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"By the time I can take people out to where Hubble is looking, they won't be human anymore, by a long way."
- Larry Niven
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| Twilight Belt | ||
| The narrow zone of livable territory on a tidally-locked planet. |
This is a unique term, but not a new idea.
| It was a mining station situated on the twilight-belt of the planet, in the borderline between that face of Mercury which presented always to the sun, baked in a terrifying furnace heat of 300°C., and the other face which, presented always to starlit space, frozen in the intense cold of minus 273°C.
 (Twilight Belt from 'The Mystery of the Twilight Belt' by JNT Lintott) ...He was Franz Arnheim. chief surveyor, returned but an hour ago from one of his perilous journeys along the twilight belt between a fiery desert on one side and a frost-tortured wilderness on the other. |
| Technovelgy from The Mystery of the Twilight Belt,
by J.N.T. Lintott. Published by Scoops in 1934 Additional resources -
|
Not an easy planet for walking around on...
The sun, a huge ball of white fire hanging low on the horizon, heal pitilessly down on Hewat's left side as he started off on their track. They went along the sunny side of the twilight belt, threading their way between huge boulders that lay half buried in the white and yellow sand. Further out on the hot side of the planet were lakes and rivers of molten metal and swamps of molten lava bubbling eternally in the frightful blasts of heat.
Hewat knew that it was safer for him to keep in the darkness night ridden fringes of the twilight belt. Here were bitter cold and eternal blackness that became ever more intense away from the twilight belt, terrifying expanses of icy desolation where the last vestiges of the Mercurian air lay chained forever as solid oxygen and nitrogen.
See ribbon world from Foundation and Empire (1952) by Isaac Asimov for a detailed discussion.
The two men were a hundred yards from the station and disappearing behind a ridge of rock.
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