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"My feeling is that the chance of our surviving into the twenty-first century as working civilization is less than fifty percent but greater than zero."
- Isaac Asimov
 |
| Ramrobot | ||
| An autonomous interstellar exploration craft using gathered hydrogen for fuel. |
| ...the ramrobots were not human. During the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, the ramrobots explored most of what later came to be called Known Space. They were complexly programmed, but their mission was simple. Each was to find a habitable planet. Unfortunately they were programmed wrong. The designers didn’t know it, and the UN didn’t know it; but the ramrobots were programmed only to find a habitable point. Having located a world the right distance from the star to which it was sent, the ramrohot probe would drop and circle until it found a place at ground level which matched its criteria for atmospheric composition, average temperature, water vapor, et cetera. Then the ramrobot would beam its laser pulse back at the solar system, and the UN would respond by sending a colony slowboat. |
| Technovelgy from The Ethics of Madness,
by Larry Niven. Published by If in 1967 Additional resources -
|
From Niven's 1968 story A Gift from Earth:
The interstellar ramscoop robots, with an unrestricted fuel supply culled from interstellar hydrogen, could travel between stars at speeds approaching those of light. Long ago, the UN had sent ramrobots to nearby stars to search out habitable planets...
Interstellar ramscoop robot #143
left Juno at the end of a linear accelerator. Coasting toward insterstellar
space, she looked like a huge metal
insect, makeshift and hastily built.
Yet, except for the contents of her
cargo pod, she was identical to the
last forty of her predecessors. Her
nose was the ramscoop generator,
a massive, heavily armored cylinder
with a large orifice in the center.
Along the sides were two big fusion
motors, aimed ten degrees outward,
mounted on oddly jointed metal
structures like the folded legs of a
praying mantis. The hull was small,
containing only a computer and an
insystem fuel tank.
Juno was invisible behind her
when the fusion motors fired. Immediately the cable at her tail began
to unroll. The cable was thirty miles
long and was made of braided Sinclair molecule chain. Trailing at the
end was a lead capsule as heavy as
the ramrobot itself.
Ramrobots had been first visitors to all the settled worlds.
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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
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'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
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