It was a question. Perhaps that's why I wasn't consulted. I wasn't necessarily talking about any mission in particular and I was thinking along the lines of a straight shot out of here in the direction of the next system. I have been led to believe by one of my professors who worked with the Apollo missions that when an object begins to move in the vacuum of space, there is no medium to act against its inertia so it needs no more power to keep it moving, only to alter its direction. The issue of power to sustain the camera and transmitter is a setback. Nevertheless, I think SETI would be in favor of a message in a bottle being sent out to sea versus having Columbus kill himself once he's found land. OK, I admit it. I'm a dreamer.
If we're already spending millions of dollars on these machines, why don't we simply send em off into space in any direction taking pictures and mapping god-knows-what, then transmitting back to us until rapture? After the initial delay of sending the first image back to us, we would be getting a fairly consistent stream of images...at least until some object comes between, the signal strength wanes, or it crashes into something else (which is what it's doing now). Even the most focused spray of transmission back to us would do since as it gets further away, its transmit area would eventually cover our entire path through the solar system so that we wouldn't miss an image. I had a professor once that would probably say, "We never bring these billion-dollar toys back because those fascist, propagandizing bastards never sent em in the first place!"
This is all a cleverly-concocted PR hoax by the makers of Dragon Naturally Speaking software, 45% of whose stock has recently been purchased by those Enron clowns. However, as of the time of this post, they will sell all of the shares and make a jillion more dollars before Bloomberg can process my revelation and publicly warn all remaining and potential investors.
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It was a question. Perhaps that's why I wasn't consulted. I wasn't necessarily talking about any mission in particular and I was thinking along the lines of a straight shot out of here in the direction of the next system. I have been led to believe by one of my professors who worked with the Apollo missions that when an object begins to move in the vacuum of space, there is no medium to act against its inertia so it needs no more power to keep it moving, only to alter its direction. The issue of power to sustain the camera and transmitter is a setback. Nevertheless, I think SETI would be in favor of a message in a bottle being sent out to sea versus having Columbus kill himself once he's found land. OK, I admit it. I'm a dreamer.
If we're already spending millions of dollars on these machines, why don't we simply send em off into space in any direction taking pictures and mapping god-knows-what, then transmitting back to us until rapture? After the initial delay of sending the first image back to us, we would be getting a fairly consistent stream of images...at least until some object comes between, the signal strength wanes, or it crashes into something else (which is what it's doing now). Even the most focused spray of transmission back to us would do since as it gets further away, its transmit area would eventually cover our entire path through the solar system so that we wouldn't miss an image. I had a professor once that would probably say, "We never bring these billion-dollar toys back because those fascist, propagandizing bastards never sent em in the first place!"
This is all a cleverly-concocted PR hoax by the makers of Dragon Naturally Speaking software, 45% of whose stock has recently been purchased by those Enron clowns. However, as of the time of this post, they will sell all of the shares and make a jillion more dollars before Bloomberg can process my revelation and publicly warn all remaining and potential investors.