Discussion:
The Vela: The Complete Season 1 by Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, Rivers Solomon, S. L. Huang
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Default User
2024-05-23 06:20:25 UTC
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Still catching up on things read last fall.

This book was written in some rotation, with each author doing a
chapter. Apparently it was a read as a podcast as well.

This is set in solar system with a number of colonized planets.
However, the sun is dying, and as the reduction in sunlight makes the
climate on the outer planets intolerable, the people are trying to make
their ways to the inner ones.

Asala Sikou is an orphan, refugee, and soldier-for-hire. When a ship
called The Vela vanishes during what was supposed to be a
political-stunt rescue mission, a reluctant Asala is hired to team up
with Niko, the child of a wealthy inner planet's president, to find it
and the outer system refugees on board.

She has to find out how an entire ship disappeared, where it is, and
what was behind it all.


I had mixed reactions. The author list on this was fairly impressive,
so not too surprisingly the action was all right, and the plot had some
interesting twists here and there, although I thought it dragged at
times.

On the other hand, the science was so bad that I had a bunch of cringe
moments. They wanted to feature both climate change and refugee
problems as integral parts. However, they also decided to have the
climate problems be human made, so the purported reason that the sun is
dying is due to humans harvesting hydrogen from it for their fusion
reactors and to make water from oxygen mined from underground (what?!)

A star like the sun fuses about 600 million tons of hydrogen every
second. The idea that these people, whose technology isn't that far
advanced from ours, removed any meaningful amount of hydrogen, let
alone enough to make the star's energy output drop significantly is
just, bleah.


Brian
Robert Carnegie
2024-06-08 13:32:11 UTC
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If there /is/ a way to consume the Sun in, oh,
a hundred years, for profit, then it'll happen.

As it is, we may not have time to try it.

See Isaac Asimov's _The Gods Themselves_, as usual.
Peter Fairbrother
2024-06-08 22:52:39 UTC
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Post by Robert Carnegie
If there /is/ a way to consume the Sun in, oh,
a hundred years, for profit, then it'll happen.
Or, dump rubbish into it so the surface cools down. But then of course
the inside gets hotter ... not quite a nova by my back-of-an-envelope
calculations, more a bloop, but big enough to thoroughly sterilise any
planets.


Peter Fairbrother
Post by Robert Carnegie
As it is, we may not have time to try it.
See Isaac Asimov's _The Gods Themselves_, as usual.
Michael F. Stemper
2024-06-09 14:46:12 UTC
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Post by Robert Carnegie
If there /is/ a way to consume the Sun in, oh,
a hundred years, for profit, then it'll happen.
Or, dump rubbish into it so the surface cools down. But then of course the inside gets hotter ... not quite a nova by my back-of-an-envelope calculations, more a bloop, but big enough to thoroughly sterilise any planets.
How much rubbish did it take to make a measurable effect on the Sun's surface temperature? And was the rubbish more like iron or more like chicken bones?
--
Michael F. Stemper
If you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much
more like prunes than rhubarb does.
Peter Fairbrother
2024-06-09 21:07:03 UTC
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Post by Michael F. Stemper
Post by Peter Fairbrother
Post by Robert Carnegie
If there /is/ a way to consume the Sun in, oh,
a hundred years, for profit, then it'll happen.
Or, dump rubbish into it so the surface cools down. But then of course
the inside gets hotter ... not quite a nova by my back-of-an-envelope
calculations, more a bloop, but big enough to thoroughly sterilise any
planets.
How much rubbish did it take to make a measurable effect on the Sun's
surface temperature? And was the rubbish more like iron or more like
chicken bones?
Large parts of Uranus's core and mantle, so something in between iron,
chicken bones, and water. Anything which was dumped would sink slowly if
it's heavier than hydrogen. It would also be less conductive than
hydrogen and mess up the conduction cells at the Sun's surface (which is
what causes the blurp).


As to why people might want to have dumped dump Uranus's core into the
sun 20,000 years before, it was to get the momentum and drive mass to
raise Venus into L4; though by that time Mars had been made bigger with
more core from Uranus and moved to L5, so the L naming doesn't really
apply - three similar mass planets in a common orbit around the Sun..




and it was mostly done with giant elastic bands .. but that's another
story :)



Peter Fairbrother

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