(also, Titan)

My issue with Mars or an issue with Mars is when I look at Martian regolith chemistry, I don’t see stuff people would benefit from extended exposure to, even in trace amounts. Ditto for the Moon; if lunar regolith shreds space suits, what does it do to lungs?

As far as extant life goes, it’s at least worth a look to see what’s going on in the clouds at the 50km. Life or not life, either is an interesting answer. You’d think someone would have done this by now, given how many probes have gone to Venus.

(I expect if there is life on Mars and/or Venus, it’ll turn out that thanks to interplanetary transfer of material all three sets of life (Earth, Mars and Venus) share common ancestors)

Pamela Sargent did it before KSR, although her Venus series seems to have fallen into obscurity. Like KSR she had to introduce narrative-friendly short-cuts, from compressing the time scale involved to invoking handwavium that could spin the planet up without side issues of “where’s the energy for this coming from” and “why haven’t the inefficiencies inherent in most processes led to the planet getting melted while being spun up.”

I don’t off-hand know of an SF story that accepts the time scales implied by the work of people like Fogg (although there are one or two where the other problem, the unlikelihood that we will get it right the first time, is embraced): a century or more to create an anoxic Precambrian, and millennia more before you can walk around without a space suit. Taking on a project that will span millennia is epic and yet underexploited in SF to my knowledge.

I was being somewhat facetious about aliens generously giving us FTL (either that or we shoot down their ship and take the propulsion unit – don’t tell me the military wouldn’t do that in a second if they could, that’s why they investigated UFOs for so long). I would be more than a little suspicious of any aliens who show up and declare they want to “help” us. Or Carl Sagan’s idea that advanced altruistic ETI are beaming all their knowledge across the galaxy in order to enlighten and uplift the lesser species. You don’t give guns and bombs to your potential enemies, or possibly turn them into such with such a method. Unless these ETI are really powerful and really confident. Or they are dying and they want their culture to be preserved in some fashion ala The Listeners by Gunn.

In any event I don’t see that deliberately happening, ever. We will have to sink or swim on our own, which is a good thing overall. Besides, we will learn a lot of new and unexpected bonuses along the way that we might never find out if such things as FTL were just handed to us.

You know my views on Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, so I won’t elaborate further. I did see Idiocracy. I still laugh at the memory of the background scene of the car driving off a half-finished bridge, to fall on top of other cars piled up at the base.

I wouldn’t hold my breath for FTL-bearing ETI. We have to figure this one out for ourselves, or dwindle back to whence we sprang from.

And now we learn that Disney has bought LucasFilms for $4.05 billion and will release Star Wars VII in 2015. They may improve on the franchise or not, but we will now be stuck with it for ages to come.

Star Wars has even taken away Star Trek’s once prominent position. I know a number of people, including my two sons, who care for SW far more than ST because that is what they grew up with. I was deeply unimpressed with the reimaged ST film released in 2009 and wonder if the elements that made the original ST work along with the era it appeared in make it nearly impossible for any such series to have the influence nowadays.

Have you seen the film Idiocracy? I keep thinking it has the most accurate picture of our future of any SF story to date.

If Orion, which we could build now if need be, is not much faster than many other methods considered for reaching the stars, I worry about the whole enterprise (pun intended). Fusion even as a means of powering our society is still elusive. Beamed propulsion suffers from finding some organization that would be able to build a giant laser in space and then having most of humanity fret that it could be turned into a weapon.

Antimatter is produced in too small amounts and is ridiculously expensive. The other methods are practically fantasy: So long as the promoters of warp drive keep saying the main ingredient required is “exotic matter”, they might as well be talking about dilithium crystals for such a vessel.

Tell me I am wrong, tell me I am just being too pessimistic and akin to the people who said the Wright Brother were wasting their time. However, the more I look at the interstellar propulsion situation in the light of reality, the more I think we either better learn to be very patient or hope some ETI comes along and reveals the secrets of FTL travel.