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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
 |
| Cosmoquake | ||
| Gravity waves ripple across the solar system. |
This is similar to what are described as "gravity waves".
| The force of the cosmoquake was nowhere
overwhelming. Water in small shallow ponds
tended to overflow. Mostly, however, the two
impulses were so nearly equal in duration,
and so nearly opposite in sign that there was
no great damage.
Some chimneys fell. There were a great many traffic accidents. But the damage done by the cosmoquake itself was much less than that caused by violent local earthquakes which followed wherever geologic faults existed. The thing was inexplicable. It really appeared that not only the Earth but the whole cosmos had experienced something hitherto-unknown phenomenom. There was a monstrous increase in solar disturbances to lend color to the theory. But Braddick had used a new discovery in his own specialty—which was the study of research methods—and within three days had submitted a paper to the Philosophical Journal on the cosmoquake. In it, he pointed out that the observed effects on the Earth and sun could have been produced by a body of twelve sols mass passing through the solar system at a speed approaching that of light, along a line from Polaris toward the Southern Cross and at a distance of some six hundred million miles from Earth. |
| Technovelgy from Things Pass By,
by Murray Leinster. Published by Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1945 Additional resources -
|
Here's what a cosmoquake feels like to human observers:
It is not possible to describe them all.
There were areas where human beings found
themselves completely weightless, and were
made mad by the feeling that they fell upward into an empty, cloudflecked sky.
There were other areas in which people
felt themselves pressed to the earth as if by
an intolerable weight. Those sensations reversed themselves within the term of three
seconds to which cosmoquakes seemed to
be limited by the nature of things. But the
areas in such uncomplicated phenomena
showed were the lucky ones.
Compare to the gravity beam from Wandl, the Invader (1932) by Ray Cummings.
In the laboratory, an alarm bell rang
sharply. Braddick’s face grew dark. He put
his hand to the table to push back his chair.
And the earth groaned. Literally. There
are millions of people who will always swear
that they experienced the shocking vibration of the cry of a tortured earth. And then
horrible things happened. . . .
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'Nemourlon armor of reasonable weight resists penetration by most fragments and any bullet that is not both reasonably heavy and fairly high-velocity.'
'Several thousand of them formed the positioning grid on the rubble pile.'
'Its slack walls tightened, bulged, were crossed by ripples and waves of movement.'
'Norman... had never ridden any motorized device that lacked onboard steering and balance systems.'
You will note that HG Wells also figured out the aspect ratio of the future!
'As though a switch had been turned off, the pain stopped...'
'At the ringside opposite them a table had been removed to make room for a large transparent plastic capsule on wheels.'
'... he realized that the moving thing inside was - of course - a robot.'
