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Comment by thombat | Hacker News Reader

How have I never seen this gem before? Belters banished by basic orbital mechanics, already 50 years ago!

It got me at Belter civilization apparently being already a well-established sci-fi trope half a decade ago. And here I thought The Expanse was the first to dive deep into this idea. I need to seriously catch up with sci-fi stories from before 1980s.

Also nice that, before completely ruining the idea of the Belters, and apparently also having "science robbing sf writers of Mars and Venus" (presumably in earlier installments of this work?), he proposed a working model for independent civilization settling Jovian moons. I wonder if there's an updated version of the table somewhere, with the numbers reflecting current knowledge of the Jovian area and space propulsion.

One thing with the early sci-fi is you will have to pretend you don’t know what we now know about the other planets. Asimov (The Martian Way I think got Saturn’s rings very wrong) and Heinlein (Mars and Venus are both depicted very wrongly and still a very entertaining story in Double Star) had a few stories and novellas.

Well-written relatively hard but outdated scifi is, in effect, well-written slightly-softer scifi.

I just imagine this is not our universe, but an alternate where whatever they came up with makes sense and is internally consistent. That's what you have to do for most sci-fi, after all :)

And by applying this rule then it's all hard sci-fi: take the fluffiest "Conan" tale and just tweak the parameters of the universe until it becomes not merely possible but actually inevitable.

Exactly!

Indeed - I hadn't noticed the publication date before encountering the remark about Pioneer's Jovian encounter still being in the future! High time for an update; although many of the additional moons may not be of direct interest to settlers ("By most counts, Jupiter has between 80 and 95 moons, but neither number captures the complexity of the Jovian system of moons, rings and asteroids." - https://science.nasa.gov/jupiter/moons/) but the much richer picture of the larger moons and the surprising radiation environment should either grant the Jovians their empire, or sadly banish them too.

Jupiter is a bit far from Sun, it's hard to harvest energy there. Maybe Jupiter could help, at least by reflecting more light back.

Otherwise you have to first learn how to build nuclear reactors there from local materials, and how to make fuel for them; it's sort of tricky even here on Earth.

Geothermal station on Io? Harvest the radiation belts somehow? (Probably both environments are too destructive to be practical, like putting a Crockpot on the surface of Venus)

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