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"We [science fiction writers] always wanted to believe in "private sector" space -- hucksters make better characters than a government does."
- Larry Niven
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| Metal Calculator Planet | ||
| A planet covered entirely with machinery to a height of twenty miles and covered with a metal roof. |
In this great story by Simak, explorers land on a mysterious, dead planet that appears to consist entirely of burnished metal.
And what happens when they find the door to the inside?
...there was a metal planet, third outward from the sun. Not a lump of metallic ore, but a planet with a surface - or a roof - of fabricated metal burnished to the polish of a bright steel mirror.
| It was machinery, of course. It could be nothing else...
There were shafts and pools and disks and banks of shining crystal cubes that might have been tubes, although one couldn't be sure. There were cubic miles of it, and it glistened like a silvery Christmas tree in the fanning of the helmet lights, as if it had been polished no more than an hour before... They found the planetary surface - twenty miles below.
 ('Limiting Factor' by Clifford D. Simak)
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| Technovelgy from Limiting Factor,
by Clifford Simak. Published by Startling Stories in 1949 Additional resources -
|
What was the purpose of the machinery?
"Or," continued Buckley, "they might
have come to a problem that was so
complicated, a problem with so many
facets, that this machine, despite its
size, was not big enough to handle it."
"So they went off to hunt a bigger
planet," said Taylor, not quite believing
it. "Another planet small enough to live and work on, but enough bigger so they could have a larger calculator."
The explorers theorize that the planet was an enormous calculator that was abandoned when it was no longer possible to build any additional elements.
This notion anticipates the idea that the Earth is really an enormous computer built to discover the ultimate question; this idea appears in the work of Douglas Adams.
The stories that later became the Foundation trilogy were published starting in 1942 (and throughout that decade), so the idea of a planet that has been entirely built over is probably Asimov's.
If you enjoy computers on a planetary scale, check out the Gigagnostotron from Stanislaw Lem's 1965 novel The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age and the the supercalculator from Answer (1954) by Frederic Brown.
"An analytical machine is a matter of size," said Buckley. "Each integrator corresponds to a cell in the human brain. It has a limited function and capability. And what one cell does must be checked by two other cells. The 'tell me thrice' method of making sure there is no error.'"
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Limiting Factor
More Ideas
and Technology by Clifford Simak
Tech news articles related to Limiting Factor
Tech news articles related to works by Clifford Simak
Metal Calculator Planet-related
news articles:
- Cortex 1 - Today A Warehouse, Tomorrow A Calculator Planet
| Cortex 1 - Today A Warehouse, Tomorrow A Calculator Planet |
| Is Agentic AI The Wrong Kind Of Smartness? |
| Jetson Orin Nano Super 70 Just $249 |
| Automatic Bot Traffic Is 38 Percent Of HTTP Requests |
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'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
'She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen.'
'Does thinking you're the last sane man on the face of the Earth make you crazy?'
'It hurtled on down with inconceivable speed until it was visible as thousands of tiny robot planes...'
'Then she looked up with a smile and moved closer to the camera.'
'... folios and tapes and playable discs of platinum alloy.'
