useless, but cool

I used to see little clouds form in the wing burble of fighter jets that were taking off or landing real fast. :-)

Cheers! Rich

It should be obvious that NASA is going nowhere. Martians will speak Chinese.

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onetribe - Occult Talk Show

Back during the Age of Exploration (to simplify a LOT), the ships set out to find markets for stuff and more stuff to take to market, along with ways to control land that had stuff or could grow stuff.

There's no stuff out there. Yet.

It's not that hard to get "out there" (it's only, what, a couple hundred km or so to the border?) but there's no stuff (yet) that yields a useful return on the investment.

The unmanned probes aren't as sexy but they do give us a look, albeit limited, at what's up there. So far, there doesn't seem to be any stuff that there's a market for, down here at the bottom of the gravity well.

If/when some stuff is found then boots on the ground become a pretty strong argument for who makes money on the stuff. Until then... meh.

--
Rich Webb     Norfolk, VA

Stuff "out there" worth visiting will be placed out there by Humans. The argument is over who gets to do it. My bets are on the Chinese. By 2020 the Chinese economy will be larger than that of the US by PPP measure. The spirit of Apollo died in Vietnam.

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onetribe - Occult Talk Show

Apollo accomplished nothing, and the Space Station carried on that tradition decades after Vietnam. People are finally waking up to the fact that putting people into space is expensive, dangerous, and useless.

There's a lot of vacuum out there. The Chinese are welcome to all they want.

John

Up until somebody goes out and snags a 150 gigagram iceberg from the rings of Saturn and drops it on Mars, making an atmosphere.

Cheers! Rich

"The events predicted for 2012 by the ancient Maya are not substantially different than those predicted by sages throughout the millennia. Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and other seers have predicted similar events marking 'the end of time.' And the Maya are only one of many indigenous cultures that have spoken of their deeply held vision for the events near and immediately after the end of time.

"All of these prophecies point to a relatively sudden awakening into much greater awareness for some or all of Humanity. What has been well hidden within the folds of your present four-dimensional world will be clearly revealed by the additional Light available in the unfolding of the new, five-dimensional world.

---

So, I guess it's up to you. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

On a sunny day (Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:47:21 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Look at the bigger picture, from a humanity point of view. Apollo was indeed a big step for mankind, first time anyone left the planet. In the long run one day the sun will go out, long before that it will burn earth and make it impossible to live there. You children's children, and further down the line will be extremely grateful if they have the technology to leave the solar system, and possibly the galaxy, before that.

It does not really matter who builds the bases, history shows that empires come, and empires go. We have the sum of all there achievements.

Chemical rockets firing people into LEO, or the moon, or even Mars are not useful steps towards another star; it doesn't scale. Let's let technology mature a few thousand years and maybe better ideas will pop up. There's no rush.

And it wouldn't be hard to move Earth into larger orbits as the sun expands, so there's no need to transport the population to another sun.

I wonder if people will still exist in another billion years, when the sun changes.

John

Come 2013 I'm really going to rub their noses in this shit.

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onetribe - Occult Talk Show

NASA's Apollo programme achieved exactly what it set out to do. Put a man on the moon and return safely back to Earth along with a few rock samples before the decade was out. It was a stunning accomplishment!

And it was worth going. Even if the rocks were not all that exciting chemically they are a lot older than anything found on the Earth.

Stuffing billionaire tourists into the ISS and doing high school science fair experiments in near zero g doesn't hack it at all.

And it is useful for the US to have a high lift capability rocket again. We will want ever larger and heavier science experiments in space.

It is now that we have robotics capable of doing almost anything that a human in a clumsy pressure suit can do in space. In the 1960's it was entirely different - only humans could do the job. Robots are less inclined to drop tools - and no one mourns a robot. Although the designers tend to be more than a bit upset when they vanish.

I still expect to see you foaming at the mouth when the Chinese plant a flag on the moon. Be fun if they went back to one of the Apollo sites.

Regards, Martin Brown

Agreed. It was stunningly well done and an important milestone.

Shock horror!! The sun will run out in 4 or 5 billion years. I must remember to cancel the newspapers.

It is so far down the line that humans will be long gone and replaced by whatever we evolve into. Dinosaurs lasted about 200 million years before being out evolved to put things into perspective.

You have been watching too much Bladerunner - we are never going to get out of the solar system with chemical rockets. The specific impulse just isn't there. Voyager the fastest man made objects ever has not yet reached the heliopause after more than thirty years and only another

40000 before it reaches the first star.

The fantasy of the rich all moving to another planet and leaving the plebs on the rancid remains of the Earth is a right wing fantasy.

Oh I expect a lot of hubris and hand wringing from the Americans after it happens. Much like they did after the launch of Sputnik.

Regards, Martin Brown

Previously as an astronomer I have wasted time debunking lunatic fringe End of the World bullshit. Last serious one was Heavens Gate when comet Hale-Bopp went past with a long period ephemeris.

But in this case I think it might be helpful to cull some of the credulous B-Ark material so here is one to get you all going ;-)

I wonder if the site will still be there on 1/1/2013 ?

Regards, Martin Brown

On a sunny day (Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:01:17 +0000) it happened Martin Brown wrote in :

Well, you should cancel those anyways and read online. Paper kills trees, and distributing stuff spreads viruses.

That sounds a bit like denialism? Sure if we sit and do nothing we will go the dino's way. I am not saying humanity will not, but we have the ability to use technology to spread this life form, whatever it may look like in the long run, across the universe. That may even be in a form we do not yet know, perhaps by shooting containers with DNA and some other stuff to the stars, the 'plans' so to speak, and let nature evolve, in millions of years, an other species like us, so seeding the universe. Maybe that is how we came about anyways?

I have never watched 'Bladerunner' that I know about.

Look I know all that stuff, there are other ways, now we will get Vasimir, there is nuclear, even that Voyager is still working after all that time on a RTG. It is just the LEFTIST WEENINES anti nuclear politics that have stopped us from going to other planets, HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I love that thing, very very nice.

Well, I was thinking everybody, rich or poor. Maybe we will even be able to slingshot the whole planet to elsewhere, technology advances.

Think about it, if 200 years ago, and what is that compared to how long humans have been around, if your were to mention that *everybody* on earth would have a little box the size of a slice of bread, and be able to talk and listen to anybody else, even far away, over the seas, you would have been locked up, possibly burned as a witch by the church, declared insane. And you should not mention the earth was round, it orbits the sun, and that people will be able to fly, color paintings (TV) in each house would show a reality and phantasy better then any painter that ever existed, magic (electric) lights would appear with the touch of a finger, or commanded by voice, people would ride in carriages without horses at incredible speed, weapons would destroy whole cities at once... the list is endless.

200 YEARS. And here you claim limits for the future? You should really kick the old neural net into gear, its rusted...

Sure, they may want to catch up, but the money printing presses could break down, and are made in China how to order new ones ?

The gas density at the "surface" of a red giant is much less than the athmosperic pressure a few hundres kilometers out of the Earths atmosphere. So in practice Earth would rotate around the sun for quite a while "inside" the red giant "surface".

Remember that the average solar density is in the same order of magnitude as water and if the Sun would grow from current 750.000 km radius to 150 million kilometer radius to engulf the earth, so the average density would be 1/8,000,000 of the density of water or

1/10,000 of the density of air at ground level.

The problem is of course that the power output from our star will increase significantly before this.

In order to change the orbital parameters of our planet to navigate into a more comfortable orbits and hence radiation levels, some solar sails on the ground could be used. After all, there is 5E9 years to do the trick.

Using a huge number of 1x1 m movable reflectors should be enough .eg. with the reflectors acting as spring morning reflectors and spring evening and autumn morning acting as absorbers would slowly harness the radiation pressure to change the orbital orbit and slowly increase the semi-major axle of the Earth to something similar than the orbit of Mars.

Paul

Rather a lot of bother. Simpler to just fire up the Sheewash drive.

--
Rich Webb     Norfolk, VA

I guess the big question is why aren't you upset that the big mean government wants to strap people inside these dangerous things and shoot them into space. There outta' be a law!

There's lots of angular momentum in the asteroid belt. It takes careful aiming but nearly no energy to nudge an asteroid into a hyperbolic fly-by of Earth and steal most of its momentum. The math has been done and it would work. Again, we'd have a long time to do it and there are lots of asteroids.

John

Sounds like another bird-brain idea "thunk" up by the climate change "scientists" ;-) ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
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