Word: spacecrafts
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...premise for Destination Moon (1959), a Sputnik-era comic book by the Belgian illustrator Herge. Tintin and his two human companions, Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus, eventually touch the surface of the moon, romp about in orange space suits and endure who-knows-how-many plots to steal the spacecraft. While the plot summary may sound like standard comic book fare, the genius is in the details. In his evocation of crackpot Balkan generals, shady military organizations and political doublespeak, Herge created a fictional world that eerily resembles our own--at least from a distance...
...befriended--hounded, really--by Jar Jar, a disaster-prone outcast of the Gungan race. He leads them to Amidala the Naboo Queen, whom they intend to take to the Republic's assembly in Coruscant. Engine trouble forces them to detour to Tatooine, where Qui-Gon bargains for spare spacecraft parts with Watto, a potbellied, hummingbird-winged junkman. In Anakin, Watto's slave boy, Qui-Gon senses an unusual precocity, one might almost say a Force. Qui-Gon makes a bet with Watto. If Anakin miraculously wins the big Podrace against the swaggering champ Sebulba, the boy will be freed. Free...
...trick of developing a computer that can understand faces was not to try to replicate the elusive mental processes human beings use to make judgments about one another. Despite the computer's ability to calculate the trajectories of spacecraft or pick the next move in a chess game, the machines have until now been flummoxed by crude recognition tasks that even a baby can perform, often failing to distinguish between a beach ball and a cabbage, to say nothing of picking out a familiar face in a photo album filled with strangers. Such a pattern-recognition talent, says Salk Institute...
...NASA's Sojourner spacecraft roams the surface of Mars and sends pictures back to Earth...
Science fiction boasts an impressive predictive track record--if you squint hard and ignore most of the evidence. Atom bombs, spacecraft, comsats, credit cards, jukeboxes, waterbeds, gene splicing--they all appeared in science fiction first, well before showing up at the mall or on the military base. But science fiction is visionary by design and prophetic only by accident. You'll have a hard time finding androids, aliens, time travelers or psychic powers at the K-mart, even though science-fiction writers have obsessed about them for 70 years...