Monday, June 14, 2010

BBC: Japan's New Solar Sail

How we're living in a scifi film, part #3986:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10293284.stm

I first read about solar sails (or rather, the idea thereof) in one of Freeman J. Dyson's books when I was in middle school or so (it might have been The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet, but I can't be sure, since it was so long ago). At the time he wrote it, which was about twenty years ago, methinks, he had conceived of the solar sail purely as a thought experiment. But mon dieu, look how far we've come!

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