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We already have our planet 'circling the bowl', I don't think we should ruin the whole universe and litter it with crap the way we have our planet. No offence to the dead people... but then again what do they care.
I can understand space exploration for the sake of science but just for a bunch of rich people who want bragging rights?
What's next..The Simple Life - Space Edition.
I take the opposite approach. Space is infinite, or not, it is polluted with items infinitely more dangerouse and deadly than anything we've ever done on earth. Why not put it into the cosmos where it will be burned up by a star or collide with other objects in the infinite cold?
These canisters aren't being launched out of earth's orbit. Plus they're not made of thermal resistance properties. Now, "space junk" that is made of thermal resistance properties, I would be worried about. Any satellite larger than softball is tracked by our (NORAD) aKa Cheyenne Mt. Besides, the universe is not built on a human scale of time or size. There really is no way to get outside for some perspective.Quote:
Originally posted here by whatthe
I don't think we should ruin the whole universe and litter it with crap the way we have our planet.
I heard that the satellite canister with Gene Roddenberry's cremains was accidentally placed into a decaying orbit, and he'll crash down in Asia in a decade or two.
Back in 1992, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's ashes were carried into space and back aboard the shuttle Columbia.
Now, Roddenberry's widow, Majel Barett-Roddenberry, envisions a one-way trip to the stars for her husband and herself.
"It's somewhere to be a little celestial, perhaps, to find your place out there in the stars."
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9607/10/t_t/space.burial/
Now I have an issue with that, if the practice catches on. Earth's orbit is already polluted with so much debris that windows are necessary to get spacecraft out safely. Not only is weather a factor with rendezvous vectors and gravity, but they have to also time a hole in the "junk” It would be much better to launch it out of the solar system. The problem with that is, it would be super duper expensive and extremely difficult to navigate the solar system. Just shoot em at the nearest planet and see what happens. It will either crash or spin around the solar system like a pinball. Nothing more than another abject upon a billion billion meteorites and comets spewing highly volatile pollutants around Sol and her neighbors. Without the thin layer of electromagnetics around our rock, we would all die and not just from lack of oxygen.Quote:
These canisters aren't being launched out of earth's orbit.
The funny part is... they're developing a satelite (a long one actually) designed to clean up our orbit's junk (well, okay it does have several other uses also), and then drop it into the ocean (as well as being burnt up in the fall).
Just think how much money they've wasted, "I know, I'll send my dead cells into space so they can be pulled back down in a few years."
hah... On a lighter note...
And you were complaining about the trash in space before this?Quote:
What's next..The Simple Life - Space Edition.
I do agree I can't even stand it when I see trash on the road. Though I was referring to the comment of "the whole Universe".Quote:
Originally posted here by RoadClosed
Now I have an issue with that, if the practice catches on. Earth's orbit is already polluted with so much debris that windows are necessary to get spacecraft out safely. Not only is weather a factor with rendezvous vectors and gravity, but they have to also time a hole in the "junk” It would be much better to launch it out of the solar system. The problem with that is, it would be super duper expensive and extremely difficult to navigate the solar system. Just shoot em at the nearest planet and see what happens. It will either crash or spin around the solar system like a pinball. Nothing more than another abject upon a billion billion meteorites and comets spewing highly volatile pollutants around Sol and her neighbors. Without the thin layer of electromagnetics around our rock, we would all die and not just from lack of oxygen.
Talk about serious damage space junk travels at what 17,000 miles per hour in (LEO)?
Why not just launch all of our trash (dead bodies included) into the sun. Automatic trash incinerator, the ultimate in perminate trash removeale.
Lol that would be nice. Except it would cost like 100 billion dollars to get rid of a single barge or two of New York Trash.
RoadClosed old chap..that was sloppy for Cosmos.....
Errrrrrrrrrr.............is 9mm Parabellum that expensive over there? :p :DQuote:
Lol that would be nice. Except it would cost like 100 billion dollars to get rid of a single barge or two of New York Trash.
Well, I am polluting this planet...............I have bought the hole (to be dug) and am assured that there is no rent.........................
lol, it's not just a straight shot to the sun. A projectile would have to be guided around planetary gravity and solar orbiting objects. A trajectory into the sun would be a long, complicated adventure spanning many years. ;) A vehicle with enough propellent and thus thrust to rip straight to the sun is inconceivable by modern methods. Not to mention the lift and speed required to achieve orbit for say, two barges full of trash. The heaviest load EVER lifted into space was only around 11,000 pounds. Depending on who you talk to, so build in a margine of error and say it's 15,000 pounds for a communications satellite. Now a barge of beer cans wouldn't weigh that much but even to propel a SMALL vehicle with no payload into space is 200 Million or so. You can get it cheaper, but 1 in 4 space launches are terminated because vehicles fail to reach orbit.Quote:
is 9mm Parabellum that expensive over there
I can't personally think of anything worse than floating around in outer space indefinately when I'm dead. I'll take my little hole in the ground and like it, thank you very much.
And on a completely different thought...scientists are now saying that the earthquake/tsunami in the Bay of Bengal caused the earth to wobble on its axis. That's a scary enough thought to me, I don't think the idea of shooting loads of dead people into outer space is a great idea, what if it pulls us off course and we end up heading straight for the sun, instead of dead people? I'm really not sure how much fiddling with things we don't understand is a good idea when you're talking about the lives of the entire earth.
The only way that will happen Deb is if an external body collided with the earth in such a manner as to cause our orbit to decay. Then it would not be instantaneous the decay could take centuries or millinuim but who would care? We would all be dead from the impact because it would have to be MUCH larger than any in the past, including the one that killed off the dinasaurs (if you apply that theory). I would worry more about the dangers of soccer and driving to the games. ;)
Deb, where'd you get that story on the earth wobbling please?
I read it on CNN a few hours ago. Not in the article: the earth already wobbles you know. The North pole moves in a curcular motion and the rotation of the earth is not constant. This is evident in the application of leap seconds from time to time but you would never know. The wobble is an effect on the waves displacing mass and the earthquakes permentantly shifting the landscape. BTW this is the 4th largest earthquake in 100 years. That means there were 3 others more powerful, though less devestating to the human element. The actual degree of wobble won't be known yet but it may be worse than normal since the ocean mass was not spread as even in both directions this time around. Normally the waves going say east and west cancel each other out. But based on my observation Hawaii reported no wave increase and California less than a foot so I wonder how uneven the mass was distributed?
Even so the forces involved even at 100 million tons of TNT it is insignificant compared to the force that keeps the earth rotating and obiting.
CNN
BlackIce, here is the article I read about it. Still CNN, just a different article. I did find it interesting that the earth wobbles as much as 33 feet in an average rotation. I find that alarming! :eek: However, apparently it's been doing it for millions of years now, so I guess I'll go to bed tonight anyway.
I don't know, space is just one of the things that frightens me. I don't have any fascination with it, I don't want to go there, dead or alive, I damn sure don't want to go on vacation to the moon, and I don't want to think about all the things floating around out there that might smack into us one day. It's not like we can all go into a bomb shelter and hide if we get hit by a huge meteorite that smashes us out of orbit or something. I know it's kind of an irrational fear, but I think the word for that is phobia. :p
Ironically enough, my son finds outer space fascinating, and at the rate he's going now, I'll probably wind up with an astronaut for a son. :D
I plan to be launched into space when I die.
I shall orbit the earth in a 1964 Shelby 427 S/C.
I don't give a damn what I hit.
Deb the earth has only become habitable in the last 100 million years. Imagine what it was like 100 billion years ago before the Earth was formed. It's a reality and probably a fact that we humans may experience massive alterations in climate and land mass configuration. google "Pangea" if you weren't into science as a kid you may have missed its fascination. The earth crust is like floating grass over a lake or bog, only our bog that holds up the continents is a massive "lake" of liquid metal and elements. And all of that just floats around in the “space” you have a phobia of.
Thanks, I'm going to sleep so much better now that I know I'm bobbing around in space floating on a lake of liquid metals RoadClosed. You really know how to sweet talk a girl, don't you? :p
Are you referring to my good-natured intelligence or devilish handsome looks? :pQuote:
You really know how to sweet talk a girl, don't you?
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:
The rest of the article is here.Quote:
(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.
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
Quote:
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.
Another bit from Nasa about how that quake changed Earth.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2005-009
Interesting stuff.
(refering to the article)
Wow imagine detecting a change in 2.68 microseconds. Well we all better set our clocks off by 0.00000268 seconds. :D Once that builds enough they will issue a leap second subtraction for LOD to the atomic clock in Boulder and then the GPS system. That would take a while. Nice article.