camouflage
gaslit at scale.
Just finished reading Dragons Egg by Robert L Forward.
Realy enjoyed this read, despite the cardboard characters that all scientists in the story tend to be, (I think their character development loses out to the science in which they are engaged) I developed quite a fondness for the tiny little guys called the Cheela that evolve as the human-equivalent species on the surface of their 67-billion-g world.
This is very hard skiffy right here dude, I had to refresh my knowledge of atomic and subatomic physics with an hour or two wandering internet ensychlopedias just to get a vague idea what the bloomin ell the man was going on about when it came to the explanations of the nucleonic chemistry that means the little Cheela live their lives a million times faster then we humans as they wonder around in their half-centimetre thick iron-vapour atmosphere.
The Cheela are possibly the coolest aliens I've ever encountered in skiffy, they're tiny, half a ceninmetre in diameter and 1 to five millimeters tall (depending whether their at one of the magnetic poles of their trillion-gauss neutron star or not) their basically six-eyed amoebas, except they're equal to humans in both mass and complexity.
This book really inspired my imagination, watching the story of Cheela civilisation unfold through one historic Cheela individual to the next was great and even touching considering how thuroughly not-human they were. Their culture, their politics, their religion, the importance of sex in their social interactions and their growing knowledge of the human expedition in orbit above the Neutron Star really involved me in a concept that must have been really hard to make a story out of. Eventually the Cheela overtake human techonologically and power brilliantly past us into their destiny by the end of the same day we make contact with them (when the two species meet, the Cheela are about equivalent to the Roman Empire or Ancient China, well... as close to those societies as you can get when you live on the surface of a dead sun). The tale finished in a way that made me sigh with satisfaction and wonder.
All that's not to mention the clever methods that Forward has the humans use to get into close orbit around the super-massive body of the star Dragons Egg without being liquidised, vaporized and super-collided by the stars insane tidal forces.
This is a brilliant book and I heartily reccomend it. I've alwasy found stars fascinating but, Neutron Stars are teh cool, after reading Dragons Egg I'm certain there's life on a few old stella cinders somewhere, if half the physics/chemistry in the book is possible (and it is) there mght be tiny little pancake people out there right now, zipping around at nucleonic speeds while us big fuzzy bags of slow electron-matter plod along in the relatively super-cool temperatures to which we are accustomed. Even if there are giant magnetic worms swimming the hydrogen oceans of Jupiter right now, they are now officially boring compared to the Flora and fuana of a Neutron Star.
Realy enjoyed this read, despite the cardboard characters that all scientists in the story tend to be, (I think their character development loses out to the science in which they are engaged) I developed quite a fondness for the tiny little guys called the Cheela that evolve as the human-equivalent species on the surface of their 67-billion-g world.
This is very hard skiffy right here dude, I had to refresh my knowledge of atomic and subatomic physics with an hour or two wandering internet ensychlopedias just to get a vague idea what the bloomin ell the man was going on about when it came to the explanations of the nucleonic chemistry that means the little Cheela live their lives a million times faster then we humans as they wonder around in their half-centimetre thick iron-vapour atmosphere.
The Cheela are possibly the coolest aliens I've ever encountered in skiffy, they're tiny, half a ceninmetre in diameter and 1 to five millimeters tall (depending whether their at one of the magnetic poles of their trillion-gauss neutron star or not) their basically six-eyed amoebas, except they're equal to humans in both mass and complexity.
This book really inspired my imagination, watching the story of Cheela civilisation unfold through one historic Cheela individual to the next was great and even touching considering how thuroughly not-human they were. Their culture, their politics, their religion, the importance of sex in their social interactions and their growing knowledge of the human expedition in orbit above the Neutron Star really involved me in a concept that must have been really hard to make a story out of. Eventually the Cheela overtake human techonologically and power brilliantly past us into their destiny by the end of the same day we make contact with them (when the two species meet, the Cheela are about equivalent to the Roman Empire or Ancient China, well... as close to those societies as you can get when you live on the surface of a dead sun). The tale finished in a way that made me sigh with satisfaction and wonder.
All that's not to mention the clever methods that Forward has the humans use to get into close orbit around the super-massive body of the star Dragons Egg without being liquidised, vaporized and super-collided by the stars insane tidal forces.
This is a brilliant book and I heartily reccomend it. I've alwasy found stars fascinating but, Neutron Stars are teh cool, after reading Dragons Egg I'm certain there's life on a few old stella cinders somewhere, if half the physics/chemistry in the book is possible (and it is) there mght be tiny little pancake people out there right now, zipping around at nucleonic speeds while us big fuzzy bags of slow electron-matter plod along in the relatively super-cool temperatures to which we are accustomed. Even if there are giant magnetic worms swimming the hydrogen oceans of Jupiter right now, they are now officially boring compared to the Flora and fuana of a Neutron Star.
