Posthuman Blues

Here's a kitschy yet oddly prophetic rendering of a robot probe exploring a Saturnian moon taken from a Dec. 8, 1952 magazine cover. What I find most telling about this technological forecast is the robot's anthropomorphic "tin man" look. It's walking around on gangly tripodal legs, for crying out loud! And its communication dishes are attached to vestigial humaniform "arms"; evidently the artist wanted his fictional rover to retain as many human-like attributes as possible -- almost certainly for the sake of "personality."