Improbable maybe, but it's a big universe, with lots of places for things to happen.
Life evolving on Earth alone is less probable than life being seeded. We invented electronics about 100 years ago an discovered DNA about 50 ago, and now we have robots on Mars and genetic engineering. Extrapolate a few thousand years. We could seed this galaxy. If we do, life in other solar systems will be more likely seeded than natural. If we can do it, somebody else has probably done it.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Maybe they are. Or at least one per sun.
That should be easy to safeguard against.
Hopefully the probes would be smart enough to not plop down into a magma pool. An advanced civilization might have IR thermometers or something.
That would be fun.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
We make stuff and sell it (for money!) so we can pay our employees, fund their retirement, and make the business grow. We don't sell to people who don't or can't pay the invoices. All that is basic business, stuff you have to do if you don't have government funding. We have anti-government funding, namely tons of taxes.
The real bottom line is that money is necessary to design and build radical, kick-ass electronics. A medium-good oscilloscope costs $50K these days, and a pick-and-place line costs $500K. You don't get toys and challenges like that by hacking 555 timer circuits on a charity basis.
We sell what the elected US Congress says we should sell. We have, a few times, chosen to no-bid things that we found morally repulsive. I think that qualifies as "qualms." We do sell to military programs, like F22 and JSF and some Australian stuff, which seems reasonable to us. NIF is dual-use and seems pretty sensible to us. In a lot of cases, we don't know what the end use will be - they won't tell us - so we trust that big US aerospace companies are being responsible.
You're just being crabby and not thinking, as usual.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
The crew would be space-weakened, not hardened.
The supplies would have to be boosted up to the ISS, which takes more energy than if the entire outgoing package had been boosted on its way the usual way.
Note that NASA has never chosen to launch an outgoing probe from ISS, even though they are desperate to find and publicize uses for the silly thing.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Yes, that was a sad oversight. But the shuttles were going to the ISS already.
ISS couldn't very well inspect or repair something like a Mars lander. May as well let it go on its way and see what happens.
So, the ISS is still expensive and dangerous and useless.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
It would have to be some experiment with a large, light structure, a gravity wave interferometer maybe, that requires human assembly, and can be boosted into another orbit after assembly. I can't recall anything like that having been done, or proposed.
We do launch self-unfolding solar arrays and antennas and such, no assembly required.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
The first moon probe arrived in 1959, ten years before Apollo. Sounds like a hard impact.
We knew, in the early 60's, pretty much what we'd find. Getting soil samples back didn't require astronaut/tourists.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
I mean that keeping people alive and deteriorating in LEO makes no progress in getting to Mars and beyond. It does demonstrate that space if a lot friendlier to robots than to humans.
There's no water in space, just vacuum and radiation. The guys in ISS can barely make it a few meters outside the can, for a couple hours at a time. They're not exploring anything inside that metal prison. If they ever do contact anything new, it will rip through the ISS at tens of thousands of MPH.
So is the top of the BofA building. Neither is useful in getting to Mars, much less the stars.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Leave it to the Larkin total retard to make a totally retarded attempt at a joke, simply to avert the point made.
Good job, you adolescent little puke.
That is all they have the facility to do, idiot. If they wanted to experiment with longer reach excursions, or even free, untethered excursions, they would have made equipment for those purposes. Those experiments have not been done yet.
And you are stupid enough to claim that I have a problem with math.
They have certainly allowed us to explore that pathetic excuse for a developed brain you have.
Damned shame one of those rocks doesn't wipe you and your house out of existence.
You have to hand it to NASA Apollo 11 manned mission to the moon was an incredibly impressive mission and the whole world stopped to watch.
Apollo 8 at Christmas was pretty extraordinary too with the iconic blue and white Earth rise image over a desolate barren lunar landscape.
The Russians obtained lunar samples as a spoiler by robotic lander barely a year later than the Apollo landings in 1970 at much less cost.
Lunas 16, 20 24 got samples back (and they did some swaps with NASA)
There is a pretty good programme about the space race on BBC
I don't know if you can watch it without spoofing a UK IP address (you can argue about the programmes title but there is some truly incredible archive footage and interviews with cosmonauts in it)
-- Regards, Martin Brown
grams compared to several tens of pounds.
WOW. I am NOT impressed.
The cost was far higher with that considered. Do some math, children.
But we wouldn't WANT to do it. We might want to go to those planets someday, and we don't want to find microbes waiting for us that are both capable of infecting us because they are based on the same amino acids, and are new and different from anything we've seen before.
It would be like dumping food waste in a new home and waiting for it to evolve, then moving in.
We'll need to move Earth's orbit out gradually as the sun expands.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
By that Great Bartender in the sky.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Yes. I designed some of the signal conditioning electronics and associated test sets for the S1B booster stage. The program was impressive, but it didn't make economic or scientific sense.
I also designed an acoustic monitoring system for use in Mississippi, in the countryside around the engine test site. We did discover that, in mating season, alligators make loud infrasonic calls. (They first thought my preamps were oscillating!) My only reliability problem was rednecks using the pole-mounted boxes for target practice.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
That wasn't a joke. It was a statement that ocean explorers had things to discover, and to chart, but the guys in the ISS, inside a tin can with nothing outside but hundreds of miles of hard vacuum, don't. If they want to know if anything is sneaking up on them, they find out from ground-based radar.
Exactly.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
I'm still waiting for someone to point out something really useful that the ISS has accomplished. That list doesn't seem useful to me. It could be done with unmanned satellites.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Why not spend our finite science budget on things that advance science? NASA could have done great things with the $150 billion or so that the shuttle and ISS have cost.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
On a sunny day (Fri, 27 Feb 2015 17:48:42 +0000) it happened Martin Brown wrote in :
In those day I worked at NOS, something like the Dutch BBC, and we had shifts between the head control room and keeping the old videotape recorders running... I do remember those moon landings, but especially where they had a problem with the camera on the moon, I think one astronaut pointed it into the sun, and it stopped working. THAT was our signal :-( I vaguely remember discussions with the other guys there about what happened, it could have been a rotating color wheel camera.. not sure. I do remember telling my boss: call me anytime if something happens.
Oh I found it on wikipedia, great article, lots of detail:
What was facinating was all the TV standard conversions, I remember working on such an optical converter, very clever German design where 2 BW tubes were used, one with the BW part (Y) of the picture, and the other had the chroma signal as a BW pattern,
2 cameras in the other (PAL) standard looking at it.Those were days with real man and real technology and real astronauts and your guessed it : lots of tubes.
The whole world was following the Apollos.
That is as likely as diverting an asteroid with a nuke, which you seem to also think is possible.
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