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"Human beings hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn; when they do, which isn't often, on their own, the hard way."
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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.
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