No YOU spend entirely too much time thinking about the 2nd half of Seveneves....For real though, where did all the water go?
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So... Probably shouldn't make this the next thing I read?
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I think I'm one of the few 'nerds' I know who didn't love Snow Crash.
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Jenniferplusplusreplied to Aaron Lord :csharp: last edited by
@devlord Louise does a good job explaining how I feel about this book
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@401matthall I actually do recommend seveneves. There's a reason it lives rent free in my head like this
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A'ight. I've been re-listening to Red Mars and I'm looking for something else biggly-ish to take up my reading time.
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Pete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫replied to Jenniferplusplus last edited by
@jenniferplusplus
Maybe humanity went hard for "green" hydrogen power and were just not very good at storing and transporting it for a few centuries, leaving a dry planet with a strongly oxidising atmosphere. (I don't think anyone would survive that either, to be honest.) -
Jenniferplusplusreplied to Jenniferplusplus last edited by
It's something like a million times more energy than was released by tsar bomba. It's about 10,000 times more energy than the chicxulub meteor!!!!
Aaarghghghaktjnaliugdaliudgblaiusrghb GOD!!!!
Anyway, this is definitely not just my brain refusing to engage with literally any other topic that I'm supposed to be working on right now
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@401matthall To situate my recommendation, it might help to know that I really like diamond age and cryptonomicon, but couldn't even finish snow crash or reamde
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Jenniferplusplusreplied to Pete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫ last edited by
@petealexharris No, no. The moon disintegrates and a large fraction of it falls on the earth. Which sounds like it would be a spoiler, but you learn this is the situation by the end of chapter 2, I think.
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Matthew Lyonreplied to Jenniferplusplus last edited by
@jenniferplusplus this is the book that put me off Stephenson; it’s not that I want technically accurate hard scifi, it’s more,
if I have to suspend my disbelief, make it worthwhile, and sadly Seveneves failed at that for me
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@jenniferplusplus occasionally I’ll watch something like Scavengers Reign or read something like Wings of Fire to my kid and there are parts where I hear in my partner’s voice “yeah these ecosystems are _entirely_ unbelievable, how could this possibly be self-sustaining” (she doesn’t actually say this but I hear it nonetheless) but the rest of the experience is worthwhile enough to make it worth ignoring that concern
I didn’t get that from Seveneves
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Jenniferplusplusreplied to Matthew Lyon last edited by
@mattly I don't even know how I feel about this book and its degree of believability. Like, it makes 2 little conceits. 1 is that the scenario is possible at all. And 2 is that it's survivable at all.
And I can grant those. But I needed it to go all the way. It has to make that worth it. And seveneves stops just short of all of the most interesting bits.
It should have been two books. That or the first half should have been a prologue and we just completely handwave the physics
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@jenniferplusplus I love or like so many of his books, but this one just had me: "I don't think that's how orbital physics works. And that's definitely not how genetics works. And they maintained a closed atmosphere and a civilization in a cave? And at the bottom of a trench? Nope, nope, nope."
For me to enjoy it that level of wacky needs to have less of a hard sf style and be a thinner book. -
@btuftin i want the version of this book where the first half is actually like a 20-30 page prologue, and occasional flashbacks. Then the other 800 pages are spent on exploring what the entire hell is about to happen to these 3.5 societies.
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@jenniferplusplus my reading of most of Stephenson's books is that at some point he just gives up and muddles to an end. I always imagined it's due to publisher pressure to meet a deadline or something.
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Raleigh Straightreplied to Jenniferplusplus last edited by
@jenniferplusplus Not to mention that heating the ocean seems like a great way to find out if hypercanes are actually a thing, or how much extra energy it costs to boil the ocean when a constant stream of major hurricanes is cooling it down.
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Jenniferplusplusreplied to Raleigh Straight last edited by
@RaleighStraight well, that's kind of what I imagine the early part of boiling the ocean at escape velocity would look like. Which is fine. If you drop like 1/4 of the mass of the moon onto the earth, that's going to be destructive on a scale that's hard to imagine. Even if you spread the impact out over decades.
But it's not something you survive by hoarding food in an abandoned mine, which is what the book wants me to believe.