OK, first off, let’s talk about the trip to Mars that is taking place right now.

Granted, it’s a simulated trip, and all the crew members are staying right here on Earth. But other than that little detail, the experiment is rigged to simulate the problems of a trip to Mars as faithfully as possible… including locking the crew into their metal capsule for six month there and six months back.

So far, no murders from SPACE MADNESS.

The idea is that they will, in simulation, make the trip there for six months, assume orbit on Feb 1, land on Feb 12 and spend the next two days exploring a simulated Mars surface, and then get back in the metal box for the six month journey back home.

They can communicate via email and video messages, but those are realistically delayed in order to simulate the effect of speed of light delays as the Mars capsule gets further and further from Earth.

One thing I like about this experiment is that it is highly useful science, and yet, low budget. NASA style spending is a thing of the past, and modern space programs are, quite rightly, focusing more on making space flight practical and affordable, rather than throwing enormous amounts of resources into flashy projects that prove what we already know : that it can be done.

We are past the explorer period of space flight, and far overdue for the practical era, where space flight is made as rational and reasonable as airline travel.

I have to note, though, that there is a flaw in their experimental model. It’s unavoidable, but still, it makes one wonder what the real usability of the data will be.

The thing is, the “crew members” all know, deep down, that they are on Earth and if anything bad happened they could be out of the experiment in a moment. That won’t be true in space, and I think the knowledge that rescue is as close as the next room does a lot to reduce the tension on the “crew members”, and makes it a lot easier for them to just be chummy and wait things out rather than get into personality conflicts.

Still, a lot of good science will come out of this study, and as a bonus, Americans are not involved.

Face it, you guys act like you own space!

Moving into the realm of a more modest form of transportation than space flight, we have the first very preliminary positive results in trying to develop the “road train” concept.

The idea is fairly simple. Instead of thousands of people individually piloting their individual vehicles over the exact same roads in their daily commute every day, one lead car would do all the piloting and all the other cars would simply do what that car did until it’s time to drive from the car train’s route to your job.

Put another way… imagine that you are driving to work. But instead of driving the whole way, you sit by the side of the road for a minute waiting for the road train to go by, and then your car connects wireless to the road train and, all by itself, joins the train. You sit back, put your feet up, and relax, not doing a single thing to pilot your vehicle, until the system beeps and tells you it is time to drive from road train to work. Same thing on the way home.

Sounds cool, right? But something bugs me about this idea. It seems wrong somehow. Like a problem is either being half-solved, or over-solved.

For instance, how does it handle a red light, where half your road train will make the light and half won’t? If your road train is many blocks long, it could get sliced up in many places. What then?

And trusting some other person in the lead vehicle with your life and the life of all the other passive cars is one hell of a leap of faith to ask of people. I am not sure the ability to have an easy commute while not having to relinquish the autonomy og your own vehicle is really worth it.

And a surprising amount of progress had been made in creating the self-driving car lately anyhow. Perhaps this would make sense from the point of view of the traffic controlling computers in a full-on self-driving car scenario, but within the confines of the current everyday driving work, I don’t know.

Finally, from the real world to one of my favorite world, the world of video games, and one editorialist’s cautious endorsement of the future of 3D gaming.

I’ve been kind of dubious about the idea, informed largely by how excited everyone got about “virtual reality” way back in the 90’s. But the points he makes in its favour make sense to me.

One, he’s right to say that single-player gaming has no problem with 3D needing to be focused right for one person or one small part of the room. I play video games by myself, and that would not be a problem. It only has to be focused for my eyes.

And he’s somewhat correct in saying that gamers do not mind putting on dorky accessories to play games. Admittedly, headphones and wrist straps are a far cry from something that is going to completely cover my eyes and render me blind to my surroundings, but if the results were good enough, if I was sufficiently impressed and enchanted with this new level of immersion, I could get used to it.

His best point, and the one that really struck home for me, though, is that current 3D technology is a lot more convincing when applied to animation than to real objects, and what is a video game’s visuals but a constant flow of animation? It makes sense. Animation, unlike the real world, is simplified, has a single visual style, and uses fairly predictable tricks to simulate 3D. So why not turn those tricks into actual 3D visuals?

Of course, nothing 3D like that is going to be showing up in my price range (hint : LOW) any time soon. But still, it’s good to know that my beloved video games are ready to break into that third dimension.

Virtual reality, twenty years late.