Poul Anderson's Twilight World, which just makes it into future historical status, features exploration of - Mars. The Solar System presents many opportunities for planetary and other explorations and we need not restrict our attention to future histories, e.g., there is Lunar exploration in:
the classic works by Verne and Wells;
Heinlein's first Scribner Juvenile, Rocketship Galileo;
Anderson's "The Light" and Operation Luna.
Heinlein's Adult and Juvenile Future Histories skip past interplanetary exploration to colonization but there is interstellar exploration in Methuselah's Children and Time For The Stars.
The crew of the Leonora Christine in Anderson's Tau Ceti become involuntary intergalactic explorers.
When following ideas through works of sf, we do not confine ourselves to a single author but do find that Anderson contributes much.
And now reality supersedes fiction. Explorers in sf novels had to approach quite close to a star to confirm or disconfirm the existence of a planetary system. Now we know of many exo-planets and are about to learn a lot more about them. Might extra-solar civilizations be confirmed in 2022 in our timeline?
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Anderson's story "The Light," has a fascinating premise: WHAT could Leonardo Da Vinci have discovered which enabled him to travel to the Moon and back?
Your last paragraph: I'll be keenly interested to know what the James Webb telescope might discover! Both about possible terrestroid planets and whether we find evidence of intelligent life elsewhere.
Ad astra! Sean
If there are massive "structures" of the sort that have been hypothesized (by me, among others!) then the Webb will be able to see them. That would be proof positive, and -if- it happened, would revolutionize the intellectual life of the human species.
That's the sort of revolution I could get behind!
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Absolute agreement! And it would not bother me at all if evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy is found. I already believe that is more likely to be the case than not. Nor would I consider such evidence a "challenge" to Christianity, as some like to claim it would be. An idea I find puzzling.
I'm impatient for the Webb telescope to become operational!
Ad astra! Sean
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