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From: tim@unc.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: James Hogan
Message-ID: <5565@unc.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 15-Jul-83 14:55:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: unc.5565
Posted: Fri Jul 15 14:55:28 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 19-Jul-83 13:21:33 EDT
References: sri-arpa.3022
Lines: 26


    I won't comment on the two problems with Hogan's Ganymede trilogy
that were mentioned (for one thing, the person accused Hogan of
pseudo-science and then asked if a closed temporal loop was the time
equivalent of a black hole), but I did have one big problem with the
second book.  This is a bit of a spoiler, but I can't change the
subject line of a followup, so no flames please.

(SPOILER)


    The ship was out for 25,000,000 years, correct?  That's a pretty
long time.  Isn't it amazing that they came out of their "suspension"
within a decade after the first few traces of their civilization were
turned up by a human.  (It might have been two decades.) That's
something like 1,250,000 to 1 against, using the figure of 20 years.
Even if you say that they would have come out at some point between
22,000,000 and 28,000,000, the odds are 150,000 to 1 against that
twenty-year span.

______________________________________
The overworked keyboard of Tim Maroney

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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill