Planet centauri farming free#

until exponential growth sets in, by which time it's safe for the human colonists to show up.) The Best CaseД®ven for the best case scenario, I'm going to assume that Bb is the only planet in the system. (In terms of details, it would be a bootstrapping operation, with an initial small seed of robot miners constructing more or bigger skyhooks, more miners, etc. With unlimited energy and (nearly) unlimited building materials, we can construct a thriving civilization around Alpha Centauri B, even if all we have to work with is this one piece of melted rock. There, we can build habitats-either O'Neill colonies or, if we can harvest enough material, the coronals I describe in my novel Lady of Mazes. Haul the magma up, render it in the terrible light of the star, and ship the refined goods to a higher orbit where the temperature's a bit better. If we have the technology to get to it, we'll have the technology to mine it, if only by dangling a skyhook down from the L2 point (or from a heliostat) to dredge the magma ocean. But even if Bb is uninhabitable, it is still a great source of building material. But, if we have the technology to get to Bb, then we have the technology to live and thrive there. If your idea of habitability is finding a more or less exact copy of the Earth and settling down on it to farm, then things are looking kinda bleak. Oh, and since this is a worst-case scenario, let's say that there are no other planets in the system, not even any asteroids. In this case, much or all of Bb's surface is a lava sea. If there is an atmosphere, it's mostly composed of evaporated rock. In a worst-case scenario, Bb has the kind of rotational resonance that Mercury does: it is not fixed with one face pointed forever at its star, like our Moon is to the Earth, but rotates so that the whole planet is regularly bathed in the blowtorch heat of the star. At 1500 degrees, it's hot enough to melt rock.

Let's look at two scenarios, a worst-case and a best-case, and see what's possible with each. If we can get to this star system, we can settle it. Not very hospitable, perhaps-but I'm about to argue that it's just fine. The planet, Bb as it's currently called, has a six-day year and a surface temperature of 1500C.

Yesterday it was announced that an earth-sized planet has been discovered circling the nearest star, Alpha-Centauri (around the smaller of its two main stars, actually, Alpha-Centauri B). If you want to find out what the Virga universe is all about, you can check it out here: I've made large tracts of these two Virga books available. Book Excerpts: Sun of Suns and Pirate Sun

Means you can read it and distribute it freely, but not make derivative I've released this book under a Creative Commons license, which

Ventus was first published by Tor Books in 2000, and and you can still buy it to everyone who would just like to sample my work, I hope you enjoy this version. To celebrate the August, 2007 publication of Queen of Candesce, I decided to re-release my first novel as an eBook. I am looking forward to putting up a number of short stories in the near future.

Planet centauri farming free#

I've made my first novel, Ventus, available as a free download, as well as excerpts from two of the Virga books.