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"Science fiction is what scientists would do if they could - if they had enough grant money, enough time, and enough brains to do the wonderful things they would like to do."
- Greg Bear
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| Space Beacon | ||
| An ordinary sun is transformed into a beacon for use by spacecraft when in hyperspace. |
Finding a sun that can be used as a space beacon is easy - but when that sun is orbited by inhabited planets, things can get sticky.
| "Why here, and what is a beacon?" asked Dusty...
"Here, because your sun lies at the end of a long open course through the galaxy, the continuation of which lies along a change of course..." "And what is a beacon?" "It is a phenomenon caused by the Doppler effect when traveling at galactic speeds. In this case, when coming through this rift at fifteen hundred light years per hour, a three-day variable star will appear to the observer as a rapidly blinking light..." "We use the three-day variable to denote the galactic travel lanes. Very effective. We use the longer variable types for other things - dangerous places like cloud-drifts, or a dead sun that might be as deadly to a spacecraft as a shoal is to a seagoing vessel. It's all very logical." "...you're going to make a variable star out of Sol, just for this?" Scyth Radnor shook his head. "Please do not think us hard... You're not going to insist that your animal comforts are more important than the functioning of a galaxy-wide civilization?" |
| Technovelgy from Troubled Star,
by George O. Smith. Published by Better Publications in 1952 Additional resources -
|
As it turns out, Scyth did have a plan for Earth involving a device called a barytrine field.
This idea is an obvious precursor to the opening scene in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; Scyth and his crew are a bit nicer than the Vogons who need to demolish Earth.
I also thought this item was interesting because I remember the debate that occurred when pulsars were discovered in 1967. A radio array discovered a very regular signal, consisting of pulses of radiation that recurred every few seconds. The astronomers who discovered it named it "LGM-1" for "little green men."
Everyone thought that the most obvious explanation was that they were signal beacons used by extraterrestrial civilizations. Ever wary of Occam's razor, however, scientists continued to search for a simpler, physical explanation.
Today, pulsars are believed to be rapidly rotating neutron stars with powerful magnetic fields; they emit radiation in the form of radio waves. These enormous objects have periods that range from 1.5 ms to 8.5 seconds. The radiation is focused along a very narrow beam along the poles of the magnetic field; dubbed the "lighthouse effect", pulsars emit radio waves so regularly that they are as accurate as an atomic clock.
George O. Smith was about fifteen years ahead in predicting that suns could be used as rapidly pulsating space beacons. With the right engineering, of course.
Compare to the hyperspace beacon from The Repairman (1959) by Harry Harrison. Also, distinguish from the space-beacon (in the sense of a landing signal) from Exploration Team, a 1956 story by Murray Leinster.
Also, see the seetee blinker from Collision Orbit (1941) by Jack Williamson and the Astroposit from The Hunch (1961) by Christopher Anvil.
The most technically complete reference is probably the Artificially Pulsating Star from The Cosmic Blinker (1951) by Eando Binder.
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Tech news articles related to Troubled Star
Tech news articles related to works by George O. Smith
Space Beacon-related
news articles:
- XNAV Steer Your Way By X-Ray Pulsar
- TEMPO2 Uses Pulsars For Celestial GPS
- X-Ray Pulsar 'Beacons' To Guide Spacecraft
- China's XPNAV 1 To Use X-Ray Pulsars For Navigation
| Mechazilla Arms Catch A Falling Starship, But Check Out SF Landing-ARMS |
| Solar-Powered Space Trains On The Moon |
| JWST Finds Bucking Centaur 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 |
| First Trips To Mars Announced By Elon Musk |
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'...the rocket’s landing-arms automatically unfolded.'
'...points and patches of light... sliding all over their faces in a programmed manner that had been designed to foil facial recognition systems.'
'...the combined Wind-Suncatcher, like a spray of tulips mounted fanwise.'
'I went to the control room where the three other men were manipulating their mechanical men.'
'The low-slung monorail car, straddling its single track, bored through the shadows on a slowly rising course.'
'It was a smooth ovoid floating a few inches from the floor...'
'... he thrust in his charging arm to replenish his store of energy.'
'...the terrible Jovian gravity that made each movement an effort.'
