From Newsgroup: rec.arts.sf.written

Is There Life on Other Worlds? by Poul Anderson

Extrasolar planets! What might they be like and how might humanity
reach them?

https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/time-and-stars
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James Nicoll <jdnicoll@panix.com> wrote:

Is There Life on Other Worlds? by Poul Anderson

Extrasolar planets! What might they be like and how might humanity
reach them?

https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/time-and-stars

Excerpt:

Like every other non-fiction work, Life is a snapshot of
science as it existed when it was written.

While THE SPARROW by Mary Doria Russell is a snapshot of cultural
Zeitgeist as it existed when it was written. This novel was
previously unknown to me. Yet the story's beliefs, attitudes, and
assumptions about the world enabled me to narrow down the date of
its origin to within a year or two.
THE SPARROW's simplistic science coincides with several Anderson
elemental essays. Rocket engines constantly accelerate a hollowed out
asteroid for half of the trip to exploit time dilation. Then it's time
to put the brakes on.
Alien audio artifacts awaken an Acrecibo astronomer. (By a stroke of
luck, Acrecibo remained functional in 2019. This is twenty four years
into the 1996 story's future.)
"Russell subtly raises concerns about the ways in which
sophisticated cultures tell themselves cover stories in order to
justify actions taken at a terrible cost to others." A word to the wise
is sufficient: SPARROW won a James Tiptree Jr. Award. Speaking of James Tiptree...

*** Warning - graphic content ***

People who want to remain "Comfortably Numb," in the words of Roger
Waters, ought to stop reading at this point.

Did military intelligence office Alice Sheldon take to heart the advice
"Write What You Know" when she penned WE WHO STOLE THE DREAM? Are Star
Tears an allegory for a real life substance similar to Hunter S
Thompson's fictional adrenochrome?
Did the Epstein coalition adapt Metzitzah B'peh to girls? Torturing
them beforehand to adrenalize their blood?

--
Don.......My cat's )\._.,--....,'``. veritas _|_ telltale tall tail /, _.. \ _\ (`._ ,. liberabit |
tells tall tales.. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' vos |


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On Tue, 23 Jun 2026 11:34:03 -0000 (UTC), jdnicoll@panix.com (James
Nicoll) wrote:

Is There Life on Other Worlds? by Poul Anderson

Extrasolar planets! What might they be like and how might humanity
reach them?

https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/time-and-stars

It was indeed an interesting book for its day. And of course science
will grow dated.
That humanity will expand into space if it can... I think this _can_
be seen as a given, although these days that seems to have become a
minority position.
It avoids having all our "eggs in one basket" in the case of a natural catastrophe, and it's escape from the threat of nuclear war. Given
that, barring the SF trope of a backyard inventor cobbling together a
magic FTL drive, interstellar travel is something requiring (at
least!) government-level resources, thinking of it as a _direct_ means
of escaping a repressive government seems flawed.
That is, if it isn't clear, I view escaping from the threat of nuclear
war as an indirect means of escaping from dictatorship, since the
threat of nuclear war may eventually lead to the surrender of the
democracies, in addition to the more obvious other unpleasant
possibility of the actuality of nuclear war.
As to only Earthlike planets being worth settling... that's a rather
compliated question.
Just about any lump of rock could be used for mining, to build
Earthlike habitats in orbit around it. Also, a vaguely terrestrial
planet (i.e. not a gas giant, not ferociously hostile like Venus as we
now understand it), particularly if its gravity was near to that of
Earth, could be home to underground habitats.
But the *big* plus of an Earthlike planet ought to be obvious. The
cost - and labor and materials are costs, even if one is light-years
away from the nearest stock exchange - of building new housing for an
expanding population is much lower on such a world.
I suppose, though, that resources are cheap on an unowned planet, and interstellar colonists might bring robots or von Neumann machines with
them to do all the work of building habitats as fancy as necessary on inhospitable worlds. But that requires postulating another technology
in addition to the one that got the space colonists out there - and if
we can't fault someone from 1963 for not knowing the temperature of
the surface of Venus, we also can't fault someone from then for not anticipating the recent rapid growth in the power and affordability of
computer power.

John Savard
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From Newsgroup: rec.arts.sf.written

quadibloc@invalid.com (John Savard) wrote or quoted:

That humanity will expand into space if it can...

If you want to pin down human behavior on a macro scale, the
single most reliable predictor is just weighing the cost against
the payoff. It is a given that we will always expand into areas
with rich resources.

But space is nothing like what sci-fi cracks it up to be. The
barrier to entry is astronomical. The ROI only really pans out
when you deploy machinery for highly specialized orbit-only tasks,
like the "Laser Interferometer Space Antenna".

Colonization makes no sense because a colony cannot achieve
self-sufficiency and would require a perpetual pipeline of
supplies from Earth. We can barely sustain ourselves long-term
under ideal conditions right here, so we do not stand a chance on
other planets.

The notion that humanity can bail out of Earth and salvage our
species on other worlds is a massive, naive delusion.


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On 28 Jun 2026 09:25:15 GMT, Stefan Ram seems to be quoting from AI
again:

But space is nothing like what sci-fi cracks it up to be. The
barrier to entry is astronomical

Literally.

Colonization makes no sense because a colony cannot achieve
self-sufficiency and would require a perpetual pipeline of supplies
from Earth.

You could do anything (like synthesize matter) if you had enough
energy to do it. And one thing space is not short of, itrCOs energy
sources.
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