Alpha Centauri
Dec. 12th, 2002 07:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldToday I did two things connected with Alpha Centauri:
It strikes me that Alpha Centauri is a planetary system--a trinary, actually, with the Sun-like yellow dwarf A and the orange-red dwarf B orbiting separated by roughly the same distance as our Sun and Jupiter at the centre, and Proxima Centauri a tenth of a light-year beyond the A-B pair--very often used in science fiction. Never mind William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, which used Alpha Centauri as an icon of all that which is alien, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is an excellent computer game that used a borderline-sentient planet orbiting A to very good effect, while 2300AD has humanity's second homeworld of Tirane also at Alpha Centauri. (I really should get cracking on Freihafen.)
I think that we're anxious, as a society, to find someone out there--some intelligence, some life. Given that the Solar System seems to be devoid of our type of life--deep-water biospheres in some of the Galilean moons, or subsurface microscopic life on Mars or Titan, just isn't dramatic--we have to go abroad. And why not to Alpha Centauri, home to not one but two relatively Sun-like stars?
- I read Mona Lisa Overdrive, the superb if frustratingly enigmatic concluding volume of William Gibson's 1980's Sprawl trilogy. This trilogy concludes with the AIs released from from the Tessier-Ashpool computer cores in Freeside merging with similar AIs from the Centauri system--presumably Alpha Centauri.
- I ordered, from Warehouse 23, GURPS Alpha Centauri. This is in keeping for my weird habit of collecting RPG books without actually using them RPGing.
It strikes me that Alpha Centauri is a planetary system--a trinary, actually, with the Sun-like yellow dwarf A and the orange-red dwarf B orbiting separated by roughly the same distance as our Sun and Jupiter at the centre, and Proxima Centauri a tenth of a light-year beyond the A-B pair--very often used in science fiction. Never mind William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, which used Alpha Centauri as an icon of all that which is alien, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is an excellent computer game that used a borderline-sentient planet orbiting A to very good effect, while 2300AD has humanity's second homeworld of Tirane also at Alpha Centauri. (I really should get cracking on Freihafen.)
I think that we're anxious, as a society, to find someone out there--some intelligence, some life. Given that the Solar System seems to be devoid of our type of life--deep-water biospheres in some of the Galilean moons, or subsurface microscopic life on Mars or Titan, just isn't dramatic--we have to go abroad. And why not to Alpha Centauri, home to not one but two relatively Sun-like stars?
