Things to do between here and Jupiter

[Michael Dracon]

I'm planning on writing a near-future sci-fi story set on the 4 biggest moons of Jupiter. The idea is that the moons are completely terraformed, but the inhabitants don't know how it's done. They want to apply it to Titan, the biggest moon of Saturn, but first they need to make a trip to Earth to find out how the terraforming is done.

The setting is so that communication as well as space travel has ceased only about a decade or so after people first started living on the moons. Also, traveling takes a long time. I'm thinking about it taking a week or so for a single trip.

I was already planning to take a small detour to Ceres, which just happened to be roughly on the route (about an extra day or so of traveling) at that time. This would mean I'm not going to put Mars on the route as well, because that would be just too much of a coincidence.

So what else can be done on the route? I already know that the belt which holds Ceres is by far not dense enough to form any real danger to navigation.

 

[blacbird]

If you can get readers to suspend disbelief far enough to accept that a near-future terraforming of the four major moons of Jupiter is not only possible, but accomplished, you can get them to believe anything you invent. You could blunder onto a derelict alien craft full of exotic skeletons and carapaces, all dressed like Bozo the Clown.

And the idea of "a week" representing a "long time" for travel between Earth and Jupiter is even more exotic. In our current technology, it takes unmanned exploratory craft three years or more.

caw

 

[Ravenlocks]

Hehe, when I saw your thread title "Things to do between here and Jupiter" the first thing that sprang to my mind was checkers...

If there's nothing in space for them to run into, you could always add in a nice shipboard mutiny.

Or checkers.

Or, how about this, they run into an old Soviet spacecraft with evidence that until very recently a cosmonaut had survived aboard it. How and why did he live and what secret was he protecting that will impact their lives?

 

[Lhun]

One thing that's really unlikely about the story is that communications ceased. Compared to flying earth <-> jupiter in a week, setting up a radio dish isn't even child's play.
No communications must mean something like total breakdown of all technical civilisation on earth.

 

[MattW]

One thing that's really unlikely about the story is that communications ceased. Compared to flying earth <-> jupiter in a week, setting up a radio dish isn't even child's play.
No communications must mean something like total breakdown of all technical civilisation on earth.

Or the communications breakdown was due to some source of interference in-between...that could be something worth investigating on the trip.

 

[Michael Dracon]

Hmm... I'll have to rethink the week of traveling then.

It is established that even the first ones to arrive know how the terraforming was done. It was already mostly done when the first people arrived.

I want to try and steer clear of aliens as much as possible. Though I was thinking of maybe putting some results of failed experiments along the way.

 

[dpaterso]

Hey! My band of intrepid heroes own these moons! And have been defending them against space pirates since before you started writing Sci-Fi! Probably. Then again I can't complain -- Asimov got there decades before I started writing Sci-Fi. The circle of life....

I'd be interested in finding out what kind of engines your guys are using to travel from Jupiter to Earth in one week. And that includes a small detour to Ceres. Funny, I always figured most sane spacemen would avoid flying through the Asteroid Belt.

-Derek

 

[JimmyB27]

Hehe, when I saw your thread title "Things to do between here and Jupiter" the first thing that sprang to my mind was checkers...

If there's nothing in space for them to run into, you could always add in a nice shipboard mutiny.

Or checkers.

Or, how about this, they run into an old Soviet spacecraft with evidence that until very recently a cosmonaut had survived aboard it. How and why did he live and what secret was he protecting that will impact their lives?

Too late for checkers - that's already been solved http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6907018.stm

Chess maybe?

 

[blacbird]

Alas, one of the problems for hard SF writers these days is that we now know so much about these extra-terrestrial bodies in the solar system. A half-century ago Ray Bradbury could write a classic story about endless rains in the lush jungles of Venus. A few decades earlier, Edgar Rice Burroughs could write adventures of daring warriors and evil monsters on both Venus and Mars, as well as on the Moon. No one can credibly write such things now. The idea of terra-forming any of the major moons of Jupiter, given what we now know of them, is a bigger stretch than I'm ready to accept. Callisto and Ganymede are dead balls of cratered cryogenic ice, having no atmospheres. Io is a sulfurous volcanic hell-orb bathed in radiation hundreds of times beyond what a human could tolerate for five seconds. Europa is the most interesting, appearing to be a watery world encased in ice tens of miles thick, or more.

As an SF reader, I'll more quickly accept faster-than-light travel than the industrial terraforming of such known places. It would be better to postulate another star system having more amenable planetary bodies.

caw

 

[javili]

Singing 400,0000,0000 Bottles Of Beer On The Wall?

 

[blacbird]

Singing 400,0000,0000 Bottles Of Beer On The Wall?

When I was in high school, on the basketball and track teams, traveling on buses to away events, we developed a song to drive the bus drivers mad:

Infinity bottles of beer on the wall,
Infinity bottles of beer,
If one of those bottles should happen to fall,
There'd be . . . infinity bottles of beer on the wall.

Infinity bottles of beer on the wall,
Infinity bottles of beer . . .

caw

 

[poetinahat]

"Look, Paul, a Sea of Holes..."

 

[blacbird]

"Look, Paul, a Sea of Holes..."

" . . . now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall."

-- Lennon/McCartney.

caw

 

[Higgins]

Good point

I want to try and steer clear of aliens as much as possible.

This sounds like a fun story to me. I wrote a whole stack of stories along these lines in the early 1990s. Unfortunately, I became excessively interested in the mechanics of waking people up from deep Virtual Reality passtimes and your average Sci-Fi editor just could not figure out whether that was a plot problem or a character problem. I'd say it was a writer problem...but that's just me.

 

[C.bronco]

Mars robots developed AI, stoppped sending photos back to earth and began lichen farming and a nice little agrarian society. One of the robot trade ships got caught in a solar current and lost an engine. As the robots rush to repair their craft, your protags panic and assume the robots are in a kamikaze preemptive strike...

 

[C.bronco]

The idea of terra-forming any of the major moons of Jupiter, given what we now know of them, is a bigger stretch than I'm ready to accept. Callisto and Ganymede are dead balls of cratered cryogenic ice, having no atmospheres. Io is a sulfurous volcanic hell-orb bathed in radiation hundreds of times beyond what a human could tolerate for five seconds. Europa is the most interesting, appearing to be a watery world encased in ice tens of miles thick, or more.
As an SF reader, I'll more quickly accept faster-than-light travel than the industrial terraforming of such known places. It would be better to postulate another star system having more amenable planetary bodies.

caw

The big Jup is also pretty far from the sun. It's not so balmy. If I were to terraform, I'd go with the earth's moon, or perhaps a planet near Gliese...

 

[dclary]

This is the best thread title I've seen in a long time.

 

[Michael Dracon]

This is the best thread title I've seen in a long time.

Thanks

Though I'm beginning to doubt if I ever get to write this. People do have a point that now that we know more about the other planets and moons in the solar system it is much more difficult to write about people living there.

 

[dclary]

Yep. Hate to break it to you that way, but science fiction is a lot harder when you include the science part.

 

[MidnightMuse]

Easiest way around that is to put your story in a completely different system, with planets you'll have to create. When you're mentioning planets we know so much about now, it's harder to play with reality.

 

[oscuridad]

how about die slowly from radiation poisoning - or ahve a really long discussion about whether the moon landings were faked.

 

[MattW]

Yep. Hate to break it to you that way, but science fiction is a lot harder when you include the science part.

Change thruster to dwarven flamepot and you are all set...

 

[dclary]

Change thruster to dwarven flamepot and you are all set...

Exactly. Now THAT would be an awesome book. 1901: A Steampunk Odyssey

 

[DarthIggy]

"Things to do between here and Jupiter "

Lots and lots of freaky, weightless space sex.

 

[dclary]

/note to self... avoid long trips with Darth Iggy.