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"I received a nice letter the other day from the Dalai Lama. He had read 'The Nine Billion Names of God'. It is about a computer at a Tibetan monastery."
- Arthur C. Clarke
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| Gravity Centrifuge | ||
| Used in low gravity environments to build up muscle for visits to Earth, or other high gravity worlds. |
An early reference to this idea in science fiction.
| Pete hesitated. "As a matter of fact, I feel as if I were wading in quicksand up to my neck. Every move is an effort." "Gee, that's too bad! Just what is the surface gravity on Ganymede? About one-third V isn't it?" "Thirty-two per cent. Or from my point of view, everything here weighs three times as much as it ought to. Including me." Matt nodded. "As if two other guys were riding on you, one on your shoulders, and one on your back." "That's about it. The worst of it is, my feet hurt all the time. I'll get over it-" "Sure you will! "-since. I'm of Earth ancestry and potentially just as strong as my grandfather was. Back home, I'd been working out in the centrifuge the last couple of earth-years. I'm a lot stronger than I used to be. There's Oscar." Matt greeted Oscar, then hurried to his room to phone his father in private. |
| Technovelgy from Space Cadet,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Scribner's Sons in 1948 Additional resources -
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Compare to the Gravity-Simulator Harness from Murray Leinster's 1953 novel Space Tug.
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Science Fiction
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'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
