"Sony builds astonishing roll-up OLED display of the future"

http://dvice.com/archives/2010/05/starship-probe.php


Another story at a nearby link.

Never mind going to the moon, Mars or asteroids — let's send a probe out of the Solar System, to an Earth-like planet orbiting another star. That's the idea behind Project Icarus, dreamed up by the British Interplanetary Society and the Tau Zero Foundation. They'd like to send a probe traveling at 12% lightspeed, reaching another solar system such as Bernard's Star, six light years away, in about 50 years.


How the heck would that work? As the story goes, the spacecraft would first mine fuel from gas giant planets nearby such as Jupiter and Saturn. Then, the spacecraft's engine would fuse deuterium and helium-3 using searing heat from an on-board electron beam. The explosions from such a conflagration would happen 250 times per second, zipping the spacecraft to the stars. Once it arrives at its destination, it would fly by a planet, and send back as much data as it could gather in the short amount of time it would pass by that alien world.


Insert miracle here. Good luck creating a material strong enough to stand up to that kind of stress for a half a century. Maybe these guys could devise a plan to send a probe to Bernard's Star at a slower pace, perhaps over a few hundred years. But by the time it arrived at its destination, there might not be any scientists left here who care. On the other hand, during its journey, there could be dozens of faster, shiny new probes that overtake that obsolete spacecraft from the 21st century.
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I think they may not quite get how it's supposed to work. Probably too many sci-fi movies with space ships burning their engines all the time.
 
Very scifi. I look forward to the day when the family sits at the dinner table and watches their idiot meals and then eats them like fruit roll ups.
 
David Jimerson said:
http://dvice.com/archives/2010/05/starship-probe.php

Another story at a nearby link.

I think they may not quite get how it's supposed to work. Probably too many sci-fi movies with space ships burning their engines all the time.
Click to expand...

The problem will also be that there is no profit motive in sending a probe on a one-way trip out into the void of space. Don't get me wrong, I'm a sci-fi/space nut, and I don't believe it should be all about profit or some space race to show off our superiority. That's how the space exploration-exploitation industries of the near future will probably approach proposed missions.
 
Cool. I can roll up my futuristic OLED newspaper, and use it to whack my futuristic dog across his futuristic snout when he takes an unauthorized futuristic dump on my futuristic living room carpet.
 
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