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"I think we could solve our problems more easily through strength of character; but that's always been a commodity in extremely short supply."
- Gregory Benford
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| Hammock Crutches | ||
| How would worm-like creatures walk about under heavy gravity? |
| Humanity steeled itself for the coming ordeal of horror under the Troxxt.
THEY WERE truly worm-like in form. As soon as the two night-black cylinders had landed, they strode, from their ships, their tiny segmented bodies held off the ground by a complex harness supported Dy long and slender metal crutches. They erected a dome-like fort around each ship — one in Australia and one in the Ukraine — captured the few courageous individuals who had ventured close to their landing-sites, and disappeared back into the dark craft with their squirming prizes... And over all — courteously caring for us like an intelligent parent — were our mentors, taking their giant supervisory strides on metallic crutches, while their pale little bodies lay curled in the hammocks that swung from each paired length of shining leg. |
| Technovelgy from Liberation of Earth,
by William Tenn. Published by Future Science Fiction in 1953 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the robass from The Quest for Saint Aquin (1951) by Anthony Boucher and the the centipede-machine from Monsters of Mars (1931) by Edmond Hamilton, the centipede from Killing Titan (2015) by Greg Bear and the Walker Wagon from Farmer in the Sky (1950) by Robert Heinlein.
(Walker Wagon from Farmer in the Sky)
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| Leader-Follower Autonomous Vehicle Technology |
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| The 'Last Mile' In China Crowded With Delivery Robots |
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'...each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived.'
'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'
'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain, through the mediation of the electronic brain in the leg.'
'... every veephone on the continent would display, over and over, two propositions.'
'Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty meters. No recoil...'
'He wore spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.'
