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"The immediate problem with our meat brains is that they have no back-up. We can lose the most precious information we have from one bump on the head or stroke. You want a mind system with back-up that can access other databases."
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Launching Laser | ||
| A set of very high-powered lasers used to power spacecraft. |
| Jerome Finney... showed that the spectrum was the light of our own sun, drastically blue-shifted. Some kind of mirror was coming at us, moving at a hell of a clip, but slowing as it came.
"That would mean a light-sail!" "Why the big deal, Frazer? I thought you already knew." "No. This is the first I've heard of it. I don't read the Sunday supplements." Morris was exasperated. "But you knew enough to call a laser cannon a launching laser!" |
| Technovelgy from The Fourth Profession,
by Larry Niven. Published by Quark in 1971 Additional resources -
|
Interested readers should also see the entry for laser cannon from Niven and Pournelle's 1974 novel Mote in God's Eye.
The idea of using light pressure to move a spaceship has been around for a long time; it was suggested by Jules Verne in his 1867 novel From the Earth to the Moon; see the entry for light pressure propulsion. The method was explicitly described by Edmond Hamilton in his 1929 short story The Comet Doom; see the entry for ship propelled by light pressure.
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'There was nowhere on the planet where science and technology could not provide one with a comfortable home...'
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'...a misshapen, many-tentacled thing about twice the size of a man.'
'He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain.'
