Fullerine tube composites, metal alloys and various plastics; all are nanotechnological smart materials with nanites inside to repair microcracks, impacts and to change the form. The spots are asthetic to the Idatonians, I have no purpose for them being on there. Perhaps the spots are their language
or something.

__________________
If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.-Enoch Root, The Confusion
When I was a kid, if someone brandished a shrink gun he'd get a little bit of respect!-Myron Reducto, Harvey Birdman

I was just thinking of that the other evening.

A person in an earlier age might not have envisioned jet planes, but could calculate the energy budget and figure that an airborne transport would, using engineering means unknown, move at a respectable fraction of the speed of sound. From there calculate how long it takes to cross the ocean, and speculate that there won't be a need for club cars or such, that rows of seats like a theater would suffice. In fact, why not make it an actual theater, and perform a play to occupy the passengers and provide a more familiar and comfortable context for them to remain in tightly-packed rows of chairs for a few hours?

Jules Verne not only knew that the Nautilus couldn't possibly carry enough coal even with the best advanced engineering. Perhaps he even figured out that any chemical reaction won't provide enough power for the mass and bulk he needed--no infrastructure for him to stop to take on an advanced fuel--so he used some technobable that conveyed the sailent points. In particular since it was not chemical in nature, we today recognise that his description could be applied to the real USS Nautilus when it was launched 85 years later, and went 20,000 leagues over a span of two years on a single fueling.

Perhaps it was less of a coincedence in life immitating art, first of all because the description of the power source is really more vague than modern readers remember, and he may have calculated the necessary attributes to make a long-duration-mission submarine possible even if he couldn't build it. The US Navy had the same requirements, and finally built one when it could be engineered.

Today, we can calculate how much antimatter it would take to accelerate a probe to whatever speed, and figure out the physical requirements for a interstellar robot probe. So it won't be too surprising if a lot of the details turn out to be correct, because the physical requirements are right, it is built as soon as those requirements are met, and the earliest/soonest technology to do so will be the forseeable technologies that grow from the current, as opposed to radical breakthroughs.

On another note, fiction not only inspires the future development but becomes closer and closer to the upcoming events as time passes. They are essentially draft scenareos! Kids watching a space-thriller in the 50's may have thought, "they should have sent the robot first!". Anyone watching Destination Moon would realize that maybe the should be able to cut off the empty fuel tanks. The next generation of novels (though not movies, unfortunatly) will build upon that, refining the ideas and becoming aware of more issues. The concepts and even the plans will be worked out ahead of the hardware.

--John