Seveneves

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

I'm poking around on GoodReads and I notice that I have Seveneves listed, but the status is wrong. I finished it months (years?) ago. So here's my chance to make an update to my bookshelf, and since we are here maybe I should post something from my blog. One thing led to another and now we have a story.

We start with something from a couple of years ago:

I like Daniel Silva's books, well, I liked both of the ones I've read. I finished this one in two days. It's not a great book, but it's pretty good. It is not totally smooth, the ride is a little rough, but there weren't any of those giant potholes that cause me to curse in disgust. For instance, I started reading Seveneves by Neal Stephenson a few months back and things were going along swimmingly until I got about half way through the book and the President of the United States shows up and we (by which I mean the characters in the story) start having some kind of bullshit discussion. I had to put the book aside it was so repulsive. Given Neal's skill as a writer, I presume that is the effect he was trying to achieve. It's just that in my case it worked too well. I still want to finish that book, but it is going to take some determination to wade through this section, which I am hoping is short. If it goes on for too much longer I will be forced to toss it on the reject pile.

I eventually finished Seveneves, but it took me several months to get over that hiccup. All in all it's a pretty great book. The one thing that bothered me was there was no discussion of where the projectile originated or how it came to be. I suspect a stellar event was the most likely source, you know, something like a star going nova or collapsing into a neutron star. Anything that extreme is going release a large quantity of energy, and given the right configuration of mass and timing, I can see a rock getting ejected at a high velocity. But nobody ever looked, and nobody said boo about how the projectile came to be going so fast.

The Star Destroyer Avenger chases the Millennium Falcon out of the asteroid field.

There might have been a Imperial Star Destroyer making pass through the solar system and thought they'd have a little target practice with our moon. Fuckers. Okay, unlikely, but we ought to be looking around. I mean just last week Rama came flying by.

And then there's the whole business of the moon breaking up. No explanation for that either. But then maybe it's obvious that even really a fast rock isn't going to crack the moon into pieces and Neal is just making this up to have something to base his story on. I certainly don't think it could happen. We might get some moon quakes, and maybe a little volcanic action, but I think gravity would eventually win out, things would settle down and people would mention it occasionally because it was kind of a big deal like a magnitude 27 earthquake. Devastating, but not the end of the world.

But is it obvious that even a fast, small rock couldn't really destroy the moon? I mean Neal bases his story on this premise, and Neal's stories are usually built on solid ground, so maybe such a thing is possible, theoretically speaking. Even if such a thing were possible, the odds of it happening to our moon are infinitesimal. Even so, it's a good reason to get some people off of this rock.

Let's look at this mathimagically. We can estimate the energy carried by the rock because we have estimate of its speed (a large fraction of the speed of light, is how I remember it) and it's size (there was a puff of dust when the rock impacted the moon, and this puff of dust was visible to an amateur astronomer on Earth). Okay, so very rough estimates, but still enough to draw some boundaries on the problem.

But how much energy would it take to break the moon into gravel? A heck of a lot. The Death Star and the planet Alderran might be a good place to start. I posted Scott Manley's exposition right around one year ago. Listening to Manley, I'm gonna stick with my original assessment that a rock, no matter how fast it was traveling, would not be able to destroy the moon.

And then there was the matter or all the men dying and the woman having to use lab work to get pregnant. I was kind of hoping for some sexual escapades. Okay, so I guess there were a couple of things that bothered me, but they were pretty small, except for that section about the president. That was almost a deal breaker.