Election 2004: The 5MV District

[Gatac]

The Total Recall Mars, or Ben Bova's Mars?

Gatac

[PointyHairedJedi]

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars, actually.

[Gatac]

Hm.

Think I read that trilogy.

Gatac

[Zeke]

Just catching up with this, and I must say it's a fascinating debate.

Still very definitely moving to Mars though.

Spoken like someone who hasn't read The Martian Chronicles.

[Gatac]

There's only so much near-future non-Cyberpunk sci-fi I can take.

Gatac

[Zeke]

Sorry, that was actually addressed to Jedi, not you -- I didn't quote him because I didn't notice there was a new page of posts. (Fixed now.)

[PointyHairedJedi]

Originally Posted by Zeke

Spoken like someone who hasn't read The Martian Chronicles.

As it happens, no. I've vaugely heard of it though. Must be a nicer place than Wells' Mars though.

[ijdgaf]

Not by much.

(wow, Mars discussion? Wasn't expecting that... )

[marplanauta]

wow this topic has changed!

[Vedra]

I bet Mars has oil....so we should go there to...appropriate resources and free the Martian people from their dictator...and maybe look for weapons of mass destruction,too. But then again maybe we'll just blow it up.

Has anyone considered that maybe blowing up a planet might get some alien attention? We should consider it.

[Chancellor Valium]

Hmm....I say we pipe methane from Uranus, and take valuable minerals from pluto. After all, it's least likely to affect our orbit, being so far away. Which brings me onto: if we blew up a planet, wouldn't it be seriously bad for our orbit? Mightn't it make the planet uninhabitable (this one, not the one we blow up....)?

[Sa'ar Chasm]

I say we pipe methane from Uranus...

Must...resist...childish...joke...

if we blew up a planet, wouldn't it be seriously bad for our orbit?

Like, gravitationally? Or are you concerned about getting hit with chunks of ex-planet.

The gravity we'd notice about the same time we saw the explosion, but the chunks would take considerably longer.

I seriously doubt rearranging the mass distribution three orbits out would send us into an ice age. The inverse-square law has a way of ameliorating things.

Any other questions for Mr. Science?

[Zeke]

Originally Posted by Sa'ar Chasm

Like, gravitationally? Or are you concerned about getting hit with chunks of ex-planet.

I don't know what planet my exes are on, but I sure would be concerned about getting hit with chunks of it.

Any other questions for Mr. Science?

I have some. Direct me to him.

[Nan]

Zing.

[Chancellor Valium]

I meant that we might disturb the equlibrium of the solar system and throw ourselves out of our current orbit, or possibly into the sun. Oh and chunks would be bad, yes. Oh and odd fact no. 43345: the Daleks wanted to take out the core of the planet with a bomb and pilot the planet as a massive spaceship....funny they didn't realise just how stupid they were being, but then again, they ARE the Daleks....

[Zeke]

Yeah, Daleks are dumb. How many Daleks does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

What? I don't know. Why would I ask you if I knew?

[Nan]

What happened to the member titles?

[Chancellor Valium]

GAH! they've melted! THEY'VE MELLLL-TEEED!
the alternative response by me goes like this: Egad! She's right! What shall we do?

[Zeke]

SHIZNIT. I had to upgrade to phpBB v2.0.11 because of a security leak, and I didn't think it would interfere with the mods I've made. Apparently it did.

I'll fix it as soon as I can. But pie, as always, comes first.

[PointyHairedJedi]

Originally Posted by Chancellor Valium

the alternative response by me goes like this: Egad! She's right! What shall we do?

Egad? But why would this be any kind of shock to you? Though, you're new-ish, so you'll be let off the hook this time. But anyway, for future reference, Nan is always right. She's sort of like the pope, only less holy and more cranky.

Also, on the subject of blowing up planets, I doubt it would make any major difference to us directly, though if it were Jupiter and to a lesser extent Saturn we might have problems, because they catch (Jupiter mostly) a lot of the comets and bits of junk that fly into the Solar System, and we'd have to be slightly more worried about Deep Impact (I'm absolutely not going to mention Arma-- ha, nearly got me there, didn't you) becoming a reality. Losing the Moon would have much more of a direct effect on us than any of the other planets.