Meeting of the Sydney Futurian Society: 16th April 1999.

In attendance were

• The Reverend G. P. Dalrymple
• Ron Clarke
• A cardboard cutout of Cain, the kelpie from the Daewoo advertisement, which the reverend plans to use to defend his home.
• Peter Eisler
• David Bofinger
• John August
• Ftiove
• Ted Scribner
• Brian Walls
• K. Dillon

The meeting's attendance was notable.

• Ian Woolf, Futurian stalwart and maintainer of the Sydney Futurian main web page, was absent. Ian's excuse was "exhaustion after organising Peter Eisler's buck's night party".
• Peter Eisler was present. Ian's explanation was that Peter was "made of sterner stuff".
• Occasional alien visitor "Ftiove" was present. Ftiove has attended Sydney Futurian meetings before (see my report on the meeting of 16th June, 1998) but is never observed and can only be detected by his signature on the attendance sheet. It is possible that information on interstellar travel times or the orbital period of Ftiove's homeworld could be inferred from the period between Ftiove's visits (just less than one of your Earth years). Then again, he might just be a piker who hardly ever shows.
• G. Stone was present, but apparently didn't sign the attendance form.

Ted Scribner raised Yet Another Asteroid Collision Scare, this one perhaps somewhat scarier than most. A1999AN10 is about a mile across, according to two Italian astronomers at the University of Pisa "a collision solution exists" for August 2039. We lean towards thinking it will all be OK in the end. The worries are more definite than for XF11 (is this A1996XF11?), which made a (metaphorical) splash a few years back. The good news from the SF point of view is that 2039 is probably enough warning to allow the asteroid to be diverted. Fans obsessed with a need for a silver lining may conclude that this will encourage development of spacecraft. Fans who detest really bad puns can declare me anathema for the third sentence.

Influenza has been found to be a preventative for sex, and vice versa.

Farmers around Chernobyl are growing marijuana (well, non-THC hemp, but why spoil a story) to reduce the radiation levels. Various marketing slogans for the product were suggested.

A discussion of genealogy came from nowhere. Apparently, cyclists are descended from more people than village idiots, one-third of the French are descended from the emperor Charlemagne, Elizabeth II is descended from the prophet Mohammed (via a Castilian princess), everybody is descended from the emperor Nero, and nobody is descended from Joan of Arc.

Hale-Bopp was apparently made of the original archetypal ur-goop from which the solar system was made (they can tell this from isotopic frequencies, which they know from spectroscopy). This is confirmatory evidence for the standard model of solar system formation. Funny how you don't learn how ancient and valuable something is until you watch it drop into the red spot of Jupiter.

The Next Generation Space Telescope is a program to replace the Hubble (it doesn't seem to have a famous astronomer's name of its own yet). The plan is for an 8 metre mirror, which will have to unfold somehow because that'll be bigger than the launch vehicle. (By comparison, Hubble is a one-piece.) A major focus of current research and development is getting the weight per square metre down: specifications require that the weight per square metre be no more than 15 kilograms, rather than the quarter of a ton characteristic of Hubble. Incidentally, Hubble needed almost no research and development.

Peter Eisler is still about to get married. He's also becoming a merchant of death, providing the wherewithal to make things go bang. He reported on the buck's night, saying "it was very dignified, we had a meal, we ate ice cream, we played pool". Graham Stone said he was trying to repopularise the verb transitive "to nake".

The University of New South Wales seems to be showing Anime every fortnight, for instance on the 23rd of April.

Metal Storm, an innovative very rapid fire gun invented by a Queenslander and reported on in the last meeting. Suggested applications were secure (e.g. fingerprint-locked) handguns, robot mining, nailguns, point defence systems for ships (designed to shoot down exocet-like missiles), helicopter gunship armament and kid's toys.

A search is on for Gus Grissom's Mercury capsule.

A discovery has been announced of a multiple planet system (other than Sol, obviously). All the planets are superjovian and some scepticism was expressed as to whether they could really be gas giants.

The factual question of why ancient astronomers didn't know about Uranus was discussed. Most people felt you'd only realise it was a planet if you knew where to look. Someone claimed that the ancient Tibetans knew that Jupiter had satellites.

• Gas giant generalities, since we never mentioned them in previous meetings:
• Celia Holland's The Floating World, which addresses, we think, several gas giants.
• Peter F. Hamilton'sReality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist and A Second Chance at Eden, in which gas giants in general are used for mining Helium-3 and support the most advanced civilisation.
• A Jack McDevitt story in which the initial discovery of an alien artefact is on the moon of a gas giant, but nobody remembers which.
• Uranus:
• Uranus has an axial tilt of roughly 90 degrees, which should be story fodder but doesn't seem to be.
• The Buck Rogers comic strip, in which Uranus has a closed city and robots.
• A forgotten short story concerning freebooting in the Uranus Trojan points.
• Neptune:
• Triton has a reversed orbit, which also should be story fodder and apparently isn't.
• Larry Niven's Ringworld(?), where the Outsiders are observed sunbathing on Nereid.
• Larry Niven's World of Ptavvs, see "Pluto"
• Edmund Hamilton's The Universe Wreckers, in which Neptunians terrorise the solar system. It was pointed out that at this time (the time at which the book was written) Pluto hadn't been discovered. It was further pointed out that at this time (the time the meeting was held) Neptune was further away than Pluto anyway.
• Pluto:
• E. E. "Doc" Smith's First Lensman, where Pluto is a Palainian colony.
• Robert A. Heinlein's juvenile Have Space Suit, Will Travel, also available in German translation as Piraten in Weltenraum. It was agreed this was a dumb title, since according to the definition agreed at the last meeting the bad guys weren't pirates.
• Kim Stanley Robinson's Icehenge.
• Larry Niven's Waited Out, where the viewpoint character of a first person story never gets home, some attendees found this upsetting.
• Larry Niven's World of Ptavvs, where Kzanol strikes Pluto, at that time a satellite of Neptune, and knocks it out of orbit.
• A juvenile novel about a human unmanned probe to Pluto, captured by the hostile and at least superficially malignant "grey forms", who normally use telepathic coercion on "green" forms (which can photosynthesise?), and plan to use the probe as a vehicle to conquer the inner system.
• Planet of Eternal Night, the last published story by John W. Campbell, where the Jovians are intercepting supply ships bound for the Pluto base. The base obtains power by putting a waterwheel on a liquid nitrogen river.
• A vague memory about Joe Haldeman's Forever War.
• Stellar Conquest, where there is a monitoring station on Pluto.
• Tenth Planets:
• Larry Niven's Protector, where the planet is discovered once, and then concealed.
• The Cybermen from Doctor Who lived on the Tenth Planet, but stuffed up its environment and had to enrobot themselves.
• Some reference I didn't understand to The Goon Show.
• Another reference I didn't understand to Space 1999.
• An incidental reference to a tenth planet theory in Larry Niven's The Borderland of Sol.
• Sitchin's perfectly named The Tenth Planet.
• The Oort Cloud:
• Frederick Pohl's Mining the Oort and his Heechee series (an automated factory with quasi-humans on it descended from abducted Homo Erectus and stranded there when the Heechee left).
• Frederick Pohl and Jack Williamson's The Reefs of Space.
• Larry Niven's Known Space hyperdrive was limited to outside the Oort cloud, which (usually) made piracy impractical, see Relic of the Empire.
• Larry Niven's The Borderland of Sol.
• Niven and Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer, particularly the opening and closing scenes.
• Various suggestions of using the Oort cloud as a stepping stone for interstellar flight, generally poo-pooed by the assembled judges.
• Gregory Benford and David Brin's The Heart of the Comet.
• Companion Stars: Stories based on the idea that Sol is the bright half of a binary system.
• A James Blish story, "three episodes that all read like Star Trek", starting with the arrival of a spacecraft from "elsewhere in the solar system", terrestrial life forms have alien genes.
• A fact column by Isaac Asimov.
• Barriers and Non-Existence:
• Phillip Jose Farmer's World of Tiers, where the universe ends at the edge of the solar system.
• The Great Illusion, also by Farmer?
• Greg Egan's Quarantine, where it never used to, but now looks like it might.
• David Brin's The Crystal Spheres, where barriers surround each sunlike world.