CapitalistImperialistPig

As a science fiction writer, I grant you a lot of latitude, but really. You have your spaceship jump nine light years and the captain/pilot/navigator sees only an imperceptible change in the positions of the stars? Pulleeze! The night sky would be nearly unrecognizable nine light years from Earth in any direction. Many of the brightest stars are less than twenty light years away and nearly all are less than 100 light years away. Of the twenty-six brightest stars, only Deneb, Betelgeuse, and Rigel are far enough away (1500 and 1400 light years) that they would be shifted by only a couple of degrees. If you were writing about pirates on the Spanish Main I would expect you to know that Cuba was farther from Madrid than Barcelona is. Since you write about interstellar adventure, you ought to have some clue as to how stars are distributed. Distances to brightest stars.

More speculations by Yuval Noah Harari. He thinks H. sapiens has only a few decades left. Flowers for Algernon, written by Daniel Keyes in 1958, was one of the most successful Science Fiction short stories (later, a novel, play and film) of all time. It starts with the title mouse getting a dramatic IQ upgrade. Fifty-five years down the pike, it seems that science has caught up with the fiction. The genius mouse has been engineered. One might think that Harari's judgement on our limited future means he is a technological pessimist. This is hardly the case. He doesn't think we are likely to annihilate ourselves. Instead, he thinks it is likely that we will transform ourselves. The genomes of fish and potatoes are being merged to create frost resistant potatoes. Potential artificial organs for humans are being grafted onto mice. One of the most prescient science fiction writers of my childhood was Arthur C. Clark, who in addition to envisioning communications satell...