Space: Final frontier is final resting place

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You really know how to sweet talk a girl, don't you?

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Are you referring to my good-natured intelligence or devilish handsome looks? :p

How is this, get ready to pull the covers over your head...

While floating here on this crust of land atop a small nuclear oven... There are objects floating around in space that we can't see. We don't have the technology to accurately scan the entire sky past a very close point. And the "eyes" we are using won't detect object not radiating electromagnetism. The sky is just too big and by the time we scan one section it takes years to go back to the original point and in that time some inter solar object, that can't be seen until it gets dangerously close... could come popping onto our beautiful blue soccer field. Hell the last large object that was considered dangerous was NOT even detected until it was going past.

Lucky for us, enough time has gone by that most things destined to collide have already done so. Knock on wood.

*Covers her ears*

Lalalalalalalalalala I'm not listening to you! :booty: :p

*talks anyway*

not to mention we rotate on a giant axis drifting in an outer arm of a galaxy, where that rotation is around a few billion years before we come back to our spot located in this space time. Through Hubble we can see "other" galaxies crashing into one another.... what if? In a billion years someone erected a stop light on this spot?

Makes a bit of earthy wobble seem small eh? :p At a more local level that great cup of coffe has precedence. Not forgetting the effect a shake in the earth has on human suffering when homes are destroyed. I lived through one of the worst Typhoons the pacific has ever had. I filmed the whole thing and had not hot water for 45 days. I am crazy but that warm cup of coffee does take off the bite.

BTW the launch of the Hubble telescope was my major collision with the inverse of my current political view (along with a deep space probe that will pass the outer planets). Those who oppose discovery are the witch hunters of early Scotland who burned non-believers on cold stakes of weak fire. But in a modern case, they worship nature of Gaia and nothing else. Their motivation is different but the outcome the same.

Shall we get into solar wind and the Van Allen Belts? :airoff:

Just to clarify my stance (and I think you understand it RoadClosed, I just want to be sure) it's not that I don't think we should involve ourselves in space exploration, "we" can explore it to everyone's hearts content. I'm all for it, just because I think we should know as much as possible about the things surrounding us as possible (so hopefully the next time we almost get hit by something, we'll know it before and not after it passes us :p ). However, I'm not going to be leaving my happy little space on Earth anytime soon. Outer Space holds no interest to me, and scares the crap out of me, actually. As a matter of fact, GO! the more of you that decide to live on the moon, or on Mars, the less of you I will have to fight in traffic on the way to the grocery store. :D

I like the by products having NOTHING to do with space but for our benefit... aluminum foil, plastics, ceramic heating elements, crystals grown without the effects and impurities of gravity, pictures never before possible without hubble, bioreactors, microwaves, video enhancement, heart monitors, pingers to warn porpoises of fishing net locations, pollution control, ozone monitors, tegnology to recycle tires instead of burning them, that is all I can think of without caffeine, but the list is long. The Bush initiative to go to Mars was pretty much silently killed by opponents and the media, but efforts like that push science and discovery to new areas.


The Van Allen belts may cause Deb to forever live in a closet. One of the conspiracy components of the trip to the moon as well.

Let’s not forget about Bush funding DAAD19-02-R-0005 Nanotechnology research, it was played down by the media as well. Talk about deep space exploration.

My cousin is a grad student currently working in the Nanolabs on quantum dots, specifically quantum information processing candidates. We all want to see quantum computation. The first country to get a real handle on Nanotechnology will be the biggest dog on the block.

Cheers for Nanotech! I like the concept of having hypoglycemia, lukemia, and other nasties along those lines cured by tiny little bots. Later on I expect we'll have the 'cancerkiller' nanites, among others. One lil robot, programmed to do one specific thing within the human body - x 100000 or so of them == some hellacious healing.

Road, I thought of you when I read this earlier today:

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(SPACE.com) -- The largest explosion ever seen in space reveals black holes to be more influential than expected, perhaps sometimes stifling star formation in a galaxy while gobbling up trillions upon trillions of tons of gas.

The eruption has been ongoing for some 100 million years, astronomers said Wednesday.

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The rest of the article is here.

I reckon we are safe for a while from a big hit as seen as the last one was only about 100 years ago in siberia. It hit and wiped out a couple a hundred square miles of forrest. Just imagine if it hit just a small bit later, like in the 1960, and a bit futher east,like either on moscow or washington what the result would have been....... Brrrrr!
As far i am concerned that is, on it own, a good enought reason to find out as much as possiable about our solar system as possiable.

As road said there is a lot a stuff we use today that are the direct result of space exploration, the solid state electronics used in things like cell phones and the metrological early warning systems to name but two more.

Here is another interseting view on space exploration......
Noahs Ark

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The European Space Agency's chief scientist has said there should be a "Noah's Ark" on the Moon, in case life on Earth is wiped out by an asteroid or nuclear holocaust.

Europe's first lunar probe is due to orbit the Moon in November
Speaking exclusively to BBC News at the British Association Festival of Science, Dr Bernard Foing said the ark should be a repository for the DNA of every single species of plant and animal.

Dr Foing is head of Europe's Moon missions, so his thoughts on matters lunar should be taken seriously.

He is concerned that if the Earth were destroyed, there would be little or nothing left of the rich diversity of life on the planet. His solution is to build a DNA library on Earth's satellite.

"If there were a catastrophic collision on Earth or a nuclear war, you could place some samples of Earth's biosphere, including humans, [on the Moon]," he said.

"You could repopulate the Earth afterwards, like a Noah's Ark," he said.

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