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"I'm a fairly visual thinker. In doing science, I think in terms of pictures of things happening, and then do the mathematics."
- Gregory Benford
 |
| Harvesting Saturn's Rings | ||
| Mining the rings for industrial purposes. |
Bitingly sarcastic commentary from Bester.
| Saturn was quite a sight as it came looming up... Alas, only the two inner rings remain. Despite violent protests by ecologists and cosmologists, the Better Building Conglomerate had been permitted to harvest the third outer ring for some kind of better building aggregate. There was a housing crisis, and the [Conglomerate] paid enormous taxes. One infuriated astronomer had been euthanized for burning the chairman of the board. |
| Technovelgy from The Computer Connection,
by Alfred Bester. Published by Berkeley Publishing in 1974 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the earliest mention of the idea of mining Saturn's rings that I know about, the space placers from The Day We Celebrate, a 1941 short story by Nelson S. Bond. Also, see prospecting Saturn's rings from The Ring Bonanza (1947) by Otto Binder.
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Additional
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Computer Connection
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and Technology by Alfred Bester
Tech news articles related to The Computer Connection
Tech news articles related to works by Alfred Bester
Harvesting Saturn's Rings-related
news articles:
- Planetary Parks Proposed For Mars Conservation
- Maybe We Should Harvest Saturn's Rings While We Still Can
| The New Habitable Zones Include Asimov's Ribbon Worlds |
| Will Space Stations Have Large Interior Spaces Again? |
| Reflect Orbital Offers 'Sunlight on Demand' And Light Pollution |
| Chrysalis Generation Ship to Alpha Centauri |
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'...each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived.'
'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'
'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain, through the mediation of the electronic brain in the leg.'
'... every veephone on the continent would display, over and over, two propositions.'
'Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty meters. No recoil...'
'He wore spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.'
