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"We follow the scientists around and look over their shoulders. They're watching their feet: provable mistakes are bad for them. We're looking as far ahead as we can, and we don't get penalized for mistakes."
- Larry Niven
 |
| Solar-powered Prefab House | ||
| A pre-built house that can live off the grid. |
An early mention of this idea.
| "The houses are prefabricated units," said Crawford, "and they sell at the flat rate of five hundred dollars a room — set up. You can trade in your old home on them at a fantastic trade-in value and the credit terms are liberal — much more liberal, I might add, than any sane financing institution would ever countenance. They are heated and air conditioned by a solar plant that tops anything — you hear me, _anything_ — that we have today. There are many other features, but that gives you a rough idea."
"They sound like a good idea. We've been talking about low-cost housing for a long time now. Maybe this is it." "They are a good idea," said Crawford. "I would be the last to deny they are. Except that they will ruin the power people. That solar plant supplies it all — heat, light, power. When you buy one of them, you don't need to tie up to an electric outlet. And they will put thousands of carpenters and masons and painters out of work and in the carbohydrates lines, too. They eventually will wreck the lumber industry." |
| Technovelgy from Ring Around the Sun,
by Clifford Simak. Published by Galaxy Science Fiction in 1952 Additional resources -
|
Listen to the salesman:
"Isn't that expensive?" Ann asked.
"Oh, not at all," the salesman said. "It only costs you five hundred dollars for the extra room. That is a flat and standard charge."
"This is a prefabricated house, isn't it?" asked Ann.
"I suppose you would call it that, although it does the house injustice. When you say 'prefabricated' you are thinking of a house that is pre-cut and sort of stuck together. Takes a week or ten days to put it together and then you just have a shell — no heating plant, no fireplace, no nothing."
"I'm interested in this extra room angle," said Vickers. "You say that when they want an extra room they just call you up and you come out and stick one on."
The salesman stiffened slightly. "Not _exactly_, sir. We stick nothing on. We _redesign_ your house. At all times, your house is well planned and practical, designed in accordance with the highest scientific and esthetic concepts of what a home should be. In some cases, adding another room means that we have to change the whole house around, rearrange the rooms and such.
"Well, you see, it's this way, sir," the salesman said. "This is what you might call a house that grows. You buy a five room house, say, and in a little while you figure that you want another room, so we come out and redesign the house and make it a six room house."
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Ring Around the Sun
More Ideas
and Technology by Clifford Simak
Tech news articles related to Ring Around the Sun
Tech news articles related to works by Clifford Simak
Solar-powered Prefab House-related
news articles:
- Solar-Hydrogen House Is Energy Independent
- Put MercuryHouseOne Anywhere
- Self-Deployable Habitat For Extreme Environments
- Ecocapsule - Simak's Dream Of A Prefab House
- PassivDom 3D Printed House - What If You Could Live Anywhere?
- Galini 3D Printed Sleeping Pod Tiny Houses
- Jupe Urban Escape Pods Have Tesla, SpaceX Roots
- Solar House Concept Unfolds Solar Panels Like A Flower
| AI-THu Shapeshifting Transformer Home |
| With Mycotecture, We'll Just Grow The Space Habitats We Need |
| Vast Apartment Living Will Get Even More Vast |
| LiquidView Ersatz Windows, ala Philip K. Dick |
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'Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface... and the amount of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.'
'I guess there's nobody round this table who doesn't have a Crosswell [tapeworm] working for him in the small intestine.'
'Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them...'
'So the parent drone carries a spotter that it launches...'
'...nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods.'
'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'...for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff.'
'I hope all those other cars are on automatic,' he said anxiously.
'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
