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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts
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| Space Weather Map | ||
| A map that details hazardous space conditions. |
Are there conditions in space that bode ill for human space travelers? And shouldn't these areas be depicted in "weather" maps?
| On the three-dimensional map at weather headquarters on the planet Kaider III, the storm was colored orange. Which meant it was the biggest of the four hundred odd storms raging in the Fifty Suns region of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. It showed as an uneven splotch fronting at Latitude 473, Longitude 228, Center 190 parsecs, but that was a special Fifty Suns degree system which had no relation to the magnetic center of the Magellanic Cloud as a whole. The report about the Nova had not yet been registered on the map. When that happened the storm color would be changed to an angry red. |
| Technovelgy from The Storm,
by A.E. van Vogt. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1943 Additional resources -
|
Here's what it's like to encounter a storm in space:
Even as she rode into the storm there was nothing visible. The space ahead looked as clear as any vacuum. So tenuous were the gases that made up the storm that the ship would not even have been aware of them if it had been traveling at atomic speeds.
Violent the disintegration of matter in that storm might be, and the sole source of cosmic rays the hardest energy in the known universe. But the immense, the cataclysmic danger to the Star Cluster was a direct result of her own terrible velocity.
If she had had time to slow, the storm would have meant nothing.
Striking that mass of gas at half a light year a minute was like running into an unending solid wall. The great ship shuddered in every plate as the deceleration tore at her gigantic strength.
In seconds she had run the gamut of all the recoil systems her designers had planned for her as a unit.
She began to break up.
An interesting look at space weather is provided in The Weather in Space by Ben Bova, published in Amazing Stories in 1963. You might enjoy this puckish illustration by FINLAY:
Silent as a ghost, grand and wonderful beyond all imagination, glorious in her power, the great ship slid through the blackness along the special river of time and space which was her plotted course.
(From Weather in Space by Ben Bova)
The term space-weather men has been helpfully provided by Lawrence Chandler in his 1952 story Revenge of the Robots.
Compare to the description of a cosmic storm in After World's End (1939) by Jack Williamson and the interstellar storm from The Storm (1943) by AE van Vogt.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Storm
More Ideas
and Technology by A.E. van Vogt
Tech news articles related to The Storm
Tech news articles related to works by A.E. van Vogt
Space Weather Map-related
news articles:
- Space Weather News!
- Space 'Hurricane' Has Been Seen
- Time For Your Space Weather Forecast
- Superfast Energetic Electron 'Precipitation' Pelts Our Earth!
- Mars Space Weather Alert (MSWA) System
| Will Space Stations Have Large Interior Spaces Again? |
| Reflect Orbital Offers 'Sunlight on Demand' And Light Pollution |
| Chrysalis Generation Ship to Alpha Centauri |
| The First Space Warship For Space Force |
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'There was a wall ahead... It was riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels.'
'...support the interior human structure against Jupiter’s pull.'
'Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray...'
'The German chemists have discovered how to supply the needed elements in compact, undiluted form...'
'Compounds devised by the biochemists for the rapid building of bone...'
'The car faltered as the external command came to brake...'
'It is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized...'
