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"I do think there is a link in that in both cases, writing fiction or writing a computer program, at any given moment you're focusing on a very specific and particular thing—one word, one line of code, whatever."
- Neal Stephenson
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| Kemplerer (Klemperer) Rosette | ||
| Planets without a sun; they orbit a central point. |
The Pierson's Puppeteers are sentient herd animals. They find that, as their numbers approach one trillion individuals, that their societ produces too much heat. What to do, what to do?
| "I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat. Total conversion of energy had rid us of all waste products of civilisation, save that one. We had no choice but to move our world outward from its primary."
"Was that not dangerous?" "Very. There was much madness that year. For that reason it is famous in our history. But we had purchased a reactionless, inertialess drive from the Outsiders. You may have guessed their price. We are still paying in installments. We had moved two agricultural worlds; we had experimented with other, useless worlds of our system using the Outsider drive. In any case, we did it. We moved our world." "In short, we found that a sun was a liability rather than an asset. We moved our world to a tenth of a light year's distance, keeping the primary only as an anchor. We needed the farming worlds and it would have been dangerous to let our world wander randomly through space. Otherwise we would not have needed a sun at all." "We had brought suitable worlds from nearby systems, increasing our agricultural worlds to four, and setting them in a Kemplerer Rosette." |
| Technovelgy from Ringworld,
by Larry Niven. Published by Ballantine in 1970 Additional resources -
|
A Kemplerer Rosette (misspelled by Niven) was first described by W.B. Klemperer in 1962, in an article in The Astronomical Journal. See some very cool java applets that let you envision Kemplerer rosettes more easily.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Ringworld
More Ideas
and Technology by Larry Niven
Tech news articles related to Ringworld
Tech news articles related to works by Larry Niven
Kemplerer (Klemperer) Rosette-related
news articles:
- NASA Strategy For Urban Heat island NYC
- Choking On Our Own Waste Heat
- Converting Low Temp Waste Heat To Electricity
- Has Climate Change Already Been Solved By Aliens?
| The United States Space Academy Is Official |
| Beautiful Visualization of Dawn Spacecraft |
| Tumblin' Tumbleweed Rovers To Eplore Mars |
| Tentacled Robot Captures Space Debris |
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'After twenty generations of shillyshallying...'
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'... completely forgetting the ship at sight of the awesome figure and great head of the giant Gaut...'
'So, Ender, we will now begin your education.'
'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
