Actually (it occurs to me, after I finish writing all that and hitting 'send') there /is/ one way to force humanity out of Sol system without blowing up the star: to try to stay ahead of our own post-Singularity, weakly-godlike creations, who are busily converting most of the system's dumb matter into computronium. However, this is (1) a rather different sort of SF than "space westerns", and (2) probably just delaying the inevitable. -- --------------- Kelly St. Clair xxxxxx@efn.org