One thing about that story that Heinlein got wrong (and he got it wrong in lots of stories) was the supposed Malthusian crisis. In many of his stories Earth is heavily overpopulated, food is rationed, etc. This figures prominently in Time For the Stars, Tunnel in the Sky, Farmer in the Sky, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and probably a few others I can’t think of right now.
Even in his time there was good evidence that this was never going to happen. But lots of people believed it right up until the 1990’s (and some still do), so I guess we have to give him a pass on that.
The fact that we’ve always averted these crises (at least, globally; I can think of a few Malthusian countries and regions over the last century) is not proof that we always will, any more than the fact that we backed down from the madness of the Cold War means there will never be a nuclear war.
We are into unknown territory every time we add another billion people to the planet, which we do with astonishing regularity.
I don’t think there was a planet-wide Malthusian crisis in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Oh, there’s officially world-wide rationing, but there’s also the implication that it’s basically ignored in First World countries. It’s just places like India where food is really a problem, much like today.
It was Mike who predicted a Mathusian crisis on the moon.
The text clearly indicates that food on Earth is tight, but the economics of the Luna-Earth farming behavior is such that starvation and cannibalization were only 10 or so years away.
The last two definitions fit closest in a non-academic sense. Only the academic use infers authority or expertise… at least, the way I read the definitions.
The problem is that Heinlein wasn’t and never in his lifetime entitled to the title. He may have been best-known, most-loved, most highly regarded, the best among his peers… but “dean” in any sense of seniority ignores several other writers of equivalent stature and prior tenure, many of whom outlived RAH. Williamson stands out among those.
In any case, he really disliked the term and I’ve always avoided using it for both reasons.
Time Enough for Love
Volume II of The Virginia Edition
Section One
The opening section of TEfL is interesting in that - aside from a few lines and one brief interlude between Ishtar and Galahad - it is entirely a set of dialogs between Ira Weatheral and Lazarus Long. Ira is the current head of the Howard Families - last seen returning to Earth at the end of Methuselah’s Children - and Lazarus Long is the same character - though 2000 years older - that appeared in that novella.
At the intro, we’re introduced to Lazarus as an old, old man who wishes to die. He’s not permitted to by Ira as Ira has determined that - in spite of societal custom - Lazarus is too valuable to the Families to be permitted to depart the mortal realm.
What this does is establish that the character we last saw as the driving force in MC is now nothing more than a powerless old man. Sick is body and mind and ready to die, the choice - his only choice - is removed from him. More than just prevented, it’s last revealed that Lazarus has tried to legally suicide several times but each time the device that should do so has been changed to simply knock him out. His memory is so bad that he doesn’t realize it.
Ira finds in Lazarus a need to find purpose. He’s lived alone for a long time and sees nothing new under the sun. Ira offers to find him a purpose. This is, of course, a silly thing. The idea that a person outside of oneself could give another purpose in life is short-sighted. However, it allows Ira to keep Lazarus busy - with talking if nothing else - enough that he eventually consents to being made young again.
The important thing in this section and the novella that immediately follows, “The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail”, is that both represent a person taking what he perceives - rightly or wrongly - as the easy path. In the beginning of this section, Lazarus has been trying to do the easiest of things: die. The character in the story, David Lamb, specializes in finding the easy path through life. The trick is that sometimes the easiest path is through hard work and succeeding. By the end of this section Lazarus is discovering that the easiest path for his life is now to complete his rejuvenation and become young again.
It’s an interesting tie-in to combine world-wearyness with long-term energy and youth. It also plays - in the slightest way - on what plagues our man of yesterday, today and tomorrow…the fact that he truly has run out of things for which to live. He’s done everything - a fact that becomes apparent as the narrative continues.
The case that really got me was “Farmer in the Sky”. OK, we have total conversion of matter to energy, so efficient that we can terraform Ganymede and ship food from Ganymede back to Earth. And yet on Earth there is no way to increase crop yields to feed the starving billions, food is so sharply rationed that buying and selling food is illegal and there is an intense societal taboo that only rationing is acceptable.
Yeah, food production increases arithmetically, population increases geometrically. Except shipping food to earth from GANYMEDE is going to have to be a hundred times more expensive than growing food in an underground greenhouse powered by total conversion.
Yeah, yeah, it is presented that shipping food from Ganymede is only a temporary stop-gap and a genocidal war that reduces Earth’s population to sustainable levels is immanent. But the temporary stop-gap makes no sense.
Or maybe we’re supposed to understand that the Powers-that-be know that supplying Earth from Ganymede is counterproductive, but they’re setting up the colonies anyway to provide a refuge during the upcoming Malthusian dystopia.
He may have come across that evidence. But it didn’t fit with a particular aspect of his fundamental view of life (that it’s a zero-sum game).
Also, on a less-psychological level: conflict over getting a base level of calories is easy to understand. Without that, he’d have had to come up with other plot-engines (and they might have been less effective).
I think it can be summed up more succinctly as “bureaucrats are stupid”. Heinlein knows darned well that farming off-world and shipping the food back to Earth is stupidly inefficient (that’s kind of the main plot point of Mistress, after all). He’s not trying to say that it’s a good idea; he’s saying that even though it’s a lousy idea, people would do it anyway.
I think the specific scene you’re thinking of is Farmer In the Sky (I just reread it). There’s a momentary bit in M’s Children where Libby says he’ll think about it, but it’s nt the full-blown interchange in Farmer
Let’s say Twin A zips off to Alpha Centauri at near light speed. From Twin B’s’ perspective, he’d get there in about 4 years or so. From Twin A’s POV, the trip would be…faster? than four years?
So twin B is ~4 years older than Twin A, right?
They “stop” at Alpha Centauri (define the term “stop” however is appropriate to letting passengers get off the ship on Rann, a habitable planet circling Alpha Centauri). The ship turns around and heads back to Earth at a fraction under light speed. Again 4 years for Twin A, less than that for Twin B, right?
The two twins meet and find Twin A is now ~8 years older than Twin B.
This is my (probably way incorrect) understanding of how the Twin Paradox works. This also fits with Heinlein’s story.
However…if you say it’s wrong, I trust you on this, but would love you to explain how/why.
*Note, I’m not trying to argue or be sarcastic, I honestly don’t get it.
More saying “elected politicians are stupid”! “Bread and circuses” etc. The bureaucrat Mr Kiku gets a much more favourable press than the politician Mr McClure in HSWT.
I don’t want to speak for Chronos, but I see the problem this way. You’re absolutely right about what would happen if one twin went at high speed to Rann, and returned to Earth - the traveling twin would be younger. But that’s because the younger twin switched reference frames at Rann. The two twins are in symmetric situations until the turn around - the twins are moving apart at high speed, and per relativity, there’s no reason to consider one twin or the other as the non-moving one. So when the twins communicate telepathically, which one is younger. In the real world, this is an unanswerable question - there’s no way to communicate instantaneously between the twins (communicating by light-speed signals would show that Twin a was younger from Twin b’s point of view and Twin b was younger from Twin a’s point of view), without one twin turning around and thus changing reference frames, and breaking symmetry. The fact that telepathic communication ‘picks’ twin B as the older twin implies that twin B’s reference frame is preferred - which ‘breaks’ the foundations of relativity.
This is where I get lost. We’ve done physical real-world, experimental tests of relativity (something about putting an (atomic?) clock in a plane that was synced to another clock outside the plane and the one inside the plane (after a supersonic flight) was microseconds behind the stationary one.
If the frames of reference thing was right, they should both have been equally slow or fast,right?