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CaptainCrawdad
Current Version
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Moved these Artistic License trope examples out of Headscratchers. If someone disputes that the work is an example, the discussion should be in here, not the Headscratchers page.
* YouFailEconomicsForever: No, not the Lunar anarcho-capitalism championed by the author\'s various mouthpieces. Reasonable minds can (demonstrably) disagree about the workability of that. But the premise of the central conflict in the book, that \'\'control over Luna is economically important to Earth because it produces foodstuffs\'\', makes completely no sense at all. Since the technology exists to drill tunnels in rock and grow large amounts of food in said tunnels under artificial lighting, why not drill some farming cubic in the Himalayas, much closer to home and easier to police? We\'re told that Luna has lots of solar power, but also that practical fusion power exists in this universe. Why go to the moon at all?
** lack of space? The earth\'s population is 11 billion in the book, and the moon\'s biggest customer was India.
*** The Earth\'s land area is still bigger than the Moon\'s.
*** Yes, but as Prof points out in the book, Loonies don\'t live on the Moon, but \'\'in\'\' it. They measure in cubic, not area.
*** One 11-billionth of the crustal bedrock under India alone is several times the (above-ground) [[HiroshimaAsAUnitOfMeasure volume of the Pentagon]]. You need to leave some rock in place for structural support, but how much cubic do you need to to feed a man?
*** More importantly, how do you power it? The Loonies use vast amounts of solar power, with some fusion as back up. It\'s implied fusion isn\'t cost efficient enough to use alone to supply the moon, instead almost everyone has vast acres of solar panels that in other Heinlein stories are implied to be 90+% efficient.
*** Fusion may be too inefficient to supply the moon, because hydrogen is a scarce resource there. But Earth has \'\'oceans\'\', which are 6% hydrogen by weight. Once you get fusion up and running at all, its efficiency becomes a non-issue, because your fuel supply is essentially unlimited. (The cost of liberating the hydrogen from water molecules is negligible compared to the payoff from fusing it).
*** The moon actually has reserves of Helium-3, which is (in theory) a really good resource for fusion because it has less waste. It\'s one of the main reasons for mining/colonizing the moon, and given the other technologies in the book (the electromagnetic launcher in particular), it is probably developed well enough to use as a power source.
** Considering the leaders of the world they probably refused to tunnel under the the Earth, each country fighting because their land is \
* YouFailEconomicsForever: No, not the Lunar anarcho-capitalism championed by the author\'s various mouthpieces. Reasonable minds can (demonstrably) disagree about the workability of that. But the premise of the central conflict in the book, that \'\'control over Luna is economically important to Earth because it produces foodstuffs\'\', makes completely no sense at all. Since the technology exists to drill tunnels in rock and grow large amounts of food in said tunnels under artificial lighting, why not drill some farming cubic in the Himalayas, much closer to home and easier to police? We\'re told that Luna has lots of solar power, but also that practical fusion power exists in this universe. Why go to the moon at all?
** lack of space? The earth\'s population is 11 billion in the book, and the moon\'s biggest customer was India.
*** The Earth\'s land area is still bigger than the Moon\'s.
*** Yes, but as Prof points out in the book, Loonies don\'t live on the Moon, but \'\'in\'\' it. They measure in cubic, not area.
*** One 11-billionth of the crustal bedrock under India alone is several times the (above-ground) [[HiroshimaAsAUnitOfMeasure volume of the Pentagon]]. You need to leave some rock in place for structural support, but how much cubic do you need to to feed a man?
*** More importantly, how do you power it? The Loonies use vast amounts of solar power, with some fusion as back up. It\'s implied fusion isn\'t cost efficient enough to use alone to supply the moon, instead almost everyone has vast acres of solar panels that in other Heinlein stories are implied to be 90+% efficient.
*** Fusion may be too inefficient to supply the moon, because hydrogen is a scarce resource there. But Earth has \'\'oceans\'\', which are 6% hydrogen by weight. Once you get fusion up and running at all, its efficiency becomes a non-issue, because your fuel supply is essentially unlimited. (The cost of liberating the hydrogen from water molecules is negligible compared to the payoff from fusing it).
*** The moon actually has reserves of Helium-3, which is (in theory) a really good resource for fusion because it has less waste. It\'s one of the main reasons for mining/colonizing the moon, and given the other technologies in the book (the electromagnetic launcher in particular), it is probably developed well enough to use as a power source.
** Considering the leaders of the world they probably refused to tunnel under the the Earth, each country fighting because their land is \
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