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"The trouble with too much genre SF is that it's so obviously the product of the conscious mind."
- William Gibson
 |
| Teleoperated Lab Robot | ||
| A robot is used to conduct experiments in an environment too extreme for humans. |
One of the operators of a remotely controlled beetle car is inspecting a project deep in the atmosphere of Jupiter. He is surprised to find a laboratory, with an occupant hard at work.
| ...Helmuth saw instead that there was a large platform jutting out from the buttress not far below him, just to one side of the rails. It was enclosed and roofed, but the material was transparent. And there was motion inside it...
For a wild instant he had thought there was a man on Jupiter already; but as he pulled up just above the platform's roof, he realized that the moving thing inside was - of course - a robot; a misshapen, many-tentacled thing about twice the size of a man. It was working busily with bottles and flasks, of which it seemed to have thousands on benches and shelves all around it The whole enclosure was a litter of what Helmuth took to be chemical apparatus, and off to one side was an object which might have been a microscope... The robot looked up at him and gesticulated with two or three tentacles... "This is Doc Barth. How do you like my laboratory?" |
| From Cities in Flight,
by James Blish. Published by Avon in 1957 Additional resources -
|
It turns out that this is the only way to study the 'jellyfish' of Jupiter, life forms that float freely in the upper levels of the planet.
Compare to the teleoperated mechanical men from The Ancient Brain (1929) by AG Stangland and the space laboratory from Crystalized Thought (1937) by Nat Schachner.
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Additional
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More Ideas
and Technology from Cities in Flight
More Ideas
and Technology by James Blish
Tech news articles related to Cities in Flight
Tech news articles related to works by James Blish
Teleoperated Lab Robot-related
news articles:
- Robonaut ISS Checkout Video
- Russia's SAR-400 To Work Alongside Robonaut 2
- Mahoro Two-Armed Lab Robot
- Students Control Lab Experiments Remotely Via App
- The Remotely-Operated Cold Atom Laboratory
| Dyson's Secret Household Robots |
| Festo BionicSwift Bird Robots Described In 1930 |
| Robotics Jobs In The Food Industry |
| Smallest Remote-Controlled Walking Robot Crabs |
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'the registration number which the traffic control automatically photographed as she left the controlway...'
'It could maintain a steady six miles per hour...'
'Then they press one of these here thirteen buttons...'
'...without burning a single hydrocarbon molecule to injure the diseased atmosphere any further.'
'Bird-like robots now descended from the ceiling of the theatre...'
'The efficient robot waiter of the Sky Club had cleared away the remnants of an epicurean meal.'
'...in the tank the new body and the new mind and memory and life has taken almost instant form.'
'pirate three-vee satellites sanded out of orbit...'
'The atmosphere yielded its moisture with reluctance. It had to be coaxed down...'
