Happy Birthday, Karel Čapek

[filkertom]

On this date in 1890.

What/who is your favorite robot? Yes, androids and real-life robots (e.g., the Mars rover) count. First person to name Cherry 2000, Bethlehem Steele, or Girltron gets a thump on the head.

... Wait... that would be m- [thump]

Comments

[darrenzieger.livejournal.com]

Most of my favorite robots are fictional/satirical - the bots from MST3K, any number of robots from the Futurama universe (Bender, of course, Hedonism-bot, Kwanzaa-bot, Malfunctioning Eddie, The Robot Mafia, etc.)

But big-time props to the real-life Mars rovers. Not only are they honest-to-science autonomous cybernetic explorers, but they are still going strong after 4 years. That's damned plucky.

Seriously, those little guys have been wandering alone across the landscape of an alien world, sending back images and information, for 4 years now, and whenever I see one of those snapshots, I still get the same chill-up-the-spine amazement I had when the images came back from that first Mars probe: "That is a photograph from another. fucking. planet. Not death valley through a tinted lens, not a model, not an artist's rendering, not CGI, not even an image taken from a space probe from 250,000 miles away. The surface of another world. WTF hath ghod wrought?"

OTOH, Bender is great...