Conference noted::sf

926.0. "Tsiolkovsky's Dreams of Earth and Sky 1895" by HITPS::FALOR (Ken Falor) Tue Oct 23 1990 13:10

         From "Dreams of Earth and Sky", by Russian Konstantin 
         Tsiolkovsky, 1895:
         
         "These remarkable creatues combine the characteristics of 
         animals and plants and so I call them animal-plants..."
         
         "All right.  Don't get angry.  Just explain how your 
         creatures avoid getting dired up like mummies."
         
         "That is simple.  Their skin is covered with a glassy layer, 
         thin and flexible but absolutely impermeable to gases and 
         liquids and all kinds of particles, so that the creatures are 
         protected from any loss of material... Their bodies have 
         appendages which look like wings and are exposed to the sun, 
         seving as chemical laboratories for the production of energy 
         and food.  Such appendages would be an encumbrance in earth's 
         gravity-field, but in the zero-g environment of space they 
         are hardly noticeable even with a surface area of several 
         thousand square meters."
         
         "Stop!  How do your animal-plants talk to each other and 
         exchange ideas without any air?..."
         
         "They have a much more perfect and natural means of 
         communication.  One part of their body carries under the 
         transparent skin an area like a camera obscura, on which 
         moving pictures are continually playing, following the flow 
         of their thoughts and represented them precisely.  The 
         pictures are formed by fluids of various colors which flow 
         through a web of fine channels under the skin."
         
         ----------------
           Pretty good for 1895.
         
         

    i was under the impression that tsiolkovsky was involved in early
    experiments with rockets, maybe the first. is that correct?
    
    ken

>    i was under the impression that tsiolkovsky was involved in early
>    experiments with rockets, maybe the first. is that correct?
    
		I believe so.

    	He was one of the first to write about using rockets as a means
    of traveling through space.  He did not build any actual working
    models.  The man who did build and launch the first liquid-fueled 
    rockets was Robert Goddard (1882-1945).
    
    	Larry
            

    Tsiolkovsky was the subject of an article in a recent (well,
    sometime in the past year) issue of Smithsonian magazine.
    He is a hero in the Soviet Union; his house a museum visited
    by school children on field trips.