Like the future, space is a vast wilderness of magical promise, an expanse pregnant with possibility for the disorganised ramblings of the human race. New technologies have been emerging that make News Hour somewhat giddy, that recall the wild open days of the ancient sea, and promise and intriguing future – the space sail. For any one who has read their fair share of science fiction, solar sails will not be new. They even reached TV and film – plonking them down firmly in the mainstream. The principle is to use the build-up of photons present in light to ‘push’ a craft with a wide saile through space, so light = propulsion. Nasa’s vessel is called the NanoSail-D; a toaster-size craft pulled by a 100 sq ft sail. See it move here.
The magic of this is undeniable – just imagine the size of the sail required to pull something significant, or taking a pleasure cruise tethered behind one in a sealed bubble, drifting among the astral elements – and in stark contrast to the slow march of extraterrestrial commercialisation: Doritos sent advertised their potato chips (not snacks) to the possibly habitable 47 Ursae Majoris as a publicity stunt. The magazine SFX beams itself into space. (Clearly, aliens are fat sci-fi nerds, sitting in the basement of their parents’ house, fiddling with police scanners and getting the munchies.)
With the rise of Virgin Galactic, space seems that bit closer, that bit more like a big piece of real estate – witness the moon as a billboard in Hancock. The problem with property is that its value is subjective to that which is outside its condition, as those poor people with the house on and nearly off the coast discovered – they thought it was worth £80,000 but the survey disagreed, citing the voracious coastal erosion and valuing it at the princely sum of 100 pence. With space, will we just treat it as one big dumping ground? Given that it is supposedly infinite, whatever that means, does it matter? Yes. The issue, even in Infinity, is that something is always local to someone. (Register your concern over coastal erosion, if any, here.)
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 