Artificial horizon

“ It is on shore, and most of all in the far interior of the great continents of the world, that the artificial horizon is most needed, and that it renders the truest service to the explorer; and therefore it is of the greatest importance that the instrument should be at once simple in construction, easy of management, not easily put out of order, and, above all, perfectly reliable in the result obtained from it. ”

“ But it often happens in practice, that the artificial horizon cannot be used, and we are then reduced to the sea horizon, where the changes of refraction are always the greatest. In the Yellow Sea, for instance, we had no opportunity of landing during all the time that the squadron was at anchor, till the day before we sailed. So that during nearly a fortnight that the ships were at anchor, the sea horizon was necessarily used. I need only to refer to the observations taken off the Pei-ho, viz. ”

“ The conventional artificial horizon provides a direct reading indication of the bank and pitch attitude of the aircraft which is accurately indicated by a miniature aircraft pictorially displayed against a horizon bar and as if observed from the rear. ”

“ The movable mirror is turned by an arm, which moves along a graduated arc on the frame, and its reading, when the two objects appear in the telescope superposed upon each other, gives the angle beteween the objects. In determining the altitude of the sun at sea the edge of the sun is made to touch the horizon; a movement of the ship moves the sun and the horizon together and the contact is not destroyed. On land, when the sea horizon is not available, a so-called artificial horizon must be used. ”

“ A long bar pierced the base of the sphere in which were the explosive forces to impel or direct the sphere. It was a wonderful triumph of skill—a little artificial world, as it were, fitted to dart through interplanetary space with every triumph of our skill and science comprised within its globe and stored in its many cells. All accidents appeared provided against, while the apparatus gave us an immense power over nature. ”

“ Nineteen years ago, when I commenced my own experiments, I was told that my reputation would be greatly injured, that mankind looked upon artificial flight as an ignis-fatuus, and that anyone who experimented in that direction was placed in the same category as those who sought to make perpetual-motion machines or to find the philosopher’s stone. ”

“ In the meantime you might set up a number of ships with very heavy relux walls, walls that will stand rays for a while, and equip them with the rudimentary artificial matter machines you have, and go ahead with the work on the calculations. Thett will land other machines here—or on the moon. Probably they will attempt to ray the whole Earth. They won't have concentration of ray enough to move the planet, or to seriously chill it. But life is a different matter—it's sensitive. It is quite apt to let go even under a mild ray. ”

“ It has here, practically the same fault which the artificial matter had on your world.
"As I see it, the ray is actually a directed gravitational field.
"Now here is one thing that makes it more interesting, and more useful. It seems to defy the laws of mechanics. It acts, but there is no apparent reaction! A small ship can swing a world! Remember, the field that generates the attraction is an integral, interwoven part of the mesh of Space. It is created by something outside of itself. Like the artificial matter, it exists there, and there alone. ”

“ In the hundred years since the Boston Light was built the same great changes wrought by the development of artificial light in other activities of civilization have appeared in the beacons of the mariner. The development of these aids to navigation has been wonderful, but it must go on and on. The surface of the earth comprises 51,886,000 square statute miles of land and 145,054,000 square miles of water. Three fourths of the earth's surface is water and the oceans will always be highways of world commerce. ”

“ A thousand miles above Earth's surface the great space platform sped from daylight into darkness. Once every two hours it circled the earth completely, spinning along through space like a mighty wheel of steel and plastic.
Through a telescope on Earth the platform looked to be a lifeless, lonely disk, but within it, hundreds of spacemen and Planeteers went about their work. ”

“ After endeavoring to form, from the definitions, as clear an idea as we can of the various circles of the sphere, we may next resort to an artificial globe, and see how they are severally represented there. I do not advise to begin learning the definitions from the globe; the mind is more improved, and a power of conceiving clearly how things are in Nature is more effectually acquired, by referring every thing, at first, to the grand sphere of Nature itself, and afterwards resorting to artificial representations to aid our conceptions. ”

“ Even if we select a level and open country, more or less inequalities of surface will occur; rivers must be crossed, morasses must be traversed, thickets must be penetrated, and innumerable other obstacles must be surmounted; and finally, every time we apply an artificial measure, as a rod, for example, we obtain a result not absolutely perfect. ”

“ For everything."
"For the entire planet."
"For the entire solar system."
"Sure, but not today."
"Not only for today, but for all time. Gravity, warp, everything. If you don't believe me, try explaining the difference between Space as it exists inside and outside the Barrier sometime. Those—" she gestured toward the upper rows of machines, "control the power. When you know how to manipulate them, you can move any body within the system at will—in any direction, at any speed. The sun itself, if you want to." ”

“ It has required all the refinements of modern instruments to render the eclipses of these remote moons available to the mariner; now however, that system of bodies invisible to the naked eye, known to man by the aid of science alone, enables him to traverse the ocean, spreading the light of knowledge and the blessings of civilization over the most remote regions, and to return loaded with the productions of another hemisphere. ”

“ But it must be understood that the etherial motion here contemplated is the general drift of the entire medium; or its correlative, the uniform motion of all the matter concerned. There is nothing to be said against aberration effects being producible or modifiable by motion of parts of the medium, or by the artificial motion of transparent bodies and other partitioned-off regions. Artificial motion of matter may readily alter both the time of journey and the path of a ray, for it has no potential conditions to satisfy ”

“ Whether the economy of the globe is circular, or not, I am not in a position to show. But its movements certainly are; and so are the movements of all the myriad worlds with which astronomy is conversant. Asteroids, planets, satellites, comets, suns,—nay, even the stellar universe itself—obey in their motions, the grand universal law of circularity. ”

“ What is that mysterious movement of some essence pervading all space, whereby, from remotest depths, news is brought to us, after journeys lasting many years, though space is traversed at a rate exceeding more than ten million times the velocity of the swiftest express train?
Light is in reality the result of undulations in what is called the ether of space, a perfectly transparent, almost perfectly elastic medium, occupying not only void space, but flowing as freely through the densest solids as the summer breeze flows through the forest trees. ”

“ Artificial signals, plainly not made by men, are now reaching Earth every seventy-nine minutes from remotest space. There is as yet no hint of what the messages may mean, but that they are an attempt at communication is certain. ”

“ Instead, as energies continued to flood in at a frightfully accelerating rate, they turned into something else. Things no Terran science has ever even imagined; things at the formation of which all neighboring space actually warped, and in that warping seethed and writhed and shuddered. ”

“ They devised and tested methodologies to convert crude space matter into forms with which to create and integrate structures, and manufacture and operate machines and networks that would sustain surface and contiguous space and inter-satellite and interplanetary navigation and logistics systems.
The emigrants procreated and populated their cities in the void. Their disparate ancestries blended through a natural vitality that accelerated human evolution so as to survive in a radically new environment. ”

“ Super-constructions adapted to a dense medium in inter-planetary space—sometimes, by stresses of various kinds, they are driven into this earth's thin atmosphere—
Later we shall have data to support just this: that things entering this earth's atmosphere disintegrate and shine with a light that is not the light of incandescence: shine brilliantly, even if cold—
Vast wheel-like super-constructions—they enter this earth's atmosphere, and, threatened with disintegration, plunge for relief into an ocean, or into a denser medium. ”

“ Your business, however, will be to overhaul the Earth. The telescope will inform you of the planet's position, and by properly regulating the screens of the cubes you can hang in the orbit of Terra until it reaches you; then, once within its influence, shut off the energy of the cubes and suffer the car to fall to its surface. ”

“ The occurrences of Nature consist in the changes in these qualifications, and more particularly in the changes of motion. The connection between each bits of matter consists purely of spatial relations. Thus, the importance of motion arises from its change of the sole mode of interconnection of material things. Mankind then proceeds to discuss these spatial relations and discovers geometry. The geometrical character of space is conceived as the one way in which Nature imposes determinate relations upon all bits of matter which ate the sole occupants of space. ”

“ They do not, at least, possess the properties of life as it is known throughout the galaxy. They are—as nearly as a poor analogy can suggest—Machines! Machines cannot live, yet here on Earth machinery has reached a level of sophistication—and autonomy—quite unprecedented. Every spark of Terran life has become victim and bondslave of the incredible mechanisms. The noblest enterprises of the race are tarnished by this almost symbiotic relation.
Earth reaches to the stars, but it extends mechanical limbs. Earth ponders the universe, but the thoughts are those of a machine. ”

“ Slowly but surely physical developments on earth and in adjacent space regions are preparing the stage for the later attempts to establish such life forms as we had decided would be best adapted to the unfolding physical environment—both terrestrial and spatial. ”

“ No enterprise has so stirred human imagination as the reach of man toward the exploration of space. New worlds to explore. New distances to travel—3,680 million miles to Pluto, the outermost planet of our solar system, 8 years journey at 50,000 miles per hour when we attain such a capability. Innumerable problems ahead. New knowledge needed in almost every branch of science and technology from magneto fluid dynamics to cosmology, from materials to biology and psychology. ”

“ Let us first of all establish as an impassable boundary the frontiers of our solar system and, in this immense circle, concentrate our gaze upon the more accessible and consequently the nearer points. For, when all is said, if there be really projections, they must necessarily, whether extrahuman or human, emanate from fixed points, situated in space. ”

“ In the only machine we employ today, save for the manufacture of the skydome, and our laboratory equipment. With absolute zero stopping motion, there is neither time nor space. You know that. Well, the first contact, creating new motion, brings one to the time in which he is revived. ”

“ An advanced machine intelligence system for autonomous space exploration must possess the capability to utilize already formulated patterns of order and to devise new or revise existing patterns of order ”

“ A thinking that has learnt to acknowledge the existence of levity must indeed pursue precisely the opposite direction. Instead of freezing time down into spatial dimension, in order to make it fit into a world ruled by nothing but gravity, we must develop a conception of space sufficiently fluid to let true time have its place therein. We shall see how such a procedure will lead us to a space-concept thoroughly conceivable by human common sense, provided we are prepared to overcome the onlooker-standpoint in mathematics also. ”

“ For example, it is extremely inefficient for an Earth-sensing satellite to "rediscover" a lake, road, or city on every orbital pass. The truly important aspects of the object are its fundamental attributes area, temperature, color, texture, etc. - many of which are either constant or predictable. The use of a world model to eliminate continual rediscovery of such features could greatly reduce the extraordinary redundancy of most visual imagery.
All object attributes studied must reflect worthwhile goals. One goal should be the assembly of a historical record of Earth features. ”

“ We are continually expecting to see a limit reached by the discoverer, and by the inventor, and are as constantly finding that we are simply on a frontier which is being steadily pushed further and further out into the infinite unknown. ”

“ In much the same way, the mere survey of a landscape would be incapable of revealing the rotundity of the earth. And so we understand why it was that the discovery of space-time had to await the performance of ultra-refined physical experiments. We might, of course, conceive of beings whose senses were so far developed as to detect the minute differences that escape us. ”