President Bush heard that two Brazilian soldiers were killed in Iraq. In shock and disbelief, the grieving president held his head in his hands and asked “How many in a brazillion?”
Sorry.
Not really.
Hadn’t found that earlier thread; thanks. So, if we accept Clarke’s monolith-driven deus ex machina, how long could Lucifer sustain fusion?
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Since the whole enterprise would require, if I may borrow a phrase from Clarke, a technology indistinguishable from magic, it’s impossible to say.
Stranger
Didn’t 3001 postulate that Lucifer was already starting to run out of energy, a mere thousand years after it was created?
I’ve never read 3001, but if so, that was a piss-poor design. The idea was to give the Europans the opportunity to evolve to sentience, and there’s no way a mere millenium would be enough for that.
Well see, you do this trick with a humming monolith while playing Also Sprach Zarathustra just as the sun is about ready to rise…
I’m guessing that the Monolith Builders had a regime change, though, and the budget line item for “Sustainment and Maintanence, Lucifer, Sol, Milky Way Galaxy, Virgo Supercluster” got axed as part of a deal to get more funding for Kerr Metric subsidies.
Stranger
Upon further investigation, it appears that Clarke has deliberately employed retroactive continuity, saying that each novel is a separate “alternate-timeline” version of events. The story versions are inconsistant. In 2010: Odyssey Two, the epilogue states that Lucifer is still burning in 20,001 AD, while 2061: Odyssey Three states that Lucifer is burning out in 3001 AD.