On Mar 9, 12:33 pm, Matt Browne SFW <matt.h.bro...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
> The idea was brought up by Marshall T. Savage and is part of his
> Millenial Project ('colonizing the galaxy in 8 easy steps'). Basically
> it's about eva****ation of Mars's dry ice caps (they are made of carbon
> dioxide) and thus raise the temperature. Send a comet (perhaps
> multiple comets) cra****ng into Mars to bring in some water and to
> liberate some carbon dioxide and water from the soil. Then use algae
> to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen. The course of the comets would be
> manipulated when they are very close to the Sun. Just give them a few
> small "****ges". Given the resources and the money, could this really
> work?
(retargeted from rec.arts.sf.science to rec.arts.sf.composition)
Planetary Bias or Planetary Chauvinism in SF is pretty much the norm.
Any sort of orbital colony is almost always a small, antiseptic, and
almost painfully artificial space station. There are some exceptions
though, some stories/movies/etc... show them as dirty, cluttered,
utilitarian space stations, or sprawling, bustling, manufacturing
space stations, but few show them to be the kinds of garden-esque,
panoramic, almost planet-like megastructures that people like Larry
Niven, John Bernal, and Gerard O'Neill have been talking about since
the 70s. (For example you have Niven's Ring World, and its follow up,
the titular location from the HALO series of games. There is also
Clarke's Rama and the "Sides" from the anime Gundam which both take
after the Island 3 concept from O'Neill. There is also a series of
books about a generation ****p that is essentially an Island 3 type
colony with an engine, but mercifully I can't remember the name of the
series or its author. (Yeah, it's that bad.))
The reasons for the Planetary Bias are mostly pretty obvious: Most
people lack imagination, all humans live on a planet, all humans have
always lived on a planet, thus all humans will always live on a
planet. There are also probably a lot of other psychological reasons
for people to simply skip over even considering orbital colonies
before going straight for Terraforming another planet (like Mars or
Venus) but I'm no psychologist or sociologist.
There are also some that do briefly consider the use of orbital
colonies but discard them for Terraforming because they believe them
unworkable, technologically unavailable, or simply psychologically
undesirable. Personally I don't see any reason to colonize Mars aside
from the infrastructure required to do so would also put orbital
colonies in arms-reach. Mars is a great place for research, but
Terraforming kinda' screws that up and aside from that what else could
10,000 or 100,000 people on Mars give Earth (or themselves) that Earth
or an orbital colony cannot? Also if you have the infrastructure to
really put enough people on Mars to make a self-sustaining colony,
then you probably have enough infrastructure to build orbital colonies
around Earth which would provide a much better return on investment.
(Not to mention if you can "****ge" enough comets into Mars to
Terraform it, you should be able to build a few megastructures around
the earth.)
But that's not what this post is about. I figure that sheep will be
sheep. If the sheep can't imagine themselves not living on a planet
then they can be a new third-world on Mars and become indebted to
their new overlords cruising around in orbital shopping malls. What
this post *is* about however, is why stick with the planetary bias in
SF writing?
Despite my overwhelming belief that colonizing planets (except perhaps
ones with already habitable surfaces that are suitable with minimal
terraforming (i.e. terran flora and fauna need be im****ted) provided
that the planet is able to install some sort of orbital elevator or
your universe has anti-gravity or some other suitable way of getting
things to and from the surface of a planet with a significant gravity
well and atmosphere) is just not economically viable, and thus
unrealistic for most SF stories (again excepting those with trivial to-
and-from-orbit technology) but they do seem to make it easier to write
SF.
It really depends on the particulars of the story, but I've been
trying to write a sort of SF-cyberpunk-espionage story (think
something like "The Bourn Identity" + "Neuromancer" + Insert-Random-
Military-SF-Set-In-Space) off and on for a few years and I've been
having a lot of trouble making it work on orbital colonies. Stumbling
blocks include the difficulty of travel from one location to another,
the inability (no stealth in space) to move around without attracting
unwanted attention, the ease of locking down a single orbital colony,
among many others.
If the story was set on Earth (for example) the protagonist could
break plot-device-character out of the clutches of cardboard-villain-
state and then sneak over the border into neutral-state and go to
ground. After a suitable time the protagonist could then take plot-
device-character to cardboard-good-state and end the story. (Insert
difficulties along the way.) However, I'm having trouble accounting
with various problems since the story does not occur on a planetary
surface. When the protagonist breaks the plot-device-character out of
the cardboard-villain-colony's hands, the cardboard-villain-colony can
lock the colony down and track any ****ps that have left since the plot-
device-character has been sprung. They can send out their
GoonSquads[TM] to the points that any suspicious ****ps have flown to
(or have those goons already there) and instruct those colonies to
hold any passengers for questioning.
Some of these problems can be overcome. For example, I have made the
international situation a bit dicey: the colonies have just come out
of a war, and they don't trust each other so they are unlikely to
comply with the cardboard-villain-colony willingly, but unless the CVC
is very discreet about it the destination colony will likely step in
and take the PDC for themselves which then makes it necessary for the
protagonist to do it all over again and extract the PDC from this new
colony. I've been working on a stealth system using realistic
technology to overcome that "no stealth in space" thing, but it's not
going as well as it could. I could set the whole story on a single
large Island 3 type colony with a population of 5 to 15 million, but
then it becomes something like setting the whole story in Manhattan,
the protagonist can possibly keep hidden for a long time if they have
contacts in the colony, but if you can't get off the island you can't
keep hiding forever (the money has to run out sometime) and they will
find you eventually.
So, what does rec.arts.sf.composition think of planetary bias in SF?
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