Friday, June 3, 2011

"A Line From A Pale Blue Dot"

A Line From A Pale Blue Dot
Total Time:  6:00:00

In the book "2001:  A Space Odessy",  Arthur C. Clarke discusses the solitude of space travel.  I had been pondering the idea for an obsenely long piece of music for quite some time.  I had recorded approximately 18 hours of music and was in the process of editing.  I had the idea of taking the parts the fit and combine them.  Having the parts drift into each other.  The overall theme of the piece was that of taking a long journey and looking out the window.  I am scared to death of airplanes, but it's the quickest was to get to Italy.  One time on the return trip, I was drugged with seditaves and dramamine and spent the day looking out the window at the Atlantic Ocean.  It was so beautiful.  40,000 feet and it looked like textured glass.  The question was, if this was going to be about a long journey, then what would the journey be?  What could happen, where could one go in 6 hours.  A drive to Atlanta, a walk to the Auscilla River, or a flight to Vancover?

I began to think in terms of "where would the music go?"  Knowing radio waves travel the speed of light, I calculated that over a 6 hour period, the radio waves in a continous broadcast would travel roughly 4 billion miles.  The next question was "What is 4 billion miles from earth.  So I do a Google search for 4 billion miles from earth and discoverd the wole Pale Blue Dot thing.  The probe Voyager took a photograph from 4 billion miles out, which is the furthest photo ever taked of earth.  So, basically, if I can ever get a radio statio to play this on some late night show, it will theoretically form a continous line from earth to the edge of the solar system.  I think it is a great description of how far does light travel listen to this, and travel at light speed, and you'll be out past Neptune.  Will we ever break the light barrier.  Hell, yeah.

Sample calculation:
speed of light = 299792458 m/s = 6.475517093 * 10 exp 12, 6,475,571,093 km (6 hours) or 4,023,669,776 miles (6 hours)
4 billion miles at the speed of light
186000 miles per second
11160000 miles per minute
669600000 miles per hour
4017600000 miles in 6 hours.
If you think I'm crazy, absurb, ignorant, look at it this way.  Read what was said "before" we broke the speed of sound.
The logical reasons why it couldn't be done.  Einstien figured e = mc2.  When an object reaches the speed of light squared,
it's mass converts to energy. It doesn't mean that it can't be done, It just means that you wont be able to travel the speed of
light squared.   That's 34,596,000,000 miles per second.  Now, that's a bit fast.

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