To Crush the Moon (30 page)

Luna
—(prop n) Original name of Earth's moon.

Lune
(also
The Squozen Moon, The Half Moon
)—(prop n) Name attaching to Earth's moon following the terraforming operations which reduced its diameter from 3500 to 1400 kilometers.

Malo e lelei
—Traditional Tongan greeting widely used within the Queendom. Literally: “Thank you for coming.”

Matter programming
—(n) The discipline of arranging, sequencing, and utilizing pseudomaterials in a wellstone or other programmable-matter matrix, often including the in situ management of energy and computing resources.

Mechsprach
—(n) Any spoken accent or dialect reserved for use by machines, to distinguish them from human or human-derived speakers.

Metastable
—(adj) Existing in an unstable state which is transient but relatively long-lived.

Microbar
—(n) A measure of atmospheric pressure, equivalent to one-millionth of an Earth atmosphere at sea level. Partial pressures of oxygen must reach approximately 70,000 microbars to be considered breathable.

Millibar
—(n) A measure of atmospheric pressure, equivalent to one-thousandth of an Earth atmosphere at sea level. Partial pressures of oxygen in the 70 millibar range are generally considered breathable.

Nasen
—(n) An acronym: Neutrino Amplification through Stimulated EmissioN. A monochromatic beam of high-energy neutrinos, sometimes employed for interplanetary communication thanks to its extremely small divergence angle. However, the difficulty of generating such a beam, plus its ready interactions with matter, limit its usefulness except as a weapon.

Naturalist
—(n, adj) Adherent to the belief that natural events and processes are preferable to artificial ones. Naturalists may or may not also be deathists.

Neoteny
—(n) The retention of juvenile characteristics (usually physical) into adulthood.

Nescog, The
—(prop. n) NEw Systemwide COllapsiter Grid. Sol system's successor to the Inner System Collapsiter Grid or Iscog; an ultrahigh-bandwidth telecommunications network employing numerous supraluminal signal shunts.

Neuble
—(n) A diamond-clad neutronium sphere, explosively formed, usually incorporating one or more layers of wellstone for added strength and versatility. A standard industrial neuble masses one billion metric tons, with a radius of 2.67 centimeters.

Neutronium
—(n) Matter which has been supercondensed, crushing nuclear protons and orbital electron shells together into a continuous mass of neutrons. Unstable except at very high pressures. Any quantity of neutronium may be considered a single atomic nucleus; however, under most conditions the substance will behave as a superfluid.

Neutronium barge (also Neutronium Dredge)
—(n) A space vessel, typically one billion cubic meters (1000 x 1000 x 1000 m) or larger, whose primary function is to gather mass, supercompress it into neutronium, and transport it to a depot or work site. Although less numerous, smaller neutronium barges also existed for transport only.

Nubia
—(prop n) Subtropical Luner nation of the southern hemisphere, on the former Nearside, with a population of approximately 100 million.

Older
—(prop n) Informal title or ethnic slur applied to immorbid Queendom residents by the morbid, mortal peoples of Lune.

Ophiuchus
—(prop n) A large, dim, nonzodiacal constellation, “The Snake Holder,” beginning between Scorpius and Sagittarius near the Sol Ecliptic Plane and extending some 50 degrees northward.

Petabyte
—(n) A measure of data storage equal to 10
¹⁵
bytes or eight quadrillion digital bits.

Philander
—(n) A title granted to formal consorts of the Queen of Sol. Only four philanders were ever named.

Photochromic
—(adj) Changing color under the influence of light.

Photosail
—(n) Any nearly two-dimensional device whose primary function is to derive mechanical energy from the pressure of reflected light, including sunlight, starlight, and radiation from artificial sources. The term “solar sail” is sometimes applied colloquially, but in fact solar sails are a subset of photosails.

Photosphere
—(n) The hot, opaque, convectively stable plasma layer of a star beginning at the photopause, responsible for most thermal and visible emissions. Usually less than 1000 kilometers deep, with temperatures of several thousand kelvins and the approximate pressure of Earth's stratosphere. The photosphere floats atop the deep hydrogen convection zones of the stellar interior.

Photovoltaic
—(adj) Capable of generating an electrical voltage with the input of light energy, through the liberation of bound electrons in a preferred direction. In many isolated devices, wellstone pseudomaterials
must
be photovoltaic in order to maintain their other properties using ambient radiation.

Picometer
—(n) A measure of distance, equal to 10
^-12
meters or one-billionth of a millimeter.

Planette
—(n) Any artificial celestial body consisting of a stony or earthy lithosphere surrounding a core or shell of supercondensed (neutronic) matter. The vast majority of planettes are designed for human habitation, and include Earthlike surface gravity and breathable atmospheres.

Plibbles
—(n) Fruits of the plibble tree.

Plurality
—(n) The condition of existing in more than one physical instantiation under the same identity, e.g., with intent to reconverge the copies at a later time.

Positronium
—(n) A material consisting of “atoms” made from one electron and one positron orbiting their mutual center of attraction. Unstable in free space, positronium is generally stored in magnetic nanobottles between the fibers of bulk wellstone.

Print plate
—(n) The largest single component of a fax machine, responsible for assembling and disassembling finished goods at the atomic level. Print plates are generally flat and most typically rectangular, although with effort they can be fashioned as cylinders or other three-dimensional forms.

Pseudoatom
—(n) The organization of electrons into Schrödinger orbitals and pseudoorbitals, made possible with great precision in a designer quantum dot. The properties of pseudoatoms do not necessarily mimic those of natural atoms.

Pup
—(prop n) Innermost world of the Wolf 359 star system, first colonized in Q427. Considered marginally habitable.

Quantum dot
—(n) A device for constraining the position of one or more charge carriers (e.g., electrons) in all three spatial dimensions, such that quantum (“wavelike”) effects dominate over classical
(“particlelike”) effects. Charge carriers trapped in a quantum dot will arrange themselves into standing waveforms analogous to the electron orbitals of an atom. Thus, the waveforms inside a quantum dot may be referred to collectively as a pseudoatom.

Reportant
—(n) Any person or mechanism gathering information for public distribution.

Rodenbeck, Wenders
—(prop n) Poet laureate of the Queendom era.

Senatoria Plurum
—(prop n) The main governing body of the Luner nation of Nubia.

Sensorium, Neural
—(n) Any system for channeling synthetic neural inputs into the brain. Sometimes employed as a form of torture, but generally considered a medium for education and entertainment, especially in remote environments.

Shattering, The
—(prop n) Global seismic event with a death toll in the hundreds of millions, generally credited with destroying the post-Queendom Iridium Age civilization of Lune. According to Conrad Mursk, an ostensibly preventable disaster.

Sila'a
—(n) A pinpoint fusion generator or “pocket star” consisting of a wellstone-sheathed neutronium core surrounded by gaseous deuterium. From the Tongan
si'i
(small) and
la'aa
(sun).

Sketchplate
—(n) A thin, typically rectangular block or sheet of wellstone sized and preprogrammed for the portable display and input of text, drawings, and
physical simulations.

Squozen Moon, The
(See
Lune
)

Stealth
—(n) Concealment, especially during movement or action. Colloquially, a synonym for technologically derived invisibility.

Stormlands, The
—(prop n) 180-kilometer-wide region of Lune's northern hemisphere, characterized by reduced gravity, peripheral convection cells, and permanent cyclonic weather formations.

Superabsorber (also superblack)
—(n) Any material capable of absorbing 100% of incident light in a given wavelength band. The only known universal superabsorber (i.e., functioning at all wavelengths) is the event horizon of a hypermass. (Approximations of 100% absorption are generally referred to as “black.”)

Superfluid
—(n, adj) Any fluidized material capable of propagating with zero friction and zero viscosity. The vast majority of superfluids are either cryogenic, as with liquid helium, or supercondensed, as with neutronium.

Superreflector
—(n) Any material capable of reflecting 100% of incident light in a given wavelength band. No universal superreflectors are known. (Approximations of 100% reflectance are generally referred to as “mirrors.”)

Supervacuum
—(n) A state of vacuum in which some wavelengths of the Zero Point Field have been suppressed or excluded. Since the speed of light is a function of vacuum energy, supervacuum is useful for the transmission of matter and information at supraluminal velocities.

Supraluminal
—(adj) Exceeding the classical speed of light.

Tazzer
—(n) A short-range beam weapon consisting of pulsed, coaxial streams of electrons and metal ions in a guide beam of blue or violet laser light. Tazzers are primarily used to induce temporary incapacity (pain, paralysis, unconsciousness), although lethal versions also exist.

Terraform
—(v) To make Earthlike. In general, to match the gravity, climate, and atmosphere of a planet or planette to that of Earth, possibly including the imposition of a stable biosphere. Enclosed spaces are “climate controlled” rather than terraformed. Attributed to Jack Williamson.

Thermocline
—(n) Any layer boundary marked by an abrupt change in temperature.

Tillspar
—(prop n) Highest nonvacuum suspension bridge in the known universe, spanning
the 10-kilometer-deep Highrock Divide in the Imbrian province of Apenine, Lune.

Timoch
—(prop n) Capital city of the Luner nation of Imbria, with a population of approximately two million.

Tonga
—(n) Former Earth kingdom consisting of the Tongatapu, Ha'apai, and Vava'u archipelagoes of Polynesia, and scattered islands occasionally including parts of Samoa and Fiji. Tonga was the only Polynesian nation never to be conquered or colonized by a foreign power, and was the last human monarchy prior to the Q1 establishment of the Queendom of Sol.

Tropopause
—(n) In a planetary atmosphere, a sharply defined thermocline or barocline separating the troposphere or lower atmosphere from the stratosphere or upper atmosphere.

Upsystem
—(adj, adv) One of the six cardinal directions: away from the sun in any orientation.

Varna
—(prop n) A 640-meter-radius planette constructed in orbit around Luna by private investors during the latter years of the Queendom of Sol. Site of the Q1290 Treaty of Varna, granting Right of Return to Barnard refugees.

Viense
—(prop n) Temperate Luner nation of the original Farside, including the north pole, with a population of approximately fifty million.

Wellcloth
—(n) A fabric woven wholly or partially from wellstone fibers. While sheet wellstone could technically be considered a form of cloth, the term “wellcloth” is generally reserved for fabrics with weavelengths larger than 1 micrometer.

Wellglass
—(n) Any wellstone substance which is both optically transparent and electrically insulative, often employed as the default state of wellstone devices. Most typically refers to a wellstone substance closely emulating the properties of transparent silica-soda-lime (SiO
₂
, NaO, CaO) “window glass” preparations except in terms of mass and toughness. In general, natural substances containing a preponderance of silicon are the easiest to emulate in a wellstone matrix.

Wellstone
—(n) A substance consisting of fine, semiconductive fibers studded with quantum dots, capable of emulating a broad range of natural, artificial, and hypothetical materials. Typical wellstone is composed primarily of pure silicon, silicon dioxide, and gold.

Wellwood
—(n) An emulation of lignous cellulose (“wood”), often employed as the default state of wellstone devices.

Zetta-ton
—(n) A measure of mass, equal to 10
²¹
tons or one million billion billion kilograms.

appendix C

technical notes

planetary descriptions

For the curious, the Lalandean world of Gammon and the Wolf 359 world of Pup, which are mentioned briefly in Chapter 10 and form the twin seats of the Biarchy government in Chapter 25, are described in more detail by this series' previous volume,
Lost in Transmission
.

Saturn's A, B, and C rings—by far the most visible at a distance—are 15,000, 25,800, and 17,400 kilometers wide, respectively, as measured from the inner to the outer edge. Their outer
diameters
are obviously much larger: 274,000, 235,400, and 183,500 kilometers, versus 120,700 km for the planet itself. By comparison, the Earth's diameter is only 12,750 km. The observation platform described in Chapter 8 is just inside the orbit of Mimas, the innermost of Saturn's large, spherical moons. Notably, it's also inside the sparse E ring, which is thought to extend to a distance of eight planetary radii and to include a number of the inner moons. Please note that this book relies on pre-
Cassini
data. I had a hand in the launching of that spacecraft and will be following it with great interest, but as of this writing it has not yet reached the planet.

As described, the planet Mulciber in the Epsilon Eridani system is possible only if it's close enough to its parent star that the ambient heat will melt tin and drive off light gases such as oxygen and nitrogen. Also, for heavy metals to occur in such abundance at the planet's surface, Mulciber must have been shattered by a collision of some sort, in such a way that its light, rocky crust has coalesced into a separate moon—Aetna—while its exposed iron core re-formed into the planet Conrad describes.

Stephen L. Gillett (while not mentioning a world as strange as Mulciber) outlines some of the details of this process in his excellent reference
World-Building
(Writer's Digest Books, 1996), but it's worth mentioning that something very similar appears to have happened to Earth. If the mass of our moon were distributed on top of the existing Earth, as it seems to have been in the early stages of the solar system's formation, we'd have a much thicker crust with much lower metal content near the surface. If the Mars-sized body which struck Earth had done so less glancingly, our planet might well have become an iron cannonball with a much larger moon. A straight-on hit could even have pulverized the Earth, forming a second asteroid belt, although it's likely that a planet of some sort would have re-formed from the shards eventually.

the squozen moon

The atmospheres of planettes like Maplesphere and Ash are not stable over geologic time, or even the span of a few years, without a replenishment mechanism and/or a mechanism for keeping the upper atmosphere very cold. Make no mistake: these are technological artifacts, like buildings, and will not persist forever without stewardship.

Lune, the Goliath of planettes, does not have this problem, and will keep its atmosphere indefinitely. With a radius of 707 km (reduced from the original 1738 km), a surface gravity of 1.0 gee, and an unaltered mass of 7.3¥10
²²
kg, Lune's escape velocity is 3.72 kilometers per second (vs. 11.9 km/s for Earth). This is more than enough to retain oxygen and nitrogen, but also small enough to make access to space a lot easier than it is from Earth.

The delta velocity necessary to reach Varna—in an orbit 50,000 km high—from Lune's surface is very close to the escape velocity:

Fortunately, this is achievable through low-tech means, as we see in Chapter 19.

Note that Lune's sphere of influence—the maximum radius of a stable circular orbit—is just over 65,000 km. Past this point, the gravity of Earth (even Murdered Earth) will perturb the orbit over time, until the orbiting object either crashes, is ejected from the Earth-moon system, or becomes a stable satellite of Earth.

The dimensions of Lune give it a surface area of 6.28 million square kilometers—about 17% of its original area, or 1.7% of Earth. This is slightly smaller than the continent of Australia, and while it includes ocean as well as land surfaces, it does create a plausible home for hundreds of millions of human beings even at sub-Queendom technology levels.

Because angular momentum is always conserved, reducing the diameter of Luna from 3476 to 1414 km (almost exactly a 60% reduction) will increase its rotation rate. For a sphere with a mass M, rotation period P, and radius r, the angular momentum is (2⁄5) (Mr
²
) (2p/P). Thus, r
²
/P is a constant, and reducing the radius by 60% decreases the rotation period by a factor of 6. As a result, the moon's current solar day of 29.53 Earth days (708.72 hours) is shortened to 4.92 Earth days (118.12 hours). By crushing to slightly less than 60%, the day can be adjusted to exactly 5 earth days, or 120 hours.

The original soil composition of Luna is compared with the Earth's crust in the table below:

So, from a terraformer's perspective Luna is not a bad piece of real estate once the gravity problem is solved. The only real problems are a lack of carbon and hydrogen in the Lunar soil, and an overabundance of toxic nickel. The figures on nitrogen are misleading, since Earth's atmosphere contains a huge reservoir of this element, whereas Luna has no such resource. A dense nitrogen atmosphere is certainly necessary to support Earthly life, so one would need to be imported.

wellstone

I've written a great deal about this subject elsewhere, and will not repeat it all here. For now, I'll just say that although it sounds far out—and I've pushed the limits of credulity pretty hard here—this is a mostly real technology which is currently under development. Readers interested in learning more are encouraged to check out my nonfiction book on the subject,
Hacking Matter
(Basic Books, April 2003), or the web site www.programmablematter.net.

positronium

The “positronium” material mentioned in Chapter 11 is a real substance, consisting of a semistable “atom” with an electron and positron (or antielectron) orbiting their mutual center of attraction. The positronium atom has no nucleus, but it does have a definite size, and in fact the Air Force Research Laboratory has investigated quantum dots (and by extension, wellstonelike quantum-dot solids) as a means for storing this explosive in microgram quantities. According to Gerald Smith of Positronics Research in Los Alamos, New Mexico, when the electron and positron are collided together by shock or high temperatures, each microgram of positronium releases the energy equivalent of 40 kilograms of TNT. Thus, the potential for positronium-in-wellstone as a fuel or a munition is considerable. A BB-sized pellet of the stuff could easily sink a battleship, or propel a Volkswagen to the moon.

blindsight

Again, a real thing, although the dolcet berry is not. Interested readers should check out V. S. Ramachandran's fascinating
Phantoms in the Brain
(Perennial, 1999).