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"One can see the free software movement as a precusor for a "free hardware" or "free wetware" movement--one that will provide free libraries of designs for biological or nanotechnological products that replicators can be programmed to churn out."
- Charles Stross
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| Magnetic Control of Nebulae | ||
| Controlling the structure and shape of nebulae using magnetic fields. |
This is one of those big picture concepts; in the novel, an enormous space cloud - a nebula - is seen coming toward the solar system.
| "I imagine that the beast orders the material of the cloud magnetically, that by means of magnetic fields he can move materials wherever he wants inside the cloud." |
| Technovelgy from The Black Cloud,
by Fred Hoyle. Published by Harper and Row in 1957 Additional resources -
|
Here's a quote from the cloud:
[Y]our very largest animals have been mostly bone and muscle with very little brain... By and large, one only expects intelligent life to exist in a diffuse gaseous medium... The second unfavourable factor is your extreme lack of basic chemical foods. For the building of chemical foods on a large scale starlight is necessary. Your planet, however, absorbs only a very minute fraction of the light from the Sun. At the moment, I myself am building basic chemicals at about 10,000,000,000 times the rate at which building is occurring on the whole ... surface of your planet.
Be sure to read about the recent discovery of magnetic fields in planetary nebulae.
Compare to The Poison Belt (1913) by Arthur Conan Doyle.
[I]t is most unusual to find animals with technical skills inhabiting planets, which are in the nature of extreme outposts of life... Living on the surface of a solid body, you are exposed to a strong gravitational force. This greatly limits the size to which your animals can grow and hence limits the scope of your neurological activity. It forces you to possess muscular structures to promote movements, and ... to carry protective armour ...
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Black Cloud
More Ideas
and Technology by Fred Hoyle
Tech news articles related to The Black Cloud
Tech news articles related to works by Fred Hoyle
Magnetic Control of Nebulae-related
news articles:
- Magnetic Fields Found To Shape Planetary Nebulae
- Precursor To Life Found In Space Cloud
- Should SETI Talk To Molecular Cloud Barnard 68?
| Beautiful Visualization of Dawn Spacecraft |
| Tumblin' Tumbleweed Rovers To Eplore Mars |
| Tentacled Robot Captures Space Debris |
| Reflect Orbital Sunlight On Demand |
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'Our planes are going to start bringing in bales of discarded plastics...'
'... completely forgetting the ship at sight of the awesome figure and great head of the giant Gaut...'
'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.'
