Er, I meant to say I would appreciate hearing others’ thoughts.
Well, aside from fighting the hypothetical, what you suggest is vastly beyond the technology we currently have available (and the technology in the book, as well, which is slightly ahead of ours). We can barely get a capsule the size of the Lunar Module to the moon and it costs us several billion dollars and ten years of effort. Moving all the Earth-directed rocks out of the way would be the equivalent, in energy terms, of moving a chunk of rock the size of the moon, but worse, because you’d somehow have to do it tens of thousands of times, once for every stray chunk of rock. Just not possible at our level of space technology, and particularly not possible in the space of two years.
Stephenson spends a lot of time (in his very particular way) explaining just what’s involved in moving large objects to higher orbits. It ends up being a pretty important plot device.
Do we have any idea what percentage of the moon ended up back on Earth where it began? Would that extra mass make any difference? I understand the oceans boiled but where did the water go? Wouldn’t it have eventually coalesced back into water?
Stephenson is on my list of “will read whatever he writes as soon as it comes out” authors, even after having read the trashy “Reamde”.
That said, “Seveneves” is a bizarre book. Really, two books, one a near-future techno sci-fi that kinda peters out at the end, and the other a far future (but WAY too “regular” for being that far in the future) sci-fi, kinda slapped together without much plot or meticulous explanations like the first part, with a really very “tacked on” feel, and huge hanging plot lines.
If he writes a sequel (and it does feel like a sequel is in order) I am not sure I will read it.
The vast majority of the moon stayed in orbit, and was eventually used to build the enormous habitat ring surrounding the earth. Likewise, most of the ocean did not actually evaporate.
Stephenson doesn’t really get into the details of either, though.
I will say that as a biologist, I was HUGELY offended by Stephenson’s crimes against biology. We can start with “that’s not even CLOSE to what epigenetics is!!!” and move into population genetics from there.
The reproductive biology made me cringe the most. (Though to be fair, it pretty much seems like Stephenson just wanted some sort of contrivance that let him tell a story about clonal “races”)
Oh noes! The entire repository of the world’s human genetic material has been destroyed! What would you do?
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Absolutely nothing! We’ll just wait around for several years until all the males are dead and then make up a program of human cloning as we go.
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Pass out sample cups and sugar saline to all surviving men. (As a bonus, now you won’t have to use as many resources washing the towels.)
OK, for some reason a reproductive biologist forgot that men make sperm for several years. Now how do you continue the human race?
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More cloning and labor-intensive, per-embryo, genome-scale genetic engineering! With only one biologist whose wet lab skills must be decades out of practice (and no grad students to be found!)
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Use the magical genetic engineering tech to fix up one busted Y chromosome of the old man that’s not quite dead yet. Or pop in the handful of critical Y-chromosome genes onto an X-chromosome, letting you make sperm from female stem cells. Ta-da! Sexual reproduction fixes everything!
This is where I was too. I know enough biology to know that the biology was awful. I don’t know enough physics, but I have to assume, based on the biology, that this was awful.
I really enjoyed the premise, I just think it was extremely uneven, and could have used an editor with a stronger hand. I totally just skimmed the last third of the book (or the final 300 pages or so…) and honestly forgot what happened in the book within minutes of putting it down.
Disappointing in only the way that something that you actually have high hopes for can be disappointing.
I only know enough rocket to play Kerbal Space Program, but I got the impression that the orbital mechanics, spacecraft design, and propulsion were at least plausible.
I’m not a cryptographer or computer scientist either, but I’ve always heard that Cryptonomicon does a respectable job in its numerous lengthy technical digressions.
I’m sure Stephenson (like many techies) thinks biology must be just like engineering, just a bit squishier. It’s a distressingly common misconception…
So I know that Stephenson intentionally wanted to set up a scenario where everything on earth was doomed, but his scenario still bugs me. Even if two years isn’t enough time to develop the tech to tow the bigger moon chunks out of earth’s orbit (ideally before they start breaking up into so many small ones), it would require much less energy to keep them in earth’s orbit but spread them out into a ring to reduce the frequency of collisions and buy time. Then you can use the time to work on improving tech and moving a much greater share of humanity underground, into the ocean, and into space. It seems that the tech level described in the book would make something like this at least an option that is vetted before announcing to the world that everyone is going to die. And even if it wasn’t going to work, a giant program to avert the coming mega-extinction event would be a much better way to keep society functioning than telling everyone to make a video diary for a handful of survivors to watch after life on earth is almost extinguished.
And then, somehow, the children of the seven women, despite living together for many many generations in a tiny habitable area, manage to separate into different, genetically distinct races??!
And let’s discuss how incredibly implausible it is that the two groups who survived on Earth come from one of the Eve’s fiancee, and another’s dad. UGH.
I’m not at all convinced by the orbital mechanics in the final third of the book.
There’s a giant orbiting satellite/space elevator sort of thing with a hole through it which orbits 2/3rds of way around the Earth and then changes direction and orbits in the other direction! Constantly. And a load of other satellites are so precisely positioned that they pass snugly through the hole when the big satellite swings back.
The amount of energy to continually have an object that size constantly reversing it’s orbit (extremely precisely) must be huge!
I’d have been happier if he had finished the book at the ‘moment of hope’ at the end of part two and not had the 5000+ years in the future section at all. Or saved it for a sequel. Not a huge happy ending, but still a positive note to end on.
Or, alternatively, not written the first 2/3rds at all but incorporated any necessary backstory into a reworked novel entirely set 5000+ years in the future.
Might have found out what happened to the Mars mission if he did that! 
Anywy, it’s his story and he can tell it any way he wants, but after Seveneves I’m no longer a buy-on-sight Stephenson fan anymore. Especially as his next book is apparently a sequel of some sort to Reamde.
I’m surprised you found this implausible. It seemed wildly plausible to me. After all, a significant fraction of the world’s population is obsessed with the machinations of a small tribe that lived in the Levant several millennia ago, and another significant fraction is obsessed with the history of a single family that came to prominence on the Arabian peninsula about 1500 years ago.
Will they still in 3000 years?
I picked up on this zombie after reading today’s SD Classic: I plan to destroy the moon. What effect would this have on the earth? - The Straight Dope. I googled Seveneves and the first listing in google was this thread.
My first Neal Stephenson was Cryptonomicon, which I loved. Then the Baroque Cycle, ditto. I was less than enthused by Snow Crash. I did like Diamond Age. Zodiac was a bit light weight. Anathem blew my mind. I did like Reamde, but then I like this kind of adventure. And I really liked Seveneves. But the title was also descriptive (don’t read this unless you have read or are sure you will not read the book):
In the world that emerged there were in fact seven races each founded by one “Eve”, one of the seven woman who survived the lunar apocalypse
I got this book as a Christmas gift and just finished it. My only other experience of Neal Stephenson before this was Snow Crash, which I read when it first came out…I have good memories of that book, but I really don’t remember any details.
Anyway, I was hooked by Seveneves for a while, but eventually the endless pages of tedious technical detail wore me out, and I began skimming for the main plot points. Unfortunately some of those plot points became pretty stupid, and the writing became erratic in the way it jumped from scene to scene, and by the time I reached the Battle of the Four Armies, I didn’t give much of a damn.
It’s odd to see this book on so many year-end best book lists, and I wonder if in some ways the idea of Neal Stephenson is more attractive than the actuality.
I realize it’s his thing to go on for 700 pages, but I’m curious what would happen if it were trimmed to 250. I think there’s a lot out there that’s 250 pages worth of interesting and not 700 pages worth of interesting.
I’ve finally had the chance to finish the book. I liked it. I trudged on through what I saw as massive improbabilities in the narrative, here repeating what others have said with my own commentary:
- People didn’t freak the fuck out nearly as much as I think they would in such a scenario, but I let that slide because it was clearly not the story Stephenson wanted to tell, so he downplayed it.
- I don’t buy the split into seven races. As soon as sexual reproduction was available in a relatively small population, we’d have one human race within a couple of generations. But he wanted to tell a story premised on this split, so I let him have it. It did though read like the set up for a GURPS campaign or something. It often felt like the story had gone quite pulpish at that point, which was delightful.
- We went into a hell of a lot of detail about how the Cloud Ark was supposed to work, but blurred over the many questions I had about how the Morlocks and the Atlanteans survived.
- If everybody has been watching recordings from The Epic at all times for the past 5000 years, how is it that everybody didn’t realize they might have Morlocks and Atlanteans to deal with?
- The Epic as must-see-TV for millennia allows him to hand-wave language problems to some extent, but having acid-free 100% cotton bond paper would not have prevented significant linguistic shifts on the Morlock end. And he doesn’t really make a pass at how the Atlantean language is still mutually intelligible.
- And, yes, it doesn’t make sense that everybody and his mammy with a shovel wasn’t involved in their own Morlock solution, however realistic their efforts might have been without access to professional miners. And once you realize that the vague hints that there was an Atlantean solution in the works did pay off, one must wonder why the Russians and the Chinese couldn’t have had their own version. One must presume there were other efforts, but it’s like nobody who didn’t have a personal connection to an Eve managed to make it work.
- On a meta-level, it seems like they would have figured out that they were going to have problems with bolide strikes being unsustainably frequent and needing to escape an expanding atmosphere at least as quickly as a science fiction writer would.
- Did I miss something, or did Aïda come out of nowhere? Usually you introduce a character who is going to become that important early on.
Overall, though, I loved it. I liked the hard science details about how a space-based survival might work. I thought the social science was the weakest part. I can believe how people behaved individually, but the collective behavior seemed unlikely. And of course later we’re just asked to take a highly speculative premise and run with it. I was quite willing, but others would not be wrong to complain about the unevenness about how ‘hard’ the science was.
I finished it a while back, and I put it down as one of Stevenson’s middling works. I can suspend disbelief in some areas, but I couldn’t really get past the unrealism of the racial split (particularly on how it ties back perfectly to the seven Eves) amongst the cloud ark crew; the way that the cloud ark crew survived the failure of the technology set up with them from earth (they didn’t have a robust manufacturing base yet, so how did they actually manage to bootstrap that?); and the survival of the aquamen. Those latter two in particular might have been interesting to explore, but as it was, they were glossed over and it came across as a major weakness.
I basically really liked the book until the jump to 5000 years in the future. Then, I spent the rest of the book thinking, “Uh-huh, yeah, sure…”