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It does assume that life must be associatable with a planet. It's a plausible assumption, but you could also hypothetically have life develop on a star itself o
by scarmig 1y ago
It does assume that life must be associatable with a planet. It's a plausible assumption, but you could also hypothetically have life develop on a star itself or its remnants, comets, clouds of interstellar gas. Maybe even something more exotic than that (dark matter? some weird correlated statistical properties of the quantum foam?)
- dotancohen 1y agoAbout forty years ago I read a terrific book about life forms that live on a star. Maybe Starquake was it called? Did to the abundance of energy on the surface of a star, they live their lives a million times faster than humans. Thus for both them and the humans who discover them, communication is difficult. I think the humans push these life forms to develop civilization, which from the human's perspective had them go from primitive animals into sophisticated beings of technology past their own in something like a day.
- LeifCarrotson 1y agoThat's "Dragon's Egg" by Robert L. Forward, a classic Sci-fi story: https://annas-archive.org/md5/4c381ac344506d10037fc8e774709863 https://annas-archive.org/md5/4c381ac344506d10037fc8e7747098... The cheela lived on the surface of a neutron star, and they lived faster because the nuclear physics that powered their metabolism are far faster than the chemical and mechanical physics that power our own.
- DennisP 1y agoThere's also Sundiver by David Brin, which has plasma life forms in our sun.
- dotancohen 1y agoYes, that was it!
- squigz 1y agoI'm not against piracy, and I love Anna's Archive... but publicly linking directly to a pirate source for something like this seems wrong. Could've just linked the Wikipedia page and let people acquire however they prefer. Anyway, sounds interesting, gunna add that to my list
- sho_hn 1y agoIt's 45 years old and the author is deceased. I assume you would be untroubled by a link to a copy of Macbeth. Where do you draw the line?
- squigz 1y agoWell I don't really have a line, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go linking directly to such sources in public - not everyone agrees with my stance on copyright. Those who do can easily go find it themselves. Also Macbeth was written 400 years ago. Let's not pretend this is a fair comparison. This author has been dead only 20 years - it might be that their partner is still alive and needs that money, or their children.
- me-vs-cat 1y agoWhy won't anyone think of the publishers and the book stores! Amazon is hanging on by a thread, and piracy is stealing their cut.
- antonvs 1y agoAn obvious line would be when copyright expires. In fact, drawing that line is exactly what copyright expiry is intended to do.
- lazide 1y agoCopyright has far exceeded sane limits a long time ago.
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- dreamcompiler 1y agoAnd "The World at the End of Time" by Frederik Pohl. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_at_the_End_of_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_at_the_End_of_Time
- ElFitz 1y agoAndy Weir’s Project Hail Mary had an interesting take on that.
- gcanyon 1y agoI was bothered by the nearly a-scientific-ness of PHM. The story was nicely done in general, but it feels like he pretends to be hard science fiction when he's really Star Trek-level.