Tag Archives: alpha centauri

Thoughts: Pandora – First Contact

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I pulled a muscle in my neck last week. Shortly afterwards I came to the realisation that you don’t truly appreciate how many things you use your neck for until you’re suffering searing, agonising pain every time you move it, even if it’s just the tiniest fraction of a millimetre. It got so bad that I had to take a day off work, and with an afternoon of enforced sitting very, very still in front of a computer doped up on painkillers lying ahead of me I decided to try to alleviate both my pain and my crippling boredom by buying one of the many, many games I have on my Steam wishlist1. As luck would have it Pandora: First Contact’s number came up, which I think conclusively proves that the universe is out to get me.

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  1. This isn’t quite the glowing accolade it might seem, since if they’re on the wishlist it means I wasn’t sufficiently convinced to buy them in the first place.
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Bussard? Bustard? Buzzard?

Say at some point the human race gets its act together and actually decides to send a spaceship to another star. We’ll say it’s unmanned because that makes everything so much easier; it’s just  a robot probe that’s intended to sate our curiosity about what Alpha Centauri actually bloody looks like, and so we don’t need any life support systems or generation ship malarkey going on. We’ll also say that getting the probe out of the Earth’s gravity well – aka the trickiest part of spaceflight – is similarly not an issue because we’re building it in orbit or something. This leaves us just one, fairly major problem: how do we make it go?

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It’s About The Future, Because That’s Where We’re Going.

After my pathetic begging last week I got asked several questions; thanks if you did so! I’ll be answering them at the rate of about one per week, so I should have them all done by the end of the month.

Adam Benton asks

I know this is a rather difficult question, and one you’ve probably answered before, but what game/tv/film depiction to you think is one of the most accurate glimpses of the future?

For example, on the one hand we have Mass Effect, which postulates some crazy advanced technology but seems to keep it within the laws of physics (as much as I know). On the other hand we have BSG, which has less crazy technology but does have dogfights in space ships which – as your most recent post suggested – is unlikely to happen.

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