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"I've got this beautiful panoramic three-dimensional painting of Mars based on Martian photos. It's 30 feet wide. You can pick out every pebble on the Martian landscape. And who'd have dreamed you could do that?"
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| Ramrobot (Ramscoop Robot) | ||
| An autonomous interstellar exploration craft using gathered hydrogen for fuel. |
| It had started a century ago, when the first ramrobot left the solar system. The interstellar ramscoop robots could make most of their journey at near lightspeed, using a conical electromagnetic field two hundred miles across to scoop hydrogen fuel from interstellar space. But no man had ever ridden a ramrobot. None ever would. The ramscoop magnetic field did horrible things to chordate organisms.
Each ramrobot had been programmed to report back only if it found a habitable world near the star to which it had been assigned. Twenty-six had been sent out. Three had reported back — so far. |
| Technovelgy from Bordered in Black,
by Larry Niven. Published by Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1966 Additional resources -
|
From The Ethics of Madness (1967) by Niven:
During the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, the ramrobots explored most of what later came to be called Known Space. They were complexly programmed, but their mission was simple. Each was to find a habitable planet.
Unfortunately they were programmed wrong.
The designers didn’t know it, and the UN didn’t know it; but the ramrobots were programmed only to find a habitable point. Having located a world the right distance from the star to which it was sent, the ramrobot probe would drop and circle until it found a place at ground level which matched its criteria for atmospheric composition, average temperature, water vapor, et cetera. Then the ramrobot would beam its laser pulse back at the solar system, and the UN would respond by sending a colony slowboat.
From Niven's 1968 story A Gift from Earth:
The interstellar ramscoop robots, with an unrestricted fuel supply culled from interstellar hydrogen, could travel between stars at speeds approaching those of light. Long ago, the UN had sent ramrobots to nearby stars to search out habitable planets...
Interstellar ramscoop robot #143
left Juno at the end of a linear accelerator. Coasting toward insterstellar
space, she looked like a huge metal
insect, makeshift and hastily built.
Yet, except for the contents of her
cargo pod, she was identical to the
last forty of her predecessors. Her
nose was the ramscoop generator,
a massive, heavily armored cylinder
with a large orifice in the center.
Along the sides were two big fusion
motors, aimed ten degrees outward,
mounted on oddly jointed metal
structures like the folded legs of a
praying mantis. The hull was small,
containing only a computer and an
insystem fuel tank.
Juno was invisible behind her
when the fusion motors fired. Immediately the cable at her tail began
to unroll. The cable was thirty miles
long and was made of braided Sinclair molecule chain. Trailing at the
end was a lead capsule as heavy as
the ramrobot itself.
...the ramrobots were not human.
Ramrobots had been first visitors to all the settled worlds.
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