It can happen so fast you don’t realize it until it’s too late and you drop dead. You can quickly become overheated, and just as quickly overchilled. It’s because the helium atmosphere makes body-heat control very volatile. And you know why this habitat constantly adjusts as we walk through it? It’s not because that’s slick and high-tech. You know why the Navy has that rule about pulling people out within seventy-two hours? Because after seventy-two hours, you increase your risk of something called “aseptic bone necrosis.” Nobody knows why, but the pressurized environment causes bone destruction in the leg and hip. Barnes didn’t bother to give us all the gory details. Just leave it at this – we’re in a very dangerous environment. “Reading the details will only upset you. This is a book about people who find something from, as it turns out, our own future. It that’s true in a hundred years, then there must be something very much like it fifty or a hundred years in the future if we could see ahead-see what kinds of things we would be doing. This is one giant piece of magic to him, and all he can really do is sit on the outside and look at it as some very strange rectangular object that that has funny black and white shifting images on it. He certainly doesn’t know anything about electronics doesn’t know anything about solid-state electronics doesn’t know anything about cathode-ray tubes. The electron hasn’t been discovered yet-he doesn’t know what an electron is.
Let me explain to you how this works”-it involves whole fields of highly developed knowledge he doesn’t know anything about. The chances are he would run screaming from the room: “It cannot be anything but witchcraft.” If you decide to sit down and say “Okay, Chuck.
I didn’t really want to spend too much time challenging the extreme situation itself-to say, “How realistic is this?” What I was trying to do the book about was just to say, “What would happen to people if they were confronted by-as a premise-the possibility of time travel, the possibility of contact with an extraterrestrial artifact, something that comes from another civilization that’s very much more advanced than ours?” All I would say in defense of the extreme premise is: Take anyone from a hundred years ago-take Charles Darwin, a pretty knowledgeable guy from that time-and plunk him in front of a Macintosh. What interested me in this was to take a book in which a very extreme situation was presented to a group of people and then to see how this group of people responded to the extreme situation.
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