Books: The Draco Tavern

The Draco Tavern by Larry Niven

by Larry Niven. Science Fiction - Short Stories. Larry Niven was required reading in my basic astronomy class back in school, many years ago. Many of his stories featured unusual stellar objects, and his stories made use of some of their properties. It added some life to what could have been some very dry subject matter.

This book uses the tavern and its' patrons as props for some philosophical speculations on things like the nature of knowledge, how much you can know, have there been any civilizations here before us? Most of the characters are aliens and pretty sketchily drawn. If you don't get bogged down in the philosophy, it's pretty light reading. I finished it in a day.

He does make some attempt to make the aliens alien. They come in different sizes, in different constructions, use different atmospheres, speak different languages. Some of them even live on a different time scale. There was one alien that took two years to come through the door. But they were all able to communicate (using the universal translator).

I sometimes wonder if we will ever meet any intelligent alien life. I also wonder if we would be able to recognize it if we did come across some. Shoot, we may have some sort of alien life here on earth right now that we don't even know about, and they might not even recognize us as intelligent life forms.


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All this makes me wonder about SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). They are listening for radio signals. But how powerful a radio would you need to be heard 100 light years away? In all directions? If somebody out there was listening, would they even be able to hear us? And what if their transmission methods are far more efficient than ours? Do we have the technology, or even the knowledge to recognize a signal? Much of our current radio transmission technology revolves around being undetectable, and we have only been doing this for 100 years. What are we going to be doing with electromagnetic radiation in another 100 years? I guess it doesn't hurt to listen, but I wonder if anyone is going to want to foot the power bill for a radio that can be heard on Alpha Centauri.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture, autofix map html.