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"I can remember when the first pulsars were discovered. I was able to go and sit down and listen to graduate students talking about what their theories, to explain what pulsars really were."
- Vernor Vinge
 |
| 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 Electrostatic Disturbance in Space from SOS in Space (1937) by Eando Binder, 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
| SETI Suggests Prospecting The Solar System Without Landing |
| Cislunar Space And The Space Lanes of Golden Age Science Fiction |
| NASA Moonbase Update |
| The Solar Oberth Slingshot |
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'Space-sickness is one of the most unpleasant sensations that a human being can experience. Not all are subject to it...'
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'The answer to the dumb student's prayer.'
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'The dinner was excellent. It was completely vegetarian — grown in specially prepared gardens in this Moon base...'
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'It was a relief to enter one of the comfortable autos, whisper a direction down the tube, and just know that you would be taken to your destination in the quickest, safest, and cheapest manner.'
'But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced...'
