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In the logs of 20th September, 2005, and 21st September, 2005, Alex answered questions about pirates
- Have you seen any pirates?
- Do you think in the future there will be cloaking devices to hide boats from pirates???
- What would you do if pirates came?
– We haven’t seen any pirates – at least, not that we know of. There really are pirates in some places, who steal whole ships but we hope we don’t meet any of them. We are a long way from the coast (at least 500 nautical miles most of the time) and it is not likely that – even if there were any – pirates would come this far out.
– I don’t think there will ever be cloaking devices, although it’s a very interesting idea, because it would be impossible to make a ship invisible. Force fields and gravity curtains are interesting and provocative in SF stories but not that easy to arrange in real life. The Americans have Stealth technology which makes aircaft hard to see by radar but that’s about as far as it seems possible to go, at least with the knowledge that we have now. And anyway, clever people and pirates would would soon work out how to get around the device.
– As for what we’d do if they came – we would do exactly as they told us, give them everything they asked for, keep very still and hope that they go away. Real life is sometimes difficult to accept, but we would certainly get hurt if we tried to do anything else.
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The logs ramblings can be cryptic, so we have added: