Quote Originally Posted by IAN 2411 View Post
Why do we say the planets go around the sun in a clockwise motion?
Actually, they move counter-clockwise! But it's merely convention. Since most western astronomers were in the northern hemisphere, they simply defined North as "Up". Using that convention the Earth turns towards the East, or counter-clockwise. Therefore, by convention, all planets, and the sun, are defined with East in the direction of their rotation. The North pole of the sun is defined as being "Up" relative to the solar system, so we conventionally view the solar system by looking "down" on it. Therefore, counter-clockwise rotations and revolutions.

We seem as a space age world to spend a lot of money sending drone ships with telescopes that can see a billion light years away. However, I have yet to see a photo from one of these drones that is pointing to our own solar system, or maybe I am wrong in thinking that we have a probe that far out.
There are two probes which have left the solar system, the Voyagers. But they are not telescopic probes. And one of them, Voyager 1 I believe, DID turn back and snap a picture of the solar system. Look at Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot". The telescopes you're thinking of are either in orbit or on the surface.

If not, why not?
It wouldn't work, really. You need to have the telescopes close enough to communicate with Earth in almost real time. The further away you get, the longer the communications take. And the narrower the bandwidth available to send back images.

I think I would be right in saying that about 80% of the world’s oceans have never been mapped.
I think it's much lower than that. I have a map of the Earth on my wall, showing all of the trenches, ridges, scarps, faults and other features on the bottoms of the seas. They may not be mapped to the nearest meter, at least not everywhere, but actually, it's cheaper, and easier, to map the moon than to map the ocean.

Yet I notice we cannot send a manned submarine down to the bottom of some oceans.
The Trieste, a manned submersible, descended to the bottom of the Marianas trench in 1960, reaching about 11km deep. Two more expeditions also reached the bottom, the latest in 2009. So we CAN do it. It's not easy, nor cheap, but it can be done.

I can only hope that we never find a plannet inhabited, because if history is anything to go by there won't be much left if they find a third world, world. No doubt by then the space ship will be made up of people from the new world order and colonise it.
It's pretty obvious that there's no world habitable by humans in our solar system. Anything beyond that is far out of our reach, at least for the foreseeable future. Hopefully, if we ever do achieve interstellar travel, we'll have learned to be more humane towards indigenous cultures. I won't hold my breath, though.