I Miss You Earth
You are a little robot floating in space in a distant galaxy, thousands of light-years from home: the Earth. You want to send a message to your robot friends on Earth because you miss them so much. What do you want to say?
Concept Brainstorming:
Delay as a design choice
We are so used to a world without delay. Or put it in another way; we expect a world without delay and when a delay occurs we get frustrated. We hate the subway running late and when we send our friends a message we expect an instant reply. We want orders and predictability in a chaotic and unpredictable world.
But this is not always the case. Sometimes, a delay is just part of a communication process. When Huston sent a radio message to Apollo mission astronauts who were on the moon, it took roughly 1.3 seconds for those astronauts to receive the message and another 1.3 seconds to send it back.
Delay is a common theme in communication in space. It took on average 12 minutes for radio frequency, which travels at the speed of light, to reach Mars. Depending on the relative position of the sender on the Earth and the receiver on the Mar, the one-way travel time can range from 3 minutes to 22 minutes. If you want to send a signal to your friend on Neptune, a giant blue planet near the edge of our solar system, it could take 4 hours for your message to arrive. Even more, our solar system is just a tiny little dust in the universe. For our signal to arrive at the Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to us other than the sun, it takes four years.
Prototyping
