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发信人: by (春天的小懒虫), 信区: SFworld
标  题: 2010 (57)
发信站: 哈工大紫丁香 (Wed Oct  6 15:42:12 1999), 转信

                 Acknowledgements

My  first  thanks,  of  course,  must  go  to Stanley Kubrick,
who  a rather long time ago wrote to ask if I had any ideas for
the `proverbial good science-fiction movie'.
  Next,  my  appreciation  to  my  friend  and  agent (the two
are  not  always  synonymous) Scott  Meredith,  for perceiving
that  a  ten-page  movie  outline I sent him as an intellectual
exercise had rather wider possibilities, and that I owed it to
posterity, etc., etc...
  Other thanks are due to:
  Senor  Jorge  Luiz  Calife  of  Rio de Janeiro, for a letter
which  started  me  thinking seriously about a possible sequel
(after I'd said for years that one was clearly impossible).
  Dr   Bruce  Murray,  past  Director  of  the  Jet  Propulsion
Laboratory,  Pasadena,  and  Dr Frank Jordan, also of JPL, for
computing  the  Lagrange-1  position  in  the  Io-Jupiter sys-
tem.  Oddly  enough, I had made identical calculations thirty-
four  years  earlier  for  the  colinear  Earth-Moon  Lagrange
points  (`Stationary Orbits ,Journal (the British Astronomical
Association,  December  1947) but I no longer trust my ability
to  solve  quintic  equations, even with the help of HAL, Jr.,
my trusty H/P 9100A.
  New   American   Library   and   Hutchinson   &   Co.,   pub-
lishers  of  2001:  A Space Odyssey, for permission to use the
material  in  Chapter  51  (Chapter  37 of 2001: A Space Odys-
sey) and also quotations in Chapters 30 and 40.
  General   Potter,   US   Army   Corps   of   Engineers,   for
finding   time   in  his  busy  schedule  to  show  me  around
EPCOT  in  1969  -  when  it was only a few large holes in the
ground.
  Wendell  Solomons,  for  help  with  Russian  (and Russlish).
  Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis, and the incomparable John
Williams, for inspiration whenever it was needed.
  C. P. Cavafy for `Waiting for the Barbarians'.

While writing this book, I discovered that the concept of
refuelling on Europa had been discussed in a paper, `Outer
planet satellite return missions using in situ propellant pro-
duction', by Ash, Stancati, Niehoff, and Cuda,(Acta Astro-
nautica VIII, 5-6, May-June 1981).
  The idea of automatically exponentiating systems (von
Neumann machines) for extraterrestrial  mining has been
seriously developed by von Tiesenhausen and Darbro at
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (see `Self-Replicating
Systems'- NASA Technical Memorandum 78304). If any-
one doubts the power of such systems to cope with Jupiter, I
refer them to the study showing how self-replicating fac-
tories could cut production time for a solar power collector
from 60,000 years to a mere twenty.
  The startling idea that gas giants might have diamond
cores has been seriously put forward by M. Ross and F. Ree
of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, University of Cali-
fornia, for the cases of Uranus and Neptune. It seems to me
that anything they can do, Jupiter could do better. De Beers
shareholders, please note.
  For more details on the aerial life forms that might exist in
the Jovian atmosphere, see my story `A Meeting With
Medusa' (in The Wind From the Sun). Such creatures have
been beautifully depicted by Adolf Schaller in Part 2 of Carl
Sagan's Cosmos (`One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue'), both
book and TV series.
  The fascinating idea that there might be life on Europa,
beneath ice-covered oceans kept liquid by the same Jovian
tidal forces that heat Io, was first proposed by Richard C.
Hoagland in the magazine Star and Sky ('The Europa
Enigma', January 1980). This quite brilliant concept has
been taken seriously by a number of astronomers (notably
NASA's Institute of Space Studies' Dr Robert Jastrow), and
may provide one of the best motives for the projected
GALILEO Mission.

  And finally: Valerie and Hector, for providing the life-
support system;
    Cherene, for punctuating every chapter with sticky
kisses;
    Steve, for being here.

                                     COLOMBO, SRI LANKA
                                JULY 1981-MARCH 1982

This book was written on an Archives III microcomputer
with Word Star software and sent from Colombo to New
York on one five-inch diskette. Last-minute corrections
were transmitted through the Padukka Earth Station and
the Indian Ocean Intelsat V.

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