Discuss the novel Aurora
2015 – Aurora
Comments
16 responses to “2015 – Aurora”
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I’ve been loving the book and not finished quite yet but I am having a problem with the reference to island biography theory. I’m a scientist with Masters in ecology and that theory simply has nothing to do with why the ships citizens are having shorter life expectancy etc. Maybe a genetic bottleneck or lack of genetic diversity but not island bio theory. That pertains to species diversity and richness of large island versus small and distance from other islands and it seems to be interpreted wrong.
Also there was mention of natural selection occurring at different rates among species which was supposed to be an issue, there was mention of bacteria evolving faster than plants and humans. Hahahaha um that occurs here on earth too because of different life expectancies.
Anyway good book, but almost threw it out because it seems the science is fiction.-
“almost threw it out because it seems the science is fiction” – well, he is a science fiction author…
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I’ve been reading Aurora (great book!) but have not finished yet.I’m trying to get a pitur ein my head of what Ship’s configuration is.
The author describes the ship as two rings of twelve cylinders each, and each cylinder is 4km long. The twelve cylinders meet at 30 degree angles, with locks between them that are “canted at 15 degrees each”. So each ring is (as later explicitly described) “a dodecagon”.
Does the author anywhere in the story talk about the uneven apparent gravity this produces?
Standing at the end of any biome, a citizen will find that a plumb bob will not point perpendicular to the ground – it will point 15 degrees off “down”. This means that a citizen will find every biome they walk into to be a steep hill with 15 degree grade. It also means (and this is a big problem) everything *else* – including soil and any standing water – will slide down this hill and pool at the bottom/ends of each biome.
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Indeed, I don’t recall a description either way. In my mental image the biomes are straight cylinders, and I “solved” the gravity issue by imagining that within the biomes the “ground” that partially fills the space is arranged in such a manner as to have a curved surface. The “ground” doesn’t need to be adjacent to the outer wall of the cylinder, the ship could be carrying some amount of dirt and “underground” water and indeed there are also mentions of mountains, so the ground is not level.
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Yes, agree. I drew up a little diagram to see if it was feasible to have the ground curved.
The potential problem I foresaw was that – to have the ground level to be at or below the centreline locks – would it still have sufficient dirt in the middle of the biome – or would you end up with two “islands” of ground and bare hull in between.
It turns out it works fine. Assuming a ideally flat plain and ground level at the locks, you get a terrain that is hourgass-shaped – a little narrower at the middle.
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Yes, I’ve seen the artwork out there. They are ambiguous about the shape of the biomes themselves – opting for a single continuois torus. Note they also get the spokes and rings wrong. There are six spokes, not four. So they can’t be trusted for accuracy.
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Ship was not evolved enough at first to run the whole ship on its own – let alone having to raise thousands of children. And freezing the wildlife would defeat the mission’s purpose – the secondary mission was to experiment with what the small biomes needed to be sustainable over many generations.
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I’m trying to build up a picture of what Ship really looks like from the author’s description in the book. It doesn’t quite match the picture on the cover, (The author describes each ring as comprised of 12 cylinders whereas The picture shows a continuous ring.)
Each cylinder is 4km long and 1km in diameter. My question is: Are the cylinders straight (like a hot dog) or are they curved around the Ship’s radius (like a banana or a sausage link)?
The description says that “the tunnels are canted at fifteen degree angles to the biomes at each end” – which suggests the biomes are straight.
The problem with biomes that are straight is that the apparent direction of gravity will not be straight up. It will vary from perpendicular at the centre of the biomes to 7.5 degrees off-vertical at each end, so that can’t be right. It also means any free-standing water will flow down a very steep 7.5 degree slope to each end, and then pool there.
What am I missing?
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For a nice review of Aurora, see
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Since the quantum computer is smart enough to narrate the story, it is probably smart enough to raise children. It would be advantageous to just freeze sperm and eggs and then combine them when reaching Tau Ceti instead of having people trapped in a ship for that long. The rest of the life support could be frozen, or could just be allowed to live for the duration of the trip.
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Hi,
Aurora (German ed.) contains many “interesting words” like “Wahrscheinlichkeitsblindheit” (e: blindness for probability?) or “Ankerheuristik” (e: anchoring heuristic) which I searched for.
The combination of both (in german) yields in just 1 (!) hit: Dean Buonomano: Brain Bugs.
I assume, Kim read it?
Yours,
Michael
P.S.: I enjoyed “Aurora” very much – it IS a thrilling novel, serios & inspiring with many facts…
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Brilliant as usual, but possibly overly pessimistic? Human interstellar travel seems highly unlikely given our self destructive instincts but a world ship is not technically impossible as KSR shows us. The idea that alien worlds with life would kill life from elsewhere is interesting. I think it’s more likely that since evolution would have proceeded separately we wouldn’t make a good host for alien prion like diseases or other single celled organisms and viruses. Getting to a habitable planet will be the hard part. Unlikely as it seems since we haven’t even managed to get back to the moon in the last 40 years I think humans will eventually achieve the goal if we get through the next 100 years or so.
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I just finished a painting that was inspired by the book Aurora. I just wanted to share it with folks who read the book. Any suggestions where I can upload the image? It’s not for sale or anything like that, I just want to share it.
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Hi everybody!
I was recently reading the Aurora book (which, by the way, is AMAZING), and it was mentioning pretty early on that the ship in Aurora is 12 magnitudes smaller than Earth. Since it is hard for the human mind to fully conceptualize the size of our world, I was trying to use Google to figure out how small, exactly, is 12 magnitudes smaller than Earth. I couldnt find anything useful online, so I was wondering if somebody here could help me out with some comparison (My research lead me to believe that 12 magnitudes smaller than earth is the size of bacteria, which it awfully small for a inter-solar space ship).
Thanks! (btw thanks to Science Friday for recommending this book!)-
[quote=Naseem]Hi everybody!
I was recently reading the Aurora book (which, by the way, is AMAZING), and it was mentioning pretty early on that the ship in Aurora is 12 magnitudes smaller than Earth. Since it is hard for the human mind to fully conceptualize the size of our world, I was trying to use Google to figure out how small, exactly, is 12 magnitudes smaller than Earth. I couldnt find anything useful online, so I was wondering if somebody here could help me out with some comparison (My research lead me to believe that 12 magnitudes smaller than earth is the size of bacteria, which it awfully small for a inter-solar space ship).
Thanks! (btw thanks to Science Friday for recommending this book!)[/quote]
Lets look at it by volume.The volume of the earth is 1.08*10^12 km. So I guess 12 orders of magnitude smaller would leave a volume of 1.08 km. That still seems a small for so many people but in bacteria sized.
Alan
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Surface would be more relevant than volume in our case.
The Earths surface is roughly 4*pi*r^2=5.1e8 km2
I remember each biome be about 4 km long and 500 m wide, thats 2 km2
Times 24 biomes, 48 km2Thats about 7 orders of magnitude.
Hm.
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