disposable robots and the talus

Alastair Reynolds · 05 May 1999, 15:20 · from whorl-v0009.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: areynold at estsa2.estec.esa.nl (Alastair Reynolds)
Subject: Re: (whorl) disposable robots and the talus
Date: Wed, 5 May 1999 17:20:20 +0200 (MET DST)
Message-ID: <whorl-v0009-0110 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0009/0110.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Robert:

>=20
> require some level of terraforming. While I find the probability-based
> arguments for the existence of biospheres on other planets to be fairly
> plausible, I see no reason to expect that their life-chemistry will be in
> any way compatible with ours. I just re-read Vernor Vinge's
> _A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep_, and while it is a great book, he seems rather nai=
ve
> in assuming that everyone can eat everyone else and not die.
>=20
>=20
> R.

there's a nice Joe Haldeman short story which exploits the idea of
incompatible biochemistries - I think it's in his last collection,
whatever it was called.

It's interesting that at the moment, SF seems to be questioning some of=20
the core assumptions which have held good for decades - like, if we
had the ability to settle other worlds (in this solar system or elsewhere)
we automatically would do so. Remember in Sterling's Schismatrix, how
the entire solar system has been "taken over" by humans, but hardly
anyone actually bothers with settling planets or moons. Similarly in
Egan's recent Diaspora, the posthuman explorers (actually just software
running on tiny spacecraft!) are deeply reluctant to introduce any sort
of contaminant into the planet they are exploring. Rather than sending
submarine probes into the planet's ocean, they toy with the idea of
waiting a few hundred years until a tsunami dumps some sea-life onto
dry-land, where they can study it from orbit.

Incidentally - for anyone interested in the science (and art) of
extrasolar planets - I'd suggest having a look at this *very* nice
website I found yesterday (needs Java though):

http://www.jtwinc.com/Extrasolar/

cheers...

Al

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request at lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth at lists.best.=
com

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net