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"I've got this beautiful panoramic three-dimensional painting of Mars based on Martian photos. It's 30 feet wide. You can pick out every pebble on the Martian landscape. And who'd have dreamed you could do that?"
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| Gravity Web | ||
| Device for limiting the extent to which a person is subject to gravitational attraction. |
Nice trick, if you can do it. McKie is a BuSab operative who travels to a wide variety of planets, which undoubtedly have a wide range of gravitational field strengths.
| There were times during the climb down the narrow path to the lava shelf when McKie felt thankful he had been fitted with a gravity web beneath his skin. If he fell, it would limit his rate of descent to a non-injurious speed. |
| Technovelgy from Whipping Star,
by Frank Herbert. Published by Galaxy Publishing in 1969 Additional resources -
|
Some science fiction ideas seem absurd. How could you limit gravity? Gravity is a (relatively) weak force, but a planet-sized mass creates a force that is difficult for us to ignore. Most of the thinking about anti-gravity takes the form of some sort of generator that creates an opposite strength field.
But radio waves can be kept out of a space that is surrounded by a metal mesh screen. What if there was some sort of mesh that would keep out gravity?
For those who think that only people who think that space aliens built the pyramids are keen on the idea of anti-gravity, consider this exerpt from a letter exchanged between noted scientists:
Another technovelgy worth considering is what Baron Vladimir Harkonnen uses in Frank Herbert's Dune - the suspensor. Compare to the geopeller from One Against the Legion (1939) by Jack Williamson. See also the portable g-ray from Vagabonds of Space (1930) by Harl Vincent and the levitator pack from Gears for Nemesis (1942) by Raymond Z. Gallun.
Here's a cartoonist's idea of what this might be like; George du Maurier created this drawing in 1879:
I always rejoice to hear of your being still employed in experimental researches into nature and of the success you meet with. The rapid progress true science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born too soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter. We may, perhaps, deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport. Agriculture may diminish its labor and double its produce: all diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, (not excepting even that of old age,) and our lives lengthened at pleasure, even beyond the antediluvian standard. Oh that moral science were in as fair a way of improvement, that men would cease to be wolves to one another, and that human beings would at length learn what they now improperly call humanity.
(Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Priestly, 1780)
(Edison's Anti-Gravitation Under-Clothing)
You might be surprised how long ago the idea of weightlessness goes back.
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'So, Ender, we will now begin your education.'
'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
