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"The SF approach: an awareness that things could have been different, that this is one of many possible worlds, that if you came to this world from some other planet, this would be a science fiction world."
- Neal Stephenson
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| Evolution Machine | ||
| A device that accelerates the process of evolution by millions of times. |
Dr. John Pollard has not only discovered the cause of evolution on earth, but is prepared to make possible evolution many times faster than man ordinarily experiences.
| A big cube-like structure of transparent metal surmounted by a huge metal cylinder resembling a monster vacuum tube, took up the room's center, and he showed us in an adjoining stone-floored room the dynamos and motors of his private power plant...
 ('The Man Who Evolved' by Schachner and Zagat) "...it is the cosmic rays, beating upon every living organism on earth, that cause the profound changes in the structure of those organisms which we call mutations... "I have been able in the last months to do something no physicist has been able to do, to concentrate the cosmic rays and yet remove from them their harmful properties. You saw the cylinder over the metal cube in my laboratory? That cylinder literally gathers in from an immense distance the cosmic rays that strike this part of earth, and reflects them down inside the cube. "Now suppose those concentrated cosmic rays, millions of times stronger than the ordinary cosmic rays that strike one spot on earth, fell upon a man standing inside the cube? What will be the result? ...He will be changed millions of times faster than ordinarily, will go forward in hours or minutes through the evolutionary mutations that all mankind will go forward through in eons to come!" |
| Technovelgy from The Man Who Evolved,
by Edmond Hamilton. Published by Wonder Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
Here's what happens when Dr. John Pollard steps into his device:
The cylinder broke again into glowing white light, and as the shafts of glowing white force shot down from the disk in the cube's ceiling upon Pollard, we glimpsed his whole body writhing as though beneath a terrifically concentrated electrical force. The shaft of glowing emanations almost hid him from our view.
Thanks to Winchell Chung (aka, @nyrath) for reminding me to put this item in the index.
He stepped up into the cube, standing directly beneath the disk in its ceiling...
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Tech news articles related to The Man Who Evolved
Tech news articles related to works by Edmond Hamilton
Evolution Machine-related
news articles:
- Evolution Machine Compresses Eons Into Days
| The Zapata Air Scooter Would Be Great In A Science Fiction Story |
| Could Crystal Batteries Generate Power For Centuries? |
| Replace The Smartphone With A Connected Edge Node For AI Inference |
| Sunday Robotics 'Memo' Bot Has Unique Training Glove |
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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
