Remora

A group at MIT has come up with a little robot reporter. It is based on the design of one of those nifty machines NASA uses to explore Mars, the kind they always used to diagram in the National Geographics of my youth, except that this little baby has more RAM. And since there is, reportedly, intelligent life on Earth, communication between the robot and its base will be quicker:


"One example of how designing for Intraplanetary exploration is significantly simpler than Interplanetary systems is that information travels much faster from one side of the Earth to another than it does between planets. It can take minutes for radio information to travel from Mars to Earth, which is too long if the message is "I'm rolling towards the edge of a cliff!" Lag time in our system is expected to be less than 1000 milliseconds. Likewise, lifting a payload into orbit is incredibly expensive, and serves as perhaps the largest single constraint in the design of space bound vehicles. For instance, the original Space Shuttle had only 36K words of fixed memory, and 2K words of erasable memory! Our system can use a conventional laptop with many gigabytes of storage, able to handle digital video and audio recording, as well as the control and communications programs."

Whoever invented this thing certainly knows how journalism works. How many journalists have silently cried out, "I'm rolling towards the edge of a cliff!" as they skewed their perspective to that freedom friendly, free enterprise friendly, America friendly ideology of the base, aka Megagiant media corporation, for which they work as gravediggers of the truth, merely in order to enjoy the fruits of the earth on a credit card. For instance, take the whole of the Fox News staff. If only someone out there could recieve their little distressed frequencies! But alas, non-robotic reporters, like lemmings, roll off the edges of cliffs with regularity, and have to live with their shameful prosperity in sorrow and ulcers. Perhaps MIT can do something about that, next.