To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.Copyright © 2003-2024 Christopher P. Winter. All rights reserved.
This page was last modified on 14 August 2024.
| IMAGINING SPACE: Achievements * Predictions * Possibilities 1950-2050 Roger D. Launius Howard E. McCurdy Ray Bradbury (Fwd.) San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN 0-8118-3115-9 | 176pp. | HC/LF/FCI | $35.00 | |
| Page 38: | "In the spiritually conscious nineteenth century, people turned their attention to ghosts and sought methods for communicating with the dead." |
| I know what the authors meant by "spiritually conscious". Still, I wish they had chosen different words to express it — perhaps "spiritualism-dominated". |
| Page 48: | "Some scientists would like to analyze alien samples on orbiting space stations, but there is no inherent advantage to this. All such stations eventually fall back to Earth. Given that fact, most scientists prefer to bring extraterrestrial samples directly to terrestrial laboratories." |
| There's nothing factual or inevitable about it. The station could be boosted into deep space, or dropped into the Sun. |
| Page 52: | "In 1960 Frank Drake went to West Virginia and tuned the 80-foot-wide dish of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory to 1,420 megahertz. He pointed it at Epsilon Eridani, a sunlike star some ten light-years away. To his astonishment, he received a strong signal of intelligent origin." |
| This is a bit oversimplified. It makes it sound like Drake just popped in one day, twirled a few knobs and, Voilá! However, it gets the main idea across (and such compression in places is probably inevitable in a broad-coverage book like this.) |
| Page 63: | "The proposed Mars spacecraft was as massive as a football field." |
| How massive is a football field? How much weight can an adult swallow carry? What's wanted here is a comparison to the size of the football field, not to its (indeterminate) mass. |
| Page 64: | "In place of the familiar orbiter spacecraft, the rockets support a tall cylindrical-shaped object." |
| Nit: S/B either cylinder-shaped or cylindrical. |
| Page 81: | "High-performance components such as these are hard to manufacture and endure unnatural stress while in operation." |
| Surely this S/B "unusual stress" or "extreme stress". |
| Page 83: | "NASA's plans for a Spaceliner 100 revises this technique." |
| Number error: S/B "plan ... revises". |
| Page 103: | "The distribution of data for analysis by ordinary individuals has already been done on a limited basis by the SETI Institute. Participants receive data from radio telescopes searching for extraterrestrial civilizations and use home and office computers to scan the signals. Results are returned automatically to the SETI@home project." |
| This is all true — except that the SETI Institute has nothing to do with it. SETI@home is run by Project Serendip, another SETI project out of UC Berkeley. |
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.