Science for Use in Science Fiction

I've read some, a few of these. Can think of a couple others I'd like to see on this rather long list.
(It's a subject opinion piece of sorts, of course ...)

The Most Influential Sci-Fi Books of All Time​


K.W. Colyard Oct 12, 2021
 

This Will Help You Grasp the Sizes of Things in the Universe​

It’s one thing to imagine the scale of the universe. It’s another to see it up close.
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Stuff for classic scenarios ...​

8 asteroids are approaching Earth, all bigger than the Great Pyramid of Giza​

The Great Pyramid of Giza is measured at almost 500 feet tall and stood as the tallest object on Earth for 4,0000 years. Now, several asteroids bigger than the pyramid will zoom past the Earth in the coming weeks.
...
 
This might be seen by some as more history than science, but the two inter-relate and I need to park this link for now, before I lose it. "The Atlantic" limits one's freebies and this is my last. This article presents many intersting variations and aspects on human culture and civilization development that challenge the mainstream paradigms and hence has significant merit, IMO.

Human History Gets a Rewrite​

A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change.
By William Deresiewicz
...
And what a gift it is, no less ambitious a project than its subtitle claims. The Dawn of Everything is written against the conventional account of human social history as first developed by Hobbes and Rousseau; elaborated by subsequent thinkers; popularized today by the likes of Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari, and Steven Pinker; and accepted more or less universally. The story goes like this. Once upon a time, human beings lived in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers (the so-called state of nature). Then came the invention of agriculture, which led to surplus production and thus to population growth as well as private property. Bands swelled to tribes, and increasing scale required increasing organization: stratification, specialization; chiefs, warriors, holy men.

Eventually, cities emerged, and with them, civilization—literacy, philosophy, astronomy; hierarchies of wealth, status, and power; the first kingdoms and empires. Flash forward a few thousand years, and with science, capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution, we witness the creation of the modern bureaucratic state. The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back), uniform (they are followed the same way everywhere), progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated), deterministic (development is driven by technology, not human choice), and teleological (the process culminates in us).

It is also, according to Graeber and Wengrow, completely wrong. Drawing on a wealth of recent archaeological discoveries that span the globe, as well as deep reading in often neglected historical sources (their bibliography runs to 63 pages), the two dismantle not only every element of the received account but also the assumptions that it rests on. Yes, we’ve had bands, tribes, cities, and states; agriculture, inequality, and bureaucracy, but what each of these were, how they developed, and how we got from one to the next—all this and more, the authors comprehensively rewrite. More important, they demolish the idea that human beings are passive objects of material forces, moving helplessly along a technological conveyor belt that takes us from the Serengeti to the DMV. We’ve had choices, they show, and we’ve made them. Graeber and Wengrow offer a history of the past 30,000 years that is not only wildly different from anything we’re used to, but also far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical, inspiring.
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This one is interesting. Composition suggests a very old star's remains;
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Weird stellar remnant may be from one of the first stars in the universe​

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Astronomers have detected an extremely unusual star that they believe is a stellar fossil, or remnant, of one of the universe's very first stars.
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The star, named AS0039, is located in the Sculptor dwarf galaxy around 290,000 light-years from the solar system. This stellar remnant has the lowest concentration of metal, particularly iron, of any star measured outside the Milky Way. The researchers think that finding is evidence that the remnant is a direct descendent of one of the universe's earliest stars, which contained very little metal.

The team found that the primordial parent star of AS0039 would have been around 20 solar masses and likely died in a hypernova — a stellar explosion 10 to 100 times more powerful than a regular supernova.

The discovery may reveal new information about the universe's first stars, which have never been directly or indirectly observed until now. "AS0039 has such an unusual chemical composition that it enables us to probe the nature of the first stars and, in particular, their stellar mass," study co-author Mike Irwin, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge in England, told Live Science.
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Are Black Holes Actually Dark Energy Stars?​

Why one physicist believes our whole understanding of black holes is wrong.
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What does the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way look like? We might find out. The Event Horizon Telescope—really a virtual telescope with an effective diameter of the Earth—has been pointing at Sagittarius A* for the last several years. Most researchers in the astrophysics community expect that its images, taken from telescopes all over the Earth, will show the telltale signs of a black hole: a bright swirl of light, produced by a disc of gases trapped in the black hole’s orbit, surrounding a black shadow at the center—the event horizon. This encloses the region of space where the black-hole singularity’s gravitational pull is too strong for light to escape.

But George Chapline, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, doesn’t expect to see a black hole. He doesn’t believe they’re real. In 2005, he told Nature that “it’s a near certainty that black holes don’t exist” and—building on previous work he’d done with physics Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin—introduced an alternative model that he dubbed “dark energy stars.” Dark energy is a term physicists use to describe a peculiar kind of energy that appears to permeate the entire universe. It expands the fabric of spacetime itself, even as gravity attempts to bring objects closer together. Chapline believes that the immense energies in a collapsing star cause its protons and neutrons to decay into a gas of photons and other elementary particles, along with what he refers to as “droplets of vacuum energy.” These form a “condensed” phase of spacetime—much like a gas under enough pressure transitions to liquid—that has a much higher density of dark energy than the spacetime surrounding the star. This provides the pressure necessary to hold gravity at bay and prevent a singularity from forming. Without a singularity in spacetime, there is no black hole.
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Often referred to as NEOs = Near Earth Objects, just how "near" tends to be rather subjective. So long as within Earth's solar orbit some would consider "near" but others go for the factor of Lunar orbit zone as the gauge.

Either way, big rocks passing fast by should remain a concern, since such have made impact through out Earth's history. Here's one that just zoomed by earlier today ...

Asteroid That Could Be as Big as Two Football Fields to Pass Earth This Week​

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An asteroid that may be as big as two NFL football fields end-to-end is due to zoom past Earth this week, according to NASA data.

Named 2017 TS3, the space rock is due to fly past our planet on Tuesday, November 2, at roughly 5:51 a.m. UTC (1:51 a.m. ET).

At that time, it's estimated the asteroid will be moving at a speed of about 22,000 miles per hour—about 30 times faster than the speed of sound.

Luckily, the asteroid poses no danger to Earth despite its hulking size and speed. It's due to make its "close approach" to us on Tuesday—meaning it will reach its nearest point to Earth during its journey around the sun—but it will still be nearly 14 times as far away from us as the moon is.
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Why Would Anyone Invest in Interstellar Travel?​

It would be a daring adventure, but despite what you seen in the movies, making it profitable is something else altogether.
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Alien, Avatar and Passengers are science fiction blockbusters with one thing in common. No, it’s not the earnings of the lead actors but the business model that underpins the plot. Each movie has a premise that involves long trips into space to transport something to or from Earth.

In Alien the crew of the ship is towing a refinery back home. The refinery has been stocked with materials extracted from another planet. The concept of resource exploitation is revisited in Avatar, where the exomoon Pandora is mined for a mineral that has enormous value on Earth. Passengers has a related theme—a company called the Homestead Corp. operates spaceships that transport thousands of people on one-way trips to colonize new planets.

Although science fiction aficionados will have no problem suspending belief about the technology imagined in each of these films, fans with a keen eye for profit may be left scratching their heads.

The reason is simple. Each of the journeys in these films—and others that share a similar plot—is presumed to take decades. In Passengers, for example, each one-way trip takes 120 years—and herein lies the issue. With time frames like this, the business model that is the foundation for these movies—and many others like it—is unlikely to be viable because of the delay involved in paying back any initial investment in the venture. This is important because it starts to throw light on how interstellar exploration is likely to evolve.

To understand this further, I talked with filmmaker James Cameron, who wrote, directed and produced Avatar. Cameron says the movie is more of a fable about how humans have treated Earth, and the plot hinged on the premise that the mineral mined on the planet was so valuable it made economic sense to transport it back. In reality Cameron says, “the best thing to bring back would be data—about new genomes, materials, etcetera.” He makes a valid point—sending data to Earth could simultaneously create tremendous value and negate the need for a ship to transport physical materials.
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Why an Old Theory of Everything Is Gaining New Life​

For decades, physicists have struggled to create a quantum theory of gravity. Now an approach that dates to the 1970s is attracting newfound attention.
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The Hunt for Earth’s Deep Hidden Oceans​

Water-bearing minerals reveal that Earth’s mantle could hold more water than all its oceans. Researchers now ask: Where did it all come from?

 
Outer Space related;

When a Mars Simulation Goes Wrong​

A mission atop a Hawaiian volcano shows humans still have much to learn before they set foot on another world.
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Project Horizon was a 1959 study to determine the feasibility of constructing a scientific / military base on the Moon, at a time when the U.S. Department of the Army, Department of the Navy, and Department of the Air Force had total responsibility for U.S. space program plans. On June 8, 1959, a group at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) produced for the Army a report titled Project Horizon, A U.S. Army Study for the Establishment of a Lunar Military Outpost. The project proposal states the requirements as:


The lunar outpost is required to develop and protect potential United States interests on the moon; to develop techniques in moon-based surveillance of the earth and space, in communications relay, and in operations on the surface of the moon; to serve as a base for exploration of the moon, for further exploration into space and for military operations on the moon if required; and to support scientific investigations on the moon.[1]

The permanent outpost was predicted to be required for national security "as soon as possible", and to cost $6 billion. The projected operational date with twelve soldiers was December 1966.

Horizon never progressed past the feasibility stage, being rejected by President Dwight Eisenhower when primary responsibility for America's space program was transferred to the civilian agency NASA.
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Why an Old Theory of Everything Is Gaining New Life​

For decades, physicists have struggled to create a quantum theory of gravity. Now an approach that dates to the 1970s is attracting newfound attention.​

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I always had a problem with quantization of gravity. Gravity is very successful with a space warp. That is fundamentally different than other particles. Also the difficulty of gravity with galactic distances is "solved" by bringing in dark matter which is also fundamentally different than other particles. These two properties make it quite different than what is in the Standard Model.

The MOND theory of gravity seems cleaner. Some like it; some don't.

If gravity can be quantized, maybe it will show that at galactic distances there is a deviation in the inverse square law, thus obviating dark matter.

Hurry up you guys and figure this out!

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That is Newtonian physics.


So why is distance in astronomy is measured in light-years, the distance that light travels in a year and not a light instance?
Because from YOUR perspective 9n earth, the astronauts will take BILLIONS OF YEARS to travel the known universe. To the astronauts it will be INSTANTANEOUS.

Watch the damn short video. That's why I posted it
 
Some ideas and insights into how having a near minor planet as a satellite of a more major planet might reflect as a major influence on hydrosphere~biosphere~ "Climates-etc." ...

How the Moon influences our weather​


Note that "weather" is short term expressions of "Climate", etc ...

... and "Climate" is expression of "Weather" over long time-periods ...
 
And that is not actually what the study says. It simply states that there are that many exoplanets that are within a distance where they could see the Earth as an exoplanet transiting their star as we see that planet as one transiting theirs.
I think that is where the term "may" applies.
 
Obviously subjective "lists", but maybe a start point for some;

The Best Sci-Fi Movies of 2021​

From Dune to Little Fish, they’re all love stories—though some are more touching than others.
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The best science fiction and fantasy books of 2021​


From sweeping space operas to deadly, magical schools
 
Pending another place(thread);

How the Moon influences our weather​

(Ooohps! Looks like I found and did this a few days ago. Oh well ...)
 
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