Latest By
Category:
Armor
Artificial
Intelligence
Biology
Clothing
Communication
Computers
Culture
Data Storage
Displays
Engineering
Entertainment
Food
Input Devices
Lifestyle
Living Space
Manufacturing
Material
Media
Medical
Miscellaneous
Robotics
Security
Space Tech
Spacecraft
Surveillance
Transportation
Travel
Vehicle
Virtual
Person
Warfare
Weapon
Work
"There's a tendency to think that maybe if we can just throw enough hardware at the AI problem, then evolution can take care of the rest. Certainly that's how God went about making us."
- Rudy Rucker
 |
| Polar Ice | ||
| Water ice at the poles of the Moon. |
Although sf authors did not first think of ice on the moon, or ice on the poles, this is a nice effort to bring the discussion to sf readers.
| Tortured sheets of frozen water cowered at the Moon's poles, hiding from the blinding power of the Sun. On a map, the ice fields are minute, covering a mere dot of the surface, easily missed from orbit. But right at the North Pole, it seemed to Larry as if the ice covered everything. The craters, the hillocks and the boulders were all covered in the midnight-black gleam of glare ice as seen by starlight. Here the Sun, hidden by high crater walls and mountains, never shone.
The first signs of polar ice had not been noticed until human settlement on the Moon was well advanced. Some thought it was all there as a result of human activity, water vapor leaking out of life-support systems on the Moon and the nearby habitats. The theory rather vaguely suggested the water was transported to the Lunar poles and deposited there. Other theories held that the ice was natural and cyclic, appearing and vanishing in a very long-term pattern that had nothing to do with humans. |
| From The Ring of Charon,
by Roger MacBride Allen. Published by Tor in 1990 Additional resources -
|
Ice in polar lunar craters? The idea was first raised by Caltech researchers Kenneth Watson, Bruce C. Murray, and Harrison Brown in 1961. Water was actually found in 2010, well before any permanent habitats, by the lunar spacecraft Chandrayaan-1.
See also the article on lunar ice mining, from Robert Heinlein's 1966 novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Thanks to L. Paul Penrod for writing in with this item.
Comment/Join this discussion ( 1 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This |
Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Ring of Charon
More Ideas
and Technology by Roger MacBride Allen
Tech news articles related to The Ring of Charon
Tech news articles related to works by Roger MacBride Allen
| JAXA's Int-Ball Drone To Follow Astronauts In Space Station |
| Moon Express Lunar Robot Mining: Shine On, Harvest Moon |
| Asteroid Deflection With DART |
| Unrolling The Filmy Materials Of Space Tech |
Want to Contribute an
Item?
It's easy:
Get the name of the item, a
quote, the book's name and the author's name, and Add
it here.
| <Previous | Next> |
|
|
|
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
|
'About a third of the people in Manhattan have replaced their Freedom Card with a radio-frequency chip...'
'The... machine, being homotropic, headed toward them, still bleating...'
'Most of the crew have the tiny imp ride on their shoulder...'
'And just as a daydreamer forgets his actual surroundings, and sees other realities...'
'Ender doodled on his desk, drawing contour maps of mountainous islands and then telling his desk to display them in three dimensions...'
'The bulldozer moved through the lunar strip mine... '
