TRANSCRIPT OF THE LOST
ANSA PSA
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
____________________________
Submitted by Rich Handley
Reviewer comments are in italics.
ANSA Public Service Announcement - Finally! For those of you who don't have big bucks to spend on a BluRay player, you can now watch the ANSA Public Service Announcement on YouTube. Find it here.
[This video primarily is of someone
talking, intersperse with short shots of video and still shots, and some
animations. I refer to the person talking as "talking guy". I don't quite
recognize him. The video style is made to look grainy and washed out, and
rough-cut as if it had been spliced to have damaged parts removed. Think
something like the DHARMA videos on Lost. It isn't very obtrusive though, I
think it is just an effect to make it seem like the "film" is old]
A Public Service Announcement From ANSA
[Running time 6:06]
[Opening text]
Auditors at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. recently discovered a reel
of sixteen-millimeter film with the label "Project Liberty" on the container.
The Library of Congress has since confirmed this artifact's importance to the
history of the United States space program.
The film is presented here to the general public for the first time, unaltered
and without editorial comment.
[An animated ANSA logo appears on a sky blue background with some music, and
the text "ANSA PRESENTS: PROJECT LIBERTY" appears at the bottom]
[The film begins... starting with a shot of a building with waving palm trees
in front, then the view tilts upward, past a U.S. flag to the top of the
building...fade in to a shot of talking guy sitting at an office desk, wearing a
blue blazer and thin black tie. He has sandy hair -
short but not a crew cut, and black horn-rimmed classes. The desk is pretty
bare, with a blotter, wide desk lamp, black standard
phone, pen-pencil holder, ash tray and rolodex. His hands are folded resting on
a black flexible-plastic three ring binder with some
pages in it. There is a U.S. flag and a table with a plant on it in the
background, and the ANSA logo on the wall above]
ANSA - what do the letters stand for? Are they just another anagram in the
alphabet soup of national bureaucracies? What do they
mean? To be precise, the letters are government shorthand for the American
National Space Administration. But what do they really
mean?
[Start short cuts to various shots of scientists and scientific stuff]
ANSA stands for the greatest conglomerate of scientific vision and knowledge in
the history of mankind. Nothing less than that.
[Back to the talking guy]
And if I sound like I'm bursting with pride, it's because I am.
[He gets up and walks around the desk]
We at ANSA have come a long way in ten years, both figuratively and literally.
From science fiction dream and the fertile
imagination of Chairman Doctor Otto Hasslein, [shot of Dr. Hasslein, then more
various shots with occasional shots of the
talking guy while he continues] the program quickly
progressed to the first manned spacecraft to orbit the Earth. With the combined
brilliance of the finest minds in aerospace science,
Dr. Hasslein then turned his attention to exploring other worlds, landing men on
the moon, and then the red planet - Mars. But ANSA's
vision could not be limited by our own solar system. Human exploration of
Earth's neighboring planets served as only a prelude
to ANSA's further ambitions. Photon propulsion, and near light speed travel have
now allowed Dr. Hasslein and his team to target
distant galaxies and nebulae for their next destinations.
The result? Project Liberty, in which a manned spaceflight will be sent to the
distant constellation Centaurus - 4 light
years away. The purpose of the mission is a selfless one - to increase the
knowledge of man for yet to be born generations.
[Back to the talking guy, who now points out and later shows a model of the
ship which appears to be sitting on a wool coat.]
This is the "Liberty - 1" - a winged chariot that will propel man into the greatest
adventure ever conceived. Built to withstand
the pressures of near-light speed travel, the Liberty represents the
technological crown jewel of the ANSA fleet.
[shot of an orange-colored "blueprint" of the ship, followed by some shots of
the ship on a flatbed truck - perhaps shots of
the unfinished prop?]
After a 5-year series of exhaustive tests and prototypes, the ANSA team are
confident that it is ready to carve out its place in
annals history.
[back to talking guy briefly]
Like a shooting star, the Liberty will slice through space at velocities
approaching the speed of light.
[White on blue animation showing "Astronaut Time" and "Earth Time" clocks
starting at 01/14/1972 and ending at 06/14/1973 AT,
06/14/3972 ET]
Dr. Hasslein discovered that under this circumstance, time dilates. The
astronauts aboard the ship will age only 18 months,
while 2000 years will have elapsed on Earth.
[Back to talking guy, sitting on edge of desk]
ANSA's Life Science group have created the means for chemically inducing human
hibernation aboard the spacecraft. The
astronauts will sleep inside hermetically sealed pods in suspended animation
during in what for them will be a four year
flight. [a couple of still shots from inside the ship from the movie]
Of course this means that these brave space pioneers can never return to the
world they knew. They will be leaving everything and
everybody behind, never to see them again. After their successful voyage, the
world they return to will undoubtedly be very
different.
[Head shot of Charlton Heston, slow zoom out to show him in a flight suit]
Colonel George Taylor leads the team into space. West Point graduate, class of
'41, ace fighter pilot in both World War II and the
Korean War, Colonel Taylor became the first candidate of ANSA's elite astronaut
corps. When asked why he would leave behind the world
he knew to explore the vastness of deep space, he answered simply, "For the
promise of a better world."
[other astronaut cast shots and a group shot]
Lieutenant John Landon serves as navigator on board the "Liberty - 1".
Distinguishing himself as navigator on ANSA's Juno Mars
mission, Lieutenant Landon automatically became the prime choice for the
Liberty Project. After searching their souls and
weighing the sacrifice, John and his wife proudly chose to add the Lieutenant's
talents to the mission. His infant son Mike will grow
to manhood knowing that his father bravely conquered nothing less than time and
space.
Lieutenant Thomas Dodge serves as head science officer. At the relatively young
age of 35, Lieutenant Dodge exhibits the vision of a
man with twice his years. He admits yearning to find intelligent life at the
crew's ultimate destination. A dream he has often
discussed as professor of organic chemistry at Annapolis.
Lieutenant Maryann Stewart, 33, is both a career astronaut and a respected
biological researcher. A veteran of ANSA's Apollo and
Juno space programs, she brings experience, curiosity, and old-fashioned guts to
the team.
[During this next sequence, there are two drop outs where it appears that the
film slips a bit, with an overlay of film stock
on the footage of the talking guy, with no audio]
Two first alternates round out the crew - John Brent,, 34, and Colonel Skipper
Donovan, 38.
[drop out]
Of course, as we bid farewell to our colleagues, the parting will be
bittersweet. We wish them Godspeed, and we envy the
unimaginable wonders they will encounter. We also realize that, for us, it is a
final goodbye. They are embarking on a journey that we
cannot share. We can only imagine the wonders they will bring back to relatives
as distant as the stars themselves.
[Talking guy removes his glasses, still sitting on his desk]
Late one night, Doctor Hasslein sat alone at his desk, the last to leave the
ANSA building, and his mind drifted from equations and
graphs to the human adventure about to begin. The sadness of sacrifice and the
thrill of discovery filled his imagination as he
grappled with his feelings. Something of an amateur poet, he picked up a pen and
wrote some words on the back of an envelope, and those
words have become a motto and a prayer for the Liberty Project, and its intrepid
explorers.
To the distant reaches, climb
Far beyond space
Far beyond time
[Back to the ANSA logo screen, with the words "This has been an ANSA
presentation" appearing at the bottom.]
Comments and Discussion
___________________________________
ANSANAUT Comments on the ANSA Public Service Announcements: The news of this short film, included only on the Blu-Ray Planet of the Apes collection, hit me broadside because I didn't know anything about it. One day I'm checking my email and it's full of messages saying "You were RIGHT!" When I read these emails, I couldn't believe that this short film existed. The ANSA PSA is important in many ways and while it apparently "officially" answers some long un-addressed questions it also opens some new questions as well.
___________________________________
Here are the questions that the film answers after nearly 40 years of open debate and some discussion of the answers that are provided within the film.
Q:
What is the name of the spacecraft / starship?
A: "Liberty - 1" Part of
the "Project Liberty" program.
The first question that people ask is "Why didn't they call the ship the "Icarus?" The answer seems fairly obvious and it involves two ugly little words; "legal" and "reasons." You see, the POTA ship never really had a name ... not an official one at least. It had many references throughout the scripts and an obscure reference on a set of Topps trading cards ("Air Force One"). For more on this, see the FAQ page.
Larry Evans was the originator of the "Icarus" nomenclature when naming this spacecraft and the fans have embraced this name over the last four decades (so much so that even manufacturers of toys and models have used Larry Evans' given name for this spacecraft, Kubrick comes to mind in this regard ...). The truth is that if the makers of this short film had in fact called the spacecraft "Icarus" then Larry Evans could probably have been entitled to some legal form of payment.
___________________________________
Q:
What does ANSA stand for?
A: American
National Space Administration.
This bit of information
was first proposed
by yours truly a long time ago and first appeared in actual print on this
website in May of 2001 at the site's kickoff (see
the FAQ page).
___________________________________
Q:
Where are the astronauts going?
A: Alpha Centauri.
The script of the PSA explains the answer to this question in the following
dialog: "Photon
propulsion, and near light speed travel have now allowed
Dr. Hasslein and his team to target distant galaxies and nebulae for
their next destinations. The result? Project
Liberty, in which a manned spaceflight will be sent to the distant constellation
Centaurus - 4 light years away.
Of course, there is no constellation of "Centaurus" four light years away but there is the Centauri system a little over three light years away (about one parsec). Why someone in a position to relate hard scientific data would make this mistake is unknown let alone let it slip in a documentary.
___________________________________
Q: Are the
astronauts explorers or colonists?
A: The astronauts are explorers.
The script of the PSA explains the answer to this question in the following
dialog: "The purpose
of the mission is a selfless one - to increase the knowledge of man for yet to
be born generations."
___________________________________
[Back to the talking guy, who now points out and later shows a model of the ship
which appears to be sitting on a wool coat.]
ANSANAUT comments - I'd
be interested in seeing this model if anyone can get some screen caps.
Dialog - "This
is the "Liberty - 1" - a winged chariot that will propel man into the greatest
adventure ever conceived. Built to withstand the
pressures of near-light speed travel, the Liberty represents the technological
crown jewel of the ANSA fleet." - What this means is that
the "Liberty - 1" is the flagship of a "fleet" of similar ships to be deployed by
ANSA. Interesting.
[shot of an orange-colored "blueprint" of the ship,
followed by some shots of the ship on a flatbed truck - perhaps shots of
the unfinished prop?]
ANSANAUT comments - I'd
be interested in seeing this model if anyone can get some screen caps.
___________________________________
The next part of the PSA reinforces some of the popularly
held beliefs and raises some critical inaccuracies in regard to flight times and
the basic math behind the fiction.
Dialog - "Like
a shooting star, the Liberty will slice through space at velocities approaching
the speed of light."
[White on blue animation showing "Astronaut Time" and "Earth Time" clocks
starting at 01/14/1972 and ending at 06/14/1973 AT,
06/14/3972 ET]
Dr. Hasslein discovered that under this circumstance, time dilates. The
astronauts aboard the ship will age only 18 months,
while 2000 years will have elapsed on Earth.
ANSANAUT comments - This is the part where the writers and
creators of the script got the concept of high relativistic flight and objective
/ subjective time passage completely wrong. If the "Liberty - 1"
can fly at nearly the speed of light and "Centaurus" is only 4 light years away,
the math makes no sense here at all. Let's look at the math that is
presented in the ANSA PSA ...
"Centaurus" is four light years away. A light year is the distance that light will travel in one year. If an object is moving at the speed of light then it will, logically, cover the distance of one light year in one year's time. If the "Liberty - 1" is moving at a velocity approaching the speed of light, if "Centaurus" is four light years distance away then logically it will take the "Liberty - 1" four objective ("real time") years to travel from Earth to "Centaurus." Since time dilates or contracts for those aboard the ship moving at a velocity approaching that of the speed of light, the time to travel (subjective time) to "Centaurus" will seem to be much less than four years for the astronauts. Somehow, the writers / creators of the ANSA PSA got this basic scientific / sci-fi concept completely wrong and that is pretty much unforgivable.
Now, if it takes the "Liberty - 1" two thousand years to go four light years distance then, logically, the "Liberty - 1" cannot be traveling anywhere near the speed of light. If it will take 2000 years for the crew of the "Liberty - 1" to travel from Earth to "Centaurus" then that means that each light year of distance that the "Liberty - 1" crosses will take 500 years of real time in order to cross (4 x 500 = 2000) a distance of one light year. If one light year is the distance that light travels in a year and if it takes the "Liberty - 1" five hundred years to cross the same distance that it takes light a single year to cross then we can safely assume that the "Liberty - 1" is not traveling at "velocities approaching the speed of light" but is instead traveling at a velocity that is 1/500th that of the speed of light. If we know that light travels at a constant speed of 186,000 miles per second then the "Liberty - 1", traveling at a velocity of 1/500th of the speed of light, is traveling at a rather sedate velocity of 372 miles per second or about 1,339,200 miles an hour. At that rate of speed, it would take the "Liberty - 1" almost 7.9 years to fly past Pluto (some 93 billion miles from Earth) alone. An object moving at nearly the speed of light would be able to cover the distance from Earth to Pluto in about 138 hours or roughly five and a half days.
Why does the "Liberty - 1" take 2000 years to travel 4 light years distance? Because it isn't doing more than a snail's crawl in stellar terms and is hardly moving anywhere near "velocities approaching the speed of light."
The premise of the original two movies (and this site in particular) is that the space flight of the astronauts was a carefully planned spaceflight that underwent normal time dilation. One year would pass Earth time while much less time would pass for the astronauts per light year covered in distance thus the journey to "Centaurus" at "velocities approaching the speed of light" would take four years of regular Earth time and much less time for the astronauts aboard the "Liberty - 1". The premise behind the POTA story is that the spacecraft (Icarus / "Liberty - 1") encountered a Hasslein Curve, a "defect in space and time" that subjected the ship and crew to unforeseen circumstances akin to a catastrophic time warp. 2000 years of time dilation was not an intentional side effect of the space flight but an unforeseen disaster. Hence, this part of the ANSA PSA makes absolutely no sense at all from any mathematical, scientific or even fictional stand point. If the "Liberty - 1" is flying at velocities approaching the speed of light and 2000 years pass on Earth then, logically, the "Liberty - 1" is going to be traveling a distance of nearly 2000 light years at the end of that time and that amount of distance, if memory serves me right, is about four times as far as it would take to get to stars in Orion's Belt let alone "Centaurus".
Let's look at it from a closer, more modern point of view. Say that you were going to travel from the city where you live to a city that is 400 miles away. Now, let's suppose that the people who built your car claim that it can cruise at nearly 100 miles an hour yet because of the unique design of your car, time is somehow dilated when you drive it. Thus, while it will only take you 4 hours to drive to the next city, time in the city that you have left behind (and the city that is your destination) will pass at a rate 500 times faster than that experienced by you in your car. Thus, for every hour you spend in your car traveling at or near 100mph, 500 hours will pass in the city behind you as well as the city in front of you. Thus, when you arrive you will find out that you are almost three months late for any appointment that you may have made. If you immediately turn your car around and go back home, again traveling at or near 100mph, another four hours will pass for you in your car but once you arrive home you will discover that nearly six months time has passed since you first started out.
Does this make sense to you?
No, and the math presented in the ANSA PSA makes no sense either.
What the creators of the ANSA PSA didn't realize is that while time passes normally for people on Earth (called "Objective Time"), time passes much slower for the astronauts traveling at or near the speed of light (called "Subjective Time"). This doesn't mean that the people on Earth are going to age much faster than the astronauts, rather the astronauts are going to age much slower than the people on Earth. Time compresses for the astronauts aboard the speeding spacecraft, it does not accelerate for the people on Earth. At trip to "Centaurus" (3.26 light years distance) by astronauts aboard the "Liberty - 1" (itself traveling at 99% of the speed of light) would see 3.29 Objective Time years pass for the people on Earth while the astronauts would age only 14% of that total (or Subjective Time). If the astronauts spend 3.29 years Objective Time traveling to "Centaurus" at 99% of the speed of light then they will, in reality, only age 6 months Subjective Time during those 3.29 Objective Time years. Six months one way is still a long time to spend in space so some form of crew preservation is going to be needed since cabin space and supplies will be very limited. What also has to be remembered is that the astronauts will, for a total expenditure of 6.68 Objective Time Earth years age only one year Subjective Time. The round trip will see the astronauts age only a single year for the flight (plus whatever time they spend looking around "Centaurus"). This means that we have to carry four one-person-years worth of food, water, entertainment, etc. Since it will be impossible to carry that many supplies onboard, conservation of supplies will have to be encouraged through limiting the amount of time that the astronauts are awake and active during the flight. Limiting the waking periods of the astronauts to mission critical segments of the mission will greatly reduce the amount of supplies needed to maintain the crew during the flight. In order to limit the activity of the crew, we need to implement a forced suspended animation routine to the flight and that aspect will be addressed next.
One critical aspect that hasn't been addressed yet (not even by me and I just thought of this as I'm typing out this comment section) is if suspended animation is introduced to the flight program and if suspended animation greatly slows down the life functions of the human body then, by its very nature and design, the astronauts will age far less. What we have here is a "double bonus" type situation where the astronauts age far less than they normally would and in addition, once the astronauts are placed in forced suspended animation they will age only a fraction of what they normally would age given the effects of both near-FTL velocities and the passage of Subjective Time dilation.
Interesting. I hadn't thought about that before ... but it stands to reason that if the astronauts will age 6 months on each leg of the journey then they would only age 6 months if they stayed awake the entire time according to the passage of normal, subjective time. If, let's say, forced suspended animation slows the body functions down by 90 percent then the astronauts, under forced suspended animation, would age only 10 percent of the six months (or roughly 18 days) during the 4 year flight.
In order to survive the space flight, the astronauts will undergo artificial suspended animation. The stated mathematical nonsense continues below in the ANSA PSA where the narrator describes this procedure.
[Back to talking
guy, sitting on edge of desk]
ANSA's Life Science group have created the means for chemically inducing human
hibernation aboard the spacecraft. The
astronauts will sleep inside hermetically sealed pods in suspended animation
during in what for them will be a four year
flight. [a couple of still shots from inside the ship from the movie]
Of course this means that these brave space pioneers can never return to the
world they knew. They will be leaving everything and
everybody behind, never to see them again. After their successful voyage, the
world they return to will undoubtedly be very
different.
ANSANAUT comments - Well, if you think of a world that has changed a full decade in the time it takes for the astronauts to travel to "Centaurus", look around, and return then the world wouldn't have changed very much at all. If the "Liberty - 1" is traveling at nearly the speed of light then it will take about four years to reach "Centaurus", say a few weeks to look around and four years to return. This is a little over eight years total Earth Objective Time to a little over a year of Astronaut Subjective Time.
If, however, you follow the humorously erroneous math set inside the ANSA PSA, over 4000 years will pass by the time the astronauts go to "Centaurus", look around and come back. Even if they did manage to complete their mission, by the time that they returned they wouldn't be considered astronauts and explorers, they'd be 4000 year old relics whose best understanding of physics and science would be like comparing a 20th century scientist to a scientist of ancient Egypt. The crew of "Liberty - 1" would have very little, if anything, to contribute to the pool of science that the 4000 year older human race would have accumulated in their absence.
If you doubt this, look back to a culture 4000 years ago and compare what they understood about science to what we understand about science today. 4000 years ago, the height of science was rubbing two sticks together to make fire and offering human sacrifices to appease the angry gods. Oh, and the world was flat with the sun revolving around the Earth not to mention that an eclipse was a sign that the gods were angry. If Taylor and his crew came back to Earth after a successful mission, they would arrive in the year 5972, give or take a year, and their best data tapes would be on par with the scribbling on a clay tablet for the people of the 60th century A.D.
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ASTRONAUT NAMES
Now, as far as I know, my website was the first to give all of the astronauts full names and to explore the names of those astronauts who did not have full names. Why didn't the creators of the PSA use the names that I had postulated. Legal reasons, again. So, officially, we have the names of the astronauts in the following segment of the ANSA PSA.
[Head shot of
Charlton Heston, slow zoom out to show him in a flight suit]
Colonel George Taylor leads the team into space. West Point graduate,
class of '41, ace fighter pilot in both World War II and
the Korean War, Colonel Taylor became the first candidate of ANSA's elite
astronaut corps. When asked why he would leave behind
the world he knew to explore the vastness of deep space, he answered simply,
"For the promise of a better world."
ANSANAUT comments -
What is interesting here is that Mark Longmire and I were collaborating on a
short story involving Taylor's experience leading up to the first POTA film, his
background in particular leading up to the astronaut program and we both agreed
that he was a ace fighter pilot in the Korean War (a F-86 Saber pilot to be
exact). I wonder if any of our thoughts or emails ever leaked out and were
picked up by the creators of this PSA ... it seems a fairly odd thing for
something that Longmire and I held in private to make it to this PSA but perhaps
coincidence or "great minds think alike" can explain it more correctly.
[other astronaut cast shots and a group shot]
Lieutenant John Landon serves as navigator on board the "Liberty - 1".
Distinguishing himself as navigator on ANSA's Juno Mars
mission, Lieutenant Landon automatically became the prime choice for the
Liberty Project. After searching their souls and
weighing the sacrifice, John and his wife proudly chose to add the Lieutenant's
talents to the mission. His infant son Mike will grow
to manhood knowing that his father bravely conquered nothing less than time and
space.
ANSANAUT comments - This is interesting. Long ago I had postulated that Landon was the navigator and Stewart was the pilot of the mission. I appear to be vindicated here in my postulation by the information provided in the ANSA PSA. The rest of Landon's description tries to pull at your heart strings but fails utterly when faced with simple reasoning, human emotion and the fallacy of the math proposed in the ANSA PSA. So here we have Landon leaving behind his beloved wife and newborn son for a 2000 year old voyage that will do nothing for his family or his immediate superiors / peers, etc. The whole "we're going to sail off into space for 2000 years" makes absolutely NO sense at all from any angle you look at it from.
Ask yourself this ...
If you were happily married, with a brand new child and someone told you that you had the opportunity to leave both of your loved ones behind forever ... that you would go to sleep and while you were asleep your loved ones would grow old and die and that you would never know your child ... would you logically / sanely make that decision? I know I would not and that is yet another reason why the math of the voyage times is obviously incorrect and poorly written. I can understand Landon leaving his family behind for a decade give or take a year or two but to abandon his soul mate, his only child for a fool's errand? I don't think so.
His infant son will
grow to manhood knowing that his father abandoned him and his mother.
Lieutenant Thomas Dodge serves as head science officer. At the relatively
young age of 35, Lieutenant Dodge exhibits the vision
of a man with twice his years. He admits yearning to find intelligent life at
the crew's ultimate destination. A dream he has often
discussed as professor of organic chemistry at Annapolis.
ANSANAUT
comments - I had postulated that Dodge was a civilian "guest" of the flight but
here I was obviously wrong. He is a military officer with full rank.
The fact that he was the major "scientist" on the flight was one aspect that I
did get correct.
Lieutenant Maryann Stewart, 33, is both a career astronaut and a
respected biological researcher. A veteran of ANSA's Apollo
and Juno space programs, she brings experience, curiosity, and
old-fashioned guts to the team.
ANSANAUT comments - I had postulated that Stewart was the pilot and this dialog seems to confirm that fact. I also postulated that there was a three way romance between Stewart, Landon and Taylor but with Landon's wife and child entering the story above this now seems implausible. In hindsight, my take on the astronauts' lives makes more sense than the "official" take.
What should be mentioned here is the payroll that these astronauts were on. While the astronauts were away in space for 2000 years, did the United States government continue to pay the families (like Landon's) an astronaut's wages for the duration of the flight? Was there some kind of lump sum payment made or what? What is interesting in regard to this line of thinking is that Taylor did tell Dodge and Landon that they needed to "start earning all of that back pay" in the original movie.
I don't even begin to understand how you would pay a government employee, the same government employee, who would occupy the same job for the better part of four millennia and that, in and of itself, might be as damning to the PSA story as the FTL math outlined above.
[During this next sequence, there are two drop outs where it appears that the
film slips a bit, with an overlay of film stock
on the footage of the talking guy, with no audio]
Two first alternates round out the crew - John Brent, 34, and Colonel Skipper
Donovan, 38.
[drop out]
ANSANAUT comments - I believe that we already knew that Brent was known as "John" but I could be mistaken. I'm still not happy with "Skipper" being a name rather than a buddy-buddy term of endearing rank among professionals. If the creators of the ANSA PSA had done just a little bit of research, they would have discovered that Skipper's name was Maddox and not Donovan.
Why are the astronauts not named as they are on this website? Legal reasons again but this time the creators of this script might have owed me money instead of owing money to Larry Evans.
___________________________________
Of course, as we bid
farewell to our colleagues, the parting will be bittersweet. We wish them
Godspeed, and we envy the
unimaginable wonders they will encounter. We also realize that, for us, it is a
final goodbye. They are embarking on a journey that we
cannot share. We can only imagine the wonders they will bring back to relatives
as distant as the stars themselves.
ANSANAUT comments - The problem with this last
paragraph is that if it takes the astronauts 2000 years to get to "Centaurus"
and 2000 years to get back to Earth then you're looking at 4000 years (and some
change) to get the job done. If you believe that human technology, already
able to build something like the "Liberty - 1", isn't going to snowball in
capacity in four thousand years then you don't understand human nature and
technology at all. In the 20th century alone the human race advanced more
in one hundred years than the sum of the human experience for 10,000 years
before. The problem with a space flight taking 2000 years to reach its
destination is that within a hundred years more or less, much more advanced
ships from Earth are going to be blowing past the "Liberty - 1" in its flight,
arriving at the destination long before the "Liberty - 1" arrives and coming back
with news and scientific information about "Centaurus" long before
"Liberty - 1"
ever reaches its destination thus making the entire "Liberty - 1" effort futile and
a worthless waste of resources. By the time that "Liberty - 1" actually does
reach "Centaurus" chances are better than good that "Centaurus" will be heavily
populated by humans and that humans will have settled "Centaurus" many thousands
of years ago.
[Talking guy removes his
glasses, still sitting on his desk]
Late one night, Doctor Hasslein sat alone at his desk, the last to leave the
ANSA building, and his mind drifted from equations and
graphs to the human adventure about to begin. The sadness of sacrifice and the
thrill of discovery filled his imagination as he
grappled with his feelings. Something of an amateur poet, he picked up a pen and
wrote some words on the back of an envelope, and those
words have become a motto and a prayer for the Liberty Project, and its intrepid
explorers.
To the distant reaches, climb
Far beyond space
Far beyond time
[Back to the ANSA logo screen, with the words "This has been an ANSA
presentation" appearing at the bottom.]
ANSANAUT comments - This is just further proof that the creators of the ANSA PSA didn't quite understand the premise behind the movies or the math involved in basic relativistic flight scenarios. Sad. While this ANSA PSA does validate several of my opinions and insights of the movies, the simple and clear misunderstanding of the whole "near FTL" flight is pretty much nigh on unforgivable.
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Questions or comments? Email ANSANAUT
