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"it slowly dawned on me that the landscape of science is maybe what interests people a great deal in science fiction."
- Gregory Benford
 |
| Solar Energy Beam | ||
| A solar energy plant on Mercury provides power for projects all over the solar system. |
In this story, there are unusual events taking place on Mercury, right where energy is gathered for use throughout the solar system.
It begins with an enormous photocell on Mercury, which is pretty much the best place to stand on solid ground while collecting free solar power.
| The control room was a wonder of clicking, chuckling, chortling, snicking gadgets. Gadgets that kept the flow of power directed to the substations on the Twilight belt. Gadgets that kept the tight beams from the substations centered exactly on those points in space where each must go to be picked up by the substations circling the outer planets.
Let one of those gadgets fail - let that spaceward beam sway as much as a fraction of a degree - Curt shuddered at the thought of a beam of terrific power smashing into a planet - perhaps into a city. But the mechanism had never failed - never would. It was foolproof... This was really free power, easy power, plentiful power. Power carried across millions of miles on Addison's tight-beam principle. |
| From Masquerade,
by Clifford Simak. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1941 Additional resources -
|
Was there another way to get that concentrated power to the outer planets?
A far cry from the day when the plant charged monstrous banks of converters to be carted to the outer worlds by lumbering spaceships.
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| Speeding Ticket Robots To Cite Autonomous Cars? |
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How long ago did Robert Heinlein write about skiing on dry alien worlds?
'There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.'
'A cable, here, from the controller to the interface plug... wires from that to the brain.'
'Everything was ready, awaiting the Overlords' pleasure...'
'Five hundred billion gallons worth of Antarctic iceberg had been towed into Santa Monica Bay.'
'...he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship's information circuit and scan the latest reports...'
'He realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it...'
'To recharge the batteries, which can be done in almost every town and village...'
