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"What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger."
- William Gibson
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| Meteor Miner | ||
| Someone who roams the solar system, hunting for metal in meteors. |
First use of this helpful phrase.
| The officers of interplanetary
liners lose no love upon the meteor miners, claiming that their
collected masses of metal, almost helpless, always underpowered, are
menaces to navigation.
 (Meteor Miner from Salvage in Space) |
| Technovelgy from Salvage in Space,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Astounding Stories in 1933 Additional resources -
|
In today's parlance, a meteoroid is a small asteroid, less than a meter in diameter. You'd call it a meteor if it entered the atmosphere and a meteorite if you found it on the ground.
See the first reference to asteroid mining from Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898) by Garrett P. Serviss.
Compare to asteroid mining (blasting) from Asteroid of Gold (1932) by Clifford Simak, the luminous stake markers from The Radium World (1932) by Frank K. Kelly,
asteroid claim law from Jurisdiction (1941) by Nat Schachner,
space placers from The Day We Celebrate (1941) by Nelson S. Bond, the
asteroid mining robot from Catch That Rabbit (1944) by Isaac Asimov, the
asteroid mine from Love Among the Robots (1946) by Emmett McDowell, the coal mole from The Web Between the Worlds (1979) by Charles Sheffield, and
asteroid metal from The Mechanical Monarch (1958) by E.C. Tubb.
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| Is China Mining Helium-3 On The Moon's Farside? |
| Solitary Black Hole Wanders In Space |
| Spaceplane From Virgin Atlantic |
| Taikonauts Exercise In China's Tiangong Space Station |
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'Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface... and the amount of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.'
'I guess there's nobody round this table who doesn't have a Crosswell [tapeworm] working for him in the small intestine.'
'Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them...'
'So the parent drone carries a spotter that it launches...'
'...nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods.'
'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'...for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff.'
'I hope all those other cars are on automatic,' he said anxiously.
'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
