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Vaguely on topic - the novel A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge touches on this subject a fair bit. potential spoilers follow Essentially, no spacefaring c
by SECProto 8y ago
Vaguely on topic - the novel A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge touches on this subject a fair bit.
potential spoilers follow
Essentially, no spacefaring civilization is stable over long time scales, a culture (the Qeng Ho) get by through predicting which planetary system will have the economy to support refueling an interstellar craft (in the centuries-later future when they arrive). Trade advanced/secret technology development info for said refueling. The story has way more to it, but I loved it as a known-physics-following scifi story. I expect the audience of this site would also love it (and probably, many have already read it)
- hartror 8y agoLoose prequel to my favourite book of all time A Fire Upon the Deep. Vinge is a brilliant author with a background in maths and computing and it shows in his writing.
- _audakel 8y agoThanks for the recommendation, I just got it on Audible and I'm looking forward to listening to it.
- girvo 8y agoSoftware archeology! I adored that book. Highly recommended to anyone on HN that hasn’t read it, it’s well worth it. Quite enjoyable too, outside the neat hard sci-fi and cute extrapolations of modern day software engineering.
- matt-snider 8y agoLove this book. The prologue is one of my favourite beginnings to a book and hints at how epic/vast the book's universe is: > The manhunt extended across more than one hundred light-years and eight centuries. It had always been a secret search, unacknowledged even among some of the participants. In the early years, it had simply been encrypted queries hidden in radio broadcasts. Decades and centuries passed. There were clues, interviews with The Man's fellow-travelers, pointers in a half-dozen contradictory directions: The Man was alone now and heading still farther away; The Man had died before the search ever began; The Man had a war fleet and was coming back upon them. With time, there was some consistency to the most credible stories. The evidence was solid enough that certain ships changed schedules and burned decades of time to look for more clues. Fortunes were lost because of the detours and delays, but the losses were to a few of the largest trading Families, and went unacknowledged. They were rich enough, and this search was important enough that it scarcely mattered. For the search had narrowed: the man was traveling alone, a vague blur of multiple identities, a chain of one-shot jobs on minor trading vessels, but always moving back and back into this end of Human Space. The hunt narrowed from a hundred light-years, to fifty, to twenty - and a half-dozen star systems. And finally, the manhunt came down to a single world at the coreward end of Human Space.
- ddingus 8y agoI am going to read that book. Thanks for posting that excerpt. It is a near perfect, "and then ehat happened?" Hook!
- mannykannot 8y agoOne of Larry Niven's 'Draco Tavern' short stories has the economics of interstellar traveling sales-aliens as its plot device. I don't recall the name.