Cambridge University students will be doing a spot of learning at a bit of a distance towards the end of this year. But what are they learning? And at how much of a distance? To answer those questions, first we have to travel back well over thirty years in time - back to 1979, in fact.
Ideally, we should arrive outside a cinema in London's Leicester Square, where posters of an egg-shaped something hatching something bright green against a black background give you a hint of what to expect once you'd bought your ticket and gone inside. But the part of the poster we're most interested in is below the egg in question. It's the movie tagline. "In space no one can hear you scream."
Now, back to the immediate future: the Cambridge University Space Flight Group are going to find out whether or not there's any truth in that tagline, by doing a little bit of distance learning of their own.
Like regular distance learning, information in the form of course materials or even streamed lectures can be delivered digitally, and the information the Space Flight Group are looking for will be delivered digitally from a distance of 248 miles - straight down. From a Nexus One smartphone. And that's why their Scream In Space website is looking for ... well ... screams. They should be in video form, at least ten seconds long, and uploaded by midnight on November 4th. The ten best screams will then be loaded into the smartphone and launched into earth orbit. Up there, a camera will record smartphone images of the screamers doing their screaming, while a microphone not too far away from the phone's speaker will be recording as well. All very worthy, perhaps, but is it really worth going to Cambridge, shelling out thousands of pounds each year in tuition fees, accommodation and all those little extras that make a student's life worth living (oh, and food, too) for an education that involves answering a question everyone knows the answer to already. There's no air in space for sound to travel through, so the movie poster was right. In space, nobody's going to hear those screams. At whatever distance. Learning that for themselves might bring those Cambridge students back down to earth again.
