SciFi : reasons it's so popular with Aspies/geeks

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I always thought SF/F was popular with geeks was because it's more intelligent and unconventional, mostly unconventional. I get so bored thinking about the same things all the time, so any setting that is starkly different from the current world is a pleasant distraction.

Another reason is that in the past, I had a hard time identifying with the real world, so I read less fiction set in the real world. That's not as true as it was, but I still read more SF/F because I find it more cutting edge/original.

No future here, so the norms are stuck to sublight speeds; I laugh at thee, and thy shuttles (superluminal speeds seems far less likely and realistic than breaking down the gravitational equilibrium of Sol, which itself seems humanly impossible, but it can happen for it does each day, but as far I know, not artificially).

One will need:
a one-shot rocket; easy
something that can breakdown the hydrostatic equilibrium of Sol that can be affixed to said rocket; hard

Goddamnit, where is that "aspie" genius I'm supposed to have?

I like the gnarly powers the characters have.

I forgot to specify, that's Space Opera; not "HARD" Sci-Fi

I like Sci-fis, because the open another world for me. I think Jonathan Coulton explained the fascination of sci-fi very well in his song 'the future soon': It's gonna be the future soon / and I won't always be this way / when the things that make me weak / and strange get engineered away.

Well, actually, the explosion would propagate through the gases expelled by the star; they would be moving at just a touch under lightspeed, so unless you're going to posit some form of sensing that exceeds the speed of light, the only warning the fleet would receive would be the sight of the sun exploding. The force would also be sufficiently great as to tear apart anything closer than about Neptune or so, and severely damage anything further away, so the proposed shielding surrounding inhabited planets would be useless against a nova. Supernovae are even worse.

Duh. Destroying the sun would effectively destroy Earth.

We are ALL stuck to sublight speeds, Daniel. General Relativity doesn't care who you are.

Wormholes. And Clarke's third law.

Clarke's third law: making hard scifi indistinguishable from fantasy since circa 1967.

I must confess to abuse of this law, but when your first race had a civilization that lasted over 4 billion years, and was just amazing at science... Well, you're allowed...

I like sci-fi for the escapist value of it. In general, I'd say I like sci-fi/cyberpunk more than fantasy, though there are exceptions like Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman and J.K. Rowling's stuff. It really comes down to the "feel" of certain worlds... there are some more "realistic" stories that I like better than some sci-fi fantasy stuff! It just seems like the overall trend is that less-realistic fictional works are more likely to have plots, characters and worlds that I connect with better than in more realistic ones.

Theoretical limitations are merely that; theoretical. The fact is that the universe is far bigger than mans knowledge of it. We do not know what we do not know.
Most recently, a group of scientists postulated that it is possible to use dark energy to create a wave effect whereby a spacecraft could effectively "surf" by bending space in front of it, thereby attaining speeds far in excess of light. While creating such a wave effect would"theoretically" require converting the mass of a planet the size of Jupiter into energy, that is still a far smaller requirement than conversion of the entire universe into energy.
Indubitably, as mans knowledge progresses so do his opportunities, and that, in my humble opinion, is the fascination of great science fiction.

1. This is Space-Opera so ansibles would be in existence

2. Well that should give them some time; especially if they're out of the planetary gravity well. So yeah if the enemy places said bomb in the sun stealthily, the planets dont get much warning. Which is one of the main points of this, killing systems full of people and the planetd and psychological scariness. If they were missiles that shot out of cannons I wonder if MAD would be applicable in space, at least for a time. It works with RKVs at least




doh! Thank you.

Well yeah, unless the thing that blows up the star is blatantly shown shooting into thw star and advance warnings; yeah a few hours isn't enough to evacuate planets..well maybe a decent portion of the pop depending on the planet's size, wealth, etc. If it has a lot of personal spaceships then yes a decent portion of the population might be able to flee. I just don't know.

And there's the other weird stuff like placing giant hyperdrives on the planet to move it away...lol they have to be synchronized good as the planets could be destroyed easily at the energies referred to.

EDIT: on a related note, this link http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/ provides information on some related stuff, though these guys are biased toward a "hard" sci-fi.

Last edited by Warsie on 19 Aug 2008, 11:26 am, edited 1 time in total.

depending on how the sun is destroyed

maybe you could freeze time, cut the sun in two, and then move all the matter like a play-doh so there are two suns orbiting each other. And then you re-arrange the rest of the matter in the solar system to maintain its' orbit. Hey, Im sure a god can do it!

Well, nothing is impossible, just some things are very, very unlikely to happen (go Hume go!).

(I haven't started work on my star killing weapon yet; I really should get around to it. They think they're so objective and special, giving life and light to everyone in equal portions, whether good or bad, it's disgusting. At least "gods" have many morals attached, albeit, some better than others.)

Would an "aspie" be revered if he or she were to "kill" Sol? Surely, that exceeds E=MC^2 by a...zillion in genius points, and genius is defined by how much one can destroy in a single incident (or create, but creating things isn't as cool as destroying things).

The fame wouldn't last long, of course.

I don't understand why everyone isnt into it.

No warning, actually; the light from the explosion (their first clue) would reach them only a few moments before the explosion itself. No time to escape, even with superluminal drives - the only way to escape death by nova is not to be within a couple of lightyears of the nova to begin with.

As for the lightspeed limit, remember that it applies in Einsteinian space; postulate some method of achieving access to another space (while bringing along your own laws of physics for your ship, so everyone can stay alive), and you can go FTL in that continuum. (Star Trek brought up two methods of doing this - in James Blish's novel Spock Must Die! they used a trick involving Hibbert space, which has as many dimensions as you need to solve a particular problem, to beam Spock halfway across the quadrant by FTL transporter; in one Next Generation episode, they explained that the "subspace" the ship traveled through in warp drive was in fact one particular subspace domain of a larger superspace "sheaf", and that the "warpfield" is a way of dragging a little bit of their own space into subspace with them. This was also supposed to be why subspace radio works so much faster than ships; sending a message uses less energy than moving a massive object, so it's possible to access more energetic subspace domains with radio.)

"Wormholes" (Einstein-Rosen bridges) have two major flaws: 1) According to the theory that predicts them, they'd be one-way only, and 2) the input end is a black hole, and would shred anything approaching it down to its fundamental quarks on the way in. Tidal stresses are a b***h when you have a gravity well that steep.