Is the Kithic life-style appealing or even feasible?
Appealing?
"'...weeks, months, maybe years crowded into a metal shell or into still more cramped seal-domes, never able to step outside for a breath of clean air, only in a suit - because, I reminded him, planets where humans can walk freely are bloody few, and to make the profit that keeps us going we often have to call at other kinds.'"
-Poul Anderson, Starfarers (New York, 1999), Chapter 17, p. 130.
This paradox arises several times in Anderson's works. Interstellar travel is seen as the ultimate freedom yet the travelers are imagined as confined inside metal spacecraft. It need not be like this. Those who cross an interstellar distance must take a habitable environment with them so they should be able to make that environment both spacious and humanly tolerable:
in Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains, the first extrasolar colonists have a much longer travel time but their vehicle and habitat is a terraformed asteroid;
in Anderson's Harvest Of Stars Tetralogy, the Lunarians live permanently inside artificial environments which however are the very opposite of crowded or cramped;
in Anderson's Technic History, van Rijn and Flandry travel in sybaritic spacecraft.
Of course, there are limits to the sizes of the ships that can be moved with the zero-zero drive technology of Starfarers but, if those ships had to be too small for the sanity of large crews, then there would be no Kith culture.
Feasible?
Is regular trade feasible? After decades or centuries:
Will there still be an organized society on Earth or any other planet?
Will that society still need or want what the Kith can sell?
Might it not have found a way to produce, e.g., those rare isotopes or biochemicals at home?
Or have developed a technology with entirely different needs?
We are told that the trade does indeed dwindle for some of these reasons but how likely is it even to start?
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8 comments:
In the Age of Sail, very long voyages under conditions much worse than that were common. Human beings are extremely tough and adaptable.
A lot of it's what you're used to.
Eg., a WW1 soldier from the Gorbals (the worst slum in Glasgow, which meant at the time the worst in Europe) who later on managed to get to Cambridge remarked that the poets who listed the horrors of the Western Front's trench warfare mostly came from middle-class backgrounds. They were used to being clean, well-fed and not often at risk of life and limb.
He pointed out that while some things were pretty bad -- as he remarked, the gang-fights and the Protestant-Catholic rumbles he'd grown up with were conducted with clubs and razors, not heavy artillery -- the filth and cold and damp and lice and hunger were pretty much what he'd experienced in civilian life.
Mr Stirling,
So British class divisions were reflected even in the experience of the trenches.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But I agree more with Mr. Stirling than I do with you. That is, I believe many humans are tougher and more resilient than we may be giving them credit for. Additionally, we don't KNOW if STL trade of the kind seen in Anderson's Kith stories will actually happen unless we get a star drive approaching the speed of light and the ships needed for that kind of use. Then the people of that future time will see what might happen.
Also, I disagree with equating too rigidly the conditions of WW I trench life with what was seen in the Gorbals slums a century ago. However bad life was there it was nothing like trying to survive either a fullscale bombardment or going "over the top" in the teeth of machine gun fire.
However poor and "lower class" the inhabitants of the Gorbals slums were, not ALL who were poor lived so wretchedly. I'm sure many people who lived in the rural areas were poor, but I doubt their conditions of life were as bad. Things like the Gorbals slums must have been a result at least partly from the economics of life in major cities, not of "class."
Sean
Paul:
"... they should be able to make that environment both spacious and humanly tolerable..."
My faith in the possibility of THAT is ... limited, unless some very new and different technologies are developed. As the "Atomic Rockets" website points out, over and over again, in space travel, EVERY GRAM COUNTS. A spaceship CAN'T be made luxurious, because every bit of extra mass requires more fuel and reaction mass to propel it.
That's not just the mass of CARGO, either; consider also that to have room for more cargo (or passengers), you need a larger and thus more massive hull ... and still more reaction mass to push it. And the not-yet-used reaction mass ALSO has to be carried and accounted for when calculating how long it'll take to get up to any significant speed.
Don't forget, either, the weight cost of reactor shielding. I assure you, "Atomic Rockets" doesn't — nor does it let its readers do so.
Bottom line: A ship capable of supporting "gracious living" isn't a ship that can go anywhere fast, unless and until someone comes up with a reactionless drive and/or FTL.
Incidentally, "Atomic Rockets" covers other things besides the hard-science aspects of space flight, and a section describing music in fictional futures includes an extensive quote from someone with the unlikely name of Paul Shackley ... discussing the Battle of Brandobar.
David,
Thanks. I found the Atomic Rockets website but could you email me a link to the discussion of music?
Paul.
Kaor, DAVID!
And we do see Poul Anderson touching on some of these problems and difficulties in how to space travel, whether STL or FTL, practical. Anderson speculated about the possibilities of using concepts developed from the Bussard ram jet, for example. Ideas seen in such books of his as TAU ZERO or ORBIT UNLIMITED.
Sean
Paul:
There's a table of contents at the bottom of every page, and music is under "Future Culture." Specifically, it's at: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/futuremusic.php
The excerpt from your commentary is roughly a quarter or a third of the way down the page.
I've found some good and useful info on that site, although its creator also explores things he admits to be NOT scientifically accurate, such as excerpts from the *Lensmen* series. Amusingly, I discovered "Atomic Rockets" in much the same way I was led to your blog: I was trying to find if there was a classical origin for Manuel Argos' phrase "Peace, ye underlings!" — that is, did one of the Roman generals, perhaps Julius Caesar himself, first say it? (As near as I can discover, no, it's original to PA.)
David,
Thank you.
Paul.
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