Subject:
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Re: The "geography" of local space
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.space
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Date:
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Sat, 13 Nov 1999 07:01:52 GMT
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Viewed:
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523 times
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"John J. Ladasky Jr." wrote:
> Consider Lindsay Braun's mention of the Sun's proposed companion, "Nemesis."
Whoa! Citation! Can I send this one to tthe Humanities Index? (>Insert the noise of a CV being violently padded
here<)
> > Paul Baulch wrote:
>
> > I mean, let's face it..... we're speculating about who's exploring these
> > systems in the future, using information that is still horribly incomplete.
> > I think that we can be a little lenient when it comes to exactly where the
> > stars are.... especially when Hipparcos has allowed us to create a star map
> > of hundreds of thousands of stars that we_know_ to be within 500 parsecs.
> > That's the important thing - they are _there_.
>
> Still, it's fun to try to get it right, no?
Absolutely. Maybe it makes us feel a little closer to reality, like we're not just playing deities but playing
*rational* deities. As Thomas Dolby's father said (on a half billion plays of that record), "Science!"
> Is there anyone out there who's really interested in doing a Lego scenario
> based around Nemesis, or some other red dwarfs? Maybe the UFO or Insectoid
> races have figured out how to eke out a living from tidally-locked terrestrial
> worlds orbiting close to tiny suns. Maybe they spread around the galaxy
> un-noticed, by hopping from star to star that nobody else wants.
The 2300AD universe found an interesting way to use "useless" stars and brown dwarfs (strangely, it's "dwarves" for
people, and "dwarfs" for stars, odd that) by imposing a 7.7ly limit on stardrives before they require a gravity well
to reset their engines. I always looked at the Insectoids theme as a way to capitalise on Alien, Starship Troopers,
et al. by positing a space full of bugs and beasts. I've always maintained--and I will continue to maintain--that the
#1 influence on UFO minifig helmet and armour design was "Predator."
If you want to use a red dwarf (or smaller) to base a world, though, chances are that, as John says, it would be
tidally locked to the star--else close to it, with only libration to spread the heat. Consider how relatively slowly
the inner planets rotate, if at all, possibly gaining occasional angular momentum from this, that, or the other object
impact, but losing it slowly over time. That would make for some interesting biota, civilisation, technology, and so
forth--I'm still somewhat haunted twelve years on by Asimov's original "Nightfall," so I'm a big fan of multiple-star
systems.
Hm, nothing epiphanic to say, just my general babbling. :)
LFB.
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: The "geography" of local space
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| Hi, Paul, (...) Trust me, Stanford has THOUSANDS of computers other than mine to worry about! Oh, and it's not my personal workstation, though I handle most of its technical operation. We have about one computer per two people in our research group. (...) (25 years ago, 9-Nov-99, to lugnet.space)
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