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"There's a tendency to think that maybe if we can just throw enough hardware at the AI problem, then evolution can take care of the rest. Certainly that's how God went about making us."
- Rudy Rucker
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| Stationmaster | ||
| A human being is preserved for life in space, serving as the conscious mind running a space station. |
George Harmon was the stationmaster, but it was more than a job.
| The first years had been the hardest, trying to adjust to giving up human qualities to become a space station. Often during that time he had gazed in upon himself, upon his human body, and wondered if the pension given to Stationmasters was worth the years of isolation. He had examined his apparently Ufeless body encased in its plastic cylinder of preserving, protecting liquid carefully traced the spiderweb wires fastened by surgery which plunged from all directions into his brain toward predetermined contacts. The wires stretched through the space station like veins and arteries and nerves, making the station a living thing.
 ('Many Dreams of Earth' by Charles E. Fritch) They had plugged him, like some great electronic tube, into the hub of the station, and from that moment on he had ceased to exist. From that instant he ceased to be George Harmon, Earthling, homo sapiens. From that moment on he was Space Station 42, a mechanical entity patrolling an orbit between Earth and Mars — on a ten year tour of duty. |
| Technovelgy from Many Dreams of Earth,
by Charles E. Fritch. Published by Orbit in 1954 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the living space ship from Solar Plexus (1941) by James Blish.
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| Beautiful Visualization of Dawn Spacecraft |
| Tumblin' Tumbleweed Rovers To Eplore Mars |
| Tentacled Robot Captures Space Debris |
| Reflect Orbital Sunlight On Demand |
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'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
'Then he became aware of a gentle pressure pushing him away from the ship.'
'And now they wre busily transforming all their companions, and so on, and so on...'
'Why, a clockwork dancer, or, better still, one that would go by electricity and never run down...'
'Maybe the individual intelligence of each Cubic pools into a group intelligence...'
