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"I kind of take it for granted that our great-grandchildren will regard us as a sort of precursor species. That they won't think of us as human and if we could see them, we probably wouldn't think of them as human either."
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How can you find your way through hyperspace, that featureless void outside of real space? You need beacons to show the way.
What happens when one of them breaks down? You can't get to it directly through hyperspace; you can get close and then travel for months through real space.
The old ones break down more often. Like the Mark III -
This is an early description of the hyperspace beacon concept. The same idea and term were used in the television show Babylon 5; without beacons, ships would drift endlessly through featureless hyperspace, unable to discern their location relative to real space.
You'll find an earlier example in Troubled Star, a 1952 novel by George O. Smith: see space beacon. You'll find another version (not quite the same idea) in The Cosmic Blinker (1953) by Eando Binder; see Artificially Pulsating Star.
Compare to the Photoelectric Telescope (Photoelectric Eyes) from The Cometeers (1936) by Jack Williamson, the
Liquid Mirror Telescope from Old Faithful (1934) by Raymond Z. Gallun, the
electro-telescope from Blood of the Moon (1936) by Ray Cummings, the
ultra-telescope ray from The Moon Weed (1931) by Harl Vincent, and the robot observatory from Space Rating (1939) by John Berryman. Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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