[LEAPSECS] drift of TAI

[John Cowan]

Rob Seaman scripsit:


> I'm not sure I want to encourage this thread :-) but the answer is  

> precisely that you are positing a human enterprise.  Merely by  

> referring to "civilization", you are conjuring vast webs of  

> connections to natural cycles at all scales.  Even in an extreme  

> "Caves of Steel" scenario, the troglodyte trillions are locked to  

> diurnal cycles of solar power stations and the daily cadences of   

> robotic combine harvesters to feed the buried billions, and even  

> commerce with other star systems points to the rhythms of other suns


That's what the author of "The Caves Of Steel" called planetary
chauvinism.  There weren't any terrestroid planets in the Heaven system,
so when it was settled by slower-than-light starships, the colonists
occupied the asteroids and the moons of a Saturn-type gas giant.
(The book was written thirty years ago, before we fully realized just
how nasty the Van Allen radiation around such planets actually is.)
With fusion-based interplanetary ships and interstellar communication
lasers, the Heavenites grew rich and prosperous.  They even went so
far as to wrap their capital asteroid, which appears to be Ceres-type,
in a transparent bubble and create an atmosphere inside the bubble.

But there was war in Heaven, a civil war (no surprise), and when Vinge's
book opens, the Main Belt is mostly a wreck of abandoned settlements and
desperate survivors.  Fusion power has been lost, so Heaven has been cut
off from other human colonies.  Most of what post-20th-century technology
remains is closely held by a government in the trojans of a Jupiter-type
giant, but they are starved of hydrogen for reaction mass, fuel, and water
-- another government holds the Saturn rings, which are the only remaining
accessible source.  The two societies have been locked in a mixture of
cold war and grudging trade since the fall of the Main Belt, and when
a starship from a troubled colony world arrives in the Heaven system,
looking for help, all they find is chaos.  

-- 
Said Agatha Christie / To E. Philips Oppenheim  John Cowan
"Who is this Hemingway? / Who is this Proust?   cowan at ccil.org
Who is this Vladimir / Whatchamacallum,         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
This neopostrealist / Rabble?" she groused.
        --George Starbuck, Pith and Vinegar