SF Stuff that Really Annoys You!

[psikeyhackr]

I was checking out a recent addition to Project Gutenberg and encountered this:

"We can't do anything else," I answered. "We're ninety-three million light years away from the Earth, and twenty-five outside the patrol area."

That is near the beginning of To the Sons of Tomorrow by Irving E. Cox

The Earth just coincidentally happens to be 93 million miles from the Sun but the Andromeda galaxy is a mere 2.5 million light years away. Of course there was no Wikipedia in 1953 but:

List of nearest galaxies - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Hubble figured out that other galaxies are pretty far away in the 1920s.

Now I realize this can be regarded as rather silly and petty since this is science FICTION and we don't even know if any kind of FTL is possible but that distance is ridiculous. I am tempted to read it to see if the story could be accomplished inside this galaxy but just thinking about that may annoy me too much.

Yeah, go ahead, laugh at me. I can hear you already.

 

[psikeyhackr]

I like that Wikipedia article explaining "Heliocentric Distance".

Like the difference between Heliocentric and Geocentric makes a difference when talking about distances over a lightyear.

An AU is what percentage of 2.5 million light years Data?

My positronic brain is not capable of handling that many zeros Captain.

 

[Bick]

An AU is what percentage of 2.5 million light years Data?

0.0006%

 

[SilentRoamer]

I know it shouldn't but it annoys me when something is "2.5x faster than light" - but Captain the enemy ship is "10x faster than light"

Would there even be a functional difference if both speeds allowed you to cross your own World Lines and travel into your own past.

I understand you cant do much else if you want multi stellar civilisations which aren't completely isolated due to relativistic effects, but it just bothers me.

 

[Bick]

I know it shouldn't but it annoys me when something is "2.5x faster than light" - but Captain the enemy ship is "10x faster than light"

Would there even be a functional difference if both speeds allowed you to cross your own World Lines and travel into your own past.

I understand you cant do much else if you want multi stellar civilisations which aren't completely isolated due to relativistic effects, but it just bothers me.

It doesn’t especially bother me that SF ships sometimes go several-fold faster than light in the sense you describe, but I do wonder why you would bother. It would cut the average interstellar travel time from many decades to fewer decades! To be able to skip around like in Star Trek you’d need to be doing hundreds or even thousands of times the speed of light, surely.

 

[SilentRoamer]

It doesn’t especially bother me that SF ships sometimes go several-fold faster than light in the sense you describe, but I do wonder why you would bother. It would cut the average interstellar travel time from many decades to fewer decades! To be able to skip around like in Star Trek you’d need to be doing hundreds or even thousands of times the speed of light, surely.

Yeah that's true.

I had an idea for a novella about humans discovering a Wormhole Gateway on Jupiter, but when they Activate it it seals Jupiter away behind a black body. Around the same time (from the PoV of Earth) a star just disappears. As humans keep moving through the Gateway more stars keep disappearing.

Some clever scientist figures out that the tech "seals" the target location as a way to protect the timeline and as we "see" the stars get sealed then we know the Gateway is FTL'ing people into the past.

Anyway it was just the bare bones of an idea I had floating in my head. Feel free to rip it to pieces

 

[Bick]

Yeah that's true.

I had an idea for a novella about humans discovering a Wormhole Gateway on Jupiter, but when they Activate it it seals Jupiter away behind a black body. Around the same time (from the PoV of Earth) a star just disappears. As humans keep moving through the Gateway more stars keep disappearing.

Some clever scientist figures out that the tech "seals" the target location as a way to protect the timeline and as we "see" the stars get sealed then we know the Gateway is FTL'ing people into the past.

Anyway it was just the bare bones of an idea I had floating in my head. Feel free to rip it to pieces

Sounds kind of intriguing actually.

 

[psikeyhackr]

0.0006%

Really?

I get 2.5 million ly is 157,783,680,000 AU.

0.0000000006%

OK, Data can handle that but he is trying to be human so he has to practice sarcasm.

Sarcastic androids annoy me too.

 

[psikeyhackr]

! To be able to skip around like in Star Trek you’d need to be doing hundreds or even thousands of times the speed of light, surely.

The FTL in Michael McCollum's Gibraltar Earth trilogy is about 7,000 times light speed.

They would drop out of FTL once a week to take navigational sightings. The story involved the Crab Nebula, 7000 ly away, and the trip took little over a year.

 

[Vladd67]

 

[tinkerdan]

I think that it really resolves down to what a person is looking for in fiction.
There are some people--many that I know in my work--who are unsuited to most fiction and are better off sticking to reading history, biography, auto-biography or science journals. And some of those I know do exactly that because of this.

If you are more inclined to seek out imaginative thought, there are certain boundaries that you need some level of flexibility.
This could end up with a sliding scale depending on the reader.

Someone who is fixated on physics as we know it might want to restrict themselves to novels or screenplays that stay within our universe.
This could possibly lead to sticking within the basic sphere of the earth and the moon and possibly Mars or Venus.

Someone willing to expand into what if of slightly differing understanding of physics might be able to expand beyond the universe without too much suspension of disbelief.

Someone who has little trouble with suspending disbelief could possible believe that 93 million lightyears is no problem some time in the far future.

One warning though. If you do throw your suspenders out, you have to face the possibility that you might some day lose your trousers.

 

[psikeyhackr]

Someone who has little trouble with suspending disbelief could possible believe that 93 million lightyears is no problem some time in the far future.

One warning though. If you do throw your suspenders out, you have to face the possibility that you might some day lose your trousers.

See!

I knew someone was going to laugh at me.

But the thing is, how many galaxies are in a 20 million ly radius, much less stars? What could there be in that story that needed such a distance? That is what bugged me about it.

No, you can't write a good science fiction story limited to just this galaxy, it isn't possible.

 

[Ursa major]

What could there be in that story that needed such a distance?

Didn't the book say what it was/might be?

 

[Fiberglass Cyborg]

I get annoyed that all my SF short story ideas have been satirised in advance by Kurt Vonnegut. I scribble the latest piece of brilliance down, then stop and think, "Hey, isn't that a Kilgore Trout story?"

 

[psikeyhackr]

Didn't the book say what it was/might be?

I would have to read the whole thing to find out.

To the sons of tomorrow by Irving E. Cox

Free kindle book and epub digitized and proofread by volunteers.

gutenberg.org

I started it to try to get an idea if it was any good and got to that point and quit.

OK, I have read 10%. It is about a starship crashing on an alien planet. The ship is badly damaged and some of the crew are killed. So far I see nothing that could not happen in this galaxy or a Star Trek episode.

 

[tinkerdan]

Didn't the book say what it was/might be?

I personally haven't read it through yet though I did start.
It is a short story-possible novella at best and was published in a magazine.

I gather from a quick scan that part of the story premise depends on their being out of explored space which was defined as possibly twenty five lighyears beyond explored space.(Though there might be an open possibility he meant 25 million light years beyond explored space), However it suggests for the plot that the survivors of the flight might not survive the possibility that explored space will expand and they might be located and saved.

From there that accesses the potential twist at the end that leaves one wondering.

Once again that is from a quick scan of the bulk of the story.

I knew someone was going to laugh at me.

We aim to please.

 

[psikeyhackr]

I have read 10%. They are supposedly 25 million ly beyond human patroled space. So how many galaxies are between 68 and 93 million ly away? How many stars?

Oh yeah, 1953, no exoplanets found by then.

 

[psikeyhackr]

I get annoyed that all my SF short story ideas have been satirised in advance by Kurt Vonnegut. I scribble the latest piece of brilliance down, then stop and think, "Hey, isn't that a Kilgore Trout story?"

You could try a story with a scientist trying to become an SF writer becoming pissed off at Kurt Vonnegut so he makes a time machine to make sure he is killed in WWII.

 

[tinkerdan]

Having finished reading I think that the distance is only meant to be used to compare the difference between volume of the patrolled universe at 68 million light years and the 93 million light years. The unpatrolled volume of space is 1.5 times larger than the patrolled volume which could conceivable take more time to gather into as patrolled space as existing patrolled space took in time to explore making it understandable for the plot to assume the survivors of a crash would not be located if we disregard any possibility that the people in the patrolled area knew their entry point and trajectory of the craft.

The author might have thought that such an imposing number would relieve any doubt that these people were lost and on their own.

On a separate note--since the observable universe is often calculated to be somewhere above 93 billion light years in diameter--it seems that 93 million light years is really not that excessive in comparison even though it could probably work as well at 9.3 million light years. However it stands to reason that it would take us more time to dispute that there is such a world to be found at 93 million than at 9.3 million.

There's a lot more surfaces space in the sphere to work with to hide that world from prying telescopes.

 

[Rodders]

I have a bit of an issue with single ecosphere planets.

Star Wars is full of them, so I’ve grown up with them but for some reason they bother me a bit. I understand that you want to give each planet its own aesthetic and feel, but lush forestry from pole to pole isn’t realistic. Okay, perhaps I just have an issue with Endor.