If you increase the use of solar energy, wouldn't you expect that the Sun's energy that is converted to electricity would lessen the heat generated by sun light entering our atmosphere and heating the objects it strikes?
The laws of thermodynamics would like to have a word with you.
Those solar panels trap energy.
House analogy. If you want to cool your house, do you trap the energy inside of it, or do you systematically pump it out with an air conditioner?
Why do warmers never understand the laws of thermodynamics?
It's worth whatever I feel like paying for it.
If that's not enough to cover costs, then maybe the invisible hand is telling them they're investing too much.
1200 years, its entirely possible culture and religion has shifted to such an extent that the simple fact such a mission was launched could be considered aberration. There's also the complete possibility that such a mission was completely forgotten, and the technology also completely forgotten, so when the alien arrives home, its treated as an alien by its own culture.
Assuming technological advances, it might be shot out of orbit long before reaching its own home. Assuming worse case, it might return home to nearly no life (apocalyptic war aftermath).
However, the real likelyhood is that a newer, better craft was launched 400 years later, beat them to some other much more viable planet that the mere closest one, and the original mission was not only considered lost, but considdered a waste, and the new data available by the time he returned meant all the data collected on the mission to that planet was essentially useless.
Under a sign which says 'beware of the leopard'.
Competition, like voting, should be a means to a desirable outcome, not an end state to be achieved for its own sake. I struggle to see the benefit of applying public funds to promote sub-standard products without also supporting the manufacturers of those currently sub-standard products in their efforts to make useful and desirable products.
I also do not look forward to six months from now when new browser exploits need to be patched in 12 silos instead of four via naive software update mechanisms. If browsers are important enough to the public interest to be regulated, such regulation should be based on objective standards and market information _which offers equal opportunity to all competitors who meet the minimum standard_, not just an arbitrary set of those who do and do not. To do otherwise only shifts the frictions and barriers from places such as Opera's budget to develop competent marketing and software to enter and stay in the market, to Brand X's political lobbying budget to become one of the chosen 12 participants in the government sanctioned oligopoly, with the net result that quality of the commodity of web browsers decreases overall.
"It's what you learn after you know it all that counts." -- John Wooden