world would have to expend any energy just keeping warm.
In any event it appears to be this one or none,” Kamblin concluded. “Does
anybody want to enter a demurrer?”
“Well…” Jorn said hesitantly.
‘Yes, go ahead, Jorn.”
“I’ve been thinking, ies kind of enervating to live where ies warm-to-hot
all the time–and I think we’ve
110 fames Blish
all bad a full enough dose of hot weather over the last five years on our
own planet to last us a long time. What about the biggest satellite of the
giant planet? That planet radiates a lot of heat, enough so the satellite is
tolerably warm around the equator even at night. And this sun is plenty
bright enough to give it enough light to raise crops by–even though the
days might be pretty dim to our eyes.”
“Interesting,” Ertak said. “I’m against it but I can’t think why; it may be
only emotional. Dr. Kamblin?”
I have two objections,” Kamblin said. “To begin with, the reason why that
planet is hot is that it has a core of collapsed atoms, and it’s generating
a small amount of energy by the red giant or deuteriumhydrogen reaction.”
He got up and went to the blackboard, where he wrote:
-,D2 + 1111 -* ~Hel + gamma
“In fact it’s not really so much a planet as it Is 4 spoiled star, what we
call a ‘gray ghost.’ Note the last term in the expression; it means that on
any of those moons we’d be getting much more hard radia. tion than would be
good for us, especially genetically. The other reason is, that satellite
isn’t massive enough to hold its atmosphere long enough to be a permanent
Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190