I looked it up, and while I already knew about the North Korea/South Korea border being visible due to the poverty/wealth difference being so stark, that's not the case with India and Pakistan: rather, it's that the border is so heavily guarded and patrolled that it's illuminated 24/7.
A number of these facts have served as the basis of SF stories. For instance, a city on Mercury which stays perpetually in the twilight zone features in a lot of the SF of Kim Stanley Robinson, first in his early short story "Mercurial" and then again in his later novel 2312. Sticking with KSR, the problems of maintaining diversity and micromanaging people's lives on a generation starship is foundational to his novel Aurora. The current season of the normally-historical podcast Revolutions, which is an SF story about the Martian Revolution (I talk about this at length here https://stephenfrug.substack.com/p/you-should-listen-to-the-delight) portrays a Mars which is essentially a company town with many of the problems you mention arising. Drugs to promote harmonious interactions are a common SF feature, occurring first (as far as I know) in Brave New World. One particularly notable example is in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? (which was very losely adapted into Blade Runner), in which there is a "mood organ" where people dial up whatever mood they want; the opening scene is a fight because the protagonist's wife decided to dial up "self-accusatory depression".
> Astronauts want to go to space. But if they get sick, then they won’t be able to get to space! The solution? CONSTANT LYING.
I always thought it was a very good choice to choose "astronaut" for the aspiring profession of its protagonist in Gattaca! I wondered how many aspiring astronauts were already doing similar things to hide the reality of their bodies.
Given current technology, it is entirely possible for two people to conceive a child without ever being in the same room, so arranged marriages wouldn't actually be necessary - a space colonist could go ahead and "marry" a close genetic relative and have the biological parent of their children be someone else.
A bunch of these (particularly the ones about the exploitation problems of Mars colonies) come up in For All Mankind on Apple TV. It's an alternative history where the space race never ended (the Russians beat us to the moon, so we had to beat them at something else, etc). Strong recommend
>The richest source of carbon on the Moon is astronaut poop, which you're not allowed to use because it is of of great historical, cultural, or scientific value and thus is part of the common heritage of humanity.
I just finished reading the book, and IIRC the US actually claims the astronaut poop as US government property.
That discussion of whether babies can be born in low gravity reminds me of a thing I read about Potosi. Because it's so high above sea level, the air pressure is very low. Thus, pregnant women among the early Spanish settlers would always travel to the foot of the mountain to give birth, because they were afraid that a newborn wouldn't be able to breathe the thin air.
> Orbital velocity is about 8 kilometers per second. Around 3 kilometers per second, if an object smacks into your spaceship it delivers roughly the kinetic energy of its own weight in TNT.
I think I learned this fact some time around when Vasili was born, and it permanently changed my outlook in space. So glad other people get to learn it today too!
I looked it up, and while I already knew about the North Korea/South Korea border being visible due to the poverty/wealth difference being so stark, that's not the case with India and Pakistan: rather, it's that the border is so heavily guarded and patrolled that it's illuminated 24/7.
A number of these facts have served as the basis of SF stories. For instance, a city on Mercury which stays perpetually in the twilight zone features in a lot of the SF of Kim Stanley Robinson, first in his early short story "Mercurial" and then again in his later novel 2312. Sticking with KSR, the problems of maintaining diversity and micromanaging people's lives on a generation starship is foundational to his novel Aurora. The current season of the normally-historical podcast Revolutions, which is an SF story about the Martian Revolution (I talk about this at length here https://stephenfrug.substack.com/p/you-should-listen-to-the-delight) portrays a Mars which is essentially a company town with many of the problems you mention arising. Drugs to promote harmonious interactions are a common SF feature, occurring first (as far as I know) in Brave New World. One particularly notable example is in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? (which was very losely adapted into Blade Runner), in which there is a "mood organ" where people dial up whatever mood they want; the opening scene is a fight because the protagonist's wife decided to dial up "self-accusatory depression".
> Astronauts want to go to space. But if they get sick, then they won’t be able to get to space! The solution? CONSTANT LYING.
I always thought it was a very good choice to choose "astronaut" for the aspiring profession of its protagonist in Gattaca! I wondered how many aspiring astronauts were already doing similar things to hide the reality of their bodies.
Given current technology, it is entirely possible for two people to conceive a child without ever being in the same room, so arranged marriages wouldn't actually be necessary - a space colonist could go ahead and "marry" a close genetic relative and have the biological parent of their children be someone else.
A bunch of these (particularly the ones about the exploitation problems of Mars colonies) come up in For All Mankind on Apple TV. It's an alternative history where the space race never ended (the Russians beat us to the moon, so we had to beat them at something else, etc). Strong recommend
> The Moon is very small
One of my favorite pieces of data visualization is this image of the size of the moon compared to the size of the British empire:
https://thesoundingline.com/map-of-the-day-the-british-empire-was-almost-the-size-of-the-moon/
And here's one visualizing the size of various empires as moons:
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bs78cDigsTq/
>The richest source of carbon on the Moon is astronaut poop, which you're not allowed to use because it is of of great historical, cultural, or scientific value and thus is part of the common heritage of humanity.
I just finished reading the book, and IIRC the US actually claims the astronaut poop as US government property.
That discussion of whether babies can be born in low gravity reminds me of a thing I read about Potosi. Because it's so high above sea level, the air pressure is very low. Thus, pregnant women among the early Spanish settlers would always travel to the foot of the mountain to give birth, because they were afraid that a newborn wouldn't be able to breathe the thin air.
Very “the expanse!”
Today i learn that science fiction writers understimate California housing prices
> Orbital velocity is about 8 kilometers per second. Around 3 kilometers per second, if an object smacks into your spaceship it delivers roughly the kinetic energy of its own weight in TNT.
I think I learned this fact some time around when Vasili was born, and it permanently changed my outlook in space. So glad other people get to learn it today too!
"Automatically drugged food to promote harmonious interactions."
The drug in question being ecstasy, presumably.
Oxytocin?
typo: it is of of