heinleinblog

Via The Register:

Promoters in Las Vegas this week vied to offer the wildest ideas for a new super-fast mass transit link between the desert gambling mecca and Los Angeles. Plans were presented for a “railless” train which would fly through magnetic rings mounted atop pillars and a “sunlight bullet expressway” employing “large air-cushioned hovercraft”.

[snip]

Fans of the great Robert Heinlein will recognise some of these ideas. The late sci-fi master wrote long ago of America-spanning “road cities” powered by rooftop solar panels, and also of zooming airborne trains which would soar between tunnels bored through hills (beginning of Starman Jones).

Cool.

Is the Internet developing sentience? The writer of this article evokes Heinlein to say it’s possible:

We tend to get lost in all that information and for the larger segment of web travelers we forget about the whole network of machines that are joined together by a nervous system of wire and wireless
connections. When I sit back a think about the wonder that is the Internet I am often reminded of a book by Robert Heinlein called The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The basic premise of the book is that at some point in the vast computer network that runs the Moon colonies something happens. In a corner of this network an awareness is born and it calls itself Mike. While the book is about much more than just a computer network becoming aware – developing an intelligence – that one aspect of it always fascinated me.

Cool.

I like Heinlein. I like the Internet. See how well the two work together:

In Robert Heinlein’s classic science-fiction story “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” an outrageously extravagant entrepreneur constructs a huge and elaborate business plan inspired by the question, “Who owns the moon?” The entrepreneur has noticed that the moon only passes directly over those parts of the earth within about 30 degrees of the equator (more or less the Third World), and given that property rights are generally understood to extend down to the center of the earth and upward without limit, he asks himself, what if someone set about buying up the “lunar claims” of these Third World “Moon States.”

It’s an entertaining story, but it’s just science fiction. Greg Wyler is a real-world entrepreneur who merely plans to hook up the 3 billion people in the Moon States to the World Wide Web. His company, O3B Networks, has as its mission to make the Internet accessible and affordable to the “other three billion” (hence “O3B”) people in the developing world, enriching lives and ensuring fair and equal access to information throughout the entire world.

Via Livescience.com:

The concept of a superlens came originally from Sir John Pendry in 2000 – although Milton and his colleagues Nicolae Nicorovici and Ross McPhedran conducted closely related studies back in 1994 – and the concept has been studied extensively. Yet no one had realized the cloaking properties until they were discovered through the research by Milton’s team.

The concept of a superlens cloak is a long way from a workable device, but the integrity of the mathematical concept has sent some experimentalists into the laboratory to try and turn the theory into reality. So far, the groups working in this area are not ready to publish papers, but they’ve accomplished enough to keep trying.

“We’re along way off from the Star Trek* device but some of the experimental results achieved so far are surprising and exciting,” Milton noted.

*RAH was a Star Trek fan, making this on topic.

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This video of a prototype [tag]powered armor[/tag] rig in use is just too cool to be believed. [tag]Juan Rico[/tag] from [tag]Starship Troopers[/tag] would approve. There’s no direct mention of Heinlein, but there ought to be.

Hat tip: Pinkerton Park.

Remember the ornithopters that welcomed Zeb, Deety, Jake and Hilda to Barsoom in “The Number of the Beast?”

Well, they’ve made one that really works:

Yesterday Dr. James DeLaurier, an aeronautical engineer and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Aerospace Studies, fulfilled a lifelong dream, seeing his manned mechanical flapping-wing airplane, or ornithopter, fly — a dream first imagined by Leonardo da Vinci.

And with the successful flight DeLaurier has been lucky enough to touch what many describe as the Holy Grail of aeronautical design, achieving a place for himself, his team of volunteers and students in aviation history.

The flapper, as it’s affectionately known, sustained flight over about a third of a kilometre for 14 seconds at about 10:20 a.m. before being hit by a crosswind and almost flipping over, damaging the nose and front wheel on the runway at Downsview Park.

If you read into the article, you find that the flapping wings get a boost from a rocket. I dunno. Strapping a rocking to an ornithopter kinda sounds like strapping a warp drive to covered wagon.

Privately-funded ventures into space was the theme in many of The Master’s works, shich “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” “Destination: Moon” and others. And the Heinlein Prize was created to encourage private ventures into space. So it seems natural to give the very first prize to this man:

The trustees of the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust have announced the first winner of the Heinlein Prize: Dr. Peter H. Diamandis. Dr. Diamandis will receive a $500,000 award, a gold Heinlein medallion and a replica of the Lady Vivamus sword (from Heinlein’s novel Glory Road) at a ceremony to be held in Houston, Texas on July 7, 2006.

Dr. Diamandis is a leader in the area of commercial space exploration. In the past twenty-five years he has started more than a dozen space organizations. In 1980, he founded the Students for the Exploration and Development in Space; it is now the largest student-based space organization in the world. The best-known of these is probably the X Prize Foundation; its $10 million Ansari X Prize helped to jumpstart the commercial spaceflight industry.

[snip]

“There is no question that Heinlein’s work has inspired and driven me during my career. His novella, The Man who Sold the Moon, is my favorite story. In fact, I flew it as personal cargo aboard SpaceShipOne during the winning Ansari X PRIZE flight on October 4th, 2004.â€? (The Heinlein Prize)

This article from TCS Daily makes a good case for a government-paid space elevator made out of carbon nanotubes:

Most importantly, however, space elevators could save us from going the way of the dinosaurs. Sixty-five million years ago an asteroid probably crashed into the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs. Space elevators would greatly facilitate the detection and deflection of earth-bound asteroids. Space elevators would also make it far easier for humans to colonize space and thus survive any world-destroying disaster. As Robert Heinlein said “The earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.”

[tags]space elevators,carbon nanotubes[/tags]

This article in Live Science says that the parasite called Toxoplasma may play a role in Schizophrenia. The writer evokes The Master to make a point:

Are parasites like Toxoplasma subtly altering human behavior? As it turns out, science fiction writers have been thinking about whether or not parasites could alter a human being’s behavior, or even take control of a person. In his 1951 novel The Puppet Masters, Robert Heinlein wrote about alien parasites the size of dinner plates that took control of the minds of their hosts, flooding their brains with neurochemicals. In this excerpt, a volunteer strapped to a chair allows a parasite to be introduced; the parasite rides him, taking over his mind. Under these conditions, it is possible to interview the parasite; however, it refuses to answer until zapped with a cattle prod.

We’re getting closer, but we’re not producing “Starship Troopers”-style armor yet:

Of course, the Roughnecks in the title would be the ones from either Robert Heinlein�s book Starship Troopers, or the cartoon (Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles), which was made after the horrible Paul Verhoeven film, not the film itself, which depicted the soldiers without powered armor (love Dina Meyer, but hated the movie, so I had to get that in). The real-life idea here is technology to let soldiers carry up to 220 lbs. in backpacks over all types of terrain. A design team at the University of California, Berkeley, under the lead of Professor Homayoon Kazerooni has completed work on their first prototype, Bleex 1 (Berkeley Lower Extremity EXoskeleton) and are working on Bleex 2.

Can you imagine Rico and the Roughnecks strolling through Fallujah? Sweet. But all we’ve got now is a prototype that will help Poor Bloody Infantry haul more stuff.

And I do agree: Dina Meyer is hot. Denise Richards looks like she could snap in two at any moment (not to mention the lousy taste in men she has). And that hack Paul Verhoeven should fall into a crevice and never crawl out as far as I’m concerned.

Rico,Starship Troopers,Heinlein,powered armor,Fallujah,Dina Meyer,Denise Richards,Paul Verhoeven