* The "got to see her tits" line is a reference to page 62.
To give you an idea of how nerdy I can be sometimes, I really like the first animation here because the cityscape in the background follows a curved surface, like it's on the inside of an O'Neill cylinder. Lame, I know!
Well, that concludes our animation series, and marks the end of the scene. Stay tuned for the next page, coming soon!
Given that there are already two animations on this page, I thought it might be considered excessive to include a science blurb on top of that.
So, here's the science blurb! This should hopefully be the start of a series exploring the neighborhood around our sun.
The sunlike star Tau Ceti has featured prominently in popular culture, including alien abduction folklore, for decades. So what makes it such a popular destination for science fiction authors, extraterrestial life studies, and general weirdos? Well, first of all, it's relatively close to us - - only 11.9 light years from our sun. Also, it's very similar to our own sun. Our sun is what's called a G-class main-sequence star. After Alpha Centauri A, Tau Ceti is the nearest G-class main-sequence star to Earth. It's not a perfect solar twin however; Tau Ceti is an older, cooler, less active star than our sun. It's only about 78 percent as massive as our sun, and only 55 percent as luminous.
Probably not. We haven't been able to directly detect any planets around Tau Ceti yet. Some scientists think they might have indirectly detected as many as five planets… but they're probably wrong. And what we do know about Tau Ceti makes it a pretty bad candidate for hosting any form of intelligent life. The Tau Ceti system is remarkably dusty. The star is surrounded by a debris disk stretching from about 10 AU (roughly the average distance Saturn is from the sun) all the way out to 55 AU. The high density of debris means that collision events are much more frequent than they are here; maybe ten times as frequent. If there are any planets there - - which there probably aren't - - they're getting clobbered all the time. It's hard to evolve anything more complex than bacteria and protists when dinosaur-killer asteroids are hitting you every ten million years.
Because it's dimmer than our sun, Tau Ceti's habitable zone is closer in. Earth would need to be about the same distance as Venus in order to get the same level of insolation as it does in our solar system. It's just barely possible that if there were a big Jupiter-type planet deflecting all of the incoming space debris, you could maybe have an almost stable world there. But surveys have pretty much eliminated the possibility of any large planets in that close, and because Tau Ceti is such a metal deficient star, it probably doesn't have rocky planets. (When astronomers talk about “metallicity,” they're basically talking about any material that isn't hydrogen or helium. Low metallicity in stars is generally associated with lack of planet formation.) Tau Ceti, most likely, is just a very old, dusty, inactive star with not much interesting going on. Sorry space geeks. You're not likely to find any aliens here. Also, multiple focused SETI searches have failed to turn up any unusual radio transmissions from that region of space.
Currently, there are no colonies or plans to colonize the Tau Ceti system. With no large planets, living around Tau Ceti would not be unlike living in the Kuiper Belt. A reasonable sized spacefaring human population could sustain themselves there for thousands if not millions of years, and longer still with substantial astro-engineering. However, long-term viability is still an issue. Our solar system has tens of billions of years' worth of fusion fuel in gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Tellisto, something Tau Ceti cannot offer. So it's hard to see any reason for colonizing there, except as a stepping stone to somewhere else.
HISTORICAL NOTE: Over two centuries ago, Ceres-based scientists deployed a nanoprobe-laden “smart dust” to Tau Ceti for research purposes. Capable of accelerating to a small fraction of light speed, the probes upon arrival would be capable of self replicating, and assembling larger structures, eventually even synthesizing biological components from local elements. However, the government which launched the probes fell and their projects were abandoned long before the probes ever reached their destination. There are - - at least officially - - currently no macro-scale manmade objects orbiting Tau Ceti.
Comments
Please login to comment.
Login or Register${ comment.author }} at
${ comment.author }} at