Comment by throw310822
7 days ago
Annoying nitpick:
> Our solar system and its planets, the millions of other solar systems that constitute our galaxy, and the island universes themselves all lie within the boundaries of the station. The station is coeval with the cosmos [...]
> Estimated diameter: 15,000 light years.
Uhmm..
Yes I know, the entire construction is not striving for realism and neither should be taken literally.
If you like nitpicking, Poe's short story *The unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall" [1] should keep you busy a couple of days ;-)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unparalleled_Adventure_of_...
But here it's not about a generic lack of realism (there's plenty of details you could point to, but it would be of course silly) but simply the internal contradiction in what the main character says: claims that the station is "as big as the cosmos" and two lines later provides an estimate for its diameter that is grossly inconsistent with that same assessment. Unless they live in a universe that is only 15k years old, which is also possible (but clearly not serving a purpose in the story).
> but simply the internal contradiction in what the main character says
Yes, the entire story has the main character confused about the reality he is presented with.
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The whole thing was already stretching realism, when the initially assumed 500 metre object "covered by a fine vapour obscuring the rest" suddenly became estimated at 500 miles across. When they were approaching to land, by the time they were a few miles out, they'd surely have wondered how a 500 metre structure was obscuring their entire field of view.
Pretty sure this is a Tardis bigger-on-the-inside situation
Then where is the 15k lightyears figure supposed to come from?
I took those distance estimates to mean "as measured by the instruments".
The longer they're in it, the larger the estimate, and they've hypothesized that it will approach the size of the universe itself.
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