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Originally Posted by sarakoth  Another thing I don't get is how they move around so fast in The Butlerin Jihad. Fold space drive wasn't invented yet but they could traverse the galaxy in a matter of months.
Also, astronomy seems to be a lost science. The "known universe" in Dune is much smaller than the "known universe" today. |
Simply put, Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert just decided to
completely ignore the inconvenient fact of Ensteinian relativity. The entire Legends trilogy simply should
not have been able to happen, because even in the course of ONE trip from Planet A to Planet B, a much shorter span of time would have happened on the ship than on the world they left/were going to and they would have arrived at their destination to find that the situation they expected was completely different (ie. the planet was dead, the war was won, etc.).
As for the size of the "known universe" -- it's fair to say that Frank Herbert didn't have all the benefits we do today from the fantastic knowledge gained by using the Hubble telescope, the IRAS, and many other far-reaching telescopes and instruments.
For story purposes, I suppose we could speculate that the anti-Thinking Machine fighters regarded such astronomical instruments as a form of thinking machine and simply destroyed them. Or even more simply, Earth's records at this point are tens of thousands of years in the past and likely destroyed anyway.