Nomads of the Galaxy — mentioned by david-given

Sat, 20 Aug 2016 16:02:52 GMT

Or go part of the way and stop. Interstellar space is riddled with bodies. Sol's Oort cloud extends out to a light-year or so, but the fringes of it mix with Alpha Centauri's. It's mainly composed of cometary nuclei and ejected rocky masses, so it's rich in low-mass elements: hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen... all the elements of life. The total mass is on the order of tens of times the mass of the Earth, except unlike Earth, all that mass is accessible. Finding estimates of the separation between objects is pretty hard, but the ones I've seen very from ~5 light seconds up depending on…

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Nomads of the Galaxy — mentioned by david-given

Thu, 15 Oct 2015 14:44:17 GMT

I've read all of those! (I actually discovered Karl Schroeder from your blog; for which I thank you. I gather _Lockstep_ addresses the same subject, but haven't read it yet.) Although they're very much focused on going substellar objects, e.g. brown dwarves or dark giants, while I'm thinking of the vastly more common asteroidal bodies. It's not a subject I've seen addressed very often. Here's the paper that crystallised the idea for me: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2687v1.pdf Also, yes, fiction --- I'm not enough of a scholar for non-fic.

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Nomads of the Galaxy · HackerPapers discussions

Nomads of the Galaxy — mentioned by david-given

Nomads of the Galaxy — mentioned by david-given