Slashdot Mirror

"Humble" is a long running joking nickname for the MOST telescope: https://www.astrobio.net/retro...

As it happens, I viewed the Europa Report last night.

I'm not sure whether they revised Europa to have more atmosphere (by a factor of about 7 billion) or they revised water to have an entirely different triple point (with Jupiter so close, who knows?)

I guess the main theme of the movie is just how quickly all that intensive drilling wears off during a long, monotonous space flight with inadequate radiation shields (the audience can only presume the crew went through some kind of training regime, even in the quick & dirty, bottom line corporate context).

You also have to question their psychological preparation. Their first response to any difficult task is to immediately lose all track of time/safety (unless someone is constantly nattering at them through their helmet radio, if these ever work).

Hiding from Jupiterâ(TM)s Radiation — January 2009

The radiation in Jupiter's belts is a million times more intense than in Earth's belts. For this reason, spacecraft—such as the Galileo orbiter—have typically tried to spend as little time as possible inside the belts. Although the radiation is generally well-understood, no one has yet figured out precisely what the effect is on Jupiter's moons.

The Europe Report in real (ish) life: we came, we saw, ventured ten feet out the door, discovered that our helmet radios were a steaming POS, immediately cancelled the EV, packed up our things, and returned home again, as we were comprehensively trained to do.

Better luck next time.

With humans on board, every milestone is preceded by ten prudent abortions.

I can't recall a time when I wasn't firmly in Dyson's astrochicken camp.

Astrochicken, Dyson explained, would be a one-kilogram spacecraft unlike any before it. It would be a creation of the intersection of biology, artificial intelligence and modern microelectronics—a blend of organic and electronic components.

Ever space movie tries to divert attention to the heroic, and every time they only manage to make the human crew look like an even bigger liability than I thought before.

The other option is one-way tickets. Which is actually way more believable than this cowboy crap.

Within fifty years, The Valhalla Implant could lie within easy reach. Plus, having redirected all that sexual energy (with a pink protein extracted from spawning salmon) it would also resolve the extra long voyage skoodlypooping-prohibition group sulk.

Nerdfighter CAPTCHA dictionary

Touche, but since we are talking about Mars and providing references: how about these? The last one even explicitly mentions microbes that can survive on perchlorates.

It's a fairly safe bet that the environment of Mars will not pose any threat to the types of life that could survive the journey unprotected, in the vacuum of space, far colder than even the coldest night on Mars.

Paleontology will always have findings like this that push dates around without mercy. It is one of the sciences, along with archeology and geology, where are always guaranteed to have massive selection bias.

We can only see what is left behind. Unlike an omniscient observer or obsessive record keeper, we merely get to read a few and unclear pages from the book of history.

Using our best dating technology, single celled life left records going back to 3.8 billion years ago, about when the surface was solid. But multicellular life, like these mushrooms, is very recent at around 600 MYA. These dates are based on very carefully calculated decay rates of nuclear decay. These same timetables apply to our planetary nuclear arsenal.

But for modern Creationists this evidence doesn't help. Unless you do the experiments yourself you are relying upon the expertise of others and their claims. Once you do that, then some people argue otherwise about the age of the world based on their own selection of experts and data.

Frankly, I just hope these people are not the ones testing and maintaining our nuclear stockpiles.

It's certainly more doable. Don't have to worry about low gravity screwing with your health, there's plenty of oxygen and water that can be extracted from the CO2 and H2SO4 atmosphere, and the temperature in parts of the clouds is just right. It even has an induced magnetosphere.

What's your phone number? Well, its a lichen, not a plant, so you can keep your number.

Because he posts the single most interesting stories on the site?

I don't know whether to (+1, Ironically Funny), or (-1, Fuck off Ethan), but you made me laugh either way.

We've known it's density waves for years. Decades, arguably. If Ethan's blogspam is new and revelatory to you, you haven't been paying attention. If you want a pop-science focus, http://www.astrobio.net/ is decent, as is Phil Plait's Bad Astronomer. If you want mission updates, http://spaceflightnow.com/ has good (and in some cases, live) coverage. If you want well-sourced articles on a wide range of topics, any of the blogs on the Planetary Society will do; these authors have been working in the field for decades.

Literally anything is better than Forbes/Medium blogspam. All the guy does is take a few pretty images that show up first on a Google Image Search for whatever it is he's cutting and pasting about, then tells you how amazing it is that space. And time. Are, like, the same thing. Like a gravity and a bowling ball and a rubber sheet. Here's that .GIF we all saw in grade school. And black holes are like where light can't come out, and the sheet is torn. And here's that same .JPG we all saw in high school. And umm, yeah, we don't know how gravity works and that's all you'll need to know about clickbait, I mean, relativity. Now let me spam my next blog on Slashdot, because they're the only site dumb enough to greenlight it multiple times a day.

Titan is gorgeous.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
http://www.astrobio.net/wp-con...
True color: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

It's also the setting of the first chapter in the brilliant hard sci-fi novel Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem.
I can't wait for new probes to report from there.

The Sahara as we know it now exists mainly because during 'roman times' (+/-500 years) the woods there got lumbered down.

Here is the timeline — already linked to once before:

• 22,000 to 10,500 years ago: The Sahara was devoid of any human occupation outside the Nile Valley and extended 250 miles further south than it does today.
• 10,500 to 9,000 years ago: Monsoon rains begin sweeping into the Sahara, transforming the region into a habitable area swiftly settled by Nile Valley dwellers.
• 9,000 to 7,300 years ago: Continued rains, vegetation growth, and animal migrations lead to well established human settlements, including the introduction of domesticated livestock such as sheep and goats.
• 7,300 to 5,500 years ago: Retreating monsoonal rains initiate desiccation in the Egyptian Sahara, prompting humans to move to remaining habitable niches in Sudanese Sahara. The end of the rains and return of desert conditions throughout the Sahara after 5,500 coincides with population return to the Nile Valley and the beginning of pharaonic society.

Then there is this article, in which a NASA scientist explains the climate-change with changes in Earth's orbit. It also dates the end of the "Green Sahara" at about 5500 years ago. Or, roughly, three thousand years before the nameless momma-wolf suckled the fateful human twins...

Can one get any more wrong than blaming Roman lumber industry for Sahara's climate-change? I suppose, one can. But you are certainly within the top 1% territory...

Lots of other stuff on the subject is along the same line, but nothing blames the humans today. Whether the humans of the times blamed each other, was my original question.

Copy of my post to the /. "Scientist Says Potential Signs of Ancient Life in Mars Rover Photos" http://science.slashdot.org/st...

From a link on microbial lifeforms found on Earth http://www.astrobio.net/news-e... "What’s more, MISS have remained unchanged over the last 3 billion years" MISS: microbially-induced sedimentary structure.

"3 billion years and little if any mutations in a microbe life or it's off spring.
“But it also raised the question: why are they so identical?” she adds. “And what does that mean about the organisms that created them?”"

Supplementing my post with this: http://www.astrobio.net/news-b...

From a link on microbial lifeforms found on Earth http://www.astrobio.net/news-e... "What’s more, MISS have remained unchanged over the last 3 billion years" MISS: microbially-induced sedimentary structure.

Says a lot really, it's considered a fact you will get cancer (a mutation of the a cell) if you live long enough.

"A certain irreducible background incidence of cancer is to be expected regardless of circumstances: mutations can never be absolutely avoided, because they are an inescapable consequence of fundamental limitations on the accuracy of DNA replication" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bo...

3 billion years and little if any mutations in a microbe life or it's off spring.
“But it also raised the question: why are they so identical?” she adds. “And what does that mean about the organisms that created them?”

The amount of water (as the protium source) used for fusion would be minuscule compared to the volume of the oceans, even if fusion technology was widespread and used over an extended period of time. Most technically literate people would know this, which is probably why your comment was marked 'Troll'. But as not everyone knows everything, your question does deserve a legitimate answer. The volume of water used would probably be more than offset by the amount of water falling to Earth in comets/asteroids/dust/etc. If it did somehow become a problem (extreme emphasis on 'somehow'), we could bring in more water from asteroids as needed. But if we did somehow burn through that much water through fusion in any reasonable timescale, I suspect we would be killed by the waste heat.

900 light years? Then for sure don't tell them about the one "only" 40 LY away.

See this article, on the subject, from back in 2009.

. Preliminary results from a dedicated research program have shown that planets around red dwarfs could be habitable if they can maintain a magnetic field for a few billion years ...

The high-energy radiation is predominantly emitted by young stars. As they age, red dwarfs become less magnetically active, while continuing to shine steadily at visible wavelengths for 100 billion years or more. ... ...

Therefore, if an orbiting planet can just hold onto its atmosphere through the wild early years of its red dwarf roommate, it could end up being a decent place to live.

If I were planning a trip to Mars, solar and cosmic radiation would be one of my main concerns. And to date, I have not seen designs for a delivery system that would adequately protect crew members from what could be a catastrophic situation. We do not want to lose the first expedition to something like this. However, the shielding required dramatically alters the economics of the mission (lead's not cheap to shoot into orbit, let alone Mars). And that's just getting there. If we want to enjoy any duration of exploration or colonization, we should be looking for caves. Without a magnetosphere, it's going to be tough.

Radiation Rules Exploration

We'll never get through the thick ice layer...?

Because you have complete knowledge of all present and future drilling technologies?

If only someone, somewhere had a good idea about how to do this! Wait, what's this? Oh how I love this "Google" thing.

And how would humans survive there? No source of energy other than gravity. Solar is not an option. Also, what about the radiation? Remember that Jupiter is essentially an unlit star with both an enormous magnetic field and powerful radiation belts (a million times more powerful, in fact, than the Van Allen Belt) that extend beyond Europa's orbit. Humans couldn't get near Jupiter without extraordinary (and likely, at today's level of technology, impractical) shielding. See, e.g., http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/3010/hiding-from-jupiters-radiation. Yes, I know I'm a buzzkill & that these types of things are fun to talk about while you sit around the bong with the dudes. Sorry.

I see you responded to every comment except the one that actually answered your question, despite having undoubtedly read it. This link will tell you all you need to know.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/401227.stm

And hey, when you combine that with maglaunch it actually becomes more cost effectiove to pull the stuff out of the sky, taking into account externalities like environmental damage and pollution. All of the raw materials are up there in far more than trace amounts. To respond to your other comment, phosphorus? Scientists believe that most of the earth's supply came from asteroids in the first place:

http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/1155/meteorites-donated-lifes-phosphorus

Nitrogen? It's right up there:

http://www.ibiblio.org/lunar/minecarb.html

Potassium? The moon is rotten with the stuff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_differentiation#Moon.27s_KREEP

Thing about the earth is, it's basically a big ball of rock floating among a bunch of other balls and lumps of rock which all formed around the same time and are made of the same stuff. Not always in the same proportions but you can find what you're looking for easily enough and tear it out with nukes if you want to because there's nothing up there to care. Solar furnaces are a better option of course.

So, yeah, anyway, I'll leave you to it.

They've already found that. Quite some time ago actually with the other rovers. Which actually still keep finding cool things (even water related) BTW.

No, I'd bet on a nuclear war.

A nuclear war still isn't going to make the planet less habitable than the radiation count on Mars or (eek!) Jupiter's radiation belts - goodbye any hope of moving to Europa.

There might be some long-lived isotopes. But they'll be confined to the surface as dust. Earth will still have oceans of water, an atmosphere full of oxygen, and a functioning magnetosphere. Worst of worst cases, you could just tunnel into mineshafts and you'll be no worse off than in space.

There's no way space starts to look more attractive than Earth unless the entire planet got exploded, and then you'd need space-grade life-support but you could still live on the asteroid fragments of Earth (would be cheaper than moving all the way out to beyond Mars orbit).

Seriously, the only thing that could drive us out of Earth would be something going wrong with the sun - red giant or nova.

Define "natural level" of anything. The hubris of man, to imagine that anything he does is above nature, is immense.

But I'll give you one example - at one point in time, there was very little O2 in the atmosphere. Without O2, life as we know it would not have been possible:

http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/541/the-rise-of-oxygen

Thanks to the dumping of O2 into the once pristine and oxygen poor biosphere, many many times the original "natural" level, we've got life on earth as we know it.

Everything, although I suppose it happens with varying degrees of selectivity. From the Astrobiology article:

When Wolfe-Simon starved GFAJ-1 cells of phosphorus, while flooding them with arsenic, far more than enough arsenic to kill most other organisms, it grew and divided as though it had been offered its favorite snack. Wolfe-Simon, with assistance from colleagues in Ron Oremland’s group at the USGS in Menlo Park, California, have grown generation after generation of these bacteria. The bacteria continue to swim around in their test tubes, unconcerned, despite the fact that, since Wolfe-Simon first collected them more than a year ago, the only phosphorus they have had access to was whatever was present in the original colony of cells, plus tiny traces, far too little to sustain ongoing growth and cell division, present as impurities in the cells’ growth medium.

presumably if they're isolating, inoculating, and growing multiple generations their phosphate ratio is going to go down to very trace levels.

My thoughts are as follows:

THIS IS BLOODY AMAZING! followed by a little more tempered cogitation:

Arsenate is a triprotic species just like phosphate, each has a valence of +5, and it's directly one period down on the table so available electron shells in ground state will appear very similar. However arsenic possesses filled d orbitals and is about 7% less electronegative than phosphorous - these factors, among others, tend to make arsenate a little more reactive than phosphate which would make it less stable as a backbone of DNA. So if the degree of replacement is as thorough as NASA claims (they said they cultured it with zero phosphorous present - so only trace impurities) the cell has either found a way to strengthen the backbone or has developed an amazing repair mechanism which can deal with frequent DNA damage.

NASA has two summaries here and here.

Astrobiology has an article here.

And http://www.sciencemag.org/">Science will release a paper later today.

So far it doesn't look that great. The article from Astrobiology magazine debates if it's just impurities. And it talks about how "arsenic bonded to oxygen and carbon in the same way phosphorus bonds to oxygen and carbon in normal DNA" which of course is wrong.

Trouble is that's not how life works. Life is basicly just chemicles interacting in a perticular way, and if you change the conditions enough you make it imposible for the same set of chamicles to exibit the behavior we call life.

One of the problems is that the concept of "life" isn't really well defined yet.

Some word out on the web, including NASA funded astrobiology teams (there are fourteen), seem to indicate the possibility of them finding something strange here on Mother Earth, probably something in or around Mono Lake according to some people and its arsenic based life forms. Since the major announcement last June by NASA concerning 'Titan and the Case of the Missing Hydrogen'. In fact one of the ladies on the panel this Thursday is in fact the researcher who is studying possible arsenic based life forms in Mono Lake. I'd say that she found something. One thing for certain, with the embargo we won't know for sure until Thursday. :)

May I point out that there are even places on earth where no (surface) life excists. "Mars like desert on Earth" I think it could be possible not likely that there is life on mars it's open for debate, heck they're still figuring out if the methane on Mars is biological or geological. "Methane on Mars"

Life was already well established 635 million years ago. We have the stromatolites to prove it. The question should be, 'Did multi-cellular life arise twice?" Even if the Earth had been completely covered in ice, life would still have survived around volcanic vents in the oceans and in the deep rock.

I saw a mini-series called Miracle Planet and it described a still forming Earth being bombarded where not only is the ocean completely vaporized the Earth's crust was heated to sterilizing temperatures down to several kilometers and the only life that could survive that would have been deep in the crust.

There may have indeed been multiple origins of life on the early Earth. There may even be an undiscovered shadow biosphere.

Nice slashdot story. I was able to find further information here: http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/3452/supersonic-freefall

Could life in comet water fit the bill for the less hostile end of the proposed condition gradient?

Actually it's not that simple.

Without Jupiter acting as a “cosmic vacuum cleaner” sucking up these dangerous objects, there would be so many catastrophic impacts that life probably wouldn’t have evolved on the Earth and we wouldn’t be here today. At least, this is the commonly accepted wisdom. Like so many topics in astrobiology, it isn’t as straightforward as it first seems.

http://euro.astrobio.net/exclusive/2521/rethinking-jupiter

I once had the privilege of briefly working with him while he was evaluating servers for 3D projection for theatrical presentations. It was for his film "Ghosts of the Abyss" which ends with a hypothetical mission to the under-ice global ocean of Europa. There the crew meets some intelligent aliens (that look a little like the ones in the movie "Abyss").

While his interest in that subject is well known, less well known is the fact he commissioned a set of renderings for a Manned Mission to Mars. Not only did he pay for this but he spent a considerable amount of time (he says "years") tracking down the specialists at NASA he needed to accurately design this mission. (From what I remember it was a little like Zubrin's proposal with in-situ propellant manufacture with a prior unmanned lander).

http://www.astrobio.net/interview/813/james-camerons-mars-reference-design

I just wanted to mention that not only does he have the technical skills (or access to them) to pull this off, he clearly has the motivation to do so as well. (On another note, I'm particularly intrigued that the sequel or pre-quel to "AVATAR" that he's rumored to be making will be set in Pandora's ocean. He obviously has an abiding interest in that as well). Anyway, more power to him!

http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/3400/bringing-the-definition-of-%E2%80%98life%E2%80%99-to-closure

Most of those C2 morons are just fucking full of themselves.

http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/3400/bringing-the-definition-of-%E2%80%98life%E2%80%99-to-closure

So easy to look up - how can cowards be so ignorant of the simple magic of Google?

Why, YES. http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/3400/bringing-the-definition-of-%E2%80%98life%E2%80%99-to-closure

Maybe you should re-think what you think you learned in school.

That's right, we're proposing a NEW DEFINITION for life.

We've received signals from Saturn using a transmitter which is only as powerful as a mobile phone.

You're a man after Carol Stoker's heart.

From what I can tell, the actual rap was done for the Astrobiology Magazine European Edition (AMEE). The AMEE credits the European Space Agency (ESA), the European Astrobiology Network Association (EANA) and the Astrobiology Magazine on its front cover. NASA only contributes funding to the Astrobiology Magazine as far as I can tell.

So claiming this rap was commissioned by NASA is slightly misleading in my opinion.

maybe not absolutely needed but it has certanily helped us here

http://astrobio.net/news/article1260.html

http://www.nathanstravels.co.uk/southamericaphotos-galapagossealifelava.php

This is a cover story and nothing more. The hydrazine has a low boiling point (114C). The high temperatures from the satellite rentry would have boiled the hydrazine and caused fuel tank rupture LONG before the satellite hit the ground.

It could have a boiling point of 10 C and it could still be a threat. The fuel tank was in the middle of the satellite (would you want your fuel tank punched by any random space debris?) and would likely survive reentry because everything around it would ablate instead. Satellites are typically insulated to protect from the thermal shock of going between day and night; this insulation would buy time for the internals to make it down to the ground.

This has happened before. Some of the nematodes that were in the experiments on Columbia's last flight survived all the way to the ground. Something that boils at 114C will have a much easier time of it.

Also, as others have pointed out, knocking down a satellite in a low, decaying orbit is a lot easier than taking one down from a higher, stable orbit. This shot does not prove that we have capabilities equal to China's.

Do they really look like geysers to anybody? Wouldn't they be more columnar, or conical?

If anything it looks like the solar corona, or a comet perhaps?

ahh, here we go ... 2 years ago, same story - with a cometary conclusion:

http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?file=article&name=News&op=modload&sid=1797

Wow, usually these phylogenetic trees are not rooted, which means you can divide them any way you like. So, the really amazing story is they rooted the tree of life! Good job, especially since we actually thought it was a ring of life.

If I may suggest some more modern papers, then I would point to these ...

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006A&A...454..201G

These are Birkeland Currents in space -- where the mainstream says they should not be.

http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1367-2630/9/8/263/njp7_8_263.pdf

The idea that DNA might have electrical roots is nothing new to EU Theory. In fact, it's to be expected within their theory.

http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2504&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

This is actually a validation of one of Hannes Alfven's predictions, from what I've been told.

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12652-milky-way-keeps-a-light-grip-on-speedy-neighbours.html

These galaxies are quite filamentary.

http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/06_releases/press_060106.html

Another filament where we didn't expect it.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v448/n7155/abs/nature06003.html

Once again, a filament. You know, there is more than one way to make a repeating flash of light, as happens for pulsars. Is it a rotating beacon with a bowshock? Or, is it two stars electrically connected? People need to think very carefully about what holds these filaments together. Also, how does the filament remain illuminated for 30,000 continuous light years all at once?

There are multiple explanations for these things that people are not taking into consideration ...

Astrobiology Magazine had the opportunity to review some of the martian olivine mystery with planetary scientist Dr. Bill Hartmann, a Mars Global Surveyor team member.

Astrobiology Magazine: There seems to be a brewing mystery centered around the geology of Mars, in that it has water-formed minerals like hematite, but also has water-reactive minerals like olivine. This seems to indicate that flowing water can't be there, particularly if olivine remains. Can you comment, and do you think these kinds of issues can be resolved with the current generation of experiments?

Bill Hartmann: The lack of spectral detection of lakebed salts and carbonates does not prove that lakes never formed (as widely reported in the press) but only that if they did form, say 3 billion years ago, they are now covered and hidden by sediments and dust drifts.

Olivine has been detected spectrally in a few regions, and part of the dominant basaltic rock type, and it's true geologically that prolonged water exposure weathers basalt to other forms. So it's been argued that Mars was never very wet.

But on the other hand, it's just not true that this rules out water activity. Most Mars meteorites, studied in labs on earth, have clear evidence of having been exposed to moisture and salty water. One (named Lafayette) has enough weathered minerals that they could be dated by two labs (California and Arizona) and the water exposure was found to have happened 670 million years ago.

It's not a question of "never any flowing water on Mars," but rather a question of dates of water, duration of exposure of the rock and soils to water, replacement by fresh unweathered rocks such as lavas. After all, earth has lots of basalt rich lava flows and even whole beaches of olivine rich sand with wave lapping on them (I've walked on them!). And no one is going to characterize Earth as a planet devoid of flowing water!

There's still this pesky little thing called olivine, a volcanic rock. It's an interesting mineral in that it decomposes rapidly in water, and Mars is covered with thousands and thousands of square miles of it. There is water on Mars, perhaps, not as much as news stories in the press would imply, but the olivine puts an upper limit on the amount of water Mars has had in it's past. I want to know how the scientists can square the evidence of water and the olivine. There have been different epochs in Mars' past. I suppose it's possible that after Mars' wet period ended where most water either froze or evaporated and disassociated with the hydrogen escaping into space then there was a period of volcanism that covered large areas of Mars with olivine. Sadly, I'm not familiar with the sequence of what was formed when. It is hard to date the surface of Mars except in general terms.

There may have been life on Mars. There may be significant amounts of water in the form of ice on Mars. It's exciting and it will take a long time to sort the geologic or areology of Mars. We should be going to explore Mars because it is an interesting world, not because it might have water or harbored life. Those discoveries are the icing on the cake. Because if those are the reasons we go an don't find anything, that will tell us something, but we will be disappointed and may not be able to get public support nor the tax dollars for future missions. We should look for evidence of life and water, but that shouldn't be our sole focus nor should we expect to find either.

Here's an idea I found for the power problem. Can someone translate this for the masses? IANAP, but it looks like it may be possible to use quantum entanglement for energy transfer. Ion or photon propulsion and a few GW (maybe TW) of power will get you there provided it gets funded, created, and scaled up.

because of the radiation issues. http://www.astrobio.net/news/article2122.html http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/17feb_radi ation.htm