Trumpler 14 lies in the Carina Nebula, about 8,000 light years away. The Carina Nebula is known for being a major star birthplace or nursery.
What if we called it a Star Farm?
Can you imagine a Sci Fi story set in a Star Farm like Trumpler 14? The seeds have already been planted and the crops of stars are already springing up.
What would the star farmers do?
Operate massive solar arrays to collect energy?
Siphon off hot gases–like hydrogen and helium?
Operate orbiting plant farms?
Please post your comments below.
Be stellar!
Matthew Cross
P.S. The small, dark shape just left of center is the silhouette of a nodule of gas. But it looks like a ship full of eager star farmers to me. MC
In Kristyn Merbeth’s space opera Fortuna, she introduces the spider tank, a sturdy, four-legged machine that can carry a squad long distances over the treacherous, icy terrain of the planet Titan.
The novel alternates between chapters told by Portia, the pilot of the family’s spaceship, Fortuna, and chapters told by her brother, Corvus, who is finishing his three-year enlistment in the military on Titan.
Here, Corvus describes the spider tank:
“The spider tank is designed to travel through dangerous terrain, able to navigate across ice and up almost-vertical cliffs, but the four legs plod along in jerky motions that always sicken my stomach. Even after three years on Titan, I’m still not used to land vehicles, too accustomed to the smoother travel of hovercrafts that are common on every other planet. Here the extreme winds and unpredictable weather make them too dangerous to operate.”
Traditional tanks on earth travel on wheels or on caterpillar treads, like those on a bulldozer.
A tank can really be any heavily armored vehicle with weapons. If it doesn’t have serious weapons, it should probably just be called an armored personnel carrier. Merbeth does not tell us about the weaponry in the spider tank. But in a battle scene, she writes of hand-held blasters and pulse rifles that shoot laser-fire. So I’m imagining the spider tank has some heavy-duty lasers and maybe a few other tricks besides.
Design your own tank!
If you were an engineer of the future, what kind of tank would you build?
Would it have wheels, treads, legs or hoverjets?
Would it fire cannonballs, shells, missiles or lasers?
Would soldiers ride in it, drive it remotely, or would it have artificial intelligence (AI) and drive itself?
Photograph by VM_Quezada (unsplash.com@vm_quezada).
Ansible — a machine used for instant communication across vast distances of space.
Sci Fi writers have created many fictional devices that allow people to talk, write, or send messages instantly or very quickly across the vast empty stretches of space.
This is a phonograph. It plays records or discs. But for some reason, I always picture one of these when I hear the word “ansible.” Photo by Sudhith Xavier (www.unsplash.com@sudhithxavier).
The legendary Ursula LeGuin created the word “ansible” in her 1966 novel Rocannon’s World. She described a device that could be used to send instant text messages to anyone else with an ansible.
LeGuin used the ansible in later books as well. By the way, “ansible” is a shortening of the word “answerable,” so-named because the device allowed a person to type a question that could get an “answerable” reply in a reasonable amount of time.
Why do Sci Fi writers need a fictional device?
Why did Le Guin need a fictional communication device? Why couldn’t her characters just send messages using an antenna that sends radio waves?
The problem is the speed of radio waves and the great distances between solar systems.
The Speed of Light
In empty space, radio waves travel at the speed of light. According to the great physicist Albert Einstein, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Even though his theory is more than 100 years old, it is still hard for most people to understand. That’s probably because in our daily lives, the only thing we see traveling at those speeds is light itself. And individual light particles–called photons–are too small and too fast for us to detect with our eyes.
Photo by Jon Geng (unsplash.com/@colourlife).
Light has no mass. It is pure energy. That’s why it can reach such a high speed. But for things with mass–things made out of atoms like you and me and everything we own–we gain mass the faster we travel. At the fastest speeds that humans and machines can travel, the change is barely noticeable. But if you send a ship rocketing through space, the closer it gets to the speed of light, the more its mass grows.
A spaceship floating in space has no weight. But it still has mass. To push it forward faster than it is already traveling requires more energy. Einstein’s law says that the faster you make the ship fly, the more mass it has. That means each time you try to add speed, you need more energy than the last push. Before the ship could ever reach the speed of light, you would run out of energy.
Radio telescope antennas capture radio waves. They can pick up a radio signal, but not send one. Photo by Matheo_JBT (unsplash.com@Matheo_JBT).
What does the speed of light have to do with communication across space?
In science fiction, we often write and read about people traveling to planets in far away solar systems. It takes years for light–even traveling as fast as light does–to reach a planet in another solar system. That means that a communication system that uses radio waves, light or lasers to send messages to a planet outside our solar system would take years. More than a lifetime, if the planet is not near one of our neighboring stars.
Why don’t Sci Fi writers use something real–some technology that we know–other than light or radio waves to send messages then? Well, because nothing travels faster than the speed of light.
Photograph by VM_Quezada (unsplash.com@vm_quezada).
Long distance communication in Sci Fi
It’s hard to write a gripping Sci Fi story if the heroes on a distant planet send an urgent message back home to Earth and then must wait 20, 50 or even a 100 years to receive the reply. Sometimes Sci Fi writers want to tell stories where humans living on different worlds or in spaceships far apart can still talk to each other or communicate in some way.
That’s why LeGuin created the fictional ansible. So her heroes could send messages back home and receive orders from their superiors.
Create your own device!
What kind of fictional device can you imagine to instantly communicate between Earth and a space ship light years away? What would you call it? How would it work?
Penumbral Lunar Eclipse–when the moon passes through the Earth’s penumbra, the lighter edge of Earth’s shadow
The night of July 4th, this past Saturday, a penumbral lunar eclipse was visible from the Western Hemisphere. Did you notice? Probably not.
Here’s why:
According to an article by Joe Rao on space.com, the Earth casts two shadows–as do all objects lit by the sun. The area of the darker shadow is called the umbra. The lighter shadow surrounding the umbra is the penumbra. Others describe the umbra as the darkest, central part of a shadow and the penumbra as the lighter edge of that same shadow. The penumbra gradually fades from the complete darkness of the umbra to light at the edges.
So a penumbral lunar eclipse is an eclipse of the moon where the moon passes through the Earth’s penumbra. That means the moon only gets shaded and you should be able to see the full moon during the entire penumbral lunar eclipse.
In fact, if only a part of the moon passes through the Earth’s penumbra, the shading can be so slight that we won’t even notice it. That was the point of Joe Rao’s article: that the penumbral lunar eclipse on July 4 was not a big deal–not nearly as exciting as fireworks or other astronomical sights–because we wouldn’t even notice it.
He says that a penumbral lunar eclipse is only noticeable when about 70 percent of the diameter of the moon passes into the Earth’s penumbra. On July 4 and July 5, only about 30 percent of the moon’s diameter passed through the penumbra.
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein features an alien race called the “Arachnids” or “Bugs.”
Cover art for Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein. Image grab from Goodreads.com
Beware the Arachnid threat!
“The Bugs are not like us. The Pseudo-Arachnids aren’t even like spiders. They are arthropods who happen to look like a madman’s conception of a giant, intelligent spider.” And they are organized! Like ants or termites, they work together, under “the ultimate dictatorship of the hive.”
Strengths of the Bugs
The Bug warriors, controlled by a brain Bug hiding below in tunnels, fight without care, fear or mercy. They never flee or surrender—humans are not even sure if the warrior Bugs can surrender. They do not rescue their wounded and, if they can kill a human with their weapons, they will do so even if it means killing one of their own kind. They are the Mobile Infantry’s most dangerous enemy!
“Their warriors are smart, skilled, and aggressive—smarter than you are, by the only universal rule, if the Bug shoots first. You can burn off one leg, two legs, three legs, and he just keeps on coming; burn off four on one side and he topples over—but keeps on shooting. You have to spot the nerve case and get it . . . whereupon he will trot right on past you, shooting at nothing, until he crashes into a wall or something.”
The Formics of Ender’s Game
In Ender’s Game[Enders Game Review] by Orson Scott Card, the ant-like Formics invade Earth to colonize it. The Formics, called Buggers by most humans, look something like giant ants. “Though their internal organs were now much more complex and specialized than any insects, and they had evolved an internal skeleton and shed most of the exoskeleton, their physical structure still still echoed their ancestors, who could easily have been very much like Earth’s ants.”
In Ender’s Game, humans and Buggers battle in space but rarely meet face to face. By the end of the book, we learn that Buggers and humans largely go to war because they do not understand each other.
Buggers can communicate without speech over any distance in space.[*Ansible] So they have no language, no speech and no writing. And humans, who do not understand this, have no way to plea for mercy or offer peace.
Strengths of the Bugs
Like the Bugs in Starship Troopers, the Buggers are directed by a single mind. For Bugs in Starship Troopers, that mind is a “brain” Bug. In Ender’s Game, the queen directs the Buggers. “To them, losing a few crew members would be like clipping your nails. Nothing to get upset about.”
What makes Buggers scary is their technology and their vast numbers. “[T]he buggers are out there. Ten billion, a hundred billion, a million billion of them, for all we know. With as many ships, for all we know. With weapons we can’t understand. And a willingness to use those weapons to wipe us out.”
Which one do you think is the most fearsome?
What other bugs, insects, and creepy crawlies have you found in science fiction?