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"Science Fiction is speculative fiction in which the author takes as his first postulate the real world as we know it, including all established facts and natural laws."
- Robert Heinlein
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| Oort Cloud Processor | ||
| An alien ship that processes Oort cloud into food. |
Sometimes, to solve a problem you need to break it down into its basic elements. And the basic elements of the food shortage?
| What comets are made of is the same thing you are made of, and what C-H-O-N spells is "food."
The Oort cloud was made up of millions of megaton-sized servings of chow. Back on Earth there were ten or twelve billion hungry people looking toward it and licking their lips.
There was still a lot of argument about what comets were doing there, out in the cloud. It was still arguable about whether they even came in families. Then Oort came along to try to make sense of it. His idea was that there was this great shell of comets all the hell around the solar system, and every once in a while the sun would reach out and pluck one out, and it would come loping in to perihelion. Then we would have Halley's comet, or the one that was supposed to have been the Star of Bethlehem, or whatever. Then a bunch of the guys began kicking that around, asking why exactly that should happen. It turned out it couldn't-not if you assume Maxwellian distribution for the Oort cloud. In fact, if you assume normal distribution, you also have to assume that there isn't any Oort cloud in the first place. You can't get the observed nearly parabolic orbits out of an Oort cloud; so said R. A. Lyttleton. But then somebody else said, well, who says the distribution can't be non-Maxwellian? And so it proved. It's all lumpy...
But it was there. It gleamed faintly blue in the darkness punctuated by stars, strangely shaped. It was the size of an office building and more oblong than anything else. But one end was rounded, and one side seemed to have a long, curved slice taken out of it. |
| Technovelgy from Beyond the Blue Event Horizon,
by Frederik Pohl. Published by Ballantine in 1980 Additional resources -
|
Compare to surta from The Great Dome of Mercury (1932) by Leo Zagat.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Beyond the Blue Event Horizon
More Ideas
and Technology by Frederik Pohl
Tech news articles related to Beyond the Blue Event Horizon
Tech news articles related to works by Frederik Pohl
Oort Cloud Processor-related
news articles:
- Space Food, Canadian Style
| SliceIt! Why Not Teach Robots To Use Knives? |
| 3D Printed Cheesecake Not Quite Food Replicator Quality |
| Porcine Fat Cells For 3D-Printed Whole Pork Products |
| Microbial Protein Production More Efficient Than Crops |
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'What would you do,' Eric asked the robot cabdriver, 'if your wife had turned to stone, your best friend were a toad, and you had lost your job?'
'those suits they wear -- call them 'stillsuits' -- that reclaim the body's own water...'
'Now, except for weight and heat, the same conditions prevail in this chamber as in space.'
'there were so many worms and counterworms loose in the data-net...'
'Now, look, let's start with the three fundamental Rules of Robotics...'
'..the synthetic intellects at the Place of Knowledge had far outstripped the minds of men.'
'But after washing and drying clothes had to be smooth - free from fine lines and wrinkles ...'
