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"I received a nice letter the other day from the Dalai Lama. He had read 'The Nine Billion Names of God'. It is about a computer at a Tibetan monastery."
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| Igloo-Shaped Space Shelter | ||
| Easy to set up on airless asteroids. |
I think this is the earliest expression of this excellent idea.
| By the time they returned to the little polar cup, the shelters were pitched - igloo shapes of woven metal, lined with lead foil and self-sealing plastic, fastened down with cables welded to the living iron, and inflated with oxyhelium. Small cylindrical airlocks gave entrance. Standing at the end of a short taut cable, above the crown of each shelter was a small peegee [paragravity] unit. Set to negative polarity, these provided a comfortable pressure against the floor, and some protection against meteor drift... |
| Technovelgy from Collision Orbit,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Astounding in 1942 Additional resources -
|
Here's another detail:
Compare to the plastic igloo from Love Among The Robots (1946) by Emmett McDowell, the Igloo Inflatable Moon Habitat from A Fall of Moondust (1961) by Arthur C. Clarke and the airtight tent from Raymond Z. Gallun's 1951 novella Asteroid of Fear.
...she kept getting up, against her will, to peer out through the tiny lead-glass peepholes in the thick, inflated fabric.
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More Ideas
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Tech news articles related to works by Jack Williamson
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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
