chris@ism780.UUCP (05/13/84)
#R:watmath:-767300:ism780:14200004:000:2223 ism780!chris May 12 11:42:00 1984 (Doc Smith Lives!) I somehow doubt that water is nearly as precious as you think. The moons and rings of saturn are believed to include some large (multi cubic mile) chunks of ice. Even rocks contain quite a bit of water. Plans for a moon base include a device for disassociating water from the lunar soil. Mars has ice caps, venus has water in the clouds (they are sulfuric acid clouds, but there is lots of water in them) and the outer planets have water vapor and ice. The next argument is that "It is too hard/expensive to get to this water". The answer is that it's far harder to cross space to another star. The British Interplanetary Society did a design project called Daedelus that was designed to send an instrument package to Barnard's Star. It was phenominally expensive, on the order of the GNP of the US. The project involved mining the atmosphere of Jupiter for fuel for the craft. If we can scoop atmosphere out of Jupiter, we can move some ice moons from Saturn. All this was just to send a small instrument package four and a scosh light years. Trying to transport the populace of a world would have to be much more expensive. Even allowing for warp/hyperspace/subspace types of drives, it would still be amazingly expensive to transport large numbers of people between the stars. The final problem is that planets change very slowly. It takes millions of years for things like the amount of water to change significantly. The only example we have of a planet that has dried out is mars. Is used to have more water (pictures show unmistakable erosion features) but it never had seas or oceans. At best there was enough water to dig some large canyons. It took literally hundreds of millions of years for even this small (compared to the earth) amount to be lost to space. The length of time necessary for a water world to dry out is large even by geological standards. The problem with Hollywood SF is that it is largely done by people who are not SF enthusiasts. Today they do SF, tomorrow adventure, and on tuesday, psychodrama. V was better then it might have been (Battlescared Lexicon comes to mind) but it still wasn't that good. chris vortex!ism780!chris decvax!cca!ima!ism780!chris