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Post by Alpha Hooligan on Dec 14, 2010 16:39:36 GMT
33 years since it's launch (and 10.8 BILLION miles on the clock) this intrepid little explorer is now about to leave the solar system proper, in a few years, it will be in true "interstellar space"...free of any influence of our sun or this solar system, heading onwards into the vast, cold, lonely enormity of the cosmos. www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11988466Please spare a thought for this amazing little craft and it's epic journey into the unknown. It may be a machine, but it carries something of us with it - This kind of thing will always have the power to fill me with wonder and hope. Godspeed Voyager 1 AH
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Post by swl on Dec 14, 2010 21:28:22 GMT
This is bad, like, reaalllly bad. It'll alert the Martians to the fact their first invasion didn't work.
Or something.
And what if it bumps into the Romulans before the Vulcans? There's a map on the side of the thing showing the bad guys where to find us!
This will end in tears.
Just you wait and see. One day the moon will be blasted from it's orbit by a massive explosion at a plastic barrel storage facility and years later the people that were on the moon at the time will have to deal with the malfunctioning Voyager probe.
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Post by Alpha Hooligan on Dec 14, 2010 21:48:27 GMT
Oh how I loved Space 1999 when I was kid...the fact that the moon must be traveling at several times the speed of light to get to all those places is niether here nor there...the small detail that any explosion powerful enough to set the moon off on such a journey would actually blow the fucker to kingdom come matters not a jot...and I want an Eagle Transport Shuttle...NASA have one and I should have one too! AH
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Post by Weyland on Dec 14, 2010 22:33:28 GMT
Oh how I loved Space 1999 when I was kid...the fact that the moon must be traveling at several times the speed of light to get to all those places is niether here nor there... Didn't like S1999 much myself, Alph. I was probably too old. But I'm sure you'd like Earthman Come Home by James Blish, and the rest of that sequence -- Cities in Flight, they call the collection. Manhattan, Dresden, Scranton, moon, planets, all with their own FTL drives, interstellar and intergalactic voyages, robots, AIs, and -- naturally -- the End of Time. I love it dearly. The city inside the perimeter of raw earth was wavery and unreal. It did not hum any more, but it gave a puzzling impression of being slightly in shadow, though the July sun was still blazing over it. Even in his grief and anger, Chris was curious enough to wonder at the effect, and finally he thought he saw what caused it: The heat waves climbing the air around the town seemed to be detouring it, as though the city itself were inside a dome. No, not a dome, but a bubble, only a part of which was underground; it met the earth precisely at the cleared perimeter. The spindizzy field was up. It was invisible in itself, but it was no longer admitting the air of the Earth. Scranton was ready.
...
After the first quake, however, Chris’s alarm began to dwindle into amazement, for the movements of the ground were puny compared to what was going on before his eyes. The whole city seemed to be rocking heavily, like a ship in a storm. At one instant, the street ended in nothing but sky; at the next, Chris was staring at a wall of sheared earth, its rim looming clifflike, fifty feet or more above the new margin of the city; and then the blank sky was back again.
...
The sky at the end of the street, and overhead too, was now totally black; and even as Chris looked up, the stars became visible at first only a few of the brightest, but the others came out steadily in their glorious hundreds.
...
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Post by everso on Dec 15, 2010 0:51:05 GMT
33 years since it's launch (and 10.8 BILLION miles on the clock) this intrepid little explorer is now about to leave the solar system proper, in a few years, it will be in true "interstellar space"...free of any influence of our sun or this solar system, heading onwards into the vast, cold, lonely enormity of the cosmos. www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11988466Please spare a thought for this amazing little craft and it's epic journey into the unknown. It may be a machine, but it carries something of us with it - This kind of thing will always have the power to fill me with wonder and hope. Godspeed Voyager 1 AH Good grief! My daughter was 6 weeks old when Voyager I was launched. I don't remember it being launched - I suppose I had more important things on my mind (to me, that is). Alph, this is really interesting. I find space exploration fascinating.
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Post by Weyland on Dec 15, 2010 11:57:59 GMT
Alph, this is really interesting. I find space exploration fascinating. Me too. From the linked article: "Sustained by their radioactive power packs, the probes' instruments continue to function well and return data to Earth, although the vast distance between them and Earth means a radio message now has a travel time of about 16 hours." Less than a day for a message to travel 10,800,000,000 miles. Sounds impressive, perhaps, but it would take the same message more than four years to get here from the nearest star. As the HHGttG puts it, "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." It also says this.
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Post by everso on Dec 15, 2010 17:27:32 GMT
I read that first of all as "Don't panic and carry a trowel"
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Post by Alpha Hooligan on Dec 15, 2010 18:54:13 GMT
Weyland, I'll add the "Cities in Flight" to all the other epic sci-fi series that I need to read...Niven's "ringworld/Known Space", Asimov's "Foundation", Herbert's "Dune" etc. There is so much out there when it comes to SF...hard to track down all of it and find time to read it properly (without skimming). ---------- AH
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Post by Weyland on Dec 15, 2010 19:17:14 GMT
Weyland, I'll add the "Cities in Flight" to all the other epic sci-fi series that I need to read...Niven's "ringworld/Known Space", Asimov's "Foundation", Herbert's "Dune" etc. There is so much out there when it comes to SF...hard to track down all of it and find time to read it properly (without skimming) What joy you have in store, Alph! I envy you, not having read those yet. (Didn't like the Dune stuff, but don't let that put you off -- I don't like Star Wars either.) Starting with the Foundation trilogy would be my advice. "The Galactic Empire Was Falling. It was a colossal Empire, stretching across millions of worlds from arm-end to arm-end of the mighty multi-spiral that is the Milky Way. Its fall was colossal, too -- and a long one, for it had a long way to go." I can remember picking a volume up by chance in a second-hand bookshop in Newcastle, circa 1963. I think it was 1s6d or so (7.5p). Still have it. How I envy you.
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Post by aubrey on Dec 16, 2010 9:34:53 GMT
I've got those to read as well. I'm not sure that I will now; probably I'll just re-read Gene wolfe instead.
There is a book by P Anderson called World without stars. It is about a bloke who gets stranded on a planet right at the edge of the Galaxy, so far away from the rest of it that there are no or very stars visible. I've only read about half of it; and it is not really the plot that gets me, but the setting. A bit like being on the bottom of NZ's south island: really at the edge of something, with nothing ahead.
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Post by Weyland on Dec 16, 2010 11:07:13 GMT
There is a book by P Anderson called World without stars. It is about a bloke who gets stranded on a planet right at the edge of the Galaxy, so far away from the rest of it that there are no or very stars visible. I've only read about half of it; and it is not really the plot that gets me, but the setting. A bit like being on the bottom of NZ's south island: really at the edge of something, with nothing ahead. Aubrey: You might like Aganst a Dark Background by Iain M. Banks. Same general idea. Good writer, good story. Vaguely related is The Mote in God's Eye by Niven and Pournelle. A highly advanced civilisation isolated by local problems of galactic structure. Great idea spoilt by Pournelle's involvement, yet again. Gormless frills galore. Niven should have done all the characters, plotting, and writing.
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Post by Alpha Hooligan on Dec 16, 2010 15:32:44 GMT
Banks is another on my list...I have several books by Alastair Reynolds, Peter F Hammilton & Neal Asher that need devouring before I buy any of Banks stuff though. It's good that there are plenty of new SF authors out there though. Got a new Charlie Stross book of short stories as well...that will be read soon, I like Stross a lot. Aubs, that Poul Anderson book "World Without Stars", I think he touched on the idea in "Tau Zero", they encounter a solar system that has been ejected from a galaxy, it's just slap bang in the middle of the void...one of the crew even comments on how it would be horrible if any people lived there, out in the darkness, totally isolated. Oh, and I sympathise with your Gene Wolfe dilema...I just can't help re-reading favorite novels & series...it sort of gets in the way of reading new stuff sometimes. AH
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Post by Weyland on Dec 16, 2010 15:44:35 GMT
Oh, and I sympathise with your Gene Wolfe dilema...I just can't help re-reading favorite novels & series...it sort of gets in the way of reading new stuff sometimes. AH Don't we all? I'm planning to reread A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge soon, after I've dealt with these pesky non-SF Larsson books I've somehow got involved with. * Great name, Vernor Vinge, wot? _____________________ * Blame Trubs.
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Post by sesley on Dec 29, 2010 16:05:43 GMT
isn't that the one that comes back in the Star Trek film that has evolved into a monster computer looking for its creator eating everything in its path?
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Post by Weyland on Dec 31, 2010 17:09:57 GMT
"The Galactic Empire Was Falling. It was a colossal Empire, stretching across millions of worlds from arm-end to arm-end of the mighty multi-spiral that is the Milky Way. Its fall was colossal, too -- and a long one, for it had a long way to go." Just found this. It's R4's version of The Foundation Trilogy from years ago, in MP3 format. My new Kindle (thank you, Santa) can play MP3, and I'm busy downloading it right now.
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Post by Weyland on Jan 19, 2011 21:28:46 GMT
I picked up a tourist leaflet in a restaurant today, and found THIS. They have several telescopes there, and it's also connected to remote-controlled telescopes in the Canaries, Australia, and Hawaii. The link is via the Internet. So they're webcams! But there are no links to them on the site, so I guess the images aren't for public viewing. Might frighten the hoipolloi. I'm going there this week, for sure.
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Post by Weyland on Jan 21, 2011 22:15:25 GMT
This is a view from above mid-Wales right now, if there were no clouds. From this site.
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Post by Alpha Hooligan on Jan 22, 2011 12:09:16 GMT
That scale can't be right...unless the Britania has put on a few pounds since I last seen her! ;D
AH
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Post by Weyland on Jan 22, 2011 12:32:33 GMT
That scale can't be right...unless the Britania has put on a few pounds since I last seen her! ;D AH I was wondering about that. It's clear that when you zoom in they enlarge the image but shrink the globe. Doesn't make much sense, but I still like it. You can get cloud and other views as well, but they're only worth seeing from much higher orbit, otherwise they pixellate too much. All in all an interesting site. Anyone know a better one with similar capabilities? [Whoops -- I told it 3°E instead of W.]
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Post by Weyland on Jan 22, 2011 13:08:48 GMT
I don't know where Lily is exactly, but this is Adelaide:
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