Saturday, February 04, 2012

Kind of makes you feel small

There’s oodles of perspectivity in an essay in The Monthly by Luke Davies about the ‘final frontier’ of space travel.

For instance, the following quote from Richard Obousy of Project Icarus:

“We only have the capability to produce a few tenths of a billion of a gram of antimatter – in fact, that’s about the level that CERN is creating at the moment. And if you extrapolate the cost you get into trillions of dollars per gram of antimatter. But CERN isn’t optimised for antimatter creation. It’s a nice by-product of the experiments they do, but it’s like building an entire McDonald’s chain just to get a single French fry.”

“Anti-matter rocket”

To put that further into perspective, our present trouble is that an even modestly ambitious interstellar space travel program would require a mass production line of McHappy Meals.


UPDATE

By the way, the double entendre of “kind of makes you feel small” in juxtaposition with the ‘phallic’ imagery has only just now occurred to me. It was either completely unintentional, or unconscious expression of a deep-seated anxiety. But, as Freud once said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

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9 Comments:

Blogger Caz said...

In other words - not necessarily speaking of penises - we are spectacularly small in the schema of the cosmos.

4/2/12 10:36 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

No Jacob old mate, any garden variety male or female for the matter would quite readily identify that thing as a colossal cosmic cock. But what I would like to see is the other thing: the colossal cosmic, er, um, vagina.

j

5/2/12 11:56 AM  
Anonymous Jacob said...

Justin, you might find it in the constellation Virgo, in the vicinity of Zeta Virginis.

5/2/12 3:48 PM  
Blogger Caz said...

There are some obvious quips I could offer you Justin, but I'm being a lady today, so won't.

5/2/12 4:32 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jacob, how does one go about getting to Virgo these days?

j

6/2/12 11:36 AM  
Blogger Father Park said...

See a surgeon Justin.

Best do it before the conflagration to end all wars though.

6/2/12 11:13 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Dear Father Park,I did, a brain surgeon - it was successful, he reckons.

Anyway I'm off to Virgo - some Dick with a grin like a piano keyboard sold me a ticket in first class (naturally). Cool, but when I checked out the ticket it was only one way (I'll hitch hike back.)

Dick advised me that it would wise to include a southwestern, rain coat, and galoshes.

I got no idea why, but I'm exited all ready.

Tell ya all about it when I get back.

Cheers dears

Theo Herzl

PS, My doctor, some dude by the name of Geoff, warned me there may be a few side effects, but insisted everything went to plan - thank god for that.

7/2/12 7:23 PM  
Blogger Father Park said...

Everything went to plan? Time to worry Theo.

10/2/12 10:47 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

What, Me Worry?

Theo Herzl

10/2/12 6:18 PM  

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