Proxima (60 page)
Authors: Stephen Baxter
Could Per Ardua exist? At the time of writing no planet of Proxima has been detected, but a careful inspection of the star’s apparent movements has put upper limits on the sizes of any
possible planets (for a technical paper see Zechmeister, M., Kürster, M., Endl, M., ‘The M Dwarf Planet Search Programme at the ESO VLT+UVES: A Search for Terrestrial Planets in the
Habitable Zone of M Dwarfs’,
Astron. Astrophys
., vol. 505, pp. 859–71, 2009). The planetary system I have invented for this novel fits these limits. Proxima is a red dwarf
– an ‘M dwarf’. We used to think that only sunlike stars could host Earthlike worlds. Now we suspect that M dwarfs like Proxima could after all host habitable worlds (see ‘A
Reappraisal of the Habitability of Planets Around M Dwarf Stars’, J. Tarter et al.,
Astrobiology
, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 30–65, 2007).
The idea of starships driven by very lightweight ‘smart sails’ pushed by microwave beams was suggested by Robert Forward (‘Starwisp: An Ultralight Interstellar Probe’,
Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets
, vol. 22, pp. 345–50, 1985) and revisited by Geoffrey A. Landis (‘Microwave Pushed Interstellar Sail: Starwisp Revisited’, paper
AIAA-2000-3337, presented at the AIAA 36th Joint Propulsion Conference and Exhibit, Huntsville AL, July 17–19, 2000). I have extrapolated wildly beyond these respectable works.
The classic work
Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience
, ed. Ben Finney and Eric Jones (Berkeley, 1985), contains much speculation on the anthropology and ethics of the
colonisation of space.
I’m deeply grateful to Professor Adam Roberts for a brief injection of Latin.
Any errors or inaccuracies are, of course, my sole responsibility.
Stephen Baxter
Northumberland
December 2012
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A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Stephen Baxter 2013
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The right of Stephen Baxter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
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This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by Gollancz.
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ISBN 978 0 575 11686 3
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