this article on Scientific American<\/a>, he talks about running the Minor Planet Center, which tracks comets, meteors and other near-Earth objects. I’m sure that the job is mainly trigonometry and physics, but it fascinates me that it even exists.
\nAnd, what a great bunch of ideas for science-fiction it stirs up. Of course, there’s the ever present idea of a meteor hitting Earth, but that’s been done to death. Or, that the folks who work here make first contact with extra-terrestrials. But, I imagined something more like a galactic air-traffic controller. I mean, if one has lots of space travel, it could become necessary, right? And, think about all the things they’d have to keep track of in three dimensions<\/i>! Certainly there must be enough tension and action in such a setting to find a story.
\nWell, something to ponder, anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brian Marsden, apparently. In this article on Scientific American, he talks about running the Minor Planet Center, which tracks comets, meteors and other near-Earth objects. I’m sure that the job is mainly trigonometry and physics, but it fascinates me that it even exists. And, what a great bunch of ideas for science-fiction it stirs up. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,28,30],"tags":[289,290,288],"class_list":["post-160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction-and-its-kin","category-science-and-technology","category-science-fiction","tag-brian-marsden","tag-minor-planet-center","tag-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}