Arthur C Clarke Round 4: Clarke On Parade
Castaway, 1947
Just a brief exploration of a "what if" scenario. My first reaction was to think, "a being made of ions? How absurd."
But on further thought I had to admit that I don't know enough about the behavior of matter in the depths of the sun to declare that it could not be a sensible environment for the evolution of life - at least, SOME kind of life, in a carefully defined sense of the word.
All you would need is for some common pool of matter to eventually churn into a pattern that perpetuates itself, and then for that pattern to fold in on itself to create distinct entities, and then for some method of variance in reproduction, and then some outside force to perform selection on the entities. We can simulate most or all of those steps for various environmental conditions, inside a computer, so .... What have astrophysicists learned about the environment inside the sun? What do our simulations look like?
I'm tempted to launch into a research project.
Nightfall, 1953
Kaboom! Apocalypse! Oh woe, oh dearie me, everything's in the crapper. The end.
History Lesson, 1949
Oh, if only Venus had turned out to be that interesting!
What I like about this story is the way two civilizations miss each other almost completely due to the "greenhouse effect". On the one hand, Earth declines into an ice age, and on the other, Venus emerges from runaway heat and begins a tropical phase, spawning reptilian life.
Unfortuantely for Venus, scientists now understand that the greenhouse effect has been going on far too long. The water that used to be on the surface of the planet was blasted so high into the atmosphere that it bled out into space, and is gone.
Venus will never be tropical again.
The Wall of Darkness, 1946
I had a feeling the story would end that way, due to the way it was framed in the beginning. Actually, what I expected was that the protagonist would return only to find that the stairway was abandoned, and appeared to have aged several thousand years.
One thing irritates me about the story: It stops well before any scientist would want it to. Having had such a phenomenon described to me, my mind was immediately bursting with experiments to conduct, to explore the details and technicalities of the phenomenon.
What happens when a single person walks in trailing a rope?
If someone walked in with a stopwatch, would it be possible to find the "halfway point"?
If two people walked in, and one turned around at the halfway point and walked back, what would happen?
Just a brief exploration of a "what if" scenario. My first reaction was to think, "a being made of ions? How absurd."
But on further thought I had to admit that I don't know enough about the behavior of matter in the depths of the sun to declare that it could not be a sensible environment for the evolution of life - at least, SOME kind of life, in a carefully defined sense of the word.
All you would need is for some common pool of matter to eventually churn into a pattern that perpetuates itself, and then for that pattern to fold in on itself to create distinct entities, and then for some method of variance in reproduction, and then some outside force to perform selection on the entities. We can simulate most or all of those steps for various environmental conditions, inside a computer, so .... What have astrophysicists learned about the environment inside the sun? What do our simulations look like?
I'm tempted to launch into a research project.
Nightfall, 1953
Kaboom! Apocalypse! Oh woe, oh dearie me, everything's in the crapper. The end.
History Lesson, 1949
Oh, if only Venus had turned out to be that interesting!
What I like about this story is the way two civilizations miss each other almost completely due to the "greenhouse effect". On the one hand, Earth declines into an ice age, and on the other, Venus emerges from runaway heat and begins a tropical phase, spawning reptilian life.
Unfortuantely for Venus, scientists now understand that the greenhouse effect has been going on far too long. The water that used to be on the surface of the planet was blasted so high into the atmosphere that it bled out into space, and is gone.
Venus will never be tropical again.
The Wall of Darkness, 1946
I had a feeling the story would end that way, due to the way it was framed in the beginning. Actually, what I expected was that the protagonist would return only to find that the stairway was abandoned, and appeared to have aged several thousand years.
One thing irritates me about the story: It stops well before any scientist would want it to. Having had such a phenomenon described to me, my mind was immediately bursting with experiments to conduct, to explore the details and technicalities of the phenomenon.
What happens when a single person walks in trailing a rope?
If someone walked in with a stopwatch, would it be possible to find the "halfway point"?
If two people walked in, and one turned around at the halfway point and walked back, what would happen?