I will also take with me (at least):
Poul Anderson, Harvest Of Stars;
Julian May, Jack The Bodiless.
May's series, like many by Anderson, has FTL interstellar travel whereas this series by Anderson has only STL. Which of these options lies in our future? Faster than light would seem impossibly fast even without the relativistic light speed barrier. I do not expect a galaxy full of uninhabited, inhabitable planets needing neither terraforming nor human adaptation but at least we now know that there are many exo-planets. I was disappointed in the early 1960s to read that it was not known whether any other star had planets. Such planets, being non-luminous, would be too small and too far away to be detected from Earth.
Scientific knowledge comes one datum at a time: plenty of planets but no sign as yet of any radio messages or of objects moving between stars at close to light speed.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Have fun at Wychnor Park, in Staffordshire. And I'm sorry Mrs. Shackley now has a cold. I hope she gets over it fast!
While I hope FTL is invented, we can STILL reach some of the stars by STL means, if we really wish to, as Anderson argued in the "Commentary" to SPACE FOLK. Anderson was more realistic than Julian May about the quantity of humanly habitable planets likely to be found. He expects some to come with difficulties and problems: the Ice Age of Altai, the heavy gravity of Imhotep, the medicine humans need to take to live on Unan Besar, etc.
And what I'm particularly hoping will be soon discovered are planets with oxynitrogen atmospheres with liquid water!
Sean
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