Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
Read More.Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
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Earth’s Final Sunset
February 27th, 2008
The Earth is toast.
New and improved calculations make a strong case that when the sun expands into a red giant several billion years from now our planet will spiral into the sun’s photosphere and disintegrate.
The space.com article also suggests that there is a way to save the Earth, at least for a while. It involves using asteroids to change Earth’s orbit, moving it out over time. This is a very similar idea to what I used in Spider Star for aliens to move their homeworld Argo away from the expanding and evolving star Pollux.
To quote Robert Frost’s Fire and Ice:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
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On the plus side, both Uranus and Neptune may become more interesting worlds from our point of view once the Sun expands:
http://www.rense.com/general49/dsndt.htm
That is interesting, although I suspect they’d remain outside the water zone even with the sun as a red giant. Jupiter’s moons might be in the water zone, however. That could make for an interesting setting for the twilight of humanity, the ones that can’t get out of the solar system anyway. Some issues with radiation to deal with, but that’s a smaller problem than your planet disintegrating.
I should work this out as it isn’t too hard for general feasibility…
As I recall, it works like this (From an old post of mine because I am too lazy to find the original source):
The Sun will spend a billion years crawling up the Red Giant Branch, reaching a peak luminousity of about 2350x Sun(now). There’s Helium Flash, which lasts a couple of seconds. The next stage is less luminous, about 110x Sun(now), and that is the 100 million year long stage I knew about (I thought it ascended up to that level, not exceeded it and then got dimmer). Then it does the asymptotic branch thing for 20 million years, getting much brighter and redder, followed by
some excitement ending in a planetary nebula and a white dwarf.
That peak of 2350x Sun should deal with both Neptune and Uranus’ excess H2 problem nicely.
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Luther Academy
http://www.okladot.state.ok.us/transit/purcellg.htm