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I was just thinking about comms in space, and wouldn't it be awful if on the first Mars shot, or whatever, all the ship radios go on the fritz.
Then, it turns out one of the crew just happens to be an internationally-famed mime artist, and NASA has to resort to using a telescope to see what the
crew are saying. Obviously NASA can signal them using a light in the telescope to send Morse. The code, not the detective.
"Hmm...umbrella in a high wind, I think he's trying to tell us the there's a pressure leak? Invisible wall...."some of the re-entry tiles have fallen off." That kind of stuff.
So I'm suggesting some internationally agreed on space mimes to aid communication, and NASA to set up a training scheme for astronauts to learn this potentially life-saving skill.
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Creative and amusing, but isn't semaphore a sensible
choice? |
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1) Not very internationally understood. You want some French geezer trying to explain the hand-gestures over the phone from whatever Polynesian observatory happens to have line of sight? And the gestures are small, likely to be scrambled by heat shimmer. |
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2) Every tried amusing people on a long space trip with sign language? For example, just going by Armstrong's memoirs of Apollo 11, half an hour after blast-off Collins kept asking "are we there yet?" and Aldrin (who had forgotten his motion sickness pills) kept trying to open a window for some air. If it hadn't been Armstong's extensive repertoire of shadow puppetry, it could have been a completely different outcome to the mission. |
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We have to learn from the past. We both know it was while the Glaswegian ground control personnel were still trying to get the first letter of "air leak" that the tragic accident happened onboard the Bonnie Prince capsule, dealing Scottish space exploration dreams a fatal blow. |
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If there had been an ISO standard set of space mimes, then they wouldn't have still been going "sounds like hair?". |
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