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"We're about 20 minutes away from the point where Clarke's law kicks in and technology becomes indistinguishable from magic."
- Peter Watts
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| Lunar Monorail | ||
| A monorail constructed above the surface of the Moon. |
| The Monorail was losing speed as it climbed up out of the shadowed lowlands. At any moment now, thought Sadler, they would overtake the sun...
He had been racing through that night, across the land that the first pioneers had opened up two centuries ago, at a steady and comfortable five hundred kilometers per hour... Ahead of the speeding car, the single rail - supported by pillars uncomfortably far apart - arrowed into the east... The low-slung monorail car, straddling its single track, bored through the shadows on a slowly rising course. In the darkness around them, dimly seen crags and cliffs rushed forward with explosive swiftness, then vanished astern. Sadler realized that probably nowhere else could one travel at such velocities so close to the ground. No jet liner, far above the clouds of Earth, ever gave such an impression of sheer speed as this. If it had been day, Sadler could have seen the prodigies of engineering that had flung this track across the foothills of the Apennines. But the darkness veiled the gossamer bridges and the canyon-fringing curves; he saw only the approaching peaks, still magically afloat upon the sea of night that lapped around them. |
| Technovelgy from Earthlight,
by Arthur C. Clarke. Published by Del Rey in 1955 Additional resources -
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news articles:
- FLOAT Levitating Train On The Moon ala Clarke
| JWST Finds Bucking Centaur 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 |
| First Trips To Mars Announced By Elon Musk |
| Lava Tubes On Moon And Mars |
| SpaceX EVA Spacesuit Tested By Polaris Dawn Crew |
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'... the expressionless face before me was therefore that of the golem-wrestler, Rolem, a creature that could be set for five times the strength of a human being.'
'Waldo put his arms into the primary pair before him; all three pairs, including the secondary pair mounted before the machine, came to life.'
'... the glittering little rocket bolted to the black iron behind him.'
'The slender stalks of a sunshade-photocell collector...'
'The operation that had transformed half his body... had located the control switchboard in his teeth.'
