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"I did more research, and realized I almost would rather be a biologist than a writer, because there was incredible stuff going on!"
- Greg Bear
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| Moving a Planet | ||
| Early use of the concept of moving a planet to a new sun. |
Leave it to E.E. "Doc" Smith to come up with the grand concept. What is a civilization to do when its sun is old and can no longer provide warmth and light?
| Be that as it may, Arisian records are clear upon the point that before the two galaxies began to coalesce, there were never more than three solar systems present in either; and usually only one. thus, when the sun of the planet upon which their race originated grew old and cool, the Arisians were hard put to it to preserve their culture, since they had to work against time in solving the engineering problems associated with moving a planet from an older to a younger sun. |
| Technovelgy from Triplanetary,
by E.E. 'Doc' Smith. Published by Not known in 1934 Additional resources -
|
Edmond Hamilton had the same idea; in March of the same year he published a story named Thundering Worlds in which the process by which a planet might be moved using planetary propulsion blasts is explicitly detailed.
You might be interested in taking a look at what happens when a species with a herd mentality decides to flee their home system. Do you really need a sun to organize your planets? See the entry for Kemplerer Rosette from Larry Niven's marvelous 1970 novel Ringworld.
For an earlier example of moving a celestial body, see steering a star from Edmund Hamilton's 1928 novella Crashing Suns. Also, take a look at the asteroid rocket from Salvage in Space (1933) by Jack Williamson.
Phil Nowlan and Dick Calkin drew this idea in the comic strip Buck Rogers: 2430 AD in 1930; see the original drawings at ship pushes moon.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Triplanetary
More Ideas
and Technology by E.E. 'Doc' Smith
Tech news articles related to Triplanetary
Tech news articles related to works by E.E. 'Doc' Smith
Moving a Planet-related
news articles:
- Planets May Wander Alone
- Moving Whole Planets, Revisited
| Space Traffic Management (STM) Needed Now |
| Denmark Joins The 'Zero Debris Charter' To Clean Up Space |
| Starship Special Edition For Lunar Shuttle |
| Capturing Asteroids With Nets |
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'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
