标题: 《The Ethics of Madness 》作者：- Larry Niven【EPUB】 [打印本页] 作者: zaq 时间: 2013-11-11 10:49 标题: 《The Ethics of Madness 》作者：- Larry Niven【EPUB】 The Ethics of Madness Larry Niven Produced by calibre 0.6.40 THE ETHICS OF MADNESS TAU CETI Is a small cool-yellow Go dwarf with four planets. Strictly speaking, none of the planets is habitable. Two are gas giants. The third inward has no air; the innermost has too much. That innermost world is about the size of Venus. With no oversized moon to strip away most of its air, it has an atmosphere like Venus': thick and hot and corrosive. No human explorer would have marked it for colonization. But the ramrobots were not human. During the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, the ramrobots explored most of what later came to be called "known space." They were complexly programmed, but their mission was simple. Each was to find a habitable planet. Unfortunately they were programmed wrong. The designers didn't know it, and the UN didn't know it; but the ramrobots were programmed only to find a habitable point. Having located a world the right distance from the star to which it was sent, the ramrobot probe would drop and circle until it found a place at ground level which matched its criteria for atmospheric composition, average temperature, water vapor, and other conditions. Then the ramrobot would beam its laser pulse back at the solar system, and the UN