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"it slowly dawned on me that the landscape of science is maybe what interests people a great deal in science fiction."
- Gregory Benford
 |
| Moondozer | ||
| A bulldozer for lunar conditions. |
There's a lot of work to be done on the moon to prepare it for human habitation. What tools will we need?
| To shift those rockslides, one would have to import moondozers across the Sea of Thirst, and import whole shiploads of gelignite to blast a road through the mountains. |
| Technovelgy from A Fall of Moondust,
by Arthur C. Clarke. Published by Harcourt, Brace and World in 1961 Additional resources -
|
Clarke doesn't give us much to work with except the basic term. By the time you get to the future outlined in Niven and Pournell's Oath of Fealty (1981), you didn't even need to be on the moon to operate one - see the entry for telepresence bulldozer.
NASA engineers take it one step further - autonomous dozers. They've been playing with the idea of using bulldozers - on Mars. Here are some Bulldozer Rovers at play.
(Baby dozers for Mars - Bulldozer Rover)
"If water sources, such as hot springs, layers of ice or groundwater reservoirs are discovered on Mars, a network of these rovers could conduct scientific investigations and excavate the site piece-by-piece, just as humans would on an archeological dig," said Brian Wilcox, supervisor of the Robotic Vehicles Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Rovers like these may also play a role in establishing a space outpost for eventual human occupancy. They may be used to create buried habitats or utility trenches and to excavate resources to support life."
(NASA Bulldozer Rovers Could Get the Scoop on Mars)
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Tech news articles related to works by Arthur C. Clarke
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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.'
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'...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.'
