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"I kind of take it for granted that our great-grandchildren will regard us as a sort of precursor species. That they won't think of us as human and if we could see them, we probably wouldn't think of them as human either."
- William Gibson
 |
| Inter-Universal Messenger | ||
| A device intended to travel to another dimension. |
| As it eventually worked out, the inter-universal messenger had to be constructed from the sub-microscopic level on up out of fundamental nuclear particles which came as close to being nothing at all as either universe would ever be likely to provide: zero-spin particles with various charges and masses, and neutrino/anti-neutrino pairs. Even detecting that the object was present at all after it had been built was an almost impossible task, for neutrinos and anti-neutrinos have no mass and no charge, consisting instead partly of spin, partly of energy of translation; it did no good to try to visualize such particles since like all the fundamental particles they were entirely outside of experience in the macroscopic world. Matter was so completely transparent to them that stopping an average neutrino in flight would require a lead barrier fifty light years thick. |
| From Cities in Flight,
by James Blish. Published by Avon in 1957 Additional resources -
|
Cities in Flight is a set of novels; this item is taken from The Triumph of Time.
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Inter-Universal Messenger-related
news articles:
- AMANDA May Find Probes To Other Dimensions
| SpinLaunch SubOrbital Accelerator |
| Tselina Spacecraft Platform Destroyed In Russian Anti-Satellite Test |
| Tiangong Space Station! Exercise Like It's 1953 |
| Orbital Reef: Bezos' High Orbit Archipelago |
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'Employees above a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors...'
'The robot knelt before the head, lifted it slowly, and with... its strong hands placed it on its shoulders...'
'But it had slid, not rolled, down upon these angry fly-wheels, and in an instant, with all our friends, it had been hurled into the sky!'
'Three rows of four colored dots appeared on the heel of my left hand.'
'I brought it back to the ship, charged it up, reprogrammed the inertia chips and voila!'
'Their playmates were not “real,” but they were a lot realer than, say, a Betsy-Wetsy doll.'
'pirate three-vee satellites sanded out of orbit...'
'Oh, there you are! the balloon piped at the amorphous mass of living tissue...'
