| Re: Looking for a sci-fi book
Water is a very common substance in the solar system, and, one suspects, in the universe at large. Hydrogen is the commonest element, and oxygen one of the standard steps in the Betha fusion chain used in stars, and they like each other, so it is no surprise that there's a lot of it around. Grabbing it from within a gravity well would seem a bit foolish when there are comets, and Saturn's rings, which contain enough H2O to re-equip the Earth entirely, all conveniently floating there.
The Niven one about stealing planetary water is "Rainbow Mars"; not one of my preferred. More or less "Flight of the horse" universe, it could have been cut to a short story without losing anything of value; still, that's only my opinion.
As regards aliens within our solar system,I assume you're talking intelligent, high tech aliens rather than bacteria or equivalents? Something you can communicate with, rather than catch? Though science fiction has been speculating about them for many decades, I'll hold that their probability is not high; if they had taken a similar technological path to ours, I hold we'd probably have detected evidence of them by now, and if it were wildly divergent we'd probably not recognise them as sentient (or maybe even alive)
Plenty of proposed potential environments for life in the solar system, (at least, something having enough of the characteristics of life that it can't be rejected) from plasma beings in the sun's photosphere to superfluid helium based out in the Oort cloud (neither of which are over diturbed about oxygen dihydride) but mostly they wouldn't be much use as allies in interstellar water raids. | 
23rd May 2007, 11:40 AM
