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"The point sticks in your head: physics rules. Virtue does not triumph unless the physics allows it."
- Larry Niven
 |
| Recording Eye | ||
| A surveillance device that can survive being dropped from space; transmits images in a wide view. |
At this point in the novel, manipulative Charles Boardman is trying to persuade the novel's protagonist, Dick Muller, to take on a risky first-contact assignment. He shows him a video of the aliens themselves.
| Muller saw a cloud-wrapped planet... it could have been Venus... The recording eye pierced the cloud layer and revealed an unfamiliar, not very Earthlike planet. The soil looked moist and spongy, and rubbery trees that looked like giant toadstools thrust upward from it...
...three alien figures came strolling through the somber grove. They were elongated, almost spidery, with clusters of eight or ten jointed limbs depending from their narrow shoulders... One of them paused, bent peered closely at the ground. It scooped up the eye that had been witnessing its activities. The image grew chaotic; Muller guessed that the eye was being passed from hand to hand... Boardman said, "That was taken less than a month ago. We parked a drone ship fifty thousand kilometers up and dropped roughly a thousand eyes on Beta Hydri IV. At least half went straight to the bottom of the ocean... This was the only one that actually showed us a clear view of the aliens." |
| From The Man in the Maze,
by Robert Silverberg. Published by Avon Books in 1969 Additional resources -
|
Although he obviously gives no details on how such a device would function, the strategy is obviously workable, providing an alternative to human exploration that could actually work. For a look at a strikingly similar device, see the Omnidirectional EyeBall Surveillance Sensor. You also might be interested in the throwbot, a similar idea in a more 'terrestrial' format.
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Man in the Maze
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and Technology by Robert Silverberg
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- The Eye Is Watching! Samsung Gear 360 Camera
| IJOP Integrated Joint Operations Platform China's Minority Report? |
| Kuri Robot Roams Your Home, Taking Pictures |
| Nuclear Drones Could Fly For Years |
| China's Drone Fleet Flies In Formation |
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Science fiction authors are serious about sleep, too.
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SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
