The Moon, Europa

The Moon, Europa

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Science Research

I've encountered a pause in writing to research a pretty big issue for the next book.  I thought I had the details hammered out, but when I went back to check some small detail I was struck by a potential problem that would change the dynamic of the entire story.  It reminded me of the amount of research I did for the first book (hours and hours and hours) and how many questions I had to answer for myself, for the book, and to make the science actually plausible even 350 years in the future.  We are so far behind where we thought we would be only 50 years ago (where is my flying car?) that I didn't want to fall into the same trap I thought so many of our contemporaries did not too terribly long ago.  It seemed that giving technology 350 years to develop was enough time for it to catch up with our expectations.  So, since the 2nd book follows the first by about 20 years, I can't get too far ahead of the science in that one either.  I could make up stuff and take large leaps in logic but, so far, I want to keep my leaps very small.  I want to make sure that whatever science I present is largely in the realm of achievable.  There are plausible formulas and plans now but we're just waiting for the technology to make it a possible build?  Whatever the case, I want my flying car or rocket pack and I still don't have them.  Unfortunately we can no longer rely on NASA to make decent decisions about the future of manned exploration. And even if NASA ever gets to Mars (or for that matter to the Moon again), they probably won't do anything but take core samples. Maybe future endeavors will be privatized and speed up the process.

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