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"All fiction is propaganda, and the fiction we like is the propaganda we believe in, and the fiction we don't like is the propaganda we don't believe in."
- Samuel R. Delany
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| Oort Cloud Processor | ||
| An alien ship that processes Oort cloud into food. |
Sometimes, to solve a problem you need to break it down into its basic elements. And the basic elements of the food shortage?
| What comets are made of is the same thing you are made of, and what C-H-O-N spells is "food."
The Oort cloud was made up of millions of megaton-sized servings of chow. Back on Earth there were ten or twelve billion hungry people looking toward it and licking their lips.
There was still a lot of argument about what comets were doing there, out in the cloud. It was still arguable about whether they even came in families. Then Oort came along to try to make sense of it. His idea was that there was this great shell of comets all the hell around the solar system, and every once in a while the sun would reach out and pluck one out, and it would come loping in to perihelion. Then we would have Halley's comet, or the one that was supposed to have been the Star of Bethlehem, or whatever. Then a bunch of the guys began kicking that around, asking why exactly that should happen. It turned out it couldn't-not if you assume Maxwellian distribution for the Oort cloud. In fact, if you assume normal distribution, you also have to assume that there isn't any Oort cloud in the first place. You can't get the observed nearly parabolic orbits out of an Oort cloud; so said R. A. Lyttleton. But then somebody else said, well, who says the distribution can't be non-Maxwellian? And so it proved. It's all lumpy...
But it was there. It gleamed faintly blue in the darkness punctuated by stars, strangely shaped. It was the size of an office building and more oblong than anything else. But one end was rounded, and one side seemed to have a long, curved slice taken out of it. |
| From Beyond the Blue Event Horizon,
by Frederik Pohl. Published by Ballantine in 1980 Additional resources -
|
Compare to surta from The Great Dome of Mercury (1932) by Leo Zagat.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Beyond the Blue Event Horizon
More Ideas
and Technology by Frederik Pohl
Tech news articles related to Beyond the Blue Event Horizon
Tech news articles related to works by Frederik Pohl
Oort Cloud Processor-related
news articles:
- Space Food, Canadian Style
| Porcine Fat Cells For 3D-Printed Whole Pork Products |
| Microbial Protein Production More Efficient Than Crops |
| NASA's Deep Space Food Challenge! |
| XROOTS eXposed Root On-Orbit Test System |
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'The pokkecon rang again. *The coffee’s for him?* Tsuyoshi said.'
The Jetsons imagined so much future.
'Rod placed the brain inside the panel... the horse raised its head, wiggled its ears, blinked twice, gave a tentative whinny.'
'Pina2bo would have to operate full blast for many years to put as much SO2 into the stratosphere as its namesake had done in a few minutes.'
'Chain of hotels that specialized in non-human service.'
'But then... not every bulldozer operator works on the Moon.'
'Griff found the white and pink map distracting and switched it off using his tongue mouse.'
