Characters and their POVs

Like everybody else, I'm watching footage from Japan and absorbing the awesomeness of the scope and power of our tiny little planet. (I'd like to apologize for how my generation trivialized 'awesome' and try to reclaim some of its power.)

Seeing it as a character-development moment, I called over my characters currently in development (Ping and Jeri) to watch a video of the lines of tsunami waves marching toward the Japanese coast.

They couldn't figure out what they were looking at. Which makes sense, since they both grew up in outer space and have never seen a body of water bigger than... um... probably never even seen a bathtub-sized clump of water. That much water loose in a zero gee station would be a nightmare. The ocean is completely outside their experience.

Heck, the ocean is largely outside my experience and I live here.

Earthquakes aren't felt much out in space, either, though if something were to hit your little asteroid homestead it would feel like an earthquake. It could be micro-meteorite, could be a bullet from a linear accelerator gun. Which brings up the question of piracy and fighting in space again. Somebody somewhere asserted that piracy in hard science fiction was either useless or pointless or something... which I disagree with. Will have to work that into a story somewhere.

Ping, Jeri, any experience with pirates? Why the nervous glance at each other, come on, talk to me...