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"The point sticks in your head: physics rules. Virtue does not triumph unless the physics allows it."
- Larry Niven
 |
| Ribbon World | ||
| A planet that presents the same face to its sun has a small habitable area - the ribbon between light and dark. |
| Radole was a small world – and, in military potential, perhaps the weakest of the twenty-seven. That, by the way, was another factor in the logic of the choice. It was a ribbon world – of which the Galaxy boasts a sufficient number, but among which, the inhabited variety is a rarity for the physical requirements are difficult to meet. It was a world, in other words, where the two halves face the monotonous extremes of heat and cold, while the region of possible life is the girdling ribbon of the twilight zone. Such a world invariably sounds uninviting to those who have not tried it, but there exist spots, strategically placed – and Radole City was located in such a one. It spread along the soft slopes of the foothills before the hacked-out mountains that backed it along the rim of the cold hemisphere and held off the frightful ice. The warm, dry air of the sun-half spilled over, and from the mountains was piped the water-and between the two, Radole City became a continuous garden, swimming in the eternal morning of an eternal June. |
| Technovelgy from Foundation and Empire,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by Doubleday in 1952 Additional resources -
|
This general idea is also discussed in Too Many Boards!, a 1931 story by Harl Vincent, referring to the planet Mercury and the belief that it is tidally locked like the Moon, presenting one face to the sun:
"Mercury!"
"Larry! It has a terrible climate and is — oh — uncivilized. Besides, its government is unrecognized by
the Tri-planetary Alliance. We'd be exiles in an awful
land where we could never live in peace."
"Honey — listen ! It's just the opposite. I've a very
good friend, Chic Davis, who's captain of the Rocket
III, one of the Tri-planetarian liners. He tells me
Mercury is the finest of all the inhabited bodies. It's
terrifically hot on the side always toward the sun and
frigid on the other, but there's a narrow belt where the
climate is moderate — semi-tropical by earthly standards.
And it's not uncivilized, but highly cultured...
The huge blood-red disc of the sun shone hotly at the
horizon, its almost horizontal rays making of the city
a motley of sweltering high lights and dark shadows.
Rose tinted mists hung low over all, effectually obscuring the heavens above. It was always thus in Luzan,
the sun never leaving the horizon entirely, but circling
it once in every, eighty-eight earth days and alternately
rising to a point that exposed the lower rim of the
enormous disc, then sinking to a point where the topmost edge just peeped through the mists above the
undulating line of demarcation between land and sky.
Apparently, Mercury is tidally locked, but at a 3:2 ratio, so it does not present the same face to the sun.
See also terminator zone from Exiles of the Moon (1931) by Schachner and Zagat.
"...Where else is there to go-?"
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Tech news articles related to works by Isaac Asimov
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| Warp Drive Tech Back On The Menu |
| JAXA Int Ball 2 Coming Right Along As Star Wars Remote |
| Space Traffic Management (STM) Needed Now |
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'You couldn't have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.'
'the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers...'
I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
'...its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities.'
'...it was all composed of tiny, identical cubes, carefully laid to form a tilelike surface.'
