Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to Heinlein kept up to date...

77 MILLION bits of data!
LJK — (archived)

Arthur C. Clarke had a story from the 1950s (cannot remember the title at the moment, sorry) which involved a special battle space ship with a huge computing capacity for planning battle analysis in space. How do we know it was powerful? Why because it had over one MILLION vaccuum tubes powering the computer! Yes, I'm suddenly thinking of Dr. Evil saying one MILLION dollars, too. :)

BTW, one of my favorite lines from the first Austin Powers film was Dr. Evil correcting someone who called him Mr. Evil by saying "I didn't go to Evil Medical School for 6 years to be called Mister, thank you very much!"

Anyhoo, in Irwin Allen's TV series The Time Tunnel, in the first episode one of those in charge of the secret time travel project hidden somewhere probably next door to Area 51, bragged about the computer capacity of the machines running the time travel experiment, saying it contained over 77 MILLION bits of data! Hey it was 1968, what do you want? Want to know how primitive the computers were on Apollo? Or that the Voyagers probes computers couldn't even come close to a low-end home PC today?

Even 2001: A Space Odyssey, which went to great lengths to look ahead from 1968 into the near future, used analog for its computers.

And they also used a Chesley Bonestell style lunar landscape, even though they did know the lunar surface mountains and other features were all quite smooth. My proof comes from the 1964 Time-Life book Man and Space, written by Arthur C. Clarke, who discussed this very subject.

But I have never received a good explanation as to why a film that strived so hard for scientific accuracy still used the old concept of a craggy lunar surface. Other than, gasp, they did some things for aesthetic appeal to what a pre-Apollo audience expected the Moon would look like!

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