Aldebaran

Like the cold wasn't enough, today it is also raining without a stop. A plan for a visit I had for the afternoon is gone.

Here in Athens today it was the first really cold day of the season. It was raining a few days ago but the weather wasn't very cold, today it was sunny but the temperature was fairly lower. From today I will have to dress up heavily and this probably means I will have to wake up earlier :- ;D

Besides the fact that Dune is promoting many useful messages (about willpower, the role of fear etc) I think the main reason I like it is its individuality among science fiction stories. Most science fiction stories that take place in the far future, feature a human civilization where computers are playing a dominant role along with a blusteringly rationalistic kind of science which doesn't allow any kind of dogma. In Dune Universe though the humanity have taken a different course. The use of computers and robots stopped at some point while mysticism continued to be spread among the people and religions kept being followed. Other traditional elements of of human history are also kept, like the governing ways, the significance of family bloodlines etc, elements which are condemned by many modernists and the way they would imagine future. Personally I would find it most possible for the humanity to follow such a course in reality too, as mysticism and tradition are things that always played an important role in human societies since the first ones were created - we can say that they are part of our DNA. While the current fury of human about computers and exclusively rational science is something transient that was formed so quickly and will probably go away as quickly. *To avoid misunderstandings, I am not trying to look like a blamer of technology or something. My computer has an important role in my daily life too and I see that computers have offered and can still offer a lot of progress to human if they are used correctly. I just don't think that everything in the cultural evolution hereafter will revolve around them.

I haven't been to really many places of the world, but I will mention my top cities from where I've been. In Greece: Nafplio and Chania Abroad: Paris and Constantinople (Istanbul)

I was a fanatic of RA2 back when the game was new, but I didn't like RA3. I am maybe kind of traditional. The only good thing in RA3 is its women ;D.

Thank you for your replies, as it looks like there is no clear reference about the pre-foldspace way of travel. The reason I asked is that I found it extremely difficult to colonize extrasolar planets with a conventional way of travel, and many worlds were already colonized before Holzmann engines or the melange were founded.

So far I know that in the era of Dune the melange is vital for space travel. It's actually the fuel of the highliners as the navigators are using it to fold space, and it is often mentioned that without it there would be no space travel. But which was the way of interstellar travel before the melange was discovered? Since Arrakis is the only place of the Universe that has melange deposits, melange couldn't be known before its colonization.