Stanley G Weinbaum and "Shirt-Sleeved Solar Systems"

[RVM45]

Friends,

This idea comes from two different articles.

One said, "Buck Rodgers travelled all over the solar system in his shirt sleeves, but now virtually everyone recognizes the absurdity of that."
i.e. You can't do that in a SF story—unless it is some over-the-top-parady.

The second discussed that when Weinbaum wrote his stories about shirt-sleeved habitable Jovian moons, there were still a few die-hard scientists that believed that Jupiter and Saturn might put out considerable heat—enough to make their moons cool but habitable.

So, today we can't write serious SF about habitable Jovian moons...

Sigh...

Sometimes it seems like the onward march of progress has robbed SF of many beloved themes.

But Imagine an alternate universe much like ours—at least the Earth there is much like ours—but there are a dozen or more habitable planets in the solar system...

Plug in Red Dwarfs between Mars and Jupiter and G-type Suns out around the orbit of Uranus and Neptune where ever you feel that you need them.

EE….

Okay, try this rationalization:

The number of alternate universes is not infinite, but it is vast beyond comprehension.

As highly improbable as an Earth almost identical to ours arising in a vastly different solar system might be, with enough possible universes to shift through, it JUST MIGHT HAPPEN.

Let's further suppose that in the multi-verse, like attracts like—so if there is such a place, it should be very close to us in hyper-dimensional space.

I think such a solar system would be fun to imagine in any context; but I especially like the idea of an unintentional traveller from our universe ending up there.

Ask yourself, how much farther along would our Space Program be, if we knew for a certainty that Venus was a cloud-shrouded jungle planet and that Mars had a climate much like Tibet...

And Jupiter and Saturn were both Red Dwarfs with 3 or 4 habitable planets each...

Who else thinks this is a fun place to set reasonably hard sf stories in?

…..RVM45

 

[Narkalui]

Yes, that does sound fun. And also, what about another 'M' class planet, exactly the same size and mineral content as Earth, following Earth's orbit on the opposite side of the sun?

 

[Venusian Broon]

Friends,

This idea comes from two different articles.

One said, "Buck Rodgers travelled all over the solar system in his shirt sleeves, but now virtually everyone recognizes the absurdity of that."
i.e. You can't do that in a SF story—unless it is some over-the-top-parady.

The second discussed that when Weinbaum wrote his stories about shirt-sleeved habitable Jovian moons, there were still a few die-hard scientists that believed that Jupiter and Saturn might put out considerable heat—enough to make their moons cool but habitable.

So, today we can't write serious SF about habitable Jovian moons...

Sigh...

Sometimes it seems like the onward march of progress has robbed SF of many beloved themes.

Sorry, I'm a child of the 70s, and couldn't stand the old Flash Gordon/Buck Rodgers stuff. Even as a seven year old I found their universe and them ridiculous.

Quaint, of it's time, and not beloved by me!

But Imagine an alternate universe much like ours—at least the Earth there is much like ours—but there are a dozen or more habitable planets in the solar system...

Believe me, there is far more you could do, that really could fill a system up with habitable things, things that could be 'sailed' to in days and weeks. Just not planets. Who wants the inconvenience of huge lumps of dumb material that need wide clear orbits when you could construct a solar system filled with millions of habitats in a dyson swarm, add gravity with black hole technology and each habitat tuned to be liveable at wherever it is. And tuned to whatever you wanted it to be. See Alastair Reynolds book Revenger for something that plays with this idea really quite well.

(After listening to a lot of Isaac Arthur's youtube videos, I am with him that we shouldn't worry about colonising planets with their dirty great gravity wells, we should be building dyson swarms, O'Neil habitats and all sorts of great stuff like that, but deconstructing all the planets!)

Plug in Red Dwarfs between Mars and Jupiter and G-type Suns out around the orbit of Uranus and Neptune where ever you feel that you need them.

Not convinced by this . This would be a solar system 1) probably highly chaotic and 2) all the planets would be dried out by the intense solar radiation and have no water/atmospheres. But that's just the physicist in me thinking it through. (I think I was a physicist aged seven when viewing the old SF reels too....)

Okay, try this rationalization:

The number of alternate universes is not infinite, but it is vast beyond comprehension.

As highly improbable as an Earth almost identical to ours arising in a vastly different solar system might be, with enough possible universes to shift through, it JUST MIGHT HAPPEN.

Let's further suppose that in the multi-verse, like attracts like—so if there is such a place, it should be very close to us in hyper-dimensional space.

I think such a solar system would be fun to imagine in any context; but I especially like the idea of an unintentional traveller from our universe ending up there.

Ask yourself, how much farther along would our Space Program be, if we knew for a certainty that Venus was a cloud-shrouded jungle planet and that Mars had a climate much like Tibet...

And Jupiter and Saturn were both Red Dwarfs with 3 or 4 habitable planets each...

Who else thinks this is a fun place to set reasonably hard sf stories in?

…..RVM45

Okay, I'm being a bit harsh, with Barsoom and all that stuff not being my thing, it's just not my cup of tea, so I wouldn't like to recreate the golden age pulp tropes. But...

...to try and rationalise your vision from a hard sf perspective. Rather than going all hyperdimension. Why not try and imagine that we had a golden age and for tens of thousands of years we were able to not only travel to all points in the solar system but we decided to actually terraform all the planets? We were so powerful that the vast amounts of material and energy needed to terraform weren't a problem?

Mars has been looked at for decades, it could become like a cold, but habitable, desert world if we tried. Venus too (albeit with more difficulty) I think could be terraformed. You'd have to really work hard to get rid of the greenhouse effect and really thin out the atmosphere, but with a bit of ingenuity (and a lot of energy)...why not?

As for the Jovian/Saturnian worlds, you called it. Just ACC/2010 them and cause both to become small stars? (Both of them being star-like and remaining in their orbits, with more-or-less the same mass would be preferable, I think, than inserting much bigger red dwarfs into new orbits. Making them star-like with the same mass, that is a bit more difficult to explain. One could just wave a magic wand over it and say, 'very advanced technology' turned them into cool, small, red dwarves. Especially if you also have habitats built around small black holes in your universe, I mean we're not close at all to doing that either!)

And you could have loads of old habitats flying in a dyson swarm all around.

Then something happened and our golden age ended, yet the planets, spaceships and stuff remained and the ancestors were just a bit like us today but were able to hop about the solar system?

Just some thoughts. I think your idea has legs.