Rama

--- Dave Logsdon wrote:

> From: Brett Sargeant [mailto:bsarge@...]
>
> "It is based on an O'Neill Cylinder."
>
> That was my assumption too, until I realized that
> Clarke's book was
> copyrighted in `73, three years before O'Neill's!
> Perhaps, some of O'Neill's
> students read Clarke, and borrowed some ideas?
> Either way, the design is
> sound, but it does cause one furiously to wonder...
>
> I'm not saying we need to start calling the habitats
> `Clarkes', but if this
> checks out, I might have to start a campaign to make
> sure the first one is
> named after the correct person. Hmmm...
>
> Dave

In the "High Frontier" O'Neill mention that the source
of his ideas is Tsiolkowski, the russian pioneer.
Ideas like those has been around since the beginning
of the XX century. I do research in chilean sci-fi
history, so I know that in 1959, for example, one
fellow countrymen wrote a book describing something
very similar to an artificial world of huge
proportions, with artificial gravity and all that, in
a novel called "the highests". So the idea of a
world-size artificial habitat was floating in the air.

Regards,

Omar Vega