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"Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen."
- Larry Niven
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| Vibra-Transmitter (Teleportation) | ||
| An early use of the notion of matter transmission. |
| He stood, still in the pajamas he had worn in the prosaic safety of his Chicago bedroom, upon a circular plate of smooth, hard metal, flanked on either side by the banked tubes and massed dials of some strange apparatus, his position directly under the steady glare of a great blue-flaming dome light. Amazement struck him again, and overwhelming curiosity. He stared again at the man in the acid-spotted smock, his eyes taking in the curious costume, half that of the confined sedentary scientist, half that of an outdoor huntsman.
"Where am I?" Girand demanded at last, after a moment of mutual appraisal... He found himself standing on the cool metal floor of a huge room, whose distant roof lost itself in shadowy vagueness high above. The room was crowded, filled almost to capacity by endless rows of apparatus of complexity and uses unguessable. "My laboratory," [Granton] said simply. "I suppose you're wondering how you got here. That plate from which you just stepped is the receiving instrument of my vibra-transmitter; I've just finished reintegrating the matter of your body. The beam into which you walked in your bedroom simply reduced your body to vibration which is carried on a returning wave-channel to the plate here... And you came." |
| Technovelgy from Into the Meteorite Orbit,
by Frank K. Kelly. Published by Teck Publications in 1933 Additional resources -
|
This is an early example of this technovelgy; note that effort made to explain how it works. By the time you get to Larry Niven's stepping discs from his 1970 novel Ringworld, you not only have less apparatus, but less explanation as well.
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'... making the point that their likenesses, every move they made, were being transmitted.'
'But the stars are only atoms in larger space, and in that larger space the star-atoms could combine to form living matter, thinking matter, couldn't they?'
'...to build up a video picture would require, say, ten million decisions every second. Mike, you're so fast I can't even think about it. But you aren't that fast.'
'The area affected was five hundred kilometres across, and perfectly circular.'
'Hasan always pitched a Gauzy - a one-molecule-layer tent, opaque, feather-light, and very tough.'
'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
