Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 56 — page 100: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION standard time, and Green- wich Mean Time would do as well as any. We could use Earth days as a measure of time even in space, where night and day will mean nothing. Now, from our tables we know at a given time the distance from Mars to Venus, and the distance of each from the Sun. By observation we can get the angle between the line from us to Mars, and the line from us to Venus This distance and this angle by a piece of simple mathematics tells us that we are somewhere in a certain imaginary sphere in space, and we know ex- actly which sphere On Earth we first discover which circle we are on by measuring our latitude Then. we find an- other circle, longitude, and we know that we must be at the place where the two circles meet In three dimen- sional space, we find from Mars and Venus that we are on a sphere. From Mars and the Sun we find we are on another sphére. Two spheres meet in a circle, so now we know we are on a circle. By bringing Venus and the Sun 99 together in a calculation we can get another sphere, and from three spheres we can get a point. A very small calculation could be made to give the answers in split seconds. The second problem is to establish a reference point and a reference direction. While we are confined to the solar system, the Sun (as- sumed to be stationary) is valid as a fixed point. The standard direction will be the line from the Sun to a distant star. But now, since we are in space, we will be dealing in spheres and solid geometry, and so we will want. a fixed plane, and that means estab- lishing a line at right angles to the first, also starting from the Sun. Thus it would be useful if we could find two big stars which are so placed that the line from one to the Sun is at right angles to the line from the other to the Sun. The estimation of speed in space will not be difficult provided we have a good calculating machine to get estimates of our position by the methods indicated. Such a machine would be operated comiclooks.conm