You Might Be A Geek If...

[chris_gerrib]

you find yourself thinking "winters on a terraformed Mars would really suck."

Let me back up a bit. As you may have heard, it's winter here in Chicago - a colder and certainly snowier then average winter. It's the kind of weather that makes one understand why birds fly south. (Answer: because they can!)

Well, I've been consoling myself with the thought that winter will be over in a few months. Except, on Mars, the seasons are twice as long. Now, if every time you step outside involves airlocks and pressure suits, seasons aren't a big deal. It's really just a factor of hours of sunlight. Also, with Mars near-lack of atmosphere, there's not much weather to fuss with.

But terraformed? Six months of snow? Yuck! Of course, you get six months of summer (probably not as hot as ours) and six months of fall and spring.

At any rate, having demonstrated my vast amount of geekiness, I'll mention that I just received my schedule of programming for Capricon (3 panels) but due to the crush of the day job I haven't had time to make a coherent post of it. That's tomorrow's update. Also upcoming are my thoughts on Cherie Priest's latest novel Fathom.

Comments

[jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com]

Of course, we understand so little about climate even on Earth that it would be hubris in spades to assume that a terraformed Mars would be just a little Earth with longer seasons. The shape of our oceans seems to matter a great deal, but it's difficult to know fersure, since we can't fool with the shape of the oceans to see how things would work with more land in the southern hemisphere, or Asia divided into two or three smaller landmasses. More water? Less water? More CO2? We simply don't know. And for SF writers, that's a damned fine thing!

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

I have to admit my original thought was rather less technical than what I ended up posting. (Expletives deleted, if you catch my drift.)

You're correct, of course - what terraformed weather would be like on Mars is largely up for grabs, which make it fertile ground for SF writers.