this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
558 points (99.1% liked)
Science Fiction
13602 readers
2 users here now
Welcome to /c/ScienceFiction
December book club canceled. Short stories instead!
We are a community for discussing all things Science Fiction. We want this to be a place for members to discuss and share everything they love about Science Fiction, whether that be books, movies, TV shows and more. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow.
- Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
- Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
- Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
- Put (Spoilers) in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers.
- Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm curious? is it the warm glow of atomic energy?
(or was it 'the warm glow of radiation'?)
The series believes nuclear is the end all of energy sources, so I would say it’s probably radiation.
That was the context times they were in. Nuclear sciences were new, and miraculous; but they didn’t quite know how dangerous it was to be around, so Asimov envisioned it was safe to have tiny little nuclear reactors powering personal shields around one’s neck
But how do we know that the assumption is not them having perfect nuclear shields? To be fair, besides fusion, our most powerful source of energy is still nuclear. And fusion is not close to being practical yet.
Because of the comments about the “glow” of radiation and such like.
It’s commonly forgotten that humans can actually see X-rays- before people knew how dangerous it was, it was common for researchers to see it. The glow is literal- In low light with enough intensity, yiu can see a hazzy bluish glow when an X-ray source is on the other side of, say, a wooden door.
The thing is, at that level of intensity… well it’s very much not good for us