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"Human beings hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn; when they do, which isn't often, on their own, the hard way."
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In this great story by Simak, explorers land on a mysterious, dead planet that appears to consist entirely of burnished metal.
And what happens when they find the door to the inside?
What was the purpose of the machinery?
The explorers theorize that the planet was an enormous calculator that was abandoned when it was no longer possible to build any additional elements.
This notion anticipates the idea that the Earth is really an enormous computer built to discover the ultimate question; this idea appears in the work of Douglas Adams.
The stories that later became the Foundation trilogy were published starting in 1942 (and throughout that decade), so the idea of a planet that has been entirely built over is probably Asimov's.
If you enjoy computers on a planetary scale, check out the Gigagnostotron from Stanislaw Lem's 1965 novel The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age. Comment/Join this discussion ( 4 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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