[scarmig]

It does assume that life must be associatable with a planet. It's a plausible assumption, but you could also hypothetically have life develop on a star itself or its remnants, comets, clouds of interstellar gas. Maybe even something more exotic than that (dark matter? some weird correlated statistical properties of the quantum foam?)

[dotancohen]

About forty years ago I read a terrific book about life forms that live on a star. Maybe Starquake was it called? Did to the abundance of energy on the surface of a star, they live their lives a million times faster than humans. Thus for both them and the humans who discover them, communication is difficult. I think the humans push these life forms to develop civilization, which from the human's perspective had them go from primitive animals into sophisticated beings of technology past their own in something like a day.

[LeifCarrotson]

That's "Dragon's Egg" by Robert L. Forward, a classic Sci-fi story:

https://annas-archive.org/md5/4c381ac344506d10037fc8e7747098...

The cheela lived on the surface of a neutron star, and they lived faster because the nuclear physics that powered their metabolism are far faster than the chemical and mechanical physics that power our own.

[squigz]

I'm not against piracy, and I love Anna's Archive... but publicly linking directly to a pirate source for something like this seems wrong. Could've just linked the Wikipedia page and let people acquire however they prefer.

Anyway, sounds interesting, gunna add that to my list

[sho_hn]

It's 45 years old and the author is deceased. I assume you would be untroubled by a link to a copy of Macbeth. Where do you draw the line?

[squigz]

Well I don't really have a line, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go linking directly to such sources in public - not everyone agrees with my stance on copyright. Those who do can easily go find it themselves.

Also Macbeth was written 400 years ago. Let's not pretend this is a fair comparison. This author has been dead only 20 years - it might be that their partner is still alive and needs that money, or their children.

[me-vs-cat]

Why won't anyone think of the publishers and the book stores!

Amazon is hanging on by a thread, and piracy is stealing their cut.

[MrSkelter]

That’s newer than Star Wars and isn’t a huge piece of IP. To the estate a few book sales makes a difference.

[antonvs]

An obvious line would be when copyright expires. In fact, drawing that line is exactly what copyright expiry is intended to do.

[lazide]

Copyright has far exceeded sane limits a long time ago.

[me-vs-cat]

My initial reaction was the same, then I thought: "no, we need more of this".

We need more discussion about copyright in our society, and we need it most in front of those who are unaware, inattentive, or would otherwise shirk that discussion. Posting a relevant link in a relevant discussion appears as good an avenue as any to get people talking.

[dotancohen]

Promoting copyright infringement in order to initiate a conversation about copyright is about as moral as murdering civilians to initiate a conversation about human rights.

[me-vs-cat]

Is that really the equivalence you want to make?

That's a rather severe escalation to me.

[squigz]

This... isn't a discussion about copyright though?

[me-vs-cat]

It wasn't, until https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45477785

[dreamcompiler]

And "The World at the End of Time" by Frederik Pohl.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_at_the_End_of_Time

[DennisP]

There's also Sundiver by David Brin, which has plasma life forms in our sun.

[dotancohen]

Yes, that was it!

[ElFitz]

Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary had an interesting take on that.

[gcanyon]

I was bothered by the nearly a-scientific-ness of PHM. The story was nicely done in general, but it feels like he pretends to be hard science fiction when he's really Star Trek-level.