The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason (2017)
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if you could get a starship booster to work with similar reliability you could put up about 2-3 times the m³ of the ISS with each launch (assuming a wet-workshop design for he upper stage where the empty fuel tanks are prepared to be made habitable).
assuming an "ISS" can host 10 people that means for 20k people in orbit you need 50 boosters launch 20 times each for a total of 1k launches. This is a very small amount for a larger country like the US on a war economy considering that the upper stages would be the somewhat easier to construct parts.
I would assume that basically every industralized country on earth put up at least as many.
- the spacers would run out of enough water as there would always be a small loses that accumulate, but a growing population would mean less available for propulsion needed to get at new comets. The cleft had lots of metal, but little else. The also had a set energy budget, there was no new nuclear power devices to be had, and they couldn't manufacture new solar cells - these would degrade over time.
- the diggers would be toast from heat. If the earth heated up as much and for as long as stated, they'd fry. If they dug deeper the earth gets hotter, if they are too close to the surface its gets hotter. Over time the surface heat would penetrate further and further in. There would be no place from them vent waste heat.
- the pingers would go first. The deep ocean environment allows no mistakes. Even minor failures would cascade into major ones.
- It has no Cold War era level technology to build a dozen spy satellites to survey every square meter of the earth, with which most of the Part 3 plot would simply not happen;
- It cannot build a simple propeller plane, so the pilot has to instead strip naked (I think - it's been a while since I read it) and wear some kind of scifi haptic feedback suit that will tell you how the wind is blowing so that you can steer your unpowered glider in the correct direction.
Honestly the second point reads like the author's sexual fantasy leaking into the story.
As for Solar cells there are factors to consider - they would degrade differently than cells in low earth orbit since factors like atomic oxygen and thermal cycling are less of an issue while I imagine micrometeorites are just terrible. Modern cells degrade at at 0.5% per year in LEO. At 1%/year degradation that means you have 85% capacity after 15 years. So we are talking decades for cells once they have been manufactured here. Cells not in the sun would last forever so they do not degrade in storage.
In the case of the diggers I have not done the math on thermal propagation through bedrock but It would all depend on when the people in orbit start building a sunshade at L1.
the pingers are not in the deep ocean. They are whatever depth the water is below 30°. Some considerations of diving change if you cannot or not plan to surface - ever. We are talking open diving bell environments here and heh - topmarines or ü-boats :) They have a very easy source of energy in the gradient between the very hot atmosphere and the cooler ocean water. no need for nukes for power. you distill oxygen as a byproduct of that snorkeling process. main issue would be metals.
The spacers weren't near earth, they were out at the (former) moon's orbit. Getting to and from Earth or anywhere not near moon's orbit would require considerable propellent. This is even assuming that the thrusters continue to work - they only have so many parts.
The book makes reference to hundreds if not a 1000 years before the spacers really started to develop things again - well past the base case for solar cells.
For the diggers, the sunshade would have been way after and even if in place would have provided no help as all the energy of consequence was coming from the bolides burning up in atmosphere and hitting ground. This worst of the hard rain lasted for at least a few hundred years in the book, although the OP analysis suggests maybe the peak hard rain may have been shorter.
For the pingers, another big issue would be corrosion. I imagine the ocean would eat away at most of their stuff long before they could develop the capacity to make more.
And if you haven't read Seveneves yet, it's definitely a Neal Stephenson book and will not disappoint.
The third part of the book felt like it was meant to be a full-length sequel to Seveneves, but was cut down to a novella-length post-script.
(Which to me still feels like the last third - to me, the book feels like the book has three sections: the setup, the survival, and the aftermath. I haven't read it in long enough to see if it's actually split that way in any sort of specific "Part 1, Part 2, Part 3" way.)
More authors should be brave and have their stories end bleakly.
Great examples that come to mind would be 'Death's End', 'Echopraxia' (to a lesser extent also the prior 'Blindsight'), 'Consider Phlebas', just to name a few.
And I dunno about age improving it. Niven and Pournelle’s politics just looks kind of ridiculous now, even if you don’t know exactly who they had a bee in their bonnet about.
I don't think that's horribly unrealistic, is it? He's pretty much a scientist the media picked to represent the topic, like Dr. Fauci in real life. They could have picked a coronavirologist, but they didn't.
I spoiled as much as I could short of playing the game, and then skipped through a full play-through on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvPyoPRgrFQ is a good synopsis (full game spoilers). The main writer did an AMA on Reddit with some questions answered, but also made it clear that some things were simply unfinished, or just left up to interpretation.
Ehhh, is definitely not everyone's vibe, but I've very enjoyed my two playthroughs.
If you don’t like the last third of Seveneves and haven’t read Anathem then you’ll struggle with the first 150 pages of that book. It’s like Seveneves flipped, starts mega slow and turns into an action fantasy book.
That said, I loved Anathem, so perhaps something of your theory tracks :)
When or if to give up on a book is a personal decision. Personally I try to allow an author 20% of the page count if the book is well written, less if it isn't. I wish I'd applied that rule to Seveneves, but I didn't because it had been so heavily recommended. By the time I'd finished it I actually felt angry for having my time wasted.
My opinion of Stephenson is that he is smart guy and an able writer (particularly of non fiction), but also that he is an undisciplined writer.
In related news, they apparently are working on a TV series of Seveneves: https://deadline.com/2024/08/legendary-tv-adapt-seveneves-sc...
It will be interesting to see if it progresses all the way to production.
I get the sense that Stephenson is really good at starting a novel, setting the scene and building a world that's ripe for some great storytelling. But from my limited experience the end is a total cascade of craziness that leaves the reader frustrated.
I'll have to check out UFO though.
Just change it from "all the nukes exploded and pushed the moon into interstellar space" to "experimental warp drive exploded on launch pad", and you're set.
Hmm… just realised, the basic setup of Space 1999 is kinda what happened with Stargate Universe; I'd say the latter's problem was aping BSG with grit and drama, as there was plenty of room for silly fun scifi in all three Stargate series.
This is the stuff I have a huge question mark about in my head. If two pieces that move very slowly relative to another collide and fragment, why should the pieces fly of in arbitrary different directions and not continue on their trajectory?
So, gravitational pull increases the velocity of bodies relative to another. That's already an exchange of energy, the piece ahead gets slowed down, the piece behind will speed up. Then they collide, exchanging the energy difference again, speeding up the piece ahead and slowing down the one behind. The relative speeds will be tiny initially, because the distances are small, so fragmentation is unlikely. Where does that process run off?
* If you’ve only simulated 1000 pieces, what is the likelihood they just don’t hit each other? (Space is pretty big.)
* How big does a chunk have to be to not burn up on hitting the atmosphere? (This energy would obviously go somewhere, just not necessarily into impact.)
* How and when does the moon reform?
Why did the moon explode without warning? Why?
What annoyed me was that the "premise" is (a) extraordinarily unlikely and (b) its causation doesn't form any part of the plot. Building a hard SF work on such a foundation is a big ask of the reader - although I'm sure it was entertaining for the writer. Thats my problem with the book.
If you take it as given that the moon is going to explode, it's guaranteed to happen without warning, for the simple reason that we do not know of anything that might cause that to happen, so even if warning signs were present, we wouldn't understand them.
The book AFAIR does point out it "might have been a primordial black hole but they don't know", which matches what the situation would be IRL.