Phil Plait, over at Bad Astronomy, just posted a lovely little piece about Cassini’s flyby of the moon Enceladus. This is amazing not just because the pictures are beautiful (and there is a special place in my heart for the fact that our earliest close-up pics of this area of space are in black and white) but because they were snapped at a range of only a hundred kilometers. Now really, look at the distance from here to Saturn. Proportionally, 100km is basically nothing. We can put a robot in space and place it where we want to within, what, 50km?

Holy shit we are awesome.

Enceladus seen from the Cassini probe at 100km.

Now in Diaspora this is slightly better than the median technology level. Maybe the same as. Maybe a little less. That means that in a cluster with higher-than-average technology (say T2 but certainly T3), this could easily be a manned vehicle, and not a bank-breakingly expensive one. You get the picture: this kind of amazing thing is in reach of the private citizen in Diaspora. Private citizens go to Enceladus. Not for laughs, mind you, but not part of a government or even corporate project, either.

They go chasing a little profit. And they look out the window and see this. Every day for a month maybe. Man my job sure sucks by comparison.

–BMurray