Diche Bach

I agree that robots are slower, clumsy, and perhaps prone to 'stupid' accidents. I'm reminded here of several that just plain "got stuck." Or which suffered some serious malfunction that an astronaut wouldn't have been vulnerable to. Apart from that, I think the case is made pretty clear in the preceding few posts that they are superior as tools of science. This will only be more true as time goes on. When you consider how relatively close the moon is (virtually no communications lag eh?) I think that X-billion dollars spent on 20 unmanned missions, which could go on providing active means for data acquisition for literally _decades_ (Those antiquated Voyagers!!! OMG, built in the 1970s!!! Those marvelous guys are still out there, doing their jobs!! Its breathtaking and FAR more romantic than the fact that a few humans landed on the moon, spent a few hours and then ran home to the warmth, oxygen and green of Earth), and without any risk of human life versus X-billion spent on 2 manned missions, and WITH risks to human life . . . well it seems obvious to me, though I do not insist that anyone agree with me. One other point: robots may be a bit slow to move around, clumsy and vulnerable to stupid accidents like getting their wheel caught on a rock or ditch that mission control just didn't happen to see from their cameras . . . but humans suffer 100 of their own foibles, which are most aptly summarized in the simple point that, humans die. I am just as much a romantic science fiction geek as any of you, and I still get that little surge of elation when I hear Armstrong say "One small step . . ." But I just cannot buy the argument that (at this point) manned space flight can hold a candle to unmanned space flight. In 50 or 100 years when there really is more infrastructure in place, escape velocity is cheaper, life support systems are more self-sustaining and failure proof, and there really are good economic reasons for humans to be up there in the cold black awfulness of space . . . sure I bet there will come a time when it really is prudent to have people going into space, even deep space. We just don't seem to be there yet. Lets let the engineers and technicians lead the way for a while and just marvel at the wonderful images, and other data that our machines are able to transmit back for us all to savor from the comfort of an arm chair. I just do not think this is true, at least not within the context of the current extraterrestrial infrastructure we have in place. A well designed moon rover project will presumably be just as robust, versatile and resilient as any the currently ongoing probes and rovers on Mars. That means that everyday mission control will be checking in with the robots multiple times per day, and making full use of all of its capacities to maintain itself, observe its surroundings, and collect information, even to test hypotheses. Given that there is no 'rush' with a robot to get it done before the oxygen runs out, I just do not see how a human being there inplace of the robot offers anything except greater cost, greater risk, a shorter window of opportunity to perform missions, and a more limited cumulative possibility for information acquisition. Not to mention risk of a human catastrophe = VERY bad PR hit for space exploration. Fast forward 100, 200 or so years into the future. Imagine a true "moon base" in which 20 humans can safely and comfortably live for long periods (whether self-sufficient, or somewhat dependent on resupply from Earth is slightly irrelevant). Your argument holds more water in this future context, tis true. With humans in a permanent moon base, the intuitive, qualitative and creative aspects of human eyes "on scene" could honestly be fruitful. But in a context where the humans are constrained to short EVAs and a short visit to the moons surface, that just doesn't seem to be true. Not only that, but even once we have a moon base, a great deal of the actual 'grunt' work is likely to be done by . . . (drum roll!) ROBOTS! What is likely to be the best way to initiate the process of building said futurisitic moon base? Sending up massive amounts of supplies to allow astronauts to spend protracted periods on the moon working as construction workers? Seems unlikely. Again, robotic automated module installers would seem to be the first few steps at least. Clearly there is at present, and will be in future a needed symbiosis between manned and unmanned aspects, but that doesn't convince me that there are are present good reasons to put people on the moon. Particularly in the absence of a clear statement of what the specific reason for putting people on the moon IS, other than "humans are versatile."

Hold on just a second here. How exactly does an expert in physical sciences have any more insight or knowledge about that which is unobservable and quite likely unknowable than anyone else? I hate to say it, but here we see the arrogance of science. There are a "boundaries" to what can be observed either directly or indirectly and because science depends on observation that means there are boundaries to science, in fact there are MANY of them. It is true that what we can observe is useful to disqualify a broad range of explanations for those things that we cannot observe. It is also true that, as time progresses, the boundaries of what we can observe keep getting pushed further away from our proximity in time and space. But the simple fact is, there may never come a time when we can say with full confidence: Okay, we can now observe EVERYTHING. There is absolutely nothing about which we cannot collect direct observations. That means there will likely always be boundaries to science and that means that lighthearted speculation about the reality beyond those boundaries is no more 'ignorant" than pseudo-authorities insisting that only they are qualified to speculate about what lies beyond the boundaries of observation.

OMG Geeks with way too much time on their hands . . . Marcus Aurelius - Roman Emperor - Roman State (Roman Empire disambiguation) - Republican (Roman Republic disambiguation) - ancient Roman civilization - civilization (yeah! castes, slavery, writing, war!!) - polities - state - centralized government - power - social science - academic disciplines - knowledge - information - sequence - mathematics - quantity - property (Philosophy) - modern philosophy - philosophy ! Phew! Lets try one more Mongongo nut - Family (biology) - biological classification - scientific taxonomy - Discipline (academic) - academic areas of study - knowledge - information - sequence - mathematics - quantity - property (Philosophy) - modern philosophy - philosophy I'm reminded here of a couple famous quotes by Kevin Warwick, cyborg professor: Actually just for kicks, lets see how it works from HIS page Kevin Warwick - British (United Kingdom disambig ..) - sovereign state - and yep, right back into the same loop as when starting from Marcus Aurelius. I smell a conspiracy.

I was gonna start a new thread, but this one seems plenty good and probably could stand to be a bit more reoriented toward 'serious' questions . . . Seeing that picture of all those objects in the inner solar system (much less the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud, or for that matter the planets and moons themselves) got me to thinking . . . well, a lot of the discussions on here seem to eventually lead around to the same topic: how much wealth is there to be had in the solar system? I've also been playing X Universe series games (already traded up to the most recent X3 Albion Prelude) and they are all about interstellar trade empire building. Are there enough precious commodities in the more remote parts of space to really be profitable? What will be the main 'imports' from outer space to Earth in the near future? How will it work?

P.T. Barnum would be so proud Maybe there IS a sucker born every minute?

Damn that is dirty . . . the solar system I mean. Just look at all those rocks and dirt littered all over the place.

As I've been reading the past few pages of this thread, and in particular the claim that any nations desire to send humans back to the moon is "for science," this is precisely the question that occurs to me. I see very few scientific reasons for people to be in space at this time, beyond the international space station or a similar low Earth orbit space station. Any science that humans can do on the moon with a one-shot trip can I would think be accomplished more safely and cheaply by robots. Not only that, but robots are semi-permanent and provide data over long spans of time. Humans require air, water, food and toilets. Humans want to come home. Humans have families. Humans can die. Humans are far more expensive to 'grow' and train than robots. If a robot can answer 99% of your scientific questions or even only 94%) for 65% the cost and effectively 0% the "risk" (in terms of human welfare) then robots are the way to go. Not only that, but what exactly do we (meaning HUMANITY) want out of space in the long-term: well-being, prosperity, knowledge, comfort, inspiration. Space can probably help us with those long-term goals, but we've got to take long-term visions for culminating the goals. Sending humans anywhere they do not 100% need to be in space at this point (and here I include with my eyebrows raised NASA's decision to send astronauts to rendezvous with an asteroid!?) does not seem to me to be contributing to the long-term vision. Long-term we want a substantial industrial and scientific presence on the moon (an international one in which the rewards are shared by all those who participate), a place to build amazing products, including space ships with the realistic capacity to travel efficiently and rapidly to the more remote parts of the solar system (Mars, asteroids, etc.) to survey the economic and scientific prospects there as well. Until real plans are on the board, I see little reason for humans to be landing on the moon. How can a human do anything at this point on the moon that contributes to the long-term vision of providing stepping stone to expand humanities reach in the solar system that a robot cannot provide? The only obvious motivation to send people anywhere (including NASA's intent to send people to an asteroid) seems to be propaganda.

Depending on which colored line you decide is "the right model" in the Holocene graph, Earth might be hotter now by 0.2 to 0.5 C than at any time during the past 2000 years. However you'll note that there are plenty of episodes during the preceding 2000 years where the slope is approximately equally steep to the current upslope. Certainly the idea that there is something unusual going on and that anthropogenic factors are contributing to it is an important hypothesis that deserves serious attention. But this standpoint, a calm rational and scientific standpoint, is many orders of magnitude less pronounced than the standard "sky is falling" Al Gore rhetoric complete with political party affiliation, taxation policy and moral high ground hyperbole. Not to mention that the observed change does not (as I argued in the preceding post) prove the cause no matter how strong the correlation coefficient. If we are going to do the right thing, then we need to know what the right thing is. If we go whole-hog on policies that turn out to have been "partly the right thing to do" while we ignore other potential policies, then we have not done the best thing. The observation of a very strong correlation between estimated temperature and carbon emissions since the industrial revolution begs the question of: what about right before the industrial revolution (ca. 1840)? Based on that fairly low resolution graph (which is based on fairly low resolution measures as we go back in time) it sure looks to me like temperature has been rising since about 1800 (esp. if we take the red line model). If recent changes are explained primarily by carbon emissions, then why were temperatures evidently rising before carbon emissions went up? This of course is to say nothing of how industrial carbon emissions can explain every other hump and bump in that graph. When we go back further in time the alarmism about current observations becomes even less rational. Looking at the Holocene graph and again, depending on which model (which colored line) you favor, we might at present be getting into the "highish" range but there is not a single model there that shows clearly we are "way off" relative to past fluctuations. Also note again: plenty of very steeply sloping and rapidly oscillating up and down fluctuations over the past 8 or 10 thousand years cine the end of the last Ice Age. Look at the red, blue and turquoise lines at about 5000 before the present . . . all three show a major increase in temperature that (based on the lines on the graph) were equally as rapid and even larger in maximum amplitude than we think we might be experiencing right now. Lots of other ups and down all the way across the graph. Are we 'out of bounds' relative to the last 2000 years? Maybe by a fraction of a centigrade. But in geological terms 2000 years is nothing, and if we look at a broader picture, 10,000 years (and excluding the last Ice Age which is obviously a huge outlier period) it becomes quite obvious that what we are experiencing right now (and assuming it is accurate given it is a hyper precise measures for the last ~30 years trailing on an additional 100 years of decreasingly good measures back to the mid 19th century) is not the least bit anomalous. So what about when we expand our view to a truly broad scale: the entire Phanerozoic, the last 550 million years since life really began to flourish on Earth? "Current" patterns (meaning those over the last 500,000 years) exhibits far more fluctuation than at nearly any time previously . . . well, actually that graph doesn't show you that, so you'll just have to take my word for it until I can find one that shows it . . . however overall trend for the last 100 million years or so (the black line in the last graph) has been a pattern of distinct cooling, albeit with at least two major warming events. Based on that, we are cooler now than at any time during the past 100 million years, so it shouldn't be a big surprise if things are warming up a bit. Whatever was driving all those ups and downs in Earth's climate and temperature over all those millions of years is unlikely to have just "stopped" working once human beings started burning coal in factories and running steam engines and stuff.

I for one am ashamed of how badly Voyager 1 is being treated in this thread, and I hope you haven't driven it away for good. Maybe if we transmit nice messages to it, it will come home after all. So basically if you assume the interstellar magnetic field will be oriented in a different direction to that of Sol, you must scratch your head in puzzlement that it has yet to leave the solar system. Whereas if you assume that the interstellar field is aligned with Sol's, then these guys are suggesting the boundary has already been crossed. Sounds like we need to send more probes, fast.

Rapid changes in climate over the span of decades and centuries, as well as years with extreme weather are nothing new. The best archaeological and historical evidence indicates that "insane" changes have been with us humans for tens of thousands of years and likely longer than that. One version of climate during the last 2000 years (don't ask me if it is or is not perfectly accurate, I don't know. The point is it is published and it reflects empirical observations stretching back decades) Holocene temperature variation (the last 10,000 years). and Phanerozoic climate change (the period during which life has exploded alternately shown periods of adaptive radiation and mass extinction) Unless historical geologists, paleoclimatologists, etc., have been engaged in a massive conspiracy for the past 50 years, there is ample basis to regard fears of the current patterns as being "insane" as being excessive. ADDIT: here is another wiki page I just stumbled onto which is quite interesting, and may suffice to convince skeptics that the climate during Earth's past might not have been so invariant after all. Timeline of environmental history A page I spotted with a rather dramatic figure . . . Meltwater pulse 1A 15,000 years ago most of northern Europe, northern North America and Russia were covered in massive ice sheets up to a couple thousand meters thick. At that time sea level was so low that one could have walked across the Bering straits that presently separate Siberia from Alaska and also large portions of the Indonesian archipelago were connected via dry land. When these masses of ice melted (for whatever reasons, and I can guarantee you that humans had almost NOTHING to do with it), sea level began to rise and it did not stop until it had come up by some 120meters, where it has largely stayed for the past few thousand years. In light of these massive fluctuations in temperature and sea level, current observations may well be nothing more than trivial and ephemeral fluctuations over-interpreted as indicators of long new cycles.

Oh I agree 100%. Did you perceive me as saying something contrary to what you have said here? It sounds to me like we are in agreement: a single minded and highly politicized focus on a single 'explanation' for the world's environmental woes doesn't seem to serve these broader and longer-term concerns that you describe. ADDIT: and btw, I consider myself to be an ardent "Environmentalist" though I am a skeptic when it comes to the prevailing models of anthropogenic climate change. I also find myself to be at odds with the way certain environmental groups ostracize half of the political spectrum. For example, Sierra Club made a point of vilifying Republicans for some reason. That to me is stupid. Everyone, of all ideological, and political orientations, races, creeds, colors, religions, etc., MUST BE AN environmentalist or we are in the long-term 'screwed.' Playing the "environmentalist" card by vilifying 'the other' is contrary to the essential spirit of environmentalism. In my opinion it is largely irrelevant whether it is "getting warmer" or not, for the simple reason, it has got warmer, and colder, and then warmer again, and then colder again numerous times in the past, and long before humans initiated industrialization. I am simply not convinced by a simplistic univariate correlation in a context where a pre-existing multi-variable dynamic process is known to have been in operation. By that I do not mean to "deny" the possibility that anthropogenic forces are in part (or in full) responsible for the observed warming; I merely ask "What about the Earth and cosmic forces that have been causing climate change for hundreds of millions of years previously?" The reason that "correlation does not equal causation" is not because correlation is irrelevant; it is because it does not offer a clear basis to show mediation, much less moderation between two variables. To do that you need additional forms of data, ideally experimental data. Correlations between the outcome variable "observed global median temperate" (OGMT) and the predictor variable "carbon emission" (CE) could in fact be a result of myriad causal processes. The simplest of course being: 1. Increases in CE are directly causing OGMT and are _the only_ factor that is having _any_ influence on OGMT. In this model, we can say that CE is both a necessary and sufficient cause of OGMT. It fully mediates the outcome of OGMT. This is, as I understand it, the model that is put forward as the prevailing model at present, and IMO it is completely untenable for the simple reason that we know beyond any shadow of doubt that CE is not the _only_ factor that can have any influence on global climate. There are myriad other anthropogenic and natural factors that must be accounted for, and no, the strength of the correlation coefficient is absolutely NOT sufficient to discount the need for solid quantitative estimates of (at least) the most important of these other factors. That is just simply not how multi-variable causal systems work. Maybe physicists can get by with that sort of simple deterministic model, but is simply does not work in ecological or meteorological systems. 2. Increases in CE are a result of some other variable that is causing both OGMT and CE to change in parallel. I think we can safely rule out this sort of model; it is obvious that humans have been pumping out a lot of carbon this past century. 3. The correlation between CE and OGMT is in part or in whole spurious and a substantial proportion of the observed variation in OGMT can be accounted for by other variables. Here we come back to the myriad of other anthropogenic and natural factors that need to be considered. Industrialization has brought with it incredible changes in human impact on the planet and a wide range of these seem tenable to me as contributors to OGMT, including just as an example: methane emissions, the heat sinks of major urban areas, the sheer number of heat producing vertebrates on the planet, degredation of ecosystems more generally. In sum, I share concern about the welfare of the Earth and all of its life. But I am not convinced that the Politco-Scientific Movement that we could call "Anti-Global Warming Activism" is in fact the best way for us to go forward in understanding the threats to our planets welfare and the ways that we can realistically and ethically reduce or mitigate those threats.

10) Santa Claus and his elves

Along with: ferns (145 my) alligators (55 my) turtles (220 my) In truth, all of these 'ancient' and 'relatively unchanging' taxa have undergone substantial adaptive radiation and diversification. But the point Shifty is making is quite valid

If I find I am ever forced to adopt a touchscreen technology for my home PC, I will quite frankly, sell it all, and move to Alaska to become a fur trapper, living with my papillon far from the electrical grid. I really dislike the incarnations of touch screen technology that I have so far experienced, and the fact that I have been using a keyboard and mouse for 25 some odd years makes me quite loathe to adopt some gimmicky crap that might only work as well as what already works just fine.

Enough of this!

There are a number of themes in science fiction that suggest good economic reasons for moon bases (helium 3 mining, solar energy harnessing, other minerals to a limited extent, micro-gravity industry, low gravity solid ground on which to build interplanetary space craft, etc.). There are obviously ample scientific reasons (myriad questions that can be studied in virtually _all_ disciplines of natural and physical sciences), but I suspect those will not afford a sufficiently rapid return on economic investment to be the initial motivation to 'go back.' I'm not even sure China will ultimately find it to be worth their while to expend the vast sums to do a bit of flag waving. In the absence of something like an intense low-intensity "Cold War" rivalry, it is difficult to imagine what could possibly make it a worthwhile investment. I believe it was Geschosskopf in a thread some days or weeks back that, who pointed out that the single most important next step for humanity to achieve its 'dreams' of space exploration and exploitation is to devise better means to defeat the tyranny of Earth's gravity well. The cost to get stuff into orbit in the first place, much less to escape velocity are the main boundary that make things like returning to the moon questionable if not unviable.

Build rocket . . . boom!

Congratulations!

Based on the Youtubes I've watched it looks exceptionally tedious and dull.

I applaud you for asking this question Monkeh. Your idea of why sounds as viable as anything I've ever heard. I tend to think we cannot ever know the answer to such things, simply because they are beyond our perceptual boundaries. What I mean by that is best explained from a personal experience and how I have reflected back on it over the years. In college I had a biology class that included a lab. I was lucky in this lab to have been one of the few students to have spotted an amoeba in the microscope. Pretty much the entire class took turns making observations of it, while the Teaching Assistant stepped in periodically to keep the scope focused with the amoeba in the center. If memory serves, we stimulated it with light, we even put a tiny needle point or something like that in there. What really amazed me about this thing was that, it was able to respond to our 'signals' (the light). This made me realize that, while an amoeba can perceive my indirect actions and respond to those actions (as can many organisms with less extensive sensory, perceptual and 'cognitive' apparatus than ourselves) this simple fact of being able to perceive manifestations of humanity obviously does not mean that the amoeba can 'understand' a human. An amoeba is nothing but a little bag of chemical factories running on genetically determined fixed action patterns, cruising through its liquid environment in response to signals of where to find food and avoid predators. It has nothing like a "nervous system" much les a complex central nervous system. Nonetheless, I had seen it for myself, an amoeba had a very limited capacity to respond to my actions, despite its scale of existence being thousands of times smaller than my own. I suspect the same scaling issues must apply to we humans and the Universe itself. The 16 billion light year bubble that we can see with our 'sophisticated' telescopes seems enormously vast to us (as I'm sure the amoeba's petry dish must seem to 'her'). But what lies beyond that bubble? What lies within/beyond those black holes? Your explanation seems as viable as any; but the main point I'm making is, it may be that we are simply physically incapable of perceiving or understanding what is beyond these boundaries of our perception and thinking. If the 'entity' or process that is beyond those boundaries of our current abilities to perceive is so massive and complex that our universe appears to be little more than a petry dish to it, then short of us evolving into a different animal with new means of perception (cyborg anyone?) we may never really be able to comprehend it.

I think Jackissimus raises an excellent point, open discussion has been made heretical and that is not a good context in which learning and knowledge are generated. It is really quite deplorable. Good theories are transformed into scientific law, not by browbeating and ostracizing those with questions, but by allowing anyone with questions to "throw it against the wall and see if it sticks." I fear that in 20 years when the current generation of 'leaders,' lobbyists, and activists are past their prime and the evidence that the story is far more complicated than the rhetoric conveys simply cannot be ignored any longer, that suddenly there will be a sad denouement and a couple generations of well-meaning environmentalist young people (now middle aged) will realize that, all that passion they felt for that single silly model, may well have blinded them to the 1000 other issues that had all along been contributing to climatic changes and/or other forms of environmental degradation: nitrogenous wastes, heavy metals waste, wasted precious metals in electronic, continued expansion of invasive species and pathogen, extinction of species that we could've saved (gray and little brown bats, African wild dogs to name only acouple that are likely goners within the next 20 years) . . .

Despite whatever consensus exists, I remain skeptical that anthropogenic forces are the sole and sufficient explanation for recently observed changes in climate. Explaining recent patterns of climate change may necessitate inclusion of anthropogenic factors, but that is not the same as those factors sufficing to explain the changes. Earth's climate has changed more or less forever, and in particular during the past ~1.3 million years of the Quaternary period, tremendous evidence indicates a pattern of more rapid and extreme oscillations in climate than the much more gradual pattern of cooling during the preceding two eras of the Cenozoic. So in sum, dramatic and possibly quite rapid variation in climatic patterns has been the rule, not the exception for the past 1.2 or so million years, and this pattern over the last 1.2 million years is a clear departure from a generally slower and more gradually fluctuating climate during the preceding 65 million years. None of this in any way 'disproves' the signs that Earth's climate has been warming, that greenhouse gases have increased, that sea level is rising, and that weather patterns have become more erratic, and extreme. Those observations appear superficially to be sound and valid, and to the extent that the aforementioned "consensus" is specific to those observations, then it seems fitting. The problem I have with the standard rhetoric of climate changes 'science' going all the way back to the IPCC findings (which incidentally get quoted by everyone still to this day) was that there has been virtually noconcern with developing models that would address how anthropogenic forces were interacting with the pre-existing patterns of fluctuation and change that the geological record (and historical records) show quite incontrovertible to have 'been there' when the industrial revolution ensued. Since then I have yet to see any advocate of climate change science, and the handy moral/ideological/political compass it tends to be presented alongside even bother to acknowledge that something might be gained from including geological climate change into "global warming" anthropogenic change models, much less serious efforts to integrate insights about natural climatic variation into such anthropogenic models. This combined with the moralistic and politicized tone and agenda have made me rather cynical about the whole thing. As I've said in other threads, I believe that reducing our ecological footprint is a good thing, nah an essential thing. But focusing on one supposed culprit, even specifically for warming trends, is a risky venture at best. I fear that the cult like focus on carbon emissions may well have distracted our attention from other equally important environmental problems.

So okay, a 500km death star (complete with glowing evil traces of volcanic MAAGMAA) comes hurtling out of the cosmos and we're toast. Literally! ToAST! GET it!? Love the fear mongering the Discovery Channel has resorted to capture people's attention. "It is estimated that impacts of this sort have happened six times during the Earth's violent history" . . . Well sure! During the first couple billion years, referred to as the Late Heavy Bombardment Phase before the messy solar system got swept up and the Earth and other planets were 'still in the oven' and not quite fully baked Short of a rogue planet hurtling in from interstellar space I cannot imagine how a 50km object, much less a 500km object is a real threat. If OP is irritated that this is OT just let us know and we'll take it to a new thread. But given the thread's topic is "Fusion of Jupiter" I figure you're probably as open to a bit of wild speculation about big cataclysmic events as any of us

What's the rush? I say do it "right" not "fast"

Okay, so 5km diameter, 1000 kg/m^3 density, 45 degree angle, striking 1000m thick sedimentary rock (St. Louis, MO lets say). Distance from impact, 6,700 km (London), which is about halfway around the planet. In sum, based on my first simulation effects seem negligible that far away, though I cannot get the site to run at the moment to double check if it postulates any climactic effects. A global winter I think humanity can survive. After all, our ancestors survived the last few ice ages and that was before they had writing, metal, plastics, firearms, etc. A severe global winter could be very, VERY destructive. But even if it kills off 99.9% of humanity, we have been through at least one severe bottleneck event where we were reduced to only about 10,000 individuals (about 200,000 years ago) so there is a precednet for us being able to do it again, especially now that we have advanced technology. Depending on the sort of social order that arose out of that sort of catastrophe, in the long-term it might almost be the best thing for Earth and humanity.