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"The way you write science fiction is: you sit down at your writing machine and you open your mind to the first thought that comes through."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Gigagnostotron | ||
| Enormously powerful computing device. |
| "...Oh, it begins innocently enough, like discovering fire by rubbing two sticks together, but eventually it leads to the construction of Omniacs, Deifacts, Hyperboreons and Ultimathuloriums! The desert on our planet is in reality no desert, but a Gigagnostotron, in other words a good 10^9 times more powerful than this primitive device of yours. Our ancestors created it for the simple reason that anything else would have been too easy for them; in their megalomania they thought to make the very sand beneath their feet intelligent..." |
| Technovelgy from The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age,
by Stanislaw Lem. Published by Harcourt Brace in 1965 Additional resources -
|
To fully understand the capacity of this device, you must first get the measure of the smaller Gnostotron.
Compare to metal calculator planet from Limiting Factor (1949) by Clifford Simak and the supercalculator from Answer (1954) by Frederic Brown.
Thanks to Yossi for suggesting this item.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age
More Ideas
and Technology by Stanislaw Lem
Tech news articles related to The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age
Tech news articles related to works by Stanislaw Lem
Gigagnostotron-related
news articles:
- Waterproof Sand Could Green A Desert Planet
| Cortex 1 - Today A Warehouse, Tomorrow A Calculator Planet |
| Is Agentic AI The Wrong Kind Of Smartness? |
| Jetson Orin Nano Super 70 Just $249 |
| Automatic Bot Traffic Is 38 Percent Of HTTP Requests |
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'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
'She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen.'
'Does thinking you're the last sane man on the face of the Earth make you crazy?'
