It's all very well for authors and editors to consult with a large body of experts using the internet, but that's different from handing the editorial function over to a court of public opinion. For instance, if a magazine or newspaper published its plans for upcoming issues and articles, they could be subjec to lobbying by interest groups in favour of or against the planned topics. In other words, opening up publishing too much risks the loss of political autonomy.
Schemes like this tend to assume a future in which everything's working as smoothly as it does today; but let's just say the technology to do this had existed in, say Germany in the 1930's. If you were a publisher planning to do an article against anti-semitism, do you think you would get very far if your whole process was "open"?
To put it another way, do we want the publishers of the world to have their content monitored exclusively by the tiny percentage of relatively well-off people who use computers? Where's the political checks and balances if it is this particular economic group with its particular prejudices and agendas that serves as the filter for the mass-media?
The ability of authors, editors, and publishers to operate out of the public eye is a key guarantor of their ability to exercise free speech.
This is not to say that Jane's hasn't stumbled on to something useful; but it's useful in a limited context, not as a complete model for the future of publishing.
Yes, it's probably not a brown dwarf, but it could be several Jupiters in mass, in which case it could have its own satellites--moons? planets? It will not be bigger than Jupiter no matter how massive it is; trans-jovian masses compress into roughly the same volume as Jupiter has. It will receive negligible light from the sun, so the dark-adapted eye might see this world as a black absence of stars containing lightning flashes, and with a halo on top--the halo being the powerful aurorae of the polar regions, their energy kicked up by its radiation belts. If it has close-orbiting moons similar to Io, there might be a luminescent ring from ionized gas orbiting the equator as well. Visitors to its moons might see this world as a collection of faint flickering luminescent rings in the sky.
In my SF stories on this subject, I've dubbed worlds like this "halo worlds".
I've been writing SF stories set at Oort-cloud planets and brown dwarfs for a couple of years now. (You can find one, "Halo", in the Tor Books anthology Northern Suns; I am just completing a novel set among these objects). This planet, if it exists, is probably not unique. The astronomer J. Davy Kirkpatrick said in a press release last year that brown dwarfs appear to be so abundant that we'll probably find one closer than the nearest star.
So what? Well, let me put it this way: while the stars remain as far away as ever, the distance between planetary systems has been halved by the recent calculations of the abundance of brown dwarfs and the possible existence of this planet.
Consider Jupiter. It's got a couple of Mars-sized moons orbiting it; one of them might even have a subsurface ocean (Europa). This theoretical new planet could easily have similar moons. Might as well call 'em planets at that size.
The resources of the Jupiter system are huge, and the same could be true of this distant world. It's not likely to be a frozen ball; Jupiter radiates more heat than it receives from the sun, and it heats its own moons with tidal force. Even half a light-year into the Oort cloud, we might find a Europan-style oceanic world orbiting Nemesis (or whatever you want to call this 10th planet).
While the radiation environment around Nemesis is likely to be nasty, if its magnetic field is anything like Jupiter's it will be trivially easy to draw power from it; easier, in fact, than it is to generate power from solar cells. A simple wire orbiting a jovian planet produces electricity in colossal amounts through interaction with the magnetic field. A nascent colony at Nemesis would have as much power as it needed for light and heat.
If this planet does exist it should be our target for settlement after Mars and Jupiter. It will be the place where we'll learn if and how we'll travel to and survive at other stars.
Slashdot Mirror
It's all very well for authors and editors to consult with a large body of experts using the internet, but that's different from handing the editorial function over to a court of public opinion. For instance, if a magazine or newspaper published its plans for upcoming issues and articles, they could be subjec to lobbying by interest groups in favour of or against the planned topics. In other words, opening up publishing too much risks the loss of political autonomy.
Schemes like this tend to assume a future in which everything's working as smoothly as it does today; but let's just say the technology to do this had existed in, say Germany in the 1930's. If you were a publisher planning to do an article against anti-semitism, do you think you would get very far if your whole process was "open"?
To put it another way, do we want the publishers of the world to have their content monitored exclusively by the tiny percentage of relatively well-off people who use computers? Where's the political checks and balances if it is this particular economic group with its particular prejudices and agendas that serves as the filter for the mass-media?
The ability of authors, editors, and publishers to operate out of the public eye is a key guarantor of their ability to exercise free speech.
This is not to say that Jane's hasn't stumbled on to something useful; but it's useful in a limited context, not as a complete model for the future of publishing.
Yes, it's probably not a brown dwarf, but it could be several Jupiters in mass, in which case it could have its own satellites--moons? planets? It will not be bigger than Jupiter no matter how massive it is; trans-jovian masses compress into roughly the same volume as Jupiter has. It will receive negligible light from the sun, so the dark-adapted eye might see this world as a black absence of stars containing lightning flashes, and with a halo on top--the halo being the powerful aurorae of the polar regions, their energy kicked up by its radiation belts. If it has close-orbiting moons similar to Io, there might be a luminescent ring from ionized gas orbiting the equator as well. Visitors to its moons might see this world as a collection of faint flickering luminescent rings in the sky.
In my SF stories on this subject, I've dubbed worlds like this "halo worlds".
I believe the name would be "Proserpine".
I've been writing SF stories set at Oort-cloud planets and brown dwarfs for a couple of years now. (You can find one, "Halo", in the Tor Books anthology Northern Suns; I am just completing a novel set among these objects). This planet, if it exists, is probably not unique. The astronomer J. Davy Kirkpatrick said in a press release last year that brown dwarfs appear to be so abundant that we'll probably find one closer than the nearest star.
So what? Well, let me put it this way: while the stars remain as far away as ever, the distance between planetary systems has been halved by the recent calculations of the abundance of brown dwarfs and the possible existence of this planet.
Consider Jupiter. It's got a couple of Mars-sized moons orbiting it; one of them might even have a subsurface ocean (Europa). This theoretical new planet could easily have similar moons. Might as well call 'em planets at that size.
The resources of the Jupiter system are huge, and the same could be true of this distant world. It's not likely to be a frozen ball; Jupiter radiates more heat than it receives from the sun, and it heats its own moons with tidal force. Even half a light-year into the Oort cloud, we might find a Europan-style oceanic world orbiting Nemesis (or whatever you want to call this 10th planet).
While the radiation environment around Nemesis is likely to be nasty, if its magnetic field is anything like Jupiter's it will be trivially easy to draw power from it; easier, in fact, than it is to generate power from solar cells. A simple wire orbiting a jovian planet produces electricity in colossal amounts through interaction with the magnetic field. A nascent colony at Nemesis would have as much power as it needed for light and heat.
If this planet does exist it should be our target for settlement after Mars and Jupiter. It will be the place where we'll learn if and how we'll travel to and survive at other stars.