So anyway, Niven and Pournelle had some really interesting books in the 1980's, a silver age of Scifi. They wrote Lucifer's Hammer, a book so fascinating I remain appalled that Hollywood didn't make that story into a movie instead of the drek they DID make with asteroids and comets hitting while space men go TO the rock to blow it up, since that was "better".
LH was far more plausible. The rock gets spotted, its too late to stop it or turn it away. Now it is too late, and too easy to do, and would be called a copycat of that drek Hollywood shat out. The basic plot is a comet, made of ice and rock, is headed for Earth. The ice keeps shifting its course and it goes from a long shot to pretty close pass to OH GOD ITS GOING TO HIT and then it breaks up in the atmosphere and becomes many hits.
The book explain how this is a bad thing, because many of them smack the oceans. The oceans are full of water and water is non-compressible, so more of the energy is transferred from the projectiles to the planet, the planet rings like a bell, and every fault under tension cracks causing huge quakes. Worse, the water columns up to 2 miles deep in the oceans vaporize and we get enormous clouds of steam and heat, causing superstorms which results in years of rain. Worse, basic chemistry means when the heat drops and elevation takes over, snow at lower and lower elevations. It starts the next ice age, and the story deals with that, and the survivors who escape the initial very tall tsunami. I think they overstated the height of those, but still, they would be a hundred meters tall at least, which would make for a billion plus deaths in the first day, most within hours of the strike.
Oceanic crust is also thinner than land crust, being more dense, and is easier to punch through so every hit site makes a volcano, which makes even more steam than the initial impact spray. In Geology it is believed/hypothesized that hot spot volcanoes on the Earth, of which there are many more than just Hawaii, are actually caused by asteroid impacts leaving scars on the outer core through a process called unloading. This makes for a persistent magma plume and why the Hawaiian islands go further NW and N to vanish under the Asian plate near Kamchatka. Yellowstone may also be a hot spot, though the evidence is weaker due to geochemistry differences. And it is worth noting that statistically, if you live above 200 feet elevation you're probably immune to most tsunami, even those from asteroid impacts in the sea. Naturally, half the world's population lives below that. Niven and Pournelle's novel won the Hugo and Nebula awards. Its a good read, should be at your library and is likely an E-book download.
Their other interesting book, though somewhat distracting, is Footfall, which is about alien invaders. I'm not as big a fan of this one for obvious reasons (space alien invasions are silly because distances are so huge it's pointlessly expensive and a one way trip takes centuries or more). Footfall does have proper use of Flying Crowbars as space artillery, which is a real thing and might actually exist despite it being against international treaties. The aliens chuck rocks at the planet, aiming at worst possible sites, including cities and oceans to kill as many people as possible. No lasers needed, though they have those too. Ground troops have rifles with bayonets, if you can believe it. I recall one of the characters being so pissed off about Death Valley being flooded by the rains caused by impacts, wiping out his precious ecology, he murders a traitor to keep secret the counter attack. This will never be a movie either because Independence Day has too much in common, despite this being written 20 years earlier. Hollywood did a good job with ID so I won't complain much. This also won awards.
In the future, humans will have sufficient technology to convince themselves that a near earth asteroid passing by would be a good opportunity to put raw materials for space exploration into a useful orbit. See, lifting materials into space is expensive. If you have the materials in space already, you've saved ridiculous amounts of energy, and can build manufacturing in space using robots to refine, process, and build say probes or tugboats or mining ships or even generation ships of more robots to go out into the solar system, start building bigger and more powerful ships to get further out, and eventually get more than 1% of lightspeed heading toward another star, see if there's anything out there. We'll need AIs for that, ones that can think and solve problems and ask questions. And hopefully not turn into Berserkers.
If you've seen Oblivion, that was a Berserker, a Von Neuman Probe of alien origin which exists specifically to wipe out all life found in the Universe. It is such a big job that anything short of infinite probes will take infinite amounts of time to accomplish. The best way to detect intelligent life is radio waves, which travel at light speed. Earth is already detectible out to 80 light years due to Hitler's Olympics broadcast. There is strong argument to suggest any aliens we ever run into will be xenocidal, seeking to annihilate other species and other life for their own religious reasons. There is equally strong argument for them to share their technology with us in hopes we'll contact them in return. And a much bigger chance that aliens become secluded isolationists with no interest in other civilizations so no space probes either. And the biggest chance of all that they wiped themselves out because to advance in technology, you generally need conflict and planning ability and communication, and where there is communication, there is war. The Babelfish caused more and bloodier wars, after all. Communication is destructive. Only potheads think communication is peaceful.
Even if the xenocidal aliens are long dead, since cults usually implode when the money runs out, their Berserker machines might be durable enough to continue their assigned project: repairing, improving, improvising, and annihilating. The most effective way to annihilate a species is accelerate a rock to 1% c (1% light speed = 3.8 x 10^6 m/s) and hit the planet. With sufficient velocity, the planet is utterly wrecked, and by utterly I mean flashboil the seas, burn up the air, churn up the ground and possibly knock the core out of the planet. That would be far better than decelerating and talking to us. That's silly Hollywood fantasy with no logic at all, other than "never let facts get in the way of a good story". If you're even more capable, you can mess up their sun, somehow, and have IT gobble up their planet. Even a sufficiently large CME would be effective, depending on how good their magnetic field is.
The Moon hit the Earth 4.6 billion years ago during the solar system's formation (planetary accretion process) and lost its own iron core to merge with our own, probably kickstarting our magnetic field dynamo in the process, which I suspect keeps spinning due to frequent solar electromagnetic bursts from CMEs. I don't have much proof, but solar magnetism is a source of power and induction heating and spinning makes more sense for long term stability than any claims of radioisotopes decay heat over this long of a time scale. Geologists prefer to claim the core mechanics need more study but few seem to be doing it. Geologists like camping field trips and scotch and coed field assistants as bed warmers, and you can't do that in a lab with no funding because core mechanics aren't sexy enough for grants or perky grad students named Britney! Keep in mind that Geologists denied Wegener, a weather man who proposed continental drift in 1912 which was later proven true in WW2 while hunting for submarines. Really. Science is funny that way.
It is entirely possible that global warming research, once unbiased data is recovered from the cultists modifying it to match their predictions which don't work in the real world, we might find some good data to give us a timeline on the return of the ice age. We have plenty of evidence to support that, just not a When. Advancing ice sheets bulldoze the crucial evidence about how they start, so we don't have very good data on that. We only know how they end: sudden increase in temps, probably by Milancovic cycles (orbital mechanics), and melting. And floods, thus the silly Biblical flood stories have some basis in fact. Ice dams are frequent and common problems in some places, like Missoula. And result in the scablands flood plain on the way to the Columbia River.
It is entirely possible that Earth's Magnetic field strength and stability over time is one of the 33 key factors that enables life to exist. There could be several more. Just finding planets in space doesn't mean we're finding planets with magnetic fields. Even slightly blue stars have poisonous levels of UV light, and by poisonous I mean sterilizing levels of mutation, so only YELLOW SUNS can have life around them. If its slightly blue NOPE. Pity, since those look so cool on the covers of Scifi novels, but nope. Life seems to be infinitely rare. And despite the statistics and hope of cultists everywhere, I still think we're it for the whole universe. Then again, I'm a Pessimist so if there were other life, it would naturally be Xenocidal cultists sending out endless Berserker probes to wipe out any life it finds. You know, because that would be more ironic. And it mimics life on Earth, too. Suicide Bombers, anyone?
No comments:
Post a Comment