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"There's a poetry in the materials we use to construct our world of artifacts; it speaks of our long history as a technological species."
- William Gibson
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| Metal Calculator Planet | ||
| A planet covered entirely with machinery to a height of twenty miles and covered with a metal roof. |
In this great story by Simak, explorers land on a mysterious, dead planet that appears to consist entirely of burnished metal.
And what happens when they find the door to the inside?
...there was a metal planet, third outward from the sun. Not a lump of metallic ore, but a planet with a surface - or a roof - of fabricated metal burnished to the polish of a bright steel mirror.
| It was machinery, of course. It could be nothing else...
There were shafts and pools and disks and banks of shining crystal cubes that might have been tubes, although one couldn't be sure. There were cubic miles of it, and it glistened like a silvery Christmas tree in the fanning of the helmet lights, as if it had been polished no more than an hour before... They found the planetary surface - twenty miles below. |
| Technovelgy from Limiting Factor,
by Clifford Simak. Published by Startling Stories in 1949 Additional resources -
|
What was the purpose of the machinery?
The explorers theorize that the planet was an enormous calculator that was abandoned when it was no longer possible to build any additional elements.
This notion anticipates the idea that the Earth is really an enormous computer built to discover the ultimate question; this idea appears in the work of Douglas Adams.
The stories that later became the Foundation trilogy were published starting in 1942 (and throughout that decade), so the idea of a planet that has been entirely built over is probably Asimov's.
If you enjoy computers on a planetary scale, check out the Gigagnostotron from Stanislaw Lem's 1965 novel The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age.
"An analytical machine is a matter of size," said Buckley. "Each integrator corresponds to a cell in the human brain. It has a limited function and capability. And what one cell does must be checked by two other cells. The 'tell me thrice' method of making sure there is no error.'"
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'There was a wall ahead... It was riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels.'
'...support the interior human structure against Jupiter’s pull.'
'Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray...'
'The German chemists have discovered how to supply the needed elements in compact, undiluted form...'
'Compounds devised by the biochemists for the rapid building of bone...'
'The car faltered as the external command came to brake...'
'It is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized...'
