The Wild Blue Yonder

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The wild blue yonder

This is my story.

Now, this is my story.

I come from the outer reaches of Andromeda.

Imagine:
planet Earth,

the Solar System, the Milky Way...

your galaxy.

I come from another galaxy.

A blue one. Way, way beyond your world.

Where I come from,

is the Wild Blue Yonder

Our star was dying.

It was like an ice age, but much more severe.

We had to move, we had to leave.

Whole armade of spaceships set out

and they all dispersed into the universe.

I don't know where they are.

I guess they're all lost.

A few made it to your planet,

planet Earth.

A few of us arrived earlier.

It was a few minutes of our time

but on the Earth time it was a hundred years too early.

They came in out of the sky and man!

Were they greeted!

What happened to them after

that - I don't know.

But it was not all great on this planet.

We got homesick

and desperate.

One of us tried to commit suicide.

He was spared.

You know, our great-great...-grandfathers

were fine scientists.

But the journey was long and boring.

And when we got here

hundreds and hundreds of years later

those of us who arrived here

just sucked.

I came in with the third group.

And we had a lot of big plans.

We knew we had to make a big impression,

so we decided to build this capital city,

one that would rival D.C.

This...

this looked great, because

two train lines

converge right here.

Over here, we made this to be the mall,

the main shopping center.

And over here was to be the supreme court.

And over here was to be congress.

And down there the pentagon.

And way way way at the end there...

was the great Andromeda memorial.

But the whole thing sucked.

Nobody came, nobody settled,

nobody shopped.

You see aliens as

these technologicaly advanced superbeings,

who destroy NYC in two minutes flat.

Well, I hate to say this,

but we, aliens, all

suck.

Look.

The failures.

Look. D.C.

I guess we're just failures.

This whole thing makes me sad.

Really makes me sad.

Our only success story was the man who

used his knowledge of the sky

and flying machines.

He became chairman of the strategic

planning commitee at the pentagon.

With great respect it might be said

that aviation itself served very small part

in the result of the WW I conflict.

However, it then proved itself,

that is, it was easily recognised

that with proper equipment and another time

aviation might become

a real instrument of military warfare.

First, I thought I was going places,

as I was accepted into CIA,

but I found nothing there, but a bunch

of people only interested in their careers.

I never got promoted. I kept trying to tell them, that

l knew some things, that I knew quite some things

but they wouldn't listen.

And that made me very angry.

So now, I stand before you,

ready to tell all.

I was involved in the Rosswell recovery.

When that thing landed 50 years ago,

they didn't know what it was

so they stashed it in some silo

underground, and they kept lying

that it was just some media invention.

Now comes this.

50 years later they dig it up.

And they decide, with the help of advanced technology,

that they are going to take another look.

That was a big mistake.

They should not have done that.

From the start, that convoy had a very ominous feel to it.

They shut out the world.

No press, no tv cameras,

no photos. This film is the only record

which they made for their secret files.

What happened there had

a far reaching consequences

and you don't even know about it.

Everything was hermetically sealed.

Man, it was ultra-clean in there,

toxic waste outfits for the men,

even the truck was sealed in plastic.

They had a hunch that something

dangerous might be lurking.

What they didn't know was that it

came from our planet.

It was one of our probes we sent

ahead of our armade.

But there was microbic life

attached to it.

Life that was unknown on planet Earth.

And what they also didn't know

was that while they filmed this here

something was seeping out.

Invisible. Secret.

Potentionally lethal.

Seeping into the few patches of bare skin.

And these scientsts would

carry it out into the world.

They scrambled the quarantine

and they barely succeeded

And there was panic.

So they hatched the secret plot.

They sent out a group of astronauts.

Their mission:
find a hospitable place

out there for human habitation.

Like something, anything

that could be the alternative to Earth.

The astronauts were told that

the mission would extend

to the boundaries of our solar system.

But noone could have foretold them

larger, more ominous voyage have they had.

It would turn out to be some sort of

a one-way ticket.

And this is the film record transmitted

back to Mission Control.

It has been kept locked away

all these years.

As time dragged on they were

still cautiously orbiting planet Earth

The mission was going nowhere.

They needed a way to reach further.

The ground crew encouraged this

even thought the spread

of the alien microbes turned out

to be not such a big deal.

It was mostly contained.

Still. They wanted the

astronauts to keep going.

To find the safe heaven

just in case.

They were in for a rude awakening.

They didn't know how

hostile it was out there.

See, I could've told them.

I know all about it.

The astronauts decided

to send out a space probe

to explore the outer fringes

of the solar system.

It could radio back images

from the planets it encountered.

They named the probe Galileo.

They waited weeks.

They waited months.

And then these images came back.

Images that proved that there was no

hospitable place anywhere nearby.

It was clear now that there

was nothing nearby.

On the ground they knew they

needed a bolder plan

a trip beyond our

immediate horizonts.

For the mathematicians it was

only a question of a different trajectory.

The potential energy doesn't

change, that is the zero.

This velocity thing says that this

derivative comes out to be vdelta v.

It just required the gravity assist from Venus

and a fly-by of Jupiter.

It looked doable.

If we look at our

standard v equation

the key is going to be getting the right

v infinity of Venus.

We are still going to need enough

performance from the spacecraft

so that we can go below the orbit of Venus.

And also that the v infinity of Venus is high enough

that when we have to come up with the velocity needed

to get us on up to Jupiter that that will work.

I guess we could use this

to look at leaving the solar system.

For example this is the Sun.

The Earth is going around it.

Instead of thinking of this being a fixed

plane with the Sun in the center

and the Earth going around.

Let's just draw an axis

and rotate the plane with the Earth

so now the Earth looks like it is fixed.

Now we are working in a rotating system.

In this rotating system

if we have a little spacecraft,

an intender or whatever.

Moving around, it has got

some velocity in the rotating system.

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