On 08 Oct 2022, peterwezeman@hotmail.com wrote
(in article<07efa4ac-15b3-422a-b52a-8cda515e40f5n@googlegroups.com>):

> On Saturday, October 8, 2022 at 8:29:59 AM UTC-5, Wolffan wrote:
> > On 08 Oct 2022, David Johnston wrote
> > (in article <thr9gt$1k01$1...@gioia.aioe.org>):
> > > On 2022-10-04 7:12 a.m., Wolffan wrote:
> > > > On 02 Oct 2022, Robert Woodward wrote
> > > > (in article<robertaw-976376...@news.individual.net>):
> > > >
> > > > > There are times, when reading a Science Fiction or Fantasy story, I come
> > > > > across something that threatens to take me out of the story. For example:
> > > > >
> > > > > 1) Human empires (interstellar in SF, otherwise in Fantasy) that are
> > > > > many centuries old. Generally speaking, empires on Earth have lasted 2
> > > > > or 3 centuries. There are outliers (e.g., a few don't survive the death
> > > > > of their founding conqueror and then there is Rome which is an extreme
> > > > > outlier in the other direction). There are reasons this happens and I
> > > > > can not see why those reasons wouldn't apply to an interstellar empire
> > > > > (note that if human lifespans are increased by a factor of say 5, then
> > > > > perhaps empires could last a millennium).
> > > > >
> > > > > 2) I have noticed a lack of children in a number of books where the
> > > > > presence of children would be an plausible complicating factor.
> > > >
> > > > Problems that I have with SF, in particular:
> > > >
> > > > 1. Reactionless drives. Given the way that both gravity and magnetic
> > > > fields
> > > > work, reactionless drives are a serious stretch. Reactionless drives
> > > > abound
> > > > in SF. In some cases there’s reasoning beyond handwavium, but mostly
> > > > they
> > > > just are. This is particularly evident in visual media in general, and
> > > > anything involving UFOs in particular. Trek, UFO, The Invaders and various
> > > > Star Wars imitators do this, as does assorted Marvel confections. Worse
> > > > are
> > > > the stories, again usual visual media, where there are some kind of
> > > > reaction
> > > > motors... but the motors are too small and there’s nowhere near enough
> > > > storage for reaction mass unless the exhaust velocities of said motors are
> > > > substantial fractions of c.
> > >
> > > Which is why I tolerate reactionless or pseudo-reactionless drives. The
> > > only alternative is just to acknowledge the impracticality of long range
> > > manned spaceflight.
> > Pournelle’s CoDo and Empire had photon rockets. Really nice exhaust
> > velocities. Really bad thrust unless you indulge in massive handwavium,
> > which
> > he did, and it would be a Really Bad Idea to stand behind them, which is one
> > reason for the, ahem, Langston Field. Otherwise you’d be rebuilding your
> > launch facility with every takeoff, and landings would be... interesting.
> > Drake has two different drives in his RCN books: the plasma thrusters, which
> > are bad enough, but can be used in an atmosphere if you’re careful, and
> > the
> > High Drive: anti-matter/matter annihilation. Very bad idea in an atmosphere.
> > Very high exhaust velocities, substantial fraction of c, very good thrust.
> > Just don’t get too close to the exhaust bells. Niven and Heinlein had
> > fusion rockets. Not as good exhaust velocity as Drake and Pournelle, but
> > nice
> > thrust. Of course you essentially have a continuous thermonuclear explosion
> > going off aft, so it is a Really Bad Idea to get close to the exhaust bells
> > there, too. Pournelle, Drake, Niven, and Heinlein all put thought into
> > tankage, their ships had significant amounts of reaction mass. It was a plot
> > point in several CoDo and RCN stories. The boys behind the Expanse also used
> > fusion rockets, but were more handwavium about it. When asked how efficient
> > their fusion rockets were, the only answer was ‘very’. There were a few
> > plot points involving available reaction mass in the various Expanse books,
> > too.
> Where did Heinlein use fusion rockets?

Every one of the stories about torchships, up to and including Time For The
Stars. Heinlein played fast and loose with things, his torchships could
sustain 4 gees Earth-to-Pluto, and could sustain 1 gee all the way to just
under c.
> He used nuclear fission thermal rockets
> in _The Rolling Stones_ and many other juveniles and _Future History_ stories,
> and he used mass to energy conversion rockets, called "torch ships", in
> _Farmer in the Sky_ and _Time for the Stars_.

fusion rockets.
> The ships in _Citizen of the
> Galaxy_
> had fusion reactors but were not rockets.
>
> Peter Wezeman
> anti-social Darwinist

On Saturday, October 8, 2022 at 12:21:10 AM UTC-4, Quadibloc wrote:
> On Wednesday, October 5, 2022 at 3:30:31 AM UTC-6, Quadibloc wrote:
>
> > They are discovered by the rest of the galaxy. And the rest
> > of the galaxy does not approve. But they won't use force to
> > overthrow the system; they will just keep sending volunteers
> > to the planet as immigrants. Even if the planet's rulers were
> > to choose to slaughter them, it would be changed by this.
> I see the story _wasn't_ Glory Season by David Brin, unless I
> badly misremembered it.
>
> John Savard
He's close. As I recall, the galactic society as a whole was determined to keep sending _diplomats_, who would bring with them ideas and trade items at least some of which the isolated society would want enough that the leaders of that society would not refuse all contact. The "threat" to keep sending people even if they are killed was (if I recall correctly) more like "Sure, you can kill me if I've offended you. But we'll send another diplomat after a while, and sooner or later, your successors are going to talk to one of them."

On Sunday, October 2, 2022 at 1:11:29 AM UTC-4, Robert Woodward wrote:
> 2) I have noticed a lack of children in a number of books where the
> presence of children would be an plausible complicating factor.
>

I've the opposite problem regarding children in at least one case of media science fiction - Star Trek Nemesis has a society of a few hundred or thousand immortals, with dozens of children running around. Something's not right about the demographics there.

Actually, now that you mention it, Asimov's The Naked Sun has too many children on Solaria - the number of children on this supposedly population-constant world implies a lifespan not too much different than our own - but supposedly people routinely live over two centuries

On 2022-10-08 10:48 a.m., Robert Woodward wrote:
> In article <thr92l$1dli$1@gioia.aioe.org>,
> David Johnston <davidjohnston29@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> On 2022-10-01 11:11 p.m., Robert Woodward wrote:
>>> There are times, when reading a Science Fiction or Fantasy story, I come
>>> across something that threatens to take me out of the story. For example:
>>>
>>> 1) Human empires (interstellar in SF, otherwise in Fantasy) that are
>>> many centuries old. Generally speaking, empires on Earth have lasted 2
>>> or 3 centuries. There are outliers (e.g., a few don't survive the death
>>> of their founding conqueror and then there is Rome which is an extreme
>>> outlier in the other direction).
>>
>> And is also the most common model for interstellar empires in SF so
>> that's going to skew the statistics. Though, I wouldn't mind seeing
>> some patriot boast about representing a 5,000 year old empire only to
>> have the pedant say "Our empire is 270 years old. It's just founded on
>> the ruins of 8 previous empires who each pretended to be a continuation
>> of the first one despite periods of collapse and fragmentation that
>> lasted longer than our version of the empire is likely to."
>>
>
> The various Chinese dynasties are something like that.
>
>> There are reasons this happens and I
>>> can not see why those reasons wouldn't apply to an interstellar empire
>>> (note that if human lifespans are increased by a factor of say 5, then
>>> perhaps empires could last a millennium).
>>>
>>> 2) I have noticed a lack of children in a number of books where the
>>> presence of children would be an plausible complicating factor.
>>>
>>
>> 3. Universes where in a galaxy rich in intelligent life, the only ones
>> who are good at fighting are the humans, and the enemies everyone else
>> wants humans to defend them from.
>>
>
> I haven't noticed that many, but it is annoying.

It was a fad in the 90s. These days there's the Humanity Fuck Yeah
reddit doing the same thing.

On 2022-10-08 7:19 a.m., Quadibloc wrote:
> On Saturday, October 8, 2022 at 2:03:06 AM UTC-6, David Johnston wrote:
>> On 2022-10-05 3:30 a.m., Quadibloc wrote:
>
>>> And their ethical system that makes it a rule that no planet
>>> can have its people speciate themselves from the rest of
>>> humanity is bizarre. The foundation of morality is Thou
>>> Shalt Not Initiate Force.
>
>> A foundation you discard without hesitation any time you view a society
>> as being unjust.
>
> How can a society possibly be unjust, if its government doesn't initiate
> force against its citizens? If so, its overthrow does not consitute
> initiation of force.

There are no societies in which government doesn't initiate force
against its citizens. It's just a matter of how often that happens and
why.

On Sunday, 9 October 2022 at 01:24:31 UTC+1, David Johnston wrote:
> On 2022-10-08 7:19 a.m., Quadibloc wrote:
> > On Saturday, October 8, 2022 at 2:03:06 AM UTC-6, David Johnston wrote:
> >> On 2022-10-05 3:30 a.m., Quadibloc wrote:
> >
> >>> And their ethical system that makes it a rule that no planet
> >>> can have its people speciate themselves from the rest of
> >>> humanity is bizarre. The foundation of morality is Thou
> >>> Shalt Not Initiate Force.
> >
> >> A foundation you discard without hesitation any time you view a society
> >> as being unjust.
> >
> > How can a society possibly be unjust, if its government doesn't initiate
> > force against its citizens? If so, its overthrow does not consitute
> > initiation of force.
> There are no societies in which government doesn't initiate force
> against its citizens. It's just a matter of how often that happens and
> why.

So, I suppose it's fair to disbelieve a story that
claims that this future interstellar society doesn't
do that. But maybe the future interstellar society
Is just lying about it. Perhaps to itself.

David Johnston wrote:

>On 2022-10-08 10:48 a.m., Robert Woodward wrote:
>>In article <thr92l$1dli$1@gioia.aioe.org>,
>> David Johnston <davidjohnston29@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>>On 2022-10-01 11:11 p.m., Robert Woodward wrote:

>>>3. Universes where in a galaxy rich in intelligent life, the
>>>only ones who are good at fighting are the humans, and the
>>>enemies everyone else wants humans to defend them from.
>>>
>>
>>I haven't noticed that many, but it is annoying.
>
>It was a fad in the 90s. These days there's the Humanity Fuck Yeah
>reddit doing the same thing.

A notable example is the Berserker series by Fred Saberhagen, which
began in the 1960s.

Brian

Robert Woodward wrote:

>There are times, when reading a Science Fiction or Fantasy story, I
>come across something that threatens to take me out of the story. For
>example:
>
>1) Human empires (interstellar in SF, otherwise in Fantasy) that are
>many centuries old. Generally speaking, empires on Earth have lasted
>2 or 3 centuries.

I recently reread (se my Deja Vue all over again thread) the Robert
Reed story "The Man With the Golden Balloon", set in his "Great Ship"
series. In that, a mysterious being is telling of human couple about
the "Union" which it describes in part:

“Simply stated, my Union is a collection of entities and beliefs, memes
and advanced tools, that have been joined together in a common cause.
And what you call the Milky Way happens to be our most important
possession—the central state inside a vast, ancient empire.”

The being claims to have personally been an agent of the Union for
three hundred and seven million years. Now, part of the story is
deciding how reliable this narrator is, and our humans are often
skeptical.

Brian

In article <thtc6o$ddsr$1@dont-email.me>,
Default User <defaultuserbr@yahoo.com> wrote:
>David Johnston wrote:
>
>>On 2022-10-08 10:48 a.m., Robert Woodward wrote:
>>>In article <thr92l$1dli$1@gioia.aioe.org>,
>>> David Johnston <davidjohnston29@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>On 2022-10-01 11:11 p.m., Robert Woodward wrote:
>
>>>>3. Universes where in a galaxy rich in intelligent life, the
>>>>only ones who are good at fighting are the humans, and the
>>>>enemies everyone else wants humans to defend them from.
>>>>
>>>
>>>I haven't noticed that many, but it is annoying.
>>
>>It was a fad in the 90s. These days there's the Humanity Fuck Yeah
>>reddit doing the same thing.
>
>A notable example is the Berserker series by Fred Saberhagen, which
>began in the 1960s.

(Hal Heydt)
Besides just human chauvanism, there's probably a lot it because
John W. Campbell liked that sort of thing, and he paid the
highest rates in the field.

Heinlein was explicit that in _Farmer in the Sky_, _Time for the Stars_, and other stories
humans have the technology to convert matter completely to energy, a trope that goes
back at least to 1928 in published science fiction. From _Farmer in the Sky_, when the
protagonist Bill Lerner is being given a tour of the Colonial Service ship Mayflower,
enroute to Ganymede. The party is in the engineering spaces and the chief engineer
is speaking:

He said that there had been three stages in the development of space ships: first was the
chemical fuel rocket ship that wasn't very different from the big German war rockets used
in the Second World War, except that they were step rockets. “You kids are too young to have
seen such rockets,” he said, “but they were the biggest space ships ever built. They had to be
big because they were terribly inefficient. As you all know, the first rocket to reach the Moon
was a four-stage rocket. Its final stage was almost as long as the Mayflower —yet its pay load
was less than a ton.

“It is characteristic of space ship development that the ships have gotten smaller instead of bigger.
The next development was the atom-powered rocket. It was a great improvement; steps were no
longer necessary. That meant that a ship like the Daedalus could take off from Earth without even
a catapult, much less step rockets, and cruise to the Moon or even to Mars. But such ships still had
the shortcomings of rockets; they depended on an atomic power plant to heat up reaction mass and
push it out a jet, just as their predecessors depended on chemical fuel for the same purpose.

“The latest development is the mass-conversion ship, such as the Mayflower, and it may be the
final development—a mass-conversion ship is theoretically capable of approaching the speed of light.
Take this trip: we accelerated at one gravity for about four hours and twenty minutes which brought
us up to more than ninety miles a second. If we had held that drive for a trifle less than a year, we
would approach the speed of light."

Later, Bill is discussing the terraforming of Ganymede:

"...mass-energy converters were used to give Ganymede its atmosphere.
"By Einstein's law, one gram mass equals 9x10 to the 20th ergs, so that fancy long figure works out
to be 1.03x1011 grams of energy, or 113,200 tons. It was ice, mostly, that they converted into energy,
some of the same ice that was being turned into atmosphere—though probably some country rock
crept in along with the ice. A mass converter will eat anything."

Peter Wezeman
anti-social Darwinist

On 10/8/2022 5:35 PM, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> On Sunday, 9 October 2022 at 01:24:31 UTC+1, David Johnston wrote:
>> On 2022-10-08 7:19 a.m., Quadibloc wrote:
>>> On Saturday, October 8, 2022 at 2:03:06 AM UTC-6, David Johnston wrote:
>>>> On 2022-10-05 3:30 a.m., Quadibloc wrote:
>>>
>>>>> And their ethical system that makes it a rule that no planet
>>>>> can have its people speciate themselves from the rest of
>>>>> humanity is bizarre. The foundation of morality is Thou
>>>>> Shalt Not Initiate Force.
>>>
>>>> A foundation you discard without hesitation any time you view a society
>>>> as being unjust.
>>>
>>> How can a society possibly be unjust, if its government doesn't initiate
>>> force against its citizens? If so, its overthrow does not consitute
>>> initiation of force.
>> There are no societies in which government doesn't initiate force
>> against its citizens. It's just a matter of how often that happens and
>> why.
>
> So, I suppose it's fair to disbelieve a story that
> claims that this future interstellar society doesn't
> do that. But maybe the future interstellar society
> Is just lying about it. Perhaps to itself.

Or no humans are involved. But even then probably not. Remember that a
cop giving you a traffic ticket involves force. Implied force but still
force.
--
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky
dirty old man.

On 09 Oct 2022, peterwezeman@hotmail.com wrote
(in article<897c5415-0336-4ef3-bc80-099215ad546an@googlegroups.com>):

> Heinlein was explicit that in _Farmer in the Sky_, _Time for the Stars_, and
> other stories
> humans have the technology to convert matter completely to energy, a trope
> that goes
> back at least to 1928 in published science fiction. From _Farmer in the Sky_,
> when the
> protagonist Bill Lerner is being given a tour of the Colonial Service ship
> Mayflower,
> enroute to Ganymede. The party is in the engineering spaces and the chief
> engineer
> is speaking:
>
> He said that there had been three stages in the development of space ships:
> first was the
> chemical fuel rocket ship that wasn't very different from the big German war
> rockets used
> in the Second World War, except that they were step rockets. “You kids are
> too young to have
> seen such rockets,” he said, “but they were the biggest space ships ever
> built. They had to be
> big because they were terribly inefficient. As you all know, the first rocket
> to reach the Moon
> was a four-stage rocket. Its final stage was almost as long as the Mayflower
> —yet its pay load
> was less than a ton.
>
> “It is characteristic of space ship development that the ships have gotten
> smaller instead of bigger.
> The next development was the atom-powered rocket. It was a great improvement;
> steps were no
> longer necessary. That meant that a ship like the Daedalus could take off
> from Earth without even
> a catapult, much less step rockets, and cruise to the Moon or even to Mars.
> But such ships still had
> the shortcomings of rockets; they depended on an atomic power plant to heat
> up reaction mass and
> push it out a jet, just as their predecessors depended on chemical fuel for
> the same purpose.
>
> “The latest development is the mass-conversion ship, such as the Mayflower,
> and it may be the
> final development—a mass-conversion ship is theoretically capable of
> approaching the speed of light.
> Take this trip: we accelerated at one gravity for about four hours and twenty
> minutes which brought
> us up to more than ninety miles a second. If we had held that drive for a
> trifle less than a year, we
> would approach the speed of light."
>
> Later, Bill is discussing the terraforming of Ganymede:
>
> "...mass-energy converters were used to give Ganymede its atmosphere.
>
> "By Einstein's law, one gram mass equals 9x10 to the 20th ergs, so that fancy
> long figure works out
> to be 1.03x1011 grams of energy, or 113,200 tons. It was ice, mostly, that
> they converted into energy,
> some of the same ice that was being turned into atmosphere—though probably
> some country rock
> crept in along with the ice. A mass converter will eat anything."
>
> Peter Wezeman
> anti-social Darwinist

hmm. I read that as using a fusion, rather than a fission, reaction. A fusion
reactor will eat anything... if primed with carbon and lithium. And the motor
will use anything for reaction mass. Niven had, for example, fusion motors
using water for reaction mass in World of Ptavvs.

there’s a difference between what’s used for _reactor_ mass and what’s
used for _reaction_ mass. it’s kinda important.

On 10/9/2022 6:44 AM, Wolffan wrote:
> On 09 Oct 2022, peterwezeman@hotmail.com wrote
> (in article<897c5415-0336-4ef3-bc80-099215ad546an@googlegroups.com>):
>
>> Heinlein was explicit that in _Farmer in the Sky_, _Time for the Stars_, and
>> other stories
>> humans have the technology to convert matter completely to energy, a trope
>> that goes
>> back at least to 1928 in published science fiction. From _Farmer in the Sky_,
>> when the
>> protagonist Bill Lerner is being given a tour of the Colonial Service ship
>> Mayflower,
>> enroute to Ganymede. The party is in the engineering spaces and the chief
>> engineer
>> is speaking:
>>
>> He said that there had been three stages in the development of space ships:
>> first was the
>> chemical fuel rocket ship that wasn't very different from the big German war
>> rockets used
>> in the Second World War, except that they were step rockets. “You kids are
>> too young to have
>> seen such rockets,” he said, “but they were the biggest space ships ever
>> built. They had to be
>> big because they were terribly inefficient. As you all know, the first rocket
>> to reach the Moon
>> was a four-stage rocket. Its final stage was almost as long as the Mayflower
>> —yet its pay load
>> was less than a ton.
>>
>> “It is characteristic of space ship development that the ships have gotten
>> smaller instead of bigger.
>> The next development was the atom-powered rocket. It was a great improvement;
>> steps were no
>> longer necessary. That meant that a ship like the Daedalus could take off
>> from Earth without even
>> a catapult, much less step rockets, and cruise to the Moon or even to Mars.
>> But such ships still had
>> the shortcomings of rockets; they depended on an atomic power plant to heat
>> up reaction mass and
>> push it out a jet, just as their predecessors depended on chemical fuel for
>> the same purpose.
>>
>> “The latest development is the mass-conversion ship, such as the Mayflower,
>> and it may be the
>> final development—a mass-conversion ship is theoretically capable of
>> approaching the speed of light.
>> Take this trip: we accelerated at one gravity for about four hours and twenty
>> minutes which brought
>> us up to more than ninety miles a second. If we had held that drive for a
>> trifle less than a year, we
>> would approach the speed of light."
>>
>> Later, Bill is discussing the terraforming of Ganymede:
>>
>> "...mass-energy converters were used to give Ganymede its atmosphere.
>>
>> "By Einstein's law, one gram mass equals 9x10 to the 20th ergs, so that fancy
>> long figure works out
>> to be 1.03x1011 grams of energy, or 113,200 tons. It was ice, mostly, that
>> they converted into energy,
>> some of the same ice that was being turned into atmosphere—though probably
>> some country rock
>> crept in along with the ice. A mass converter will eat anything."
>>
>> Peter Wezeman
>> anti-social Darwinist
>
> hmm. I read that as using a fusion, rather than a fission, reaction. A fusion
> reactor will eat anything... if primed with carbon and lithium. And the motor
> will use anything for reaction mass. Niven had, for example, fusion motors
> using water for reaction mass in World of Ptavvs.
>
> there’s a difference between what’s used for _reactor_ mass and what’s
> used for _reaction_ mass. it’s kinda important.
>
Nitpick, the fusion reaction may "eat" iron and heavier elements but it
would not be productive.
--
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky
dirty old man.

On Sat, 8 Oct 2022 16:36:22 -0700 (PDT), Andrew Love
<andrewelovejr@msn.com> wrote:

>On Sunday, October 2, 2022 at 1:11:29 AM UTC-4, Robert Woodward wrote:
>
>> 2) I have noticed a lack of children in a number of books where the
>> presence of children would be an plausible complicating factor.
>>
>
>I've the opposite problem regarding children in at least one case of media science fiction - Star Trek Nemesis has a society of a few hundred or thousand immortals, with dozens of children running around. Something's not right about the demographics there.

In a small village containing /all/ the humans on a large planet with
plenty of room for expansion.

>Actually, now that you mention it, Asimov's The Naked Sun has too many children on Solaria - the number of children on this supposedly population-constant world implies a lifespan not too much different than our own - but supposedly people routinely live over two centuries
--
"In this connexion, unquestionably the most significant
development was the disintegration, under Christian
influence, of classical conceptions of the family and
of family right."

On 08/10/2022 18.36, Andrew Love wrote:
> On Sunday, October 2, 2022 at 1:11:29 AM UTC-4, Robert Woodward wrote:
>
>> 2) I have noticed a lack of children in a number of books where the
>> presence of children would be an plausible complicating factor.

> Actually, now that you mention it, Asimov's The Naked Sun has too many children on Solaria - the number of children on this supposedly population-constant world implies a lifespan not too much different than our own - but supposedly people routinely live over two centuries

At the nursery, where Bailey gets shot at? I never thought
about it, but yeah, there does seem to be too many rugrats
there.

--
Michael F. Stemper
Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding;
Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind.

On Sunday, October 9, 2022 at 12:48:54 PM UTC-4, Paul S Person wrote:
> On Sat, 8 Oct 2022 16:36:22 -0700 (PDT), Andrew Love
> <andrew...@msn.com> wrote:
> >I've the opposite problem regarding children in at least one case of media science fiction - Star Trek Nemesis has a society of a few hundred or thousand immortals, with dozens of children running around. Something's not right about the demographics there.
> In a small village containing /all/ the humans on a large planet with
> plenty of room for expansion.

Checking the Internet, I see that there were only 600 natives in the village, and they'd been on the planet, immortal for several centuries. So unless the initial population was very small, they had a fairly stable population. Maybe it was only recently they decided to have a lot of kids, so they can expand.

On Sunday, October 9, 2022 at 3:23:10 PM UTC-4, Michael F. Stemper wrote:
> On 08/10/2022 18.36, Andrew Love wrote:
> > On Sunday, October 2, 2022 at 1:11:29 AM UTC-4, Robert Woodward wrote:
> >
> >> 2) I have noticed a lack of children in a number of books where the
> >> presence of children would be an plausible complicating factor.
> > Actually, now that you mention it, Asimov's The Naked Sun has too many children on Solaria - the number of children on this supposedly population-constant world implies a lifespan not too much different than our own - but supposedly people routinely live over two centuries
> At the nursery, where Bailey gets shot at? I never thought
> about it, but yeah, there does seem to be too many rugrats
> there.
>
Yeah. It's the only nursery on the planet, and supposedly they get about 20 new kids a month - and Solaria's population is supposedly stable at 20,000. So they get 250 or so new citizens in a year - which means they must have about 250 deaths in a year, which is not consistent with a lifespan of over 2 centuries (unless a lot of those kids die before they become adults)..

On 10/9/2022 1:19 PM, Andrew Love wrote:
> On Sunday, October 9, 2022 at 3:23:10 PM UTC-4, Michael F. Stemper wrote:
>> On 08/10/2022 18.36, Andrew Love wrote:
>>> On Sunday, October 2, 2022 at 1:11:29 AM UTC-4, Robert Woodward wrote:
>>>
>>>> 2) I have noticed a lack of children in a number of books where the
>>>> presence of children would be an plausible complicating factor.
>>> Actually, now that you mention it, Asimov's The Naked Sun has too many children on Solaria - the number of children on this supposedly population-constant world implies a lifespan not too much different than our own - but supposedly people routinely live over two centuries
>> At the nursery, where Bailey gets shot at? I never thought
>> about it, but yeah, there does seem to be too many rugrats
>> there.
>>
> Yeah. It's the only nursery on the planet, and supposedly they get about 20 new kids a month - and Solaria's population is supposedly stable at 20,000. So they get 250 or so new citizens in a year - which means they must have about 250 deaths in a year, which is not consistent with a lifespan of over 2 centuries (unless a lot of those kids die before they become adults).

Which would be consistent with holding shootouts in nurseries....

--
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky
dirty old man.

In article <c5d71ea2-e61b-408c-8374-2d6330c3daf8n@googlegroups.com>,
Andrew Love <andrewelovejr@msn.com> wrote:

> On Sunday, October 9, 2022 at 3:23:10 PM UTC-4, Michael F. Stemper wrote:
> > On 08/10/2022 18.36, Andrew Love wrote:
> > > On Sunday, October 2, 2022 at 1:11:29 AM UTC-4, Robert Woodward wrote:
> > >
> > >> 2) I have noticed a lack of children in a number of books where the
> > >> presence of children would be an plausible complicating factor.
> > > Actually, now that you mention it, Asimov's The Naked Sun has too many
> > > children on Solaria - the number of children on this supposedly
> > > population-constant world implies a lifespan not too much different than
> > > our own - but supposedly people routinely live over two centuries
> > At the nursery, where Bailey gets shot at? I never thought
> > about it, but yeah, there does seem to be too many rugrats
> > there.
> >
> Yeah. It's the only nursery on the planet, and supposedly they get about 20
> new kids a month - and Solaria's population is supposedly stable at 20,000.
> So they get 250 or so new citizens in a year - which means they must have
> about 250 deaths in a year, which is not consistent with a lifespan of over 2
> centuries (unless a lot of those kids die before they become adults).

Or over half of them emigrate when they grow up.

--
"We have advanced to new and surprising levels of bafflement."
Imperial Auditor Miles Vorkosigan describes progress in _Komarr_.
—-----------------------------------------------------
Robert Woodward robertaw@drizzle.com

On Sunday, October 9, 2022 at 8:44:17 AM UTC-5, Wolffan wrote:
> On 09 Oct 2022, peterw...@hotmail.com wrote
> (in article<897c5415-0336-4ef3...@googlegroups.com>):
> > Heinlein was explicit that in _Farmer in the Sky_, _Time for the Stars_, and
> > other stories
> > humans have the technology to convert matter completely to energy, a trope
> > that goes
> > back at least to 1928 in published science fiction. From _Farmer in the Sky_,
> > when the
> > protagonist Bill Lerner is being given a tour of the Colonial Service ship
> > Mayflower,
> > enroute to Ganymede. The party is in the engineering spaces and the chief
> > engineer
> > is speaking:
> >
> > He said that there had been three stages in the development of space ships:
> > first was the
> > chemical fuel rocket ship that wasn't very different from the big German war
> > rockets used
> > in the Second World War, except that they were step rockets. “You kids are
> > too young to have
> > seen such rockets,” he said, “but they were the biggest space ships ever
> > built. They had to be
> > big because they were terribly inefficient. As you all know, the first rocket
> > to reach the Moon
> > was a four-stage rocket. Its final stage was almost as long as the Mayflower
> > —yet its pay load
> > was less than a ton.
> >
> > “It is characteristic of space ship development that the ships have gotten
> > smaller instead of bigger.
> > The next development was the atom-powered rocket. It was a great improvement;
> > steps were no
> > longer necessary. That meant that a ship like the Daedalus could take off
> > from Earth without even
> > a catapult, much less step rockets, and cruise to the Moon or even to Mars.
> > But such ships still had
> > the shortcomings of rockets; they depended on an atomic power plant to heat
> > up reaction mass and
> > push it out a jet, just as their predecessors depended on chemical fuel for
> > the same purpose.
> >
> > “The latest development is the mass-conversion ship, such as the Mayflower,
> > and it may be the
> > final development—a mass-conversion ship is theoretically capable of
> > approaching the speed of light.
> > Take this trip: we accelerated at one gravity for about four hours and twenty
> > minutes which brought
> > us up to more than ninety miles a second. If we had held that drive for a
> > trifle less than a year, we
> > would approach the speed of light."
> >
> > Later, Bill is discussing the terraforming of Ganymede:
> >
> > "...mass-energy converters were used to give Ganymede its atmosphere.
> >
> > "By Einstein's law, one gram mass equals 9x10 to the 20th ergs, so that fancy
> > long figure works out
> > to be 1.03x1011 grams of energy, or 113,200 tons. It was ice, mostly, that
> > they converted into energy,
> > some of the same ice that was being turned into atmosphere—though probably
> > some country rock
> > crept in along with the ice. A mass converter will eat anything."
> >
> > Peter Wezeman
> > anti-social Darwinist
> hmm. I read that as using a fusion, rather than a fission, reaction. A fusion
> reactor will eat anything... if primed with carbon and lithium. And the motor
> will use anything for reaction mass. Niven had, for example, fusion motors
> using water for reaction mass in World of Ptavvs.
>
In an earlier paragraph Bill Lerner is estimating the energy needed to melt and
dissociate enough ice to give Ganymede a breathable atmosphere of three pounds
per square inch of oxygen, allowing for the fact that Ganymede has one third Earth's
surface gravity. He concludes: 92,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ergs.
In the MKS metric system this is 9.25 X 10 to the 24th joules.

Bill further calculates in the paragraph I quoted that to produce this much energy
the mass converters must have converted 1.03 x 10 to the 11th grams of ice
into energy, or 113,200 tons (seems to be English short tons of 2,000 lb). If you
run these numbers using 300,000,000 meters per second for the speed of light,
converting 103,000,000 kg of mass into energy yields 9,27 x 10 to the 24th joules,
very close to Heinlein's figure. 113,200 tons of ice contains only 12,600 tons of
hydrogen. Working with 12,600 tons of hydrogen a fusion reactor would produce
less than one percent of this energy.

I have to conclude that Heinlein was in fact writing about complete conversion
of mass into energy. When he meant fusion reactor he wrote fusion reactor,
as he did in _Citizen of the Galaxy_.

Peter Wezeman
anti-social Darwinist

Wolffan <akwolffan@zoho.com> schrieb:

> Pournelle’s CoDo and Empire had photon rockets. Really nice exhaust
> velocities. Really bad thrust unless you indulge in massive handwavium, which
> he did, and it would be a Really Bad Idea to stand behind them, which is one
> reason for the, ahem, Langston Field.

Using a photon rocket with a fusion motor is not a very good concept.
You convert a very small fraction of your fuel mass to energy, and
by emitting photons instead of the fusion product, you lose a lot of
thrust.

On Monday, October 10, 2022 at 12:53:23 AM UTC-4, Robert Woodward wrote:
> In article <c5d71ea2-e61b-408c...@googlegroups.com>,
> Andrew Love <andrew...@msn.com> wrote:
>
> > On Sunday, October 9, 2022 at 3:23:10 PM UTC-4, Michael F. Stemper wrote:
> > > On 08/10/2022 18.36, Andrew Love wrote:
> > > > On Sunday, October 2, 2022 at 1:11:29 AM UTC-4, Robert Woodward wrote:
> > > >
> > > >> 2) I have noticed a lack of children in a number of books where the
> > > >> presence of children would be an plausible complicating factor.
> > > > Actually, now that you mention it, Asimov's The Naked Sun has too many
> > > > children on Solaria - the number of children on this supposedly
> > > > population-constant world implies a lifespan not too much different than
> > > > our own - but supposedly people routinely live over two centuries
> > > At the nursery, where Bailey gets shot at? I never thought
> > > about it, but yeah, there does seem to be too many rugrats
> > > there.
> > >
> > Yeah. It's the only nursery on the planet, and supposedly they get about 20
> > new kids a month - and Solaria's population is supposedly stable at 20,000.
> > So they get 250 or so new citizens in a year - which means they must have
> > about 250 deaths in a year, which is not consistent with a lifespan of over 2
> > centuries (unless a lot of those kids die before they become adults).

> Or over half of them emigrate when they grow up.

Are the emigrees seeking other planets for human contact, or are they fleeing all planets, freaked out by the thought that there are other people just over the horizon?

"If I can get farther from the *horizon*, I'll have more warning if they come around it!"

There might be room for some sort of "Zeroth Law" reveal to be made with someone pointing out that calling Aurorans or Solarians "Spacers" is a misnomer, as they also live on planets.

--
-Jack

On Monday, October 10, 2022 at 6:24:35 AM UTC-6, jack....@gmail.com wrote:

> There might be room for some sort of "Zeroth Law" reveal to be made with someone pointing out that calling Aurorans or Solarians "Spacers" is a misnomer, as they also live on planets.

Other than *Earth*. Which, in the context of the two original Lije Baley novels, is a very reasonable distinction to make.

John Savard

In article <ti12h5$1dp4i$1@newsreader4.netcologne.de>,
Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:
>Wolffan <akwolffan@zoho.com> schrieb:
>
>> Pournelle’s CoDo and Empire had photon rockets. Really nice exhaust
>> velocities. Really bad thrust unless you indulge in massive
>handwavium, which
>> he did, and it would be a Really Bad Idea to stand behind them,
>which is one
>> reason for the, ahem, Langston Field.
>
>Using a photon rocket with a fusion motor is not a very good concept.
>You convert a very small fraction of your fuel mass to energy, and
>by emitting photons instead of the fusion product, you lose a lot of
>thrust.

As pointed out here in the early 2000s, which somehow is 20 years
ago now.
--
My reviews can be found at http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/
My tor pieces at https://www.tor.com/author/james-davis-nicoll/
My Dreamwidth at https://james-davis-nicoll.dreamwidth.org/
My patreon is at https://www.patreon.com/jamesdnicoll

On Monday, October 10, 2022 at 7:15:33 AM UTC-6, James Nicoll wrote:

> As pointed out here in the early 2000s, which somehow is 20 years
> ago now.

Ah, yes, I know the feeling too, also experiencing advancing age...

John Savard