Can a Surfboard-Sized Watercraft Cross the Pacific on Wave Power Alone?
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/05/wave-glider-crosses-pacific/
This is another one of those ideas that are so obvious once stated and yet remain so obscure until then. Once I read the description I easily envisioned how it would work, how simple it would be to build and how easy to operate. I am quite jealous, though I doubt that I would have been able to commercialize it, so my jealousy is rather nonsensical (heck, I can’t even commercialize my idea for a DNA sequencer and that fits snugly within my 20+ years of education and experience). So, I guess I am intellectually jealous, then, though since jealousy is irrational, I guess I don’t have to have any logical explanation.
Anyway, these things are brilliant in that they are directional and controllable. As the article mentions, there are plenty of measurements that are actually best done gradually and over an extended time, so using boats is quite problematic. Using buoys can also be quite problematic, particularly in the open ocean where the ocean bottom is miles below. If you want to measure something in one spot, simple, just ‘orbit’ a single location. I have tried to find backers for the same sort of concept, but at the top of the atmosphere instead. The so-called ‘atmospheric satellite’ has the potential to loiter in-place making for a ‘geostationary’ satellite for a tiny fraction of the cost and at a huge reduction in latency (5 miles vs 25,000 miles). Awesome observation platform as well, either for ground or sky. Sometimes I get very upset when I think about all the ideas I have had and that I have been able to pursue none of them (well, I am ‘pursuing’ aquaculture, but it will be at least another year and a half before I have any experimental results), so to keep myself from wallowing too much in depression my strategy is to simply not think about these things.
If you are not so much in a hurry, these approaches are excellent for inexpensive ways of exploration. I can imagine long-lived aliens sending probes to other solar systems that might take thousands of years to arrive, yet cost so little that they can easily send several to each interesting nearby star. The probe can then act as a relay and transmit (at light-speed, so the return information comes in years instead of millenia) information about the system, any signs of life (I can imagine teeny tiny robots being dropped off like grains of sand to explore bodies in the target system), resources, etc. Heck, Voyager is already outside our solar system and that was just a generation ago. If we weren’t such an impatient species, I can see us pursuing such investigation as well. I can imagine several inexpensive ways to explore our own solar system, but the travel time would be extensive (solar sails immediately come to mind, very low power, but ‘free’, just like the wave-powered vessel mentioned in the article above). Humans have such short attention spans (don’t get me started on politicians!), I just don’t see us capable of focusing on a problem for several thousand years to explore other stars. Heck, I have trouble envisioning my cheap way of exploring our own solar system and that could easily be done within a generation.
