Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
poweringspace
Image of the Day · 2026-06-15

The Only Smooth Thing

Two dozen cold rocks spend their banked daylight on one number, and the answer is the only smooth thing in the sky.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. A mid-toned green field printed entirely as coarse round halftone dots on one tilted screen. Scattered across it, bleeding off every edge, are two dozen circular bodies of widely different sizes; each is cut by a single horizontal line, dense pale green below it and bare dark green above, so each circle reads as a level gauge with a different amount left in it. Solid pale threads run between the circles, hair-thin at the outermost bodies and thickening step by step as they merge, until four heavy trunks converge on the upper right. There a large pale disc sits inside a ring of clean, completely dotless ground; it is the only smooth, razor-edged shape in the picture, and the trunks stop dead short of it. One trunk, the thickest, crosses the clean ring and continues into the disc as a round-ended slot of bare ground. No text, no insignia; purely procedural geometry, and nothing shown exists.
An artistic imagining, not a real machine, of an asteroid-belt correlator: a computer spread across scattered rocks, every node draining its banked sunlight down a network of threads into one calculation, and the single smooth disc it produces. Very-long-baseline interferometry really is built this way - separate stations recording independently while one correlator combines them - but a belt-wide computer made of powered asteroids is speculative. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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