4 ms·

Life on a neutron star (2004)

81 points by che_shr_cat 8y ago

Zanni 8y ago
I love these books (Dragon's Egg and Starquake). Robert Forward isn't great with the human characters, but they're only in a handful of scenes. He really brings the cheela to life, and the speculative physics is outstanding.
- arethuza 8y ago
  I remember some wit commenting that the strangest aliens in science fiction were the human characters in a Robert Forward novel...
- JackFr 8y ago
  Despite the clunkiness of the writing, I really enjoyed Dragon's Egg. One aspect I thought was fascinating was how they solved the problem of getting a probe (relatively) close to the the neutron star without it being torn apart by tidal forces.
lostmsu 8y ago
Wouldn't enormous gravitational pressure on the surface of neutron star essentially make it extremely flat (as in nearly perfect elongated sphere)?
- wcoenen 8y ago
  According to this article by David Darling, any surface irregularities ("mountains") would be no more than 5 mm in height. http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/N/neutronstar.html http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/N/neutronstar.html Charles Horowitz estimates 100 mm. https://www.space.com/6682-neutron-star-crust-stronger-steel.html https://www.space.com/6682-neutron-star-crust-stronger-steel...
  - zelos 8y ago
    They can also have 'seas' of hydrogen pulled off a partner star if they're in a binary system. The resulting occasional thermonuclear explosions might make it a bit of an unpleasant place to live though.
    - jerf 8y ago
      The novel occurs on a free-roaming neutron star that has stabilized enough due to its isolation to permit life. Along with the open question of whether "nuclear chemistry" is possible, it would certainly be an open question as to whether it is truly possible for a neutron star to ever stabilize enough for life. I don't think it's much of a spoiler since it's right in the title... the second one, Starquake, centers around a neutron-star quake that happens to the Cheela civilization. Neutron star quakes are so devastating that the human ships and the humans are quite badly shaken up, merely being in orbit around a neutron quake. (Imagine satellites being destroyed because of a quake on Earth. We're very low mass, we don't think of things like that. Though I'm sure we can tell the differences in some trajectories from quakes and seaslides.)
  - lostmsu 8y ago
    That seems interesting: > If you were to hold that empty teaspoon just one yard above the star's surface and drop it, it would strike the surface at 4.3 million mph. E.g. about 2 million m/s, c is 300 million m/s.
- Zanni 8y ago
  Yes. A character falls to their death off a "cliff" that would be imperceptible to humans. Another striking feature from the novels, not mentioned in the article but hinted at in the illustration, is the extremely strong magnetic field, creating an easy direction of travel (parallel to the field) and a hard direction (orthogonal to the field). The relative difference is so extreme that most cheela spend their lives just going back and forth, only running into other tribes when they're forced by circumstances to travel in the hard direction.
vbuwivbiu 8y ago
also Flux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_(novel) by Stephen Baxter
- arethuza 8y ago
  That also adds the interesting aspect of weaponized neutron stars...
  - pavel_lishin 8y ago
    For those who haven't read Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence novels, a weaponized neutron star is actually fairly tame as far as weapons go in that series.
fractallyte 8y ago
Before this, there was Mission of Gravity, by Hal Clement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_of_Gravity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_of_Gravity) He even wrote an article about the creation of his high-g planet, featured in Astounding SF in 1953.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  As a kid, I read Hal Clement. He was lauded as one of the few authors to write aliens as alien. They had different goals. This was refreshing after so many 1-dimension aliens, or aliens who were just humans in a different guise. Actually even as a kid I didn't think he'd gone far enough. Sure they had different outlooks. But fundamentally there weren't as different from me as some other people I knew. I was wishing for an alien that thought completely differently - different morals, different logic, different cultural blind spots and esthetics. Not just different solutions to obstacles they found, which they could explain in perfect western logic.
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    And also, when they got to that cliff and made a hot-air balloon to ascend, I was appalled. The balloon was described as round, which in the crushing gravity gradient would have torn itself apart. It should have been pancake-shaped or cigar-shaped to reduce the pressure differential from top to bottom, to something that the fabric could reasonably have withstood.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    Several of Stanisław Lem's works feature truly-alien aliens, to the point that the reader and probably even the author have no hope of comprehending their motives.
  - JackFr 8y ago
    "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him." http://existentialcomics.com/comic/245 http://existentialcomics.com/comic/245
  - Iwan-Zotow 8y ago

81 points by che_shr_cat 8y ago

I love these books (Dragon's Egg and Starquake). Robert Forward isn't great with the human characters, but they're only in a handful of scenes. He really brings the cheela to life, and the speculative physics is outstanding.

arethuza 8y ago
I remember some wit commenting that the strangest aliens in science fiction were the human characters in a Robert Forward novel...
JackFr 8y ago
Despite the clunkiness of the writing, I really enjoyed Dragon's Egg. One aspect I thought was fascinating was how they solved the problem of getting a probe (relatively) close to the the neutron star without it being torn apart by tidal forces.

lostmsu 8y ago

Wouldn't enormous gravitational pressure on the surface of neutron star essentially make it extremely flat (as in nearly perfect elongated sphere)?

wcoenen 8y ago
According to this article by David Darling, any surface irregularities ("mountains") would be no more than 5 mm in height. http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/N/neutronstar.html http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/N/neutronstar.html Charles Horowitz estimates 100 mm. https://www.space.com/6682-neutron-star-crust-stronger-steel.html https://www.space.com/6682-neutron-star-crust-stronger-steel...
- zelos 8y ago
  They can also have 'seas' of hydrogen pulled off a partner star if they're in a binary system. The resulting occasional thermonuclear explosions might make it a bit of an unpleasant place to live though.
  - jerf 8y ago
    The novel occurs on a free-roaming neutron star that has stabilized enough due to its isolation to permit life. Along with the open question of whether "nuclear chemistry" is possible, it would certainly be an open question as to whether it is truly possible for a neutron star to ever stabilize enough for life. I don't think it's much of a spoiler since it's right in the title... the second one, Starquake, centers around a neutron-star quake that happens to the Cheela civilization. Neutron star quakes are so devastating that the human ships and the humans are quite badly shaken up, merely being in orbit around a neutron quake. (Imagine satellites being destroyed because of a quake on Earth. We're very low mass, we don't think of things like that. Though I'm sure we can tell the differences in some trajectories from quakes and seaslides.)
- lostmsu 8y ago
  That seems interesting: > If you were to hold that empty teaspoon just one yard above the star's surface and drop it, it would strike the surface at 4.3 million mph. E.g. about 2 million m/s, c is 300 million m/s.
Zanni 8y ago
Yes. A character falls to their death off a "cliff" that would be imperceptible to humans. Another striking feature from the novels, not mentioned in the article but hinted at in the illustration, is the extremely strong magnetic field, creating an easy direction of travel (parallel to the field) and a hard direction (orthogonal to the field). The relative difference is so extreme that most cheela spend their lives just going back and forth, only running into other tribes when they're forced by circumstances to travel in the hard direction.

vbuwivbiu 8y ago

also Flux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_(novel) by Stephen Baxter

arethuza 8y ago
That also adds the interesting aspect of weaponized neutron stars...
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  For those who haven't read Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence novels, a weaponized neutron star is actually fairly tame as far as weapons go in that series.

fractallyte 8y ago

Before this, there was Mission of Gravity, by Hal Clement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_of_Gravity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_of_Gravity) He even wrote an article about the creation of his high-g planet, featured in Astounding SF in 1953.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago
As a kid, I read Hal Clement. He was lauded as one of the few authors to write aliens as alien. They had different goals. This was refreshing after so many 1-dimension aliens, or aliens who were just humans in a different guise. Actually even as a kid I didn't think he'd gone far enough. Sure they had different outlooks. But fundamentally there weren't as different from me as some other people I knew. I was wishing for an alien that thought completely differently - different morals, different logic, different cultural blind spots and esthetics. Not just different solutions to obstacles they found, which they could explain in perfect western logic.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  And also, when they got to that cliff and made a hot-air balloon to ascend, I was appalled. The balloon was described as round, which in the crushing gravity gradient would have torn itself apart. It should have been pancake-shaped or cigar-shaped to reduce the pressure differential from top to bottom, to something that the fabric could reasonably have withstood.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Several of Stanisław Lem's works feature truly-alien aliens, to the point that the reader and probably even the author have no hope of comprehending their motives.
- JackFr 8y ago
  "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him." http://existentialcomics.com/comic/245 http://existentialcomics.com/comic/245
- Iwan-Zotow 8y ago