Roland is seventy-five light years from Sol.
Earth has gone incommunicado.
Old colonies launch interstellar ships which might visit an inhabited planet two or three times a century.
Newer colonies still struggle to survive in their alien environments.
Stars in our part of the galaxy average nine light years apart? (So Proxima Centauri is relatively close.)
By writing "You could walk [one light year] in about 270 million years..." (p. 172), Anderson adopts a comfortable conversational style for discussing cosmic distances.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
The fact of Earth going incommunicado is a bad sign. At best Earth has turned totally inward, disinterested in the outer universe. At worse the decadent Federation might have finally fallen and Earth collapsed into a Dark Age where high technology and knowledge has been lost. That seems to have been what Commissioner Svoboda's feared would eventually happen, as we see in ORBIT UNLIMITED.
Sean
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