It does seem to be the most persuasive hypothesis - searches for supporting evidence do tend to find it. It may not be as well- established as anthropogenic global warming, but it did happen some 65 million years ago, so there's less stuff left to measure.
clear to me in that
That particular rule applies to all mass extinctions. It's probably statisitical. When most organisms die or get killed, there aren't many survivors. There aren't all that many big animals to start with, so it is more likely that every last one of them will end up dead, and if a pair of big animals survives they've got to find themselves a lot more food than a pair of small animals to keep going long enough to produce a breeding pair of off-spring.
They made perfectly respectable soldiers, once they had been through basic training, which taught them how to work together in battle. Untrained militias don't have this particular skill, and get slaughtered by trained troops.
The Europeans, the Russians and the Australians certainly do have telescopes, and I'd be surprised if the Canadians, the Japanese, the Indians and the Chinese didn't have a few as well - if only for teaching astronomy at universities.
The European very large telescope array in Chili
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is fairly impressive, and I'm surprised that you weren't aware of it.
Pretty much every astronomical project that I read about these days is an international collaboration and I'd be surprised if NASA wasn't getting some of its asteroid search data from non-US telescopes. By the same token, if NASA is running a earth-grazer search, nobody else is going to bother to set up a separate group to do the same job.
So John Fields knows as little about astronomy as John Larkin. One can understand why the US media doesn't run articles on the European very large telescope array in Chili
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thus leaving Americans with the impression that Gods' Only Country has all the telescopes in the world, but you'd think that Americans could have learned to compensate for the defects in their news-presenting organisations.
It's nice to see that the UK has finally turned on Rupert Murdoch and his gutter journalism. One wonders how many of his journalists in the US and Australia have been bribing police officers to get information, and how long it will take the US and Australian administrations to climb onto the band-waggon. Since his newspapers and TV channels do - still - have a lot of political influence, I'm not holding my breath.
Those sorts of telescopes aren't suited to discovering and tracking comets and asteroids in earth-intersecting orbits. For that, people use smaller, wider-field instruments.
My suggestion was that the *International* Space Station (The "I" is for "International") could be used for protecting Earth, which would be pretty much the first actual use for it.
But don't let facts get in the way of your scheduled anti-American rant.
Didn't the Brits invent tabloid scandal sheets, and Page 3, and stuff like that? The US press, even the outlets owned by Murdoch, are much tamer.
It doesn't take much expertise to know that untrained militias are militarily useless.
It may look like expertise to you, since you don't know much about anything except electronics, but it is actually the sort of general knowledge that an responsible voter ought to have.
As everybody knows - as is made obvious by the fact that even you are aware of it. There are plenty of smaller telescopes in the rest of the world and some of them are wide-field instruments, but they don't get as much media attention.
My orginal response - to you though you failed to respond to it an in fact snipped it from your reaction - was rather more detailed, and I didn't bother repeating the whole of it for John Fields.
"The European very large telescope array in Chili
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is fairly impressive, and I'm surprised that you weren't aware of it.
Pretty much every astronomical project that I read about these days is an international collaboration and I'd be surprised if NASA wasn't getting some of its asteroid search data from non-US telescopes. By the same token, if NASA is running a earth-grazer search, nobody else is going to bother to set up a separate group to do the same job."
It's actually a pretty silly idea. What the point of stock-piling hardware in low earth orbit?
Any asteroid-deflecting mission is going to do it's work a very long way from the earth, years before the actual impact might have happened, and it's going to take special purpose hardware designed for the specific job. Cobbling it together from modules stored in low earth orbit might make a photogenic movie script, but it won't be the cheapest of quickest way of putting together the equipment to do the job.
I hadn't noticed any particularly anti-American content in the thread so far. You do seem to be quite sensitive to real and imagined slights, so you may have mananged to find something.
Page 3 does seem to have been a British invention, but muck-racking journalism is an American concept - one of your better inventions in fact
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In Britain the same approach met with upper-class disdain, and references to the "gutter press", since the gutter is where you do find a lot of muck.
Sadly, the kind of investigative techniques pioneered by the muck- rakers were taken up by the scandal sheets, who publicised a lot of activity whhich wasn't necessarily anti-social.
Given the frequency of catastrophic asteroid hits and the expected span of any human enterprise, the proposition seems silly. It's just a waste of time and money to insure against accidents with vanishing probabilities. I believe we have more serious risks to deal with.
Sure, it has happened, and it will happen again, but by the time it does, there won't be any humans left to see it.
Actually several players have telescopes of the right sort for finding NEO's, but the US programme is the most advanced since the hardware required is actually rather similar to the kit used to monitor all the space junk in much closer Earth orbits in combination with BMEWS.
The number of NEOs is increasing rather rapidly and near continuous amateur video coverage of impacts on Jupiter have shown that it gets hit rather more often than we had imagined. Catalina is taking over from LINEAR these days in the detection stakes. It is now incredibly rare for an amateur astronomer comet watcher to beat the automated computer search programs for discovery of a new comet.
Some stats online:
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Small ones continue to rise steeply with increased observation time and better techniques. Discovery of larger ones have thankfully tailed off.
And one due to be pretty close on 27/6/11
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It would be utterly useless for that job too. It would only save a few minutes and the platform is too floppy and any kit up there would be prone to micrometeorite damage. Yet another thing the ISS can't do.
Most of the ISS "science experiments" would not make the grade at a typical high school science fair. It is a low Earth orbit tin can and ultra expensive uncomfortable hotel for the hyper rich to visit. Total waste of time and money now - although it may have helped indirectly in the past to prevent Russian ICBM technology finding its way to Iran.
There are a number of other NEO survey systems running around the world. It makes sense to be able to cover all approach directions. The US program is by far the most advanced of its kind.
The ISS would be just as useless in that application as well.
Far better to keep any missiles and warheads on the ground and fuel them up for use as and when needed (ie. probably never). It is such an unlikely event and we can see them coming from most directions that there would probably be time to mount a long survey trip to the inbound asteroid. Shaving a few minutes off the intercept time is utterly futile and painting it either white or black is far more likely to be effective than the gung-ho militaristic nuke em big bang approach. Soft deflection methods are preferred by those in the know.
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(but not by the Dr Strangelove types who have been looking for a target to go and nuke ever since above ground testing was banned)
He seemed only to be pointing out that you were blissfully unaware of the telescopes belonging to other countries.
Probably to avoid upsetting the puritanical US religious right. Time for him to jump off his super yatch in mid-Atlantic methinks.
On a sunny day (Sun, 17 Jul 2011 17:44:12 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Bill Sloman wrote in :
;-)
Actually on the 65 million timescale: I recently did read that the data we have is not accurate because of changes in the earth orbit due to the satellites of other planets, Same for the other planets of course.
Actually on the 65 million timescale: I recently did read that the data we have is not accurate because of changes in the earth orbit due to the satellites of other planets, Same for the other planets of course.
have is not accurate because of changes in the earth orbit due to the satellites
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Ceres and Vesta are large asteroids in the belt mostly between Mars and Jupiter. The instability of numerical solutions for the evolution of the solar system has been known for ages see for example in 2004:
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The extent of the errors in the Earths solution at ranges outside 50My are somewhat smaller than you imply.
It is also easier to hide in a small hole if you are a burrowing mammal.
On a sunny day (Mon, 18 Jul 2011 10:33:06 +0100) it happened Martin Brown wrote in :
have is not accurate because of changes in the
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Ooops, now must have had a black out, was following the NASA pictures even..
There are some problems there. First they dig up these big ancient birds, they did calculations and found that they could never have flown (not enough muscle power). Now how to explain that? Maybe a thicker atmosphere back then, or less gravity, or both. Then there is the dinos. And then there is this theory that the continents fitted together once and earth was smaller. Maybe earth was hit by a huge ice ball of similar size and that way got the oceans and the increased mass? I really dunno if that would have been possible. The other thing I cannot accept is current idea that dinos learned to fly and became birds. In my view birds landed, found plenty of food, and then lost their feathers (no need to fly), and got big and fat and became dinos (some of them anyways). That seems 1000000% more likely then dinos having a sudden deep insight into aerodynamics and deciding to modify themselves with some wings, like pigs growing wings. So between all the science and pseudo science I think we know next to nothing, and most of our their() theories are too idiotic to even think about.
On a sunny day (Sat, 16 Jul 2011 16:27:57 -0400) it happened snipped-for-privacy@is.invalid wrote in :
Yea, well, he looks confident enough though. I think the next stage, before getting some cheap plutanium fuel rods for F*ckupshima, is simple candle wax:
have is not accurate because of changes in the earth orbit due to the satellites
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So you've just found out that the planetary orbits are chaotic over periods of the order of 100 million years or longer. This has been repeatedly pointed out to John Larkin in this forum, when he tries to tell us that because weather is chaotic, climate is unpredictable.
The asteroid impact that seems to have done for the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago was dated by radioactive decay, not orbital mechanics.
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