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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
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| Central Guide-Beam | ||
| A kind of signal that demonstrates the best possible path to a destination in space and even provides motive power. |
I don't think that this is the earliest use of this idea, but it's still worth looking at.
| "Well," he said, "you saw for yourselves this was a hospital ship. It carried no crew. It was directed from a central guide-beam at Jupiter. The beam carried it from the Sol System here, where, because of a mechanical error, a meteor penetrated the protection screen and the ship crashed." |
| Technovelgy from Shell Game,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Galaxy Science Fiction in 1954 Additional resources -
|
This is an interesting idea. For one thing, there really aren't any straight lines in space, at least for material objects going through the solar system; gravity fields and the constantly changing locations of the planets make direct "beams" difficult.
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| Is China Mining Helium-3 On The Moon's Farside? |
| Solitary Black Hole Wanders In Space |
| Spaceplane From Virgin Atlantic |
| Taikonauts Exercise In China's Tiangong Space Station |
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