…becoming too conventional? A review of his latest book.
[Update a couple minutes later]
A new book about the high frontier, and an accompanying 3-D space colony app.
[Update a few minutes later]
An interview with Stephenson about the book.
11 thoughts on “Is Neil Stephenson…”
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I haven’t read Reamde yet, but I doubt it’s more accessible than Snow Crash.
Stephenson writes faster than I can read.
Rand,
Thanks for the laugh. The idea that someone will build a high tech space habitat and then fill the inside with cute suburban bungalows is as hilarious as the rock houses in the Flintstones.
The story lines which appear in it look to be as equally funny. It almost makes the Jetsons look like a documentary about the future 🙂
Diablo 3 will have an extensive online/real world economy. Gold farming will be legal and Blizzard will get their cut. It isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, other games also have similar exchanges.
The problem with buying gold in WoW is that the farmers turn around and hack your account. The problem with farming gold in wow is that an American can’t compete with slave labor (literally) camps in China.
I miss the days before gold farming went overseas, those were good days heh.
This book sounds interesting, will have to check it out.
I got the author confused with climategate when he said that fiction pays better than truth.
I find myself in rare agreement with Thomas. Given the costs of building anything in space, for the foreseeable future the inside of a space colony will probably look like an illegal hydroponic grow room tended by way too many illegal aliens, all packed inside an abandoned air cargo freighter.
Humans live as humans live.. the idea that we’re suddenly going to change when we go into space is just an extension of the fantasy of the left. It’s one of the reasons I so dislike the popularity of Carl Sagan.
Trent, humans live the way they do according to local costs, availability, materials, and other externalities, from Japanese sleeping in coffin sized sleep chambers to Texans who need a Cessna to visit their nearest neighbor. We are adaptable. A specific style of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture is not.
Ahh.. so what you’re saying is that because you can’t imagine the set of externalities that would make “western” architecture suitable on a space colony that somehow they don’t exist? The whole treatise of O’Neill was a description of how to get such externalities. The ISS looks like it was extruded through a 15 ft diameter tube because it was – the space shuttle cargo bay.
As soon as somebody says space colonies will always be this or that, they’re wrong. Space colonies will be everything one can imagine, and a good deal more we presently can’t.
Who’s to rule out colonist with a nostalgic affection for any particular kind of architecture we’ve seen on Earth?
O’Neill himself thought one could rule out something along the lines of New York City layed out onto the interior of a space habitat. One of the few areas where I would have to part with him. We can’t dismiss the notion some ex-New Yorkers would try to recreate what they knew and loved.
Trent, I’d like to see something like the O’Neill habitats, but I really don’t think they’re economically competitive due to the high initial cost, overhead, and maintenance. For one thing, the big giant windows. The glass for the windows alone, if bought on Earth at cutrate prices, would cost ten times more than his entire budget for the effort. Launching them into space would up the cost a hundred fold or more, as glass is heavy. But once up there, ASME standards for windows in occupied pressure vessels dictate that the entire population spends their lives doing window inspections.
There are clever ways around this, such as using sodium sulfur lamps or LEDs powered by solar cells, fiber optic sunflowers, and such, but as soon as you start down that path you can drop costs dramatically by packing all the light and plant growth into a dense area, warmed by light but with radiative air coolers elsewhere. So the low cost solution is a bunch of people living it what looks like an abandoned cargo plane.
Sure, you could envision an O’Neill habitat, and that will remain a goal, but anything you want done in space can be done much more cheaply by the sods in the cramped environment who only see the real sun through tiny portholes. From a cost standpoint, they win. They’ll always win.
Trent,
The key problem is with O’Niell’s basic design which is really more a tribute to Rube Goldberg then good engineering. Consider for example how an atmosphere would behave in such a huge structure, with a steep gravity gradient and no barriers to uneven heating. The complexity of the tracking mirrors. The exposure to radiation resulting from the transparent upper part of the design. And let’s not get into structural strength and stability. And without such large open areas the style of houses we have on Earth would make little sense.
There will be space habitats some day. hopefully sooner then later, but they will likely have little resemblance to the ones envisioned by Dr. O’Neill.