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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts
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| Jupiter Mining Shoes | ||
| Specialized footgear for walking on the Great Red Spot. |
| On Earth radium was the rarest of known elements and had to be patiently isolated from tons of uranium residues. But on Jupiter radium existed in a free state in the turgid, semiliquid crust area.
...intrepid Earthman — dredgers and miners — had operated them in ghastly loneliness of spirit in a world where human beings moved with the slowness of exhaustion, incased in protective suits that weighed two hundred pounds, and wearing upon their feet immense shoes that mushroomed on the surface that was neither liquid nor solid, but an amalgam alien to Earth Hamden’s nerves shrieked warnings, protested that it was time to quit. The brief, ten-hour Jovian day was drawing to a close amidst such a plethora of brightness that it seemed to be just beginning. Harnden turned slowly about on his huge flattened shoes, and moved toward the little atmosphere transport which floated in the shadow of the Foam Station a few feet from where he was standing. The turgid substance beneath him was unimaginably queer. The immense surfaces of Hamden’s shoes plopped across it, sinking through the spreading scum from the sprayer, but making only slight depressions, which immediately filled, in the basic substance of the Jeel. By ultimate analysis, it was perhaps more solid than liquid. But it was sufficiently liquid to rear into huge waves, cones and pinnacles of seething menace when the sprayer ceased to function. |
| Technovelgy from Red Storm on Jupiter,
by Frank Belknap Long, Jr.. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1936 Additional resources -
|
This is what it is like to walk on Jupiter's Great Red Spot:
Without Jeel shoes a man would be mired. He would sink in up to his knees, his waist.
His immense shoes left phantasmal tracks of vivid red, tracks that quickly vanished as he moved across the sluggishly streaming, diluent crust...
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'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
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Accompanied by a small selection of similar ideas from science fiction.
'...war-balloons, or, as it would be more correct to call them, navigable aerostats.'
