This is probably meant to be a Young Adult (YA) title in Science Fiction, about a subject which is near and dear to my heart, use of the Schroedingers Cat experiment to move from the earth you're born on to the one in the next universe, next door. In this story, the devices they use are a device built with simple radio shack electronics, a switch, and a potato for the power supply. If you're holding the box, you get carried to the universe next door when you flip the switch. As it happens, the boxes only take you to empty Earths, thus the "Long" part of the title. The reason this is near and dear to me is I think this avenue of research is more useful to humanity than space exploration. If you can WALK to an empty earth rather than build enormous and expensive space ships than travel hundreds of years to find other planets, then terraform them for centuries or millennia... walking to an inhabitable planet earth is much better. We already have maps and everything. We are evolved to conquer what we'll find there. It is a much better option for solving the overpopulation problem than war or starvation or disease. Walking to an empty earth and building how you want. Just walking into that peaceful place appeals greatly. I can't tell you how much I despise being dependent on insulin to stay alive. But at least I've got books like this so my mind doesn't run in circles, bored.
UPDATE: 12/21/14
So I'm halfway through and its raised some important points, namely that with millions of empty worlds and super cheap technology to get to them, it is actually possible to make humanity extinct by spreading us out into them so far apart and so few to each that no viable breeding population (you need hundreds) exists there, and if the technology to get back is wrecked, you are stuck there, waiting to die of old age or eaten by a cougar or bear or wolf. In most cases. Some of the characters don't need the technology to "step" to the next world. Most people need it, and get very nauseous once they go.
Another point they raise is that since you can't carry steel or iron to the next earth, you have to mine it once you get there or use bronze or various other metals instead. Aluminum comes across fine. And they say iron won't go because it has the most stable nucleus so can't skip across the boundary through this quantum tunneling bubble effect that the device uses to carry a person to the next world. The iron in your blood is okay, but not iron metal. Not having steel is an amusing plot point because it keeps coming up. Steel is common in most objects we use, but not all of them.
The authors also talk about Daniel Boone Syndrome, which is the lack of anxiety about being separated from people. I'm not sure how that's a syndrome, but mad doctors often claim that human beings need to be around other human beings and insist this is true... but I don't see how or why that would be. Claiming people HAVE to be social is a bit of an unfounded reach. Its a claim without proof. Still, its proving to be a good read.
No comments:
Post a Comment