posted
The question that bugs me to insanity is, what is Eros?
In Chapter 13, Valentine, (in my vers.,page 247 ), Col. Graff states it is a minor planet, but on the other hand, in Chapter 14, Ender's Teacher, (in my vers., page 257) Card, the narrator, tells us what Ender is thinking (if you don't remember, he hates Eros) and states that is an asteroid (he also says in the same parragraph planetoid). Confusing? Yes. Although it seems pety, I feel i need to know(am I the only one?)!!!
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Planetoid is another--more correct--word for asteroid. Asteroid means "litte star," while planetoid means "little planet." The word "asteroid" was erroneously coined when we didn't know better.
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posted
I am fully aware of the real Eros, but what if the Eros Card writes is his own ateroid? A name is a name, but there could be another asteroid in his mind...
I fully belive that Eros is an asteroid, though. Always have!
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posted
Given that there is no indication that Ender does any relativistic traveling at this point in his life, and that Eros is described, iirc, as a Bugger base in our own backyard, I would say it is the asteroid we know by the same name. (Occam's razor would also suggest that it is this planetoid, rather than that Card imagined a brand new one by the same name.)
posted
One of the fun things about being a NASA SOlar System Educator is that you sometimes get to blend your vocation with your advocation.
I was talking the mission managers of NEAR. In case you didn't know, that was a NASA mission to asteroid 433 Eros (NEAR stands for Near Earth Asteriod Rendevous). Details are at http://near.jhuapl.edu/
Anyway, I tossed their public outreach man Mike Buckley my copy of Ender's Game with the bookmark at the relevant Eros passage. He loved it (and kept my copy of EG for the next six months )
I extracted a promise that when filming Ender's Game begins, Warner Bros. will use the ACTUAL images of asteroid 433 Eros taken during the NEAR mission in movie.
BTW, OSC will be our guest in the Monday morning 11/10 episode of Sci-Fi Overdrive radio program. We'll be talking about The Crystal City, and the EG movie.
----------------
Sci-Fi Overdrive Radio Program for 10 November THIS WEEK (10 November 2003) on SCI-FI OVERDRIVE, heard on the Business Talk Radio Network:
Hr. 2 - Chris DiBona, Vice President of Marketing and Founder, Damage Studios Hr. 3 - author Orson Scott Card Hr. 4 - composer Don Davis
Hour 1 (2 AM ET): sci-fi news and commentary, including the Weekly World News world news of the week with your hosts Joey Donovan, David Durica, Erich Landstrom, Lauren Urban, and Charles Blake. http://www.scifioverdrive.com
Hour 2 (3 AM ET): Interview with Chris DiBona, Vice President of Marketing and Founder, Damage Studios. Chris DiBona brings extensive experience in marketing and community relations to Damage Studios. As the third executive hired at VA Software, Mr. DiBona spearheaded the acquisitions of Linux.com and Andover.net, and worked on the largest ever IPO in Nasdaq history. He also ran developer and Linux community relations and played a vital part in the OSDN media organization. Prior to VA, Mr. DiBona held developer positions in computer security with Tandem Computers (Acquired by Compaq) and the United States Department of State. He is a frequent commentator on open source and development issues and has spoken on game development at the Gaming Developers Conference. http://www.dibona.com
Hour 3 (4 AM ET): Interview with author Orson Scott Card. Card won the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel two years in a row for Ender's Game and its sequel, Speaker for the Dead, in 1986 and 1987. Warner Brothers also recently announced that it has made a deal for director Wolfgang Petersen to bring Ender's Game to the big screen. Perhaps Card's most innovative work is his American fantasy series The Tales of Alvin Maker, whose first five volumes, Seventh Son, Red Prophet, Prentice Alvin, Alvin Journeyman, and Heartfire are set in a magical version of the American frontier. The most recent volume, The Crystal City (November 2003), and the final volume, Master Alvin, will complete this reexamination of American history. France awarded Heartfire its highest science fiction award, Le Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire 2000. http://www.hatrack.com
Hour 4 (5 AM ET): Interview with composer Don Davis. Don Davis collaborated with the Wachowski when he scored their films THE MATRIX trilogy, as well as THE ANIMATRIX project and the video, and BOUND. His composing credits also include Jurassic Park III, Universal Soldier House On Haunted Hill, Warriors of Virtue, House Of Frankenstein, Robin Cook's Invasion, Pandora's Clock, The Beast and In The Best Of Families, as well as for the TV series SeaQuest DSV, Capitol Critters, My Life and Times, Tiny Toon Adventures, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Beauty And The Beast. http://dondavis.filmmusic.com/
SCI-FI OVERDRIVE is America's premier talk radio program about science fiction, the only nation-wide weekly radio talk show exclusively covering sci-fi and its related genres, such as comic books, animation, role-playing, horror and fantasy. We also highlight real science stranger sounding than fiction, including astronaut interviews, NASA news on missions of discovery and exploration, and the "Sci Sky" with Stuart Goldman, associate editor of the essential magazine of astronomy SKY & TELESCOPE. Guests span the sci-fi spectrum from actors to authors to animators to astronomers to astronauts, too!
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posted
Icarus, does the suffix -oid necessarily imply small size? I was under the impression that it merely meant "shape of" (or "roughly the shape of". A spheroid is an object that is roughly spherical, right? It could be tiny or huge, but it'd still be a spheroid. A humanoid is just a being that is roughly human in shape, regardless of its size, isn't it?
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-oid suff. Resembling; having the appearance of; related to: acanthoid. One that resembles something specified or has a specified quality: humanoid.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [Greek -oeids, from eidos, shape, form. See weid- in Indo-European Roots.]
Source: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
oid
-oid \-oid\ [Gr. ?, fr. ? form, akin to ? to see, and E. wit: cf.F. -o["i]de, L. -o["i]des.] A suffix or combining form meaning like, resembling, in the form of; as in anthropoid, asteroid, spheroid.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
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posted
Hey, my "friend" brought up something that I want your oppion on:
1) EG says Eros has a strong gravitational pull, one that is greater that Earth's. My response- I could be dense, but proportional whise its gravity could be strong to its mass
2) EG says the buggers burned up Eros's atmosphere, atsteroids don't have atomospheres My response- Asteroid can have atmospheres
If anyone woud like to add or inform me, I would highly appreciate it, thanks.
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posted
Wait, where does it say that Eros's gravity was stronger than Earth's? If I remember right, Ender suffered from vertigo when he arrived, as a result of low gravity and downsloping floors.
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quote: The captain docked the ship on one of the three landing platforms that circled Eros. It could not land directly because Eros had enhanced gravity, and the tug, designed for towing eargos, could never escape the gravity well.
which was 1/2 earth normal
quote: It did not help that gravity was only half of Earth-normal -- the illusion of being on the verge of falling was almost complete.
posted
well they had forcefields, and so they prolly had like a recycler for co2 to o2 and the forcefield contained the gas for a resembleance of an atmosphere.... it seems like it could work
Posts: 42 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
Maybe, but while re-reading the chap about Eros in EG, I couldnt even find where it said it had an atmosphere... If anyone could point me true, by telling me the page in the paperback edition, I would highly appreciate it!
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posted
Heh. Silly me, I posted on the wrong thread it seems. Sometimes this whole forum deal can be a little confusing I guess. Posts: 10 | Registered: May 2004
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posted
well to have air you would need an atmosphere of sorts, either airlock contained, or a forcefield (generated in the center like on ships) conatined gas holding method
Posts: 42 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
I was using the #1 definition of atmosphere:
quote:The gaseous mass or envelope surrounding a celestial body, especially the one surrounding the earth, and retained by the celestial body's gravitational field.
Of course they had air to breathe. But just like the space shuttle doesn't have an atmostphere, neither did Eros.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
Yea, but, has anyone found out if and where it asctually says Eros has an atmospher? I am writing a paper, and was just wondering. If someone can tell, i would appretiate it, but this is my rough draft so far:
Eros: Planet versus Asteroid
Eros: the God- The name Eros comes from Greek mythology, specifically the god Eros. Eros was the son of Aphrodite, and was the god of love. Early writers represented him as one of the first and creative gods, by later writers the equivalent of Cupid from Roman mythology. In addition, The American Heritage Dictionary defines Eros as “often sexual yearning, love, or desire,” and put into context with its own definition by Herbert Gold as “The new playful eros means that impulses and modes from other spheres enter the relations between men and women.”
Eros: the Asteroid- The name Eros is also given to an asteroid located between Mars and Earth outside of the main asteroid belt of this galaxy. It was discovered in August 13 of 1898 by Gustav Witt, who gave the asteroid the name Eros, the god of love in Greek mythology. Witt broke tradition of the time by giving the asteroid a male name. Eros is approximately 30 by 13 by 13 kilometers, which is very rare for a NEA, an asteroid which orbits the Sun outside of the main asteroid belt and are often thought as dead comets or fragments from main belt asteroid collisions. The closest Eros has been to Earth in the 20th century was in January 23, 1975 at a distance of about 22 million kilometers. Eros has also had other close encounters with Earth in 1901 and 1931. Because of the repeated “close” encounters with Earth, Eros has been “an important object historically for refining the mass of the Earth-moon system and the value of the astronomical unit.” This, by no means, suggests that Eros will actually come into contact with the Earth.
Eros Facts- Size: 33 km x 12 km x 13km Approx. Mass: 7.2 x 10^15 kg Rotation Period: 5.270 hrs Orbital Period: 1.76 yrs Spectral Class: S Semi major Axis: 1.458 AU Perihelion Distance: 1.13 AU Aphelion Distance: 1.76 AU Orbital Eccentricity: 0.223 Orbital Inclination: 10.8 deg Geometric Albedo: 0.16
Asteroids- Asteroid is the most common word that is used for what an asteroid actually is. The American Heritage Dictionary describes and asteroid as “Any of numerous small celestial bodies that revolve around the sun, with orbits lying chiefly between Mars and Jupiter and characteristic diameters between a few and several hundred kilometers. Also called minor planet, planetoid.” The word asteroid came from Greek word asteroeid s, meaning star like; ast r meaning star, and -oeid s, from eidos, meaning shape or form. The suffix –oid means “Resembling; having the appearance of; related to: acanthoid. One that resembles something specified or has a special quality: i.e. humanoid.
Card’s Eros- Orson Scott Card, author of Earthbound and many other award winning books, uses Eros as a major setting in the final chapters of his novel, Ender’s Game. Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, a child who is a super genius, is taken by the government to Battle School, a satellite of the Earth. He graduates from Battle School and is sent to Command School, located in Eros. Card describes Eros as: “I.F. Command is on the minor planet Eros,” “the buggers burned that to a radioactive-,” “Eros has been blacked out. Its albedo is only slightly brighter than a black hole,” “the tug reached Eros before they could see it. The captain showed them the visual scan, then superimposed the heat scan on the same screen. They were practically on top of it- only four thousand kilometers out- but Eros, only twenty-four kilometers long, as invisible if it didn’t shine with reflected light. The captain docked the ship on one of the three landing platforms that circled Eros. It could not land directly because Eros had enhanced gravity, and the tug, designed for towing cargoes, could never escape the gravity well,” “When they boarded the shuttle that would take them to the surface of Eros, they repeated perverse misquotations of lines from the videos that the captain had endlessly watched,” “It was a roughly spindle-shaped rock only six and a half kilometers thick at its narrowest point. Since the surface of the planetoid was entirely devoted to absorbing sunlight and converting it to energy, everyone lived in the smooth-walled rooms linked by tunnels that laced the interior of the asteroid. The closed-in space was no problem for Ender- what bothered him was that all the tunnel floors noticeably sloped downward. From the start, Ender was plagues with vertigo as he walked through the tunnels, especially the ones that girdles Eros’s narrow circumference. It did not help that gravity was only half of Earth-normal- the illusion of being on the verge of falling was almost complete,” “We learned gravity manipulation because they enhanced the gravity here. We learned efficient use of our stellar energy because the blacked out this planet.”
Why Eros is an Asteroid- There are many reasons why Eros is an asteroid in Ender’s Game and not a planet. All text that came from the narrator stated that Eros was a minor planet, asteroid, or a planetoid, which are all synonym for asteroid. Also, there is an actual Eros which is in Earth’s “backyard,” between Earth and Mars at time, and has about the same size as the Eros Card writes about. In addition, Card is having actual pictures of Eros in the upcoming film of Ender’s Game, taken during the NEAR mission. It has been mentioned that Eros has enhanced gravity, one that is stronger than that of Earth’s. This is very much so incorrect. Card states that Eros has enhanced gravity, but is one-half of the gravity of Earth’s, meaning that the original gravity of Eros was very small. It is also mentioned that Eros has an atmosphere, and this is also very incorrect. It is physically impossible for an asteroid to have an atmosphere. Even with the enhanced gravity, there is still not enough gravity for Eros to have an atmosphere. Furthermore, nowhere in Ender’s Game does it say the Eros has an atmosphere. Since the definition of an atmosphere is “the gaseous mass or envelope surrounding a celestial body, especially the one surrounding the earth, and retained by the celestial body's gravitational field,” and that the I.F. Command is inside of Eros, there is no atmosphere. It is evident, though; that they did have air to breath, but it is much like a space shuttle where it is contained inside. The only evidence that Eros might be a planet is when Mazer Rackham calls Eros a planet. In novels, an author may make a character slightly ignorant, or during a rant or speech say something and mean another. It is near impossible to tell exactly what Mazer meant from this, but it is probably a slip of the tongue.
Mind you, its only rough, tell me what needs to be changed!
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posted
Damn... This must really be a passionate subject for you. I mean... It's Eros. Figuring out what it is isnt going to change the story. lol. If it's that important just ask Card.
Posts: 126 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
I dunno, porteiro... We should probably spend more time figuring that out than what Eros is, neh?
Posts: 126 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
Um....You realize this is really dorky, obvious minutae, right? I mean, seriously, who has been saying that Eros is a planet with gravity greater than Earth's? Anyone?
There's only one Eros in the solar system, and it's quite possibly the most famous of all the asteroids. Every sixth-grader who's taken a natural science class with an astronomy unit has heard of the place.
It's like writing a paper about why you believe the "Mars" described in the John Carter novels is the planet by the same name, or why the "Moon" visited in Clarke's 2001 is Earth's moon and not, say, a moon orbiting one of the gas giants circling Deneb.
When you get done with this paper, please do me a favor and prove conclusively that the word "green" in the works of Jane Austen refers to the color that we coincidentally call by the same name.
posted
i dont think that really retains to the point of the paper. O, your guys wouldnt know the guy who says Eros is a planet, he isnt a 'tracker or anything, just a guys at school. Well,im pretty satisfied with it, so, if anyone doesnt have anything to add...
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posted
The point? yes, to prove to someone. It seems that whatever i do, i cannot convince him. I havent showed him this yet, but soon. Oh, i knew about Eros a while ago, like basic astronomy in elementary school. Well, if you guys have no other SUGGESTIONS, i will give it to him, it has developed into a kind of inside joke tho, between me and my friends...
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posted
If the paper is primarily about the asteroid, it would not need a section on the myth of Eros and Psyche. It is the story of how the demi-god Eros falls in love with a mortal woman, Psyche (meaning soul) but due to some condition or curse she is not allowed to see him. Her sisters convince her this must be because he is a horrible monster.
So one night when he is due to arrive she conceals a lamp near the bed and when he falls asleep she gets out the lamp to have a look. He is so astonishingly beautiful, she spills hot oil from the lamp on his shoulder and he wakes up and flies away. They are for a time parted. I forget how it ends. But I think the mythic element is that Eros is concealed, feared, and when displayed he flees.
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