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"Evolutionary success ... is going to absolutely require mobility on, at a minimum, an interplanetary scale. We either go or we die out."
- Richard Morgan
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| Shadow Square Wire | ||
| Very fine, very light, very strong wire. |
The Ringworld needed light and dark cycles to provide the inhabitants with day and night. So, shadow squares were placed in orbit closer to the sun; the squares were connected to each other with a very fine wire.
The makers of Ringworld never intended that the inhabitants would ever encounter shadow square wire. But there it was.
| "Don't touch it," Louis called... a girl had lost some fingers trying to pick up shadow square wire.
Close up, it still looked like black smoke... You could see the black thread, if your eye was within an inch of it; but then your eye would water and the thread would disappear. The thread was that close to being invisibly thin. |
| Technovelgy from Ringworld,
by Larry Niven. Published by Ballantine in 1970 Additional resources -
|
See also shadow squares.
Compare to ultron wire from Armageddon: 2419 A.D. (1928), by Philip Frances Nowlan.
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'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'If you surf over a bump... If you surf over a pothole...'
'Then the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and they stood an instant transfixed...'
'Noiselessly, on rubber-tired wheels, they journeyed...'
'...copy two of the original document no longer can be superimposed on copy one.'
My prize robot, tall, dashing would speak and act for me...
'A palm lock must be keyed to one individual's hand shape and palm lines.'
'I have transferred the ego of a dog to a synthetic dog brain in the skull case of a robot dog.'
