Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Robinson, Kim Stanley (2012-05-22), 2312, Orbit, Retrieved on 2013-05-25Source Material [books.google.com]
Folksonomies: speculation fiction science fiction Memes
28 MAY 2013
Mercury Sun Walkers
The sun is always just about to rise. Mercury rotates so slowly that you can walk fast enough over its rocky surface to stay ahead of the dawn; and so many people do. Many have made this a way of life. They walk roughly westward, staying always ahead of the stupendous day. Some of them hurry from location to location, pausing to look in cracks they earlier inoculated with bioleaching metallophytes, quickly scraping free any accumulated residues of gold or tungsten or uranium. But most of them... 1 
notes
notesPeople on Mercury hike just ahead of the sunrise.
28 MAY 2013
Beginnings of Speciation in Romantic Paintings
She wandered on her own, looking at the portraits. The big crowd scenes were too much for her, like epic movies all jammed into a single frame. The subjects of the portraits, on the other hand, looked at her with expressions she recognized immediately. “I am always me, I am always new, I am always me”—for eight centuries they had been saying it. Nothing but women and men. One woman had her left nipple exposed, just under the curve of a necklace; in most periods that would have been tran... 1 notes
notesCharacter walking around an art museum.
28 MAY 2013
A City on Mercury Must Stay on the Dark Side
Terminator rolls around Mercury just like its sunwalkers, moving at the speed of the planet’s rotation, gliding over twenty gigantic elevated tracks, which together hold aloft and push west a town quite a bit bigger than Venice. The twenty tracks run around Mercury like a narrow wedding band, keeping near the forty-fifth latitude south, but with wide detours to south and north to avoid the worst of the planet’s long escarpments. The city moves at an average of five kilometers an hour. The... 1 notes
notesIt moves on tracks that push it along from the heat expansion of the rising sun.
28 MAY 2013
Three Words Used in a List That Provides Examples of Each
When you say exergasia, synathroesmus, and incrementum together in a list, it seems to me that you have thereby given an example of all three devices in that same phrase.”
Swan snorted at this. “How so, Socrates?”
“ ‘Exergasia’ means ‘use of different phrases to express the same idea,’ ‘synathroesmus’ means ‘accumulation by enumeration,’ and ‘incrementum’ means ‘piling up points to make an argument.’ So listing them does all three, yes?”
“And what argume...Folksonomies: grammar
Folksonomies: grammar
1 notes
notesA clever bit of dialogue between an AI and its owner.
28 MAY 2013
Terraforming Venus
...build a round sunshield of lunatic aluminum, very thin material, only 50 grams per square meter and yet still totaling 3 x 1013 kilograms, the largest thing ever built by humans. Concentric strips give the sunshield flexibility and allow it to tack up into the solar wind to hold its position at the L1 point, where it will shadow Venus entirely. Deprived of insolation, the planet will cool at a rate of five K a year.
After 140 years, the CO2 atmosphere will have rained and snowed to the su...Folksonomies: teraforming
Folksonomies: teraforming
1 notes
notesA fictional account of incredible engineering.
28 MAY 2013
The Brain Dies in Stages
“The body tries to stay alive. It’s not so… It’s natural. Maybe you’ll see it now. First the human brain dies, then the animal brain, then the lizard brain. Like your Rm, only backward. The lizard brain tries to its very last bit of energy to keep things going. I’ve seen it. Some kind of desire. It’s a real force. Life wants to live. But eventually a link breaks. The energy stops getting to where it needs to be. The last ATP gets used. Then we die. Our bodies return to earth, go...
1 From higher functions to lower functions, de-evolving.
28 MAY 2013
The Universe is a Blank Slate
On the black hemisphere, Cassini Regio, the bulge bisects an area where people once upon a time went out in hoppers or rovers and blew the black dust away to make patterns out of exposed white ice. Anytime you can easily make such a contrast in the landscape, people have written out their thoughts for the universe to read. Before the Saturn League was formed, when the first arrivals from Mars had come for Titan’s nitrogen, and were exploring the other moons as well for whatever else might b... 1 notes
notesFor us to write upon, and we do.
28 MAY 2013
Geological and Social Impact of the Himalayas
When you look at the planet from low orbit, the impact of the Himalayas on Earth’s climate seems obvious. It creates the rain shadow to beat all rain shadows, standing athwart the latitude of the trade winds and squeezing all the rain out of them before they head southwest, thus supplying eight of the Earth’s mightiest rivers, but also parching not only the Gobi to the immediate north, but also everything to the southwest, including Pakistan and Iran, Mesopotamia, Saudi Arabia, even North... 1 notes
notesThey scorch the Earth and scorch the societies that live there. (Note: I disagree, this is overgeneralizing and ignores social ills of societies in more temperate climates)
28 MAY 2013
Do Animals Perceive the Uncanny Valley
pathological aggression: dolphins kill porpoises for no reason, they don’t eat them, they’re not competitors. Does this suggest the uncanny valley exists for all mammals? 1 notes
notesDoes it explain dolphin violence against porpoises?
28 MAY 2013
Human Brain is "Conserved"
evolution conserves things that work. We have a conserved brain, with different ages for its different parts—in effect lizard at back and bottom, mammal in the middle, human at the front and top. Lizard brain to breathe and sleep, mammal brain to form packs, human brain to think it overFolksonomies: evolution
Folksonomies: evolution
It conserves the ancient parts that work, adding complexity onto those.
28 MAY 2013
Actuarial Escape Velocity
actuarial escape velocity is defined as occurring when a year of medical research adds more than a year’s worth of longevity to the total population. Nothing even close to this has ever been achieved, and emerging signs of an asymptotic curve in progress suggest this velocity may neverA medical concept, when medical research extends lifespans at a rate of more than one year per one year of research.
28 MAY 2013
Turning Asteroids into Terreriums
With the hefty biomass created by a marsh, you can then build up land using some of your excavated materials, saved on the surface of the asteroid for this moment. Hills and mountains look great and add texture, so be bold! This process will redirect your water into new hydrologies, and this is the best time to introduce new species, also to export species you no longer want, giving them to newer terraria that might need them.
Thus over time you can transform the interior of your terrarium t...Folksonomies: futurism space exploration
Folksonomies: futurism space exploration
Instructions from a fictional booklet on hollowing out asteroids to fill them with biomes.
28 MAY 2013
The Majority do Robot Work
Someone had to run the harvesters in the rice and sugarcane fields, check the irrigation canals or robots, install things, fix things. Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked, generation after generation; give them three thousand calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anythi...Humans are mostly cheap robots.
28 MAY 2013
Longevity Leads to "Balkanized" Relationships
this culture’s structure of feeling could also be called balkanized. Gender therapy and speciation were both parts of the longevity project, and the combination of the three created a new structure of feeling that is often characterized as fractured, compartmentalized, bulkheaded, firewalled. Usually longevity itself is identified as the primary force driving this; until now, no one has had to integrate a personality in its second century (or more), and often it is experienced as an existen...Folksonomies: transhumanism relationships
Folksonomies: transhumanism relationships
So many experiences and knowing so many people leads to feelings of alienation.
