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Glass Dome Cities On Mars, Dreamed By Elon Musk
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, is working toward cities on Mars.
(SpaceX Starship on Mars)
On Wednesday, the SpaceX CEO explained via Twitter that this city would involve "life in glass domes at first." The planet would "eventually" be "terraformed to support life, like Earth." While the planet-changing process would be "too slow to be relevant in our lifetime [...] we can establish a human base there in our lifetime." If the worst comes to the worst, Musk explained, "at least a future spacefaring civilization — discovering our ruins — will be impressed humans got that far."(Via Inverse)
As far as I know, the earliest use of the idea can be found in the 1905 story A Modern Utopia, in which H.G. Wells refers to the idea of covering at least parts of cities with sturdy glass domes:
One will come into this place as one comes into a noble mansion. They will have flung great arches and domes of glass above the wider spaces of the town, the slender beauty of the perfect metal-work far overhead will be softened to a fairy-like unsubstantiality by the mild London air.
The first reference to using a clear dome to cover an entire city on an alien planet was Ray Cummings in his 1931 story Brigands of the Moon:
The Grantline camp stood midway up one of the inner cliff walls of the little crater. The broken, rock-strewn floor, two miles wide, lay five hundred feet below the camp. A broad level shelf hung midway up the cliff, and upon it Grantline had built his little group of glassite dome shelters…
(Read more about Cummings' glassite dome shelter)
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 11/17/2020)
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Related News Stories - (" Space Tech ")
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'...it never was built, or anything like that; it's just a big volcanic bubble.' - Robert Heinlein, 1957.
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'We made a crude , small cell and were delighted - and, I admit, somewhat surprised - to find it worked.' - John W. Campbell, 1950.
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Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
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Ultra-Realistic Robotic Arowana Robo-Fish
'Deveet unhooked his catch and laid it on the bank beside him. It was a metal fish.'
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Meshworm Soft Robot, With Peristaltic Crawling, Is Getting Better
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'If the biological robots were not living creatures, they were certainly very good imitations.'
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Poul Anderson's 'Brain Wave'
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'... the new typewriter that could be talked to, and which transposed the spoken sound into typed words.'
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'... underneath they consisted of networks of cooling tubes against the skin.'
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'...we mere people come second.'
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Your Solar Electric Paint Is Ready, Larry Niven
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How Long Till We Have These Tattoos?
Truth or fiction?
