• Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod
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    764 days ago

    In the fifth or sixth book of the Foundation series they follow a map to Earth that mentions a planet with huge rings and a planet circled by a giant moon. Throughout the universe, this combination was so unique you could identify the home of humanity among trillions of planets.

    It’s a weird book but I’m glad I read it.

    • @[email protected]
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      214 days ago

      Well, Foundation and Earth is the fifth book of the Foundation trilogy… of course it’s weird.

      • @toynbee
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        94 days ago

        Similar to the five book Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy.

    • @lunarul
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      94 days ago

      And the idea of such a big moon was part of why it was largely thought of as an unfounded myth.

      • @[email protected]
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        64 days ago

        And it shows how Asimov had zero conception of how ridiculously huge the galaxy is, though that’s just the storylines being a product of their time, probably.

        • @[email protected]
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          104 days ago

          Or he was writing a fiction and knew he could play fast and loose with scientific laws.

          Asimov wrote non-fiction books about astronomy; I’m sure he knew as much about it as you do.

          • @[email protected]
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            74 days ago

            Nah, I read the whole series recently and for some details that bothered me looked up the how the science on that progressed. I can’t give you exact examples as I don’t remember details, but I do know that there’s a bunch of very mistaken assumptions that the series is built on that he had no way of knowing back when he started and had to keep going forward (remember, the series was written over several decades starting in the fourties) and also a bunch of errors where he could have known better but just messed up.

            • @[email protected]
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              54 days ago

              Okay. We both agree that you have access to information that some who died in the last century wouldn’t have known.

              • @[email protected]
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                44 days ago

                I mean, obviously? That’s not what I was saying at all. I think you misinterpreted my original post in a big way.