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Originally Posted by GeoffC
Alternative or Alternate? You've used both in your post.
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I hadn't noticed... I suppose I was using them to mean the same thing... I should have been more specific, as I agree there is a difference.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
To successfully do that for the example "domed cities under the oceans of Venus", you would need some plausible explanation for exactly how Venus avoided the "global warming" and became simply a planet wide tropical environment under the clouds. Given what we currently surmise about the development process, that would be a neat trick.
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Neat... but not necessarily impossible for speculative science to accomplish. An alteration to Venus' orbit... early impact by asteroids carrying the right elements to alter the atmosphere and stabilize it into a waterworld... terraforming... I'm just saying that within the bounds of SF, it is possible.
I think alternate realities would be included among the SF concepts that are considered part of SF tropes only because of their long-term acceptance by the genre. Since I think we need a law to include the tropes:
Science Fiction includes various "special concepts" that have been accepted as SF elements, regardless of their actual likelihood or possibility of being proven, such as: Warp drives; psi powers; humanoid aliens; inter-species communications; alternate realities; parallel/alternative universes.
Please to point out any I've missed.