Green Baron

http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Cheat_sheet Look for: Isp = ( F1 + F2 + ... ) / ( ( F1 / Isp1 ) + ( F2 / Isp2 ) + ... ) It's a long time since i last used the cheat sheet :-) Edit: just saw this has allreday been answered in your thread in Gameplay-Questions ... nevermind

Actually my pet peeve was not just the fact that they de-/e-/re- or whatelsenotvolved about, that's just nonsense, but the fact that they calculated the process of millions of years of evolution with some sort of algorithm. Still, it's funny :-)

This reminds me of another one, hope it hasn't been mentioned before: In one of the star trek series (vovager ?) they met a race of, well, dinosaurs living in space that evolved on earth and went into space (ok, total nonsense so far). When they wanted to know where exactly these saurians derived from they told the computer to extrapolate the genome/outfit/whatever back 65My and ... voilá ... stood a dinosaur from late cretacious times. This is beyond total nonsense, it implies somehow that evolution has a direction and can be calculated. These are the moments that i think: more education to the people ! :-)

Well, around 70-80km/s rel. speed is something coming the opposite way, "wrong-way-driver" so to say. Things from the solar system can't be much faster. "Normal" relative speed is around 8-12km/s (question the eager space corvette captain bombarding a planet: why ?). Example: Halley's comet perihel speed around sun 55km/s, earth around sun 30km/s. Happy bombardment

We are that far: Because of a few anti-social contemporaries german law concerning radio controlled hobby (and this has a long tradition !) is about being reworked and not towards more liberalism. To everyone who refuses to see: stick to your smartphones and computer games, keep your hands off things too complicated for your minds ! I'm aware of getting a rule reminder soon, but i just needed to vent.

I was laughing out loud when that one dropped a wing-wheel, like: "Bah, useless anyway !". That guy at the end made it right: "f...orget the wheel, belly landing's safer". Is the U2 that difficult to land ? They are in good company: Never mind the german voice, the guy talks like an "instructor" trying to explain the mishaps. But we all see what's going on.

I must say that find the idea "we are early" and the implications of large distances between potential civilizations intriguing. The earlier a civilization, the more it sees from the surrounding universe. In an expanding an cooling universe the later they come, the more heavy elements they will have but the less they will see from their surrounding and the greater the distances will be. Einstein would be very sad about that ...

Ok, let's start a religious war :-) Nobody around here has an alt/az.-mounting. Maybe because nobody has an out-of-the-box equipment. There are quite a few private observatories, when hiking one can see the "mushrooms" in the landscape. Sadly i can't afford that ... I put it on the terrace and level it with the built in water bubble (that*s the difficult part, it's not necessary to level it but i just do it), polar axis roughly aiming at polaris, look through the viewfinder and turn the declination axis until big dipper or cassiopeia is in the right position, that's a movement out of the wrist. Two screws until polaris is where it should be and that's it. I bet i'm faster than anyone with a goto and 2 stars (better 3). And far more accurate. Just looked at the f.. handbook: 6 pages for goto-setup, 0,5 pages for manual setup (... ok plus 1 page polar finder description). See :-) ? Edit: i'm by far not criticising any out-of-the-box equipment like celestron, meade, etc. Many people can share that hobby for an affordable price with these telescopes/mounts, which would otherwise not be possible. Hough.

Hi, an elaboration could fill pages, that's why. DDE wrote a summary. Flood basalt, global icing, an equatorial desert, gas release after icing, an already stressed environment (well, it's always stressed out, isn't it :-) ?) ... could have played a role in the extinction event at the end of the permian. A long and warm period with epicontinental seas, global subtropic/tropic conditions (someone get me a gintonic), huge connected landmasses were the world of the dinosaurs. E.g.: elephants will not multiply on an island and maintain their size, an island would not be able to support enough individuals to keep the gene pool intact. They would either die out or get much smaller (like the last mammoth populations on siberian islands). I'm probably telling you a common place here, sorry if i do. I saw a misunderstanding in my post: you as the op were talking about already specialized mammals at the end of the cretacious, and i came up with the base of mammal evolution. I think we all agree that mammals, though not the dominant families of species, had a varied family tree and filled many niches at the end of the cretacious. And were better able to adapt to the new, gradually cooling and much more climatically diverse world than the saurians, the latter spreading rapidly into the air. Pls. excuse me, i don't get your second sentence ...

Am of the exactly opposite opinion but everyone as he/she can and wants ... :-) btw.: yesterday where perfect conditions here on La Palma ! The 1 out of 100 day ...

You are right, i simplified terribly to avoid wall of text which i hate to read in a game forum. It is not sure what caused the extinction event at the end of the permian, probably a combination of factors. The forming of a continent isn't a sudden thing. And in the fossil records of a few million years look quite compressed. There are other factors, climate and geographic conditions. In the >200my there was one ice age as well as a huge desert, both limiting life bearing capacity. Let me suggest a decent book on vertebrate evolution, like f.e. Benton: Vertebrate evolution (2014). It's a dry matter but compresses most knowledge in a readable format and tells when there are diverging views between scientists. I distrust Wikipedia greatly on all things evolution.

I should have looked more thoroughly: your mount is not equatorial but altitude/azimuth, this means one axis is upright, the other parallel to the ground. This is not optimal for fotography, especially long term exposures, because 2 axis' have to be motorized / continuously adjusted. But it's perfectly ok for the first steps ;-) cs (clear skies)

Well, the huge dinosaurs were products of a supercontinent that could support such massive organisms, their number declined with the narrowing of their niche when the large continent broke up. The impact just gave them them the rest, roughly 30-40% of landliving species died out. Hadrosaurus lived in france in the early palaeogene and one group of dinosaurs (saurischia) evolved into the birds, well, today are the birds. But it's very difficult to correlate the stratigraphy between america and europe. There are several models that try to explain the extinction event 66my ago. It's not quite clear at what time the first mammals ran about (therapsides shed some light on that), but probably late triassic, first traces reaching until the upper permian (see: cynodontia evolution, but i don't know whether wikipedia is the right place to look that up ...). So, year, at the end of the cretacious there was probably a whole zoo of them, or, to put it less pejorative, they had their niches and that was more than eating dino eggs and hiding from big fearsome reptiles. And they were most likely as effected from the KT-event as the reptiles. If i was a small mammal from early cretacious i'd live at twilight ...

25* magnification is a funny thing indeed, it probably was part of a set, thus the facter instead of focal length. 25mm then is 1500/25 = 60* magnification. For Jupiter get a 10mm (not less, you'll have a very dark and narrow picture and only magnify turbulences). There are quite decent 100° apparent field of view 9mm eyepieces (silly name explore scientific, but not as pricey as f.e. televue) ;-), and 70° 36mm (e.g. hyperion) for moon, clusters and nebulae. You'll love it. (i assmume you have a 2" connection and 1,25" reducing piece ?). From an astroshop or over the internet get a solar protection foil, a sheet A5 is about 20,- and tinker a cardboard enforced cap for your tube. Since your tube is completely closed it will heat up a lot when observing the sun, might even be damaged. Sun is interesting when it has sun spots or an inner planet or the moon crosses it (hi flat earthers !). A good idea to reduce risk when observing the sun is a projection screen: any white cardboard and an arm with a clip will do. Since your mount is equatorial you need electricity when in the field: a cheap car-battery, charger and 12v connector. A Bahtinov mask helps focussing (cut one out from black paper and laminate it in a copy shop). Glad to help :-)

Thanx. Well, it's not a new idea that life elsewhere is most probably carbon-based, given that carbon is quite abundant and quite reactive. I will not speculate about silicate or sulfur based "life"-forms. Buuuut :-) ... the following evolution, change in atmospheric gases, keeping a planets surface temp around 15°C for 4 billion years (interruptions to the cold side neglected), oxygen, iron, highly reactive metabolism, control loops between different environmental reservoirs for carbon (temperature) and other elements, plate-tectonics to renew surface material, magnetic field to shield from radiation, relatively quiet cosmic neighborhood, that sort of things is (imo) what forms the basis for a "successful" evolution to, well, more or less intelligent beings :-)

... for all the aliens & fiction in science & spaceflight ? Just suggesting

Somehow i'm glad it was no psychologist ;-)

... or Eric Berne: Transactional analysis ? Parent-adult-child models ?

Carl Jung didn't speculate about humanity's future. I read he had a strong influence on astrology (not my thing), but that's probably not what your looking for. Peter Pan Syndrome is Dan Kiley. If you could specify what the subject you remember is about maybe we can shed some light ...

Nothing. The military will try to find info for the ultimate weapon. Scientists will try to find the question for the answer. Google will try to find the best algorithm for guiding us all. Hackers will try to find one virus to rule them all. Secret services will try to find the best monitoring algorithm. Gurus will try to find "The lord's voice"(tm) ... and in the end they all give up and admit that it was just a faulty equipment. :-)

Wow, sir !

Yep, those were most likely satellites. There are a lot up there. It was already said that you should not point out of the window due to air currents, go out on the fields or in a park or maybe you know someone with a terrace, away from the center ? And give your 6" Schmidt-Cassegrain mirror 2-3 hours to adapt to temperature, maybe there are other starfriends nearby, try to join them, they can help a beginner a lot. Do you know http://www.cloudynights.com/page/index.html ? I live on an island where the sky can be very dark (and the internet very slow), got a 4.5" APO and an 8" Newton. The aerea around polaris is not the most interesting given the fact that the seeing in your vicinity (you mentioned city centre) is probably limited to >6mag, even with a telescope. The darker it is, the clearer the sky, the higher you are, the more you can see. Get a few decent eyepieces if you don't have already, 15mm, 22mm, 35mm or so, field of view 70° or more if your purse allows (there are calculators out there ;-), bear in mind that magnification is mostly limited by the seeing conditions, the higher the factor (it's focal lenght of the tube / focal length of the eyepiece), the snaller the field of view and the darker the sight. The tech sheet says 350 as max. for your tube, make that half ;-) You*ll find out :-) Have fun ! Edit: ah, and never, NEVER, N.E.V.E.R point at the sun unshielded ! You'll loose your sight ! Editedit: NGC 188 has an apparent magnitude of 10, that's rather faint. Probably you wont see it from out of a city center. Let me suggest to try objects with an apparent magnitude of 6 or higher (i. e. lower: 6, 5, 4, ....), especially when unsure about the telescopes alignment ...

For many people their belief is the only thing they have, i don't judge that. I for example "believe" that microbial life is "no big deal" given enough time in the right places under the right conditions, PB666 thinks it is. I have no hard data to support my "belief". Problems arise when "belief" is presented as "scientific finding", as a fact that implicitly everyone else has to adopt. Coming to science: as far as palaeontology is concerned nobody has enough data to support any hypothesis tell us about the probabilities of life-forming.There is a very nebulous basis about chemical elements (firewater, earth and air you know :-) and temperature and that radiation should not be too high plus some basic thoughts about what happened on earth once basic life had emerged (well, a fossil record). The fermi paradox or drake equation is a nice party/forum-play and that's it. Right now interstellar travel is a fiction, and it may remain so given the distances and the constraints. Edit: ninja'd by @Nibb31

trying to get back to the Fermi Paradox: - the chemical basis for life(tm) is not rare in the universe (do we agree on that ?) - the emergence of microbial life is no big deal, given a few hundred million years and reasonable conditions (liquid water, not too hard radiation, stable environment) (agreed ?) - the further development of ecosystems is another thing: it took the earth >3 billion years from microbes to the ediacaran. What about nearby radiation events like supernovae, gamma ray bursts ? A highly active sun ? Would they reset the process ? I don't know, probably not. Our neighbor stars have a similar history as the sun, the cluster the sun formed in is highly dispersed. Should we look for stars with a similar history (path around the galaxy's center) ? - after the forming of complex ecosystems the development took on speed and diversity, and quickly recovered after several extinction events. Evolution is quite effective once it starts. Is that repeatable elsewhere ? - to support a big brain the body needs a lot of spare energy. No species developed such a "useless" mass before. But without that brain we wouldn't ask ourselves why our landing legs explode. Is it likely that there is a similar development elsewhere, is it an outcome of evolution or just an incident (they happen) ? Was trying to avoid a wall of text. To make it even shorter: i don't think we can solve the problem until positive discovery (edit), because the development of a more or less intelligent species able to communicate was a succession / development (gimmi the right word) and i don't even faintly know the probabilities for any of the steps involved being successful.

Voted "yes" but it's improbable. Though it has something of a conquista ... so, go ahead :-)