-Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), pp. 709-794 AT p. 737.
That standard G has to be Terrestrial or very close to it. Certainly, there is no reason why there should be any large divergence from the gravitational field in which human beings evolved. Human beings moving out into space will take with them many standard measurements, e.g.:
"For reason or reasons unknown to members of the Galaxy at the time of the era under discussion, Intergalactic Standard Time defines its fundamental unit, the second, as the time in which light travels 299,776 kilometers. 84,600 seconds are arbitrarily set equal to one Intergalactic Standard Day; and 365 of these days to one Intergalactic Standard Year.
"Why 299,776? - Or 86,400? - Or 365?
"Tradition, says the historian, begging the question. Because of certain and various mysterious numerical relationships, say the mystics, cultists, numerologists, metaphysicists. Because the original home-planet of humanity had certain natural periods of rotation and revolution from which those relationships could be derived, say a very few.
"No one really knew."
-Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation (London, 2016), Part 1I, 16, p. 168.
(Civilization is not intergalactic at this time.)
Of these numbers, only 365, rounded down from approximately 365.25, is a natural frequency. When I first read Asimov, I really got with this vision of a far future inhabited Galaxy. Asimov's Galactics did not even know for sure whether they had spread from one planet or converged from many planets. (There was a theory that the Chinese were a separate human evolution.)
Now, I believe that Poul Anderson far excels Isaac Asimov in his accounts of:
the decline and aftermath of an interstellar empire;
the subsequent recovery;
human civilizations in several spiral arms instead of a central galactic administration.
7 comments:
Poul had a better grasp than Asimov on human nature -- and the way it interacts with wildly varying cultures.
Kaor, Paul!
While I agree with what you and Stirling said about how better Anderson's stories were, compared to those of Asimov, the latter made an interesting point. He set the FOUNDATION stories approximately 50,000 "Standard" years from now, meaning I can easily see knowledge of the origins of many standard measurements becoming lost.
Ad astra! Sean
It's true that many things from, say, Classical civilization were lost -- but that was before mechanical (or even more, electronic) copying of information. It would be unlikely in the future, unless there are genuine Dark Age interruptions when the technology is totally lost.
If some data storage as good as this is supposed to be works, even a technological Dark Age would leave most knowledge recoverable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Jim!
Except the pessimist in me is convinced there can or will be times civilization crashes so badly that knowledge/technology can be totally lost.
Ad astra! Sean
The claim about that tech is that nothing higher tech than lenses suitable for microscopes would be needed to read it.
So if you are thinking in terms of making it readable by aliens who find it, or humans recovering from a millennia long dark age, you can put in macroscopic primers about how to make such lenses, which allow you to read the picture dictionary so you can read the next more sophisticated stuff etc.
Kaor, Jim!
That can work--if the primers themselves were not lost. I'm also reminded of Anderson's VAULT OF AGES.
Ad astra! Sean
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