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"To go out on January day and run around on the beach under a golden sun makes a very great change in your outlook on the universe."
- Robert Silverberg
 |
| Self-Sealing Plastic | ||
| Transparent sheeting with a layer of material that would flow to staunch tiny leaks. |
| But the wide roof was all the way up, now—intact. It made a great, squarish bubble, the skin of which [a 'transparent, wire-strengthened plastic '] was specially treated to stop the hard and dangerous part of the ultra-violet rays of the sun, and also the lethal portion of the cosmic rays. It even had an inter-skin layer of gum that could seal the punctures that grain-of-sand-sized meteors might make. But meteors, though plentiful in the asteroid belt, were curiously innocuous. They all moved in much the same direction as the large asteroids, and at much the same velocity—so their relative speed had to be low. |
| From Asteroid of Fear,
by Raymond Z. Gallun. Published by Planet Stories in 1951 Additional resources -
|
Compare this to the plastifoam from Collision Orbit (1941) by Jack Williamson and to Robert Heinlein's tag-along balloons from his 1948 story Gentlemen, Be Seated.
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| 'Metallic Wood' Strong Like Titanium, Floats In Water |
| Self-Healing Material Pulls Carbon Out Of The Air |
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| Superstrong Multilayer Metal-Graphene Composite Material |
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SF writers popularized and elaborated on this idea a generation before the first patents were filed.
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