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"The SF approach: an awareness that things could have been different, that this is one of many possible worlds, that if you came to this world from some other planet, this would be a science fiction world."
- Neal Stephenson
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| Kemplerer (Klemperer) Rosette | ||
| Planets without a sun; they orbit a central point. |
The Pierson's Puppeteers are sentient herd animals. They find that, as their numbers approach one trillion individuals, that their societ produces too much heat. What to do, what to do?
| "I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat. Total conversion of energy had rid us of all waste products of civilisation, save that one. We had no choice but to move our world outward from its primary."
"Was that not dangerous?" "Very. There was much madness that year. For that reason it is famous in our history. But we had purchased a reactionless, inertialess drive from the Outsiders. You may have guessed their price. We are still paying in installments. We had moved two agricultural worlds; we had experimented with other, useless worlds of our system using the Outsider drive. In any case, we did it. We moved our world." "In short, we found that a sun was a liability rather than an asset. We moved our world to a tenth of a light year's distance, keeping the primary only as an anchor. We needed the farming worlds and it would have been dangerous to let our world wander randomly through space. Otherwise we would not have needed a sun at all." "We had brought suitable worlds from nearby systems, increasing our agricultural worlds to four, and setting them in a Kemplerer Rosette." |
| Technovelgy from Ringworld,
by Larry Niven. Published by Ballantine in 1970 Additional resources -
|
A Kemplerer Rosette (misspelled by Niven) was first described by W.B. Klemperer in 1962, in an article in The Astronomical Journal. See some very cool java applets that let you envision Kemplerer rosettes more easily.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Ringworld
More Ideas
and Technology by Larry Niven
Tech news articles related to Ringworld
Tech news articles related to works by Larry Niven
Kemplerer (Klemperer) Rosette-related
news articles:
- NASA Strategy For Urban Heat island NYC
- Choking On Our Own Waste Heat
- Converting Low Temp Waste Heat To Electricity
- Has Climate Change Already Been Solved By Aliens?
| 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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'...small electric motors at the principal joints worked the prosthetic framework by means of steel cables...'
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'Twoflower's Luggage, which was currently ambling along on its little legs...'
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'The peculiar quality of this light, which gave it its great preeminence over all other penetrating rays...'
'The overworked leg motor would have to cool down before he could work on it...'
‘Where to, sport?’ the starter at cab relay asked.
