all of that makes perfect sense (except Ceres). Why the bit on Ceres? Because you'd have differential gravity depending on how close you were to the pole. So you'd be losing out on a lot of living space. But you'd still have a lot of room and if the spin was just slow enough people wouldn't get vertigo. Fun fact: if…

Yes. Because so much of it is waiting for trajectory solutions, which is what you would be doing. In space warfare, if I want to blow a ship to smithereens, all I have to do is fire something at it with sufficient acceleration (as opposed to velocity) and let physics do the rest. With sufficient oomph a missile could…

I always thought the funny thing was you don't need one government on Earth to run a story like that. Kim Stanley Robinson does this with his Mars books— he posits the increasing power of multinationals against the backdrop of the UN handling a lot of space stuff while other governments are still intact. In fact I…

If you have a decent fusion reactor you can do some pretty high thrust stuff, though. But yes, warfare wouldn't likely resemble old naval battles much.

Hand me a fusion reactor, a few tons of gas (xenon would be nice but I'll get by with nitrogen, krypton, neon, or even methane in a pinch). I'll show you one hell of an electric propulsion system coupled with a fusion-powered "regular" rocket for high g needs.

I think the only writer I know who really nailed future slang was Anthony Burgess in "A Clockwork Orange" and that was largely because it's so immersive that you can understand it pretty quick. Kind of like how the best scenes of the Godfather have a lot of slang that should be completely unfamiliar to any millennial,…

"Thank you for your support"
[*sips cooler*]

I'd be more generous to it as there's a really interesting question
at the heart of this show, though I thought some plot decisions undercut
that, as well as come of the backstory bits they included. That said, I
was willing to watch the whole thing, and thought it decent enough even
though there's only one season.

I never read the books but I am also a longtime SF reader. I have to say that part of the problem is tropes that are obvious to lifers like me (and you maybe) but not to people who don't read a lot of it. My wife for instance is always asking "what the heck was that about?" because she isn't used to them.

I saw Dark Matter recently and that made me think that at least the Canadians are working with them to make good stuff, so yeah.

In low g freakishly tall wouldn't always happen (at least not with humans) because even though the height is to some extent a product of loading, humans aren't the kind of creature that just gets taller. A large chunk of our genetic heritage is people who are ~5 feet or so. So even if you tack on 15% or thereabouts…

I won't say it isn't discursive. It certainly isn't anything like the typical space opera or adventure stories, and Clarke simply does not write certain kinds of people very well. That said it's as seminal book; in many ways it kind of brought to a head the trope of humans evolving into energy beings.

I think Red Mars might be in development or something so there's no need to learn such an archaic technology. :-)

Interestingly that makes war a bigger problem in some ways. The time it takes a signal to get from Earth to Mars varies a lot, as with the asteroids. But it can still stretch out to six minutes at a bare minimum to Mars; at maximum that message will crawl there in about 15 minutes or so, plus the same to get back.…

You celarly never read "Red Mars" by Kim Stanly Robinson. The Martians *Are* all space hippies and computer nerds, though not cowardly. :-) But then I suppose the "Red" in this case means the politics…

I saw the first episode of this, and have to agree that it was a bit disjointed but some f that was a limit on the format.

I guess the point of departure between us here is

Well, I could say the only reason you know anything about physics is because someone told you about Einstein, but that doesn't mean you can't look stuff up.

Yeah, I've seen some of that. And I did watch the clip. I don't think she's as horrible as you make out and I think the Beatles weren't meant to last forever — in some ways their very creativity was the seeds of destruction for the band. Yoko could have been hit by a bus in 1965 and they still wouldn't have stayed…

The extremist minority didn't vote for David Duke — he won a House seat in Louisiana with 50% of the vote. The extremist minority didn't support segregation — a majority of the white population of the South did. And are you going to tell me slavery was all because of a small number of people and the rest of the white…