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"I was involved in a cloning project. .. to send me into outer space along with a lot of other people. Not the whole me - just a hair from my head, while I still had some. I would thus pop up in another galaxy in the distant future."
- Arthur C. Clarke
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| Momentum Screen | ||
| Allows a spacemen to avoid the problem of "high gee" forces on take-off. |
A clever twist on the idea of artificial gravity, or a gravity shield, inside a spacecraft.
| The two wipers jumped to their bunks, threw up a lever and lay down. I followed suit; in a few seconds there was a grinding roar and our beds slid on quadrantal rollers up against the bulkhead. There was a moment of crushing weight and just when I thought I'd never get the strength to draw in another breath, the beds slid back off the bulkhead and were parallel with the floor again. In those days the momentum screens were inoperable inside the Heaviside Layer, and during the few seconds it took to get outside, the acceleration was really rough... |
| Technovelgy from Completely Automatic,
by Theodore Sturgeon. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1941 Additional resources -
|
The Heaviside layer (also called the Kennelly-Heaviside layer) is a layer of ionized gas that occurs at about 56-93 miles above the earth's surface. It makes possible radio waves that can propagate beyond line-of-sight.
Compare to the gravity screen from Edmond Hamilton's 1929 classic Crashing Suns.
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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
