Hi folks,
From the "What are you reading?" Thread I see that this seems to be a popular book here, which is no surprise given our general interest in science, space, and general nerdiness.
I wonder if there is interest to discuss the book, in a virtual book club manner? I've got some questions and observations after having finished the book. To those who haven't read it yet, I recommend doing so before reading this thread. There will definitely be spoilers. It's a fun book, with some interesting twists and turns, and I don't want the thread to ruin anything for you.
So, I'll start. Note that all of my observations are good-natured, recognize that this is a work of fiction, and not intended to bash an author that is climbing my "favorite author" charts.
So, after we get to the part where the basic nature of astrophage is revealed, essentially as a space-borne bacteria, they were described as having mitochondria. But, bacteria don't have mitochondria... or any other membrane bound organelles. You have to get to a much more complex eukaryotic organism before mitochondria show up... mitochondria are believed to be sort of a remnant of bacteria living symbiotically in other cells. Since this is a pretty basic thing that science writers would know I was hoping that it would lead to some sort of big reveal, but that never happened.
Next, while the project to send the Hail Mary to understand what was going on at Tau Ceti made sense, it didn't seem to me to be the only solution, and I'm surprised Straat and the scientific establishment didn't have other projects for remediation going on. Learning how to breed astrophage opens up essentially unlimited energy. Space-borne astrophage farms, enabled by initially breeding enough on Earth to bootstrap a thriving near-Earth space capability, would make energy extremely easy to come by. If the fundamental problem is a reduction in sunlight causing a cooling of the Earth, a very practical solution would be to farm astrophage in bulk in orbit (or, near-Earth space in constant sunlight), then send the astrophage down to earth and have continuous release of astrophage energy into heat at many points on earth. Basically, astrophage driven heat engines warming the atmosphere. The physics of doing this would be pretty basic, given the experiment that was done showing a tiny amount of astrophage melted the giant block of ... silicon or whatever. This could easily overcome the lack of heat from insolation. Alternatively, with lots of energy and essentially no worry about fuel mass getting in the way, it would be easy to build a giant reflector to add to the amount of light hitting the earth.
I've got other things but first I'll wait and see if there is interest in this discussion
From the "What are you reading?" Thread I see that this seems to be a popular book here, which is no surprise given our general interest in science, space, and general nerdiness.
I wonder if there is interest to discuss the book, in a virtual book club manner? I've got some questions and observations after having finished the book. To those who haven't read it yet, I recommend doing so before reading this thread. There will definitely be spoilers. It's a fun book, with some interesting twists and turns, and I don't want the thread to ruin anything for you.
So, I'll start. Note that all of my observations are good-natured, recognize that this is a work of fiction, and not intended to bash an author that is climbing my "favorite author" charts.
So, after we get to the part where the basic nature of astrophage is revealed, essentially as a space-borne bacteria, they were described as having mitochondria. But, bacteria don't have mitochondria... or any other membrane bound organelles. You have to get to a much more complex eukaryotic organism before mitochondria show up... mitochondria are believed to be sort of a remnant of bacteria living symbiotically in other cells. Since this is a pretty basic thing that science writers would know I was hoping that it would lead to some sort of big reveal, but that never happened.
Next, while the project to send the Hail Mary to understand what was going on at Tau Ceti made sense, it didn't seem to me to be the only solution, and I'm surprised Straat and the scientific establishment didn't have other projects for remediation going on. Learning how to breed astrophage opens up essentially unlimited energy. Space-borne astrophage farms, enabled by initially breeding enough on Earth to bootstrap a thriving near-Earth space capability, would make energy extremely easy to come by. If the fundamental problem is a reduction in sunlight causing a cooling of the Earth, a very practical solution would be to farm astrophage in bulk in orbit (or, near-Earth space in constant sunlight), then send the astrophage down to earth and have continuous release of astrophage energy into heat at many points on earth. Basically, astrophage driven heat engines warming the atmosphere. The physics of doing this would be pretty basic, given the experiment that was done showing a tiny amount of astrophage melted the giant block of ... silicon or whatever. This could easily overcome the lack of heat from insolation. Alternatively, with lots of energy and essentially no worry about fuel mass getting in the way, it would be easy to build a giant reflector to add to the amount of light hitting the earth.
I've got other things but first I'll wait and see if there is interest in this discussion