Thursday
Jan212010
Walk it out, don't talk it out - Ep. 15
Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 9:12PM Dan Trachtenberg and Dave Brodbeck are back to talk about how we will one day have moving sidewalks and pills for every mental illness.
Get the episode at this link.
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Reader Comments (8)
For the moving sidewalk idea, Heinlein beat you to it by 70 years - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll
Tom's idea about the moving walkways at different speeds was part of Isaac Asimov's Robot series of novels. The main character is a police man w/ a robot partner and he travels around their big biodome cities on these things. My memory is a bit fuzzy as i read these 20 years ago. But i distinctly remember the moving walkways.
I came here to comment on the moving walkway but I see i was beaten to it on both books :)
I would say the one in foundation more closely matches Tom's with the inner lanes at faster speeds.
I havent read the Asimov novels (they are on my realllly big to read pile). From what I remember of The Roads Will Roll they also had the inner lanes moving faster than the outer ones (or it might have been in a different Heinlein short story - I read "Roads" as part of the Past Through Tomorrow collection so it might in another story in there).
Looks like a case of convergent ideas to me from around the same timeframe.
I totally read both those books and I guess just sublimated the idea. But it seems perfectly logical right!
I don't think you will ever see that happening for a few reasons.
1 being safety and the other being if you go shopping. I mean what are you going to carry your stuff back home with your hands ?
Dagnabbit, I just emailed Scott and Tom to tell them about The Roads Must Roll. That's what I get for waiting to listen to the podcast uintil I have to work all night. Oh well. I do like the roads idea, but the whole terrorism/revolution problem is a bad one. All it takes is one small bomb to wipe out a lot of people.
Caves of Steel was the Asimov book with the moving sidewalks -- pretty much exactly as Tom described them. It is not a large book, by the way--almost tiny by today's standards. It is the first in a trilogy about a human/robot detective team. Kinda like Sherlock Holmes if Watson's brain was positronic.
They are not part of the Foundation series, except that Asimov pulled together his I, Robot universe and his Foundation universe ex post facto.