Re: Ogre Articles in Pyramid
If they can withstand Venus on a "nice" day, they can stand Mercury. Not much hotter there. Mercury's got a magnetic field, so it won't be all that bad for radiation, unlike the moon, which has no field. Mercury's very dense, so it's probably rich in ores (nevermind that the magfield alludes to this too).
I can agree that the best places for permanent settlement might be the poles, but I don't see any problem with some kind of roving "harvester" type thingy, not unlike the units of the same name from the Dune series of RTS games, which would probably stay on the dark side. And be a LOT bigger.
Heck, they might even hook up a giant space engine and slow the planet's rotation so that it's tidally locked and give a good section of permanent darkness, and perhaps Larry Niven would stop kicking himself.
From Wiki: Niven is the author of numerous science fiction short stories and novels, beginning with his 1964 story "The Coldest Place". In this story, the coldest place concerned is the dark side of Mercury, which at the time the story was written was thought to be tidally locked with the Sun (it was found to rotate in a 2:3 resonance just months before the story was published).
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