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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A spot of ABC science-reporter bashing

Oh dear, it seems there’s a problem with Earth’s “cosmic radiation defence wind”:

Scientists say the solar wind which is a stream of particles that flows from the sun and helps protect the earth from cosmic radiation, is at its lowest level in 50 years.

They say there is nothing to fear because the earth is also protected by a magnetic field.

Oh good, we’ll still be in reasonably good shape for the death knell when the LHC comes back online next March.

But they say the situation could make things more difficult for astronauts who go beyond Earth’s orbit.

No, there’s never been any astronaut who’s gone “beyond Earth’s orbit”, nor are there any immediate plans to send any.

It’s when astronauts venture beyond Earth’s “magnetic field” that the difficulty danger arises.

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Thursday science & technology bashing

An exciting news update from our very own CSIRO:

The US space agency NASA has announced that CSIRO research scientist, Dr John Bunton, is to receive a NASA Space Act Board Award for research into the development of a novel ‘beamformer’ capable of providing a live video link from Mars.

Well actually, the best that could be achieved is an almost-live video link from Mars, given that the absolute limitation imposed by special relativity means any video link from Mars will have an unavoidable delay of anywhere between 5 and 20 minutes, depending on the relative positions of Earth and Mars within the celestial clockwork.

Anyway, Dr Bunton is to receive the award for developing a design for the ‘Deep Space Array Based Network Beamformer’ in which video data from a ‘large antenna array’...

... is divided into narrow channels and transported to beamformer boards. Each board sums the narrow channel data from all 400 antennas. This data can then be reconstructed back into a broadband signal.

This all sounds quite splendid... but it’s one thing to design a system, while it’s quite another to get it to work. The Large Hadron Collider is a handsome design — if only it had legs! The latest news has it that the LHC will be down for repairs until March 2009.

We’re assured, however, that a “prototype system [of the ‘beamformer’] has been built at the JPL and shown to work on signals from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft mission to Saturn.”

Unfortunately we seem to have missed the first-ever ‘live’ video link from Saturn (albeit with up to 90 minutes delay) ... unless maybe someone’s put it up on YouTube...?

Apparently the ‘beamformer’ solution is necessary because “the current Deep Space Network does not have enough ‘sensitivity’ for the task , even with its 70m antenna.”

Obviously, then, what’s needed is a more sensitive, new-age Deep Space Network antenna. I’ll take the credit for this revolutionary brainwave — and the award, thanks NASA — but I’m afraid I’ll have to delegate the actual development and design to the boffins.

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Brewed nieflets

Anyone who wasn’t aware that China was ranked 72nd in the world on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2007 would nevertheless probably take the following as indicative of certain problems facing China today:

A Chinese Government website encouraging citizens to report corruption has crashed on its first day under the weight of too many hits.

And the latest round in an argument that has raged for years, and will continue until the day we are either greeted as long-lost celestial brethren, or enslaved or zapped out of existence by the ETs:

Two senior scientists have resigned from an elite international study group in protest over a lack of public discussion about the possible consequences of attracting the attention of aliens by sending signals deep into space.

Almost forgot to mention that Tim Dunlop recently published an urgent News Flash over at his news.com.au gig, as apparently he’d detected some residual confusion over events that occurred almost a month ago.

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The wonder lives yet

As Chrissy Hinde Oscar Wilde said, we are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

For those of the latter ilk, this week has delivered at least a couple of treats.

Meteor shower to brighten night skies

Stargazers have the chance to spot a meteor shower in the skies tonight.

If the clouds hold off, the annual Geminids meteor shower will be visible to the naked eye from about midnight until dawn.

And it isn’t even Meteorite Monday (remember that?).

Also, Phillip Adams on Late Night Live interviews the esteemed Ann Druyan, co-author with (and widow of) the esteemed Carl Sagan. You can download and hear the podcast from here.

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“Successful undocking” reported

Yes, space cadets, “the US space shuttle Discovery has successfully undocked from the International Space Station (ISS) to begin a journey back to Earth, space officials said.”

That the “successful undocking” of a spacecraft from a space station is actually newsworthy in 2007 says a lot about the current state of human efforts to colonise outer space.

Particularly given that forty years ago, the great prophet of space-flight Arthur C. Clarke had, in his epic 2001 A Space Odyssey, envisaged scheduled commercial flights between the earth and moon well before now...

Entropy never sleeps.

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