a minor throway plot point - Clarke put a lot of thought into space exploration and his stories were riddled with plausible notions that deserved further study (even if ultimately impractical).

That one was fun. I loved the fusion ramjet exit strategy, and the big reveal at the end.

There was also the one (was it Clarke or Asimov?) where they simply grew genetically engineered Jovian bodies and transferred their minds to them. That one (as you'd expect) ends with the explorers deciding it was way too much fun running around Jupiter as raptor-thingies.

This was "City" by Clifford Simak. Great book. The Jovians were called "lopers".

Yes, that's the one!

Oh, that's a very nice use of ChatGPT. This sort of question is usually impossibly hard to find by searching, and requires consulting the sages.

I was so excited to try this because I have a book that I’ve not been able to locate (have tried my own searches, Reddit and online forums) but ChatGPT gave me a lot of hallucinations and listed out real books and incorrectly claimed that all those books had the plot bit that I’d remembered.

Ah! Well. Nevertheless.

Something authors often ignore when writing fiction about Jupiter is the intense radiation there. You often see stories/games about astronauts doing EVA around Jupiter, but it is way more dangerous than the Van Allen Belts around Earth.

https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Techn...

Fair point - I do a bit of geophysics and look at ground and cosmic radiation so a point appreciated.

That said .. there's always some killjoy dragging reality and science into science fiction . . . :-)

True. I love a good story over anything else. But sometimes it just seems the writers, particularly for TV are just lazy. A few fixes in the script and everything looks a lot better. The Expanse is a good compromise IMHO.

You can buy small vacuum chambers on ebay. Making a large one is also doable. What's problematic is making one lightweight enough to be buoyant. When you make staggered one it will still have too much mass because all shells will weight as much as one thicker shell.

I also saw one, different, wherein the solution was that the shell curled in on itself and compressed, like squeezing a scroll.

This was pre-Outer Limits, too, if I am right. The main premise was that a monomaniacal skillionaire decided to hoax the planet into uniting against a horrible threat inside Jupiter. The last transmissions from this doomed ship, as it descended through the ever-thicker atmosphere, was a kind of Lovecraftian exhortation that they were too horrible for him to properly describe, ending in "Defend! Defend!" before cutting out.

This was in Hyperion Canthos, Dan Simmons! [Edit] after checking, it was not Jupyter that Dan Simmons wrote about, but the story sounded very familiar. Apologies.

Good to know, cheers.

Definitely not the story I'm dimly recalling though as I would have read it before 1982 as part of my (until then) ever expanding collection of tattered science fiction novels and anthologies.

( First book of the Hyperion series being published in 1989 )

I recall something like that being described in Larklight by Philip Reeve

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