Slashdot Mirror

The slideshow is here

David Grinspoon: I agree that, given the time and energy constraints, any intelligent creatures would have to be nuts to attempt interstellar travel. But you would also have to be nuts to attempt to cross the ocean in a rowboat, and people have done that. Why do we need to go one-tenth the speed of light? What's the hurry? So what if travel times are thousands of years? From the perspective of an individual human life at this stage in our evolution, this seems like a long time. But will the galaxy never, ever, anywhere, produce a creature or cultural entity that doesn't find this span of time daunting? Even at these slow speeds, if someone decided to start spreading across the galaxy they would be able to spread across the whole Milky Way in a few hundred million years, tops, which is still short compared to the life of the galaxy.

(This was ripped straight from here for those who wish to read more.

What are those creatures viewing the Rover from the top and scheming destruction plans in the polar view picture?. They're a step ahead of us!

From the first article:
http://www.astrobio.net/articles/images/hartmann_h appy_face.jpg

According to another article on the same site HERE , the data transfer rate is exceeding their expectations 150% by sending "24 megabits per second" which certainly isn't broadband, but it ain't that bad either.

All that money and all that time and still got the picture of the backs of heads. Funny how these martians look like NASA geeks. Maybe if we flew in some babes and a couple cases of beer there really would be life on Mars.

Alive and well, with domains *.mr for Mars. See Astrobiology Magazine and the main project page IPN

I think it's just been done.
Although the Tuesday SF Chronicle article (referred to in this slashdot article) claims that Jimo will be up to 300 feet long, Both the astrobio.net article, (also referred to here) and a Monday SF Chronicle article (pointed to by today's SFC article) refer to Jimo being 60-100 feet long.

I'm thinking that somebody saw 100 feet, and thought metres. Hopefully they're not the engineers for the current mission.

More in depth article from NASA

Let's look at the links in this article:

• "skymap" points to the astrobio article
• "most promising" points to the skymap
• "project" points to a past slashdot article about SETI@home
• "these" points to a description of the signals SETI@home looks for

"An Astrobiology Magazine article today presents the skymap of where in the night sky to find the most promising SETI@Home signals, along with the research plan for the March Stellar Countdown project that produced it. The dedicated use of the Arecibo Telescope to revisit the most promising spikes, pulses, and steady signals, focused on 166 star candidates. Those 166 were pruned from the five billion signals that have been found since 1999, depending on the signal's persistence, closeness to a known star, and frequency. The next step is particularly fascinating, if a signal appears to have increased since the first observation put that star on the checklist."

Let's look at the links in this article:

• "skymap" points to the astrobio article
• "most promising" points to the skymap
• "project" points to a past slashdot article about SETI@home
• "these" points to a description of the signals SETI@home looks for

"An Astrobiology Magazine article today presents the skymap of where in the night sky to find the most promising SETI@Home signals, along with the research plan for the March Stellar Countdown project that produced it. The dedicated use of the Arecibo Telescope to revisit the most promising spikes, pulses, and steady signals, focused on 166 star candidates. Those 166 were pruned from the five billion signals that have been found since 1999, depending on the signal's persistence, closeness to a known star, and frequency. The next step is particularly fascinating, if a signal appears to have increased since the first observation put that star on the checklist."

planetary.org

Discovery.com

Some of the context is redundant, the first link is the most informative.

Reading this a couple of days ago when the article about the timeline of space discorveries came on /. said that :
In addition, the new portrait precisely pegs the age of the Universe at 13.7 billion years old, with a remarkably small one percent margin of error.

So I'm not really all that sure what "humble" is trying to find out...

Murphy(c)

Reading this a couple of days ago when the article about the timeline of space discorveries came on /. said that :
In addition, the new portrait precisely pegs the age of the Universe at 13.7 billion years old, with a remarkably small one percent margin of error.

So I'm not really all that sure what "humble" is trying to find out...

Murphy(c)

http://www.astrobio.net/articles/images/computer_t est.jpg

No wonder the space program costs so much! We've got Micheal Jackson doing the dirty work!

And, quick HTML lesson: <a href="http://www.astrobio.net/articles/images/comp uter_test.jpg">Hot NASA engineer</a> Becomes

Hot NASA engineer

Sadly... we have probably already seeded Mars with bacteria.

Links here and here.

Luckily, unique bacteria trapped on Mars should have far different DNA that our earth-created bugs.

Davak

By the way, in the Slasdot posting, why isn't the word interview linked to the story?

I tried out the link and uploaded a pic of kermit, and another of a tree frog. Guess who's biogenic?

• The Mars meteorite fossil
• and my wife

at the comparison page attached to the article that lets you run the same test on images that the researchers tried. In a startling discovery that is sure to earn me a Nobel Prize for Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Marital Relations, I was told the following:

"Answer: Image 1 [the Mars image](1.43702451394759 % compression) has a higher complexity measure than image 2[the image of my wife] (0.773501341151519 % compression), and thus image 1 is more probably biogenic."

Not only does this prove that there was once life on Mars, but it also proves that my wife is some sort of robot. Further research will be undertaken pending receipt of my prize money.

Because of related research, the universe is now known to be 13.7 billion years old (to within 1%). That's a whole lot more accurate that what the estimate was a few months ago.

There is a Much Ado About Nothing debate here. It tries to compare the needs of asteroid mitigation to the other social needs. Interesting to imagine what is lost terrestriallly in pursuing the asteroid threat.

Unless space rocks are magically different, any rock within the Earth's atmosphere could pick up living material here on Earth.

You would have to find a 'virgin' rock in space, and never expose it to any sources of contamination, cut it open and look inside.

You might want to wine it and dine it a little first, but I think that would be contamination. Let me know what you find ;)

so..... this is probably immoral, if not illegal, but their javascript source for it is in the cleverly named file javascript/showimages.php...

actually took a little while to find it, thanks to the somewhat deceiving name.

wow, this is really interesting... I've never heard of this meteor before, however I find this really cool.
I wonder why this was never mentioned in any of my chemistry, physics, geology, or biology classes in high school or college (last 10 years)?

on a side note... is anyone else creeped out by the picutre of the guy halfway down the page?
*shudder*

A slightly better set of real images. Includes the orbital shot of the last manned lunar mission, which perhaps can provide further fuel for the moon landing as just a Hollywood backlot.

Twin shadows and twin sunrises would be the order of the day, as noted by the Astrobiology Magazine story here.

You believe wrongly.

HD28185 b and IotaHor b both could support moons with liquid water, year-round.

HD27442 b (aka Epsilon Reticulum) could also do it.

Other planets visit their star's habitable zones, too. Even though most of these other planets have eccentric orbits which would take them in and out periodically, they still "come close to matching those criteria".

Also a much better link to details of the Gamma Cephei system can be found here.

An article in Astrobiology magazine seems to suggest that the magnetite found the in famous "Mars meteor" *does* seem to be bacteria-made after all.

There has been a constant see-saw about this rock for a long time.

It is kind of a coincidence that the fossils are bacteria-shaped (wormy) and that the magnetite has properties very similar to magnetite-using-bacteria on Earth. IOW, it has both the right look and the right "chemistry". Not proof, but intreeging nevertheless.

I would also note that the Viking probes picked up life-like signs in the soil, however, it was later determined that inorganic chemistry could possibly emulate the same results.

But, there are newer claims that one experiment shows "cycadic" (sp?) rythms in the samples. This is the "internal clock" of life that changes their metabolism to match the day/night cycle and/or tides. They did not know about these patterns in microbes much at the time of Viking. This pattern in Viking data is much harder to explain by dead soil chemistry alone.

The saga continues...

It has been more than 100 years since the "canali" fiasco started, and we still don't know whether there is life on that stupid orange ball yet.

i was sort of wondering about this as well, from the article ilnked to in the post on astrobio.net (link) it stated the following: Astronauts can suffer from motion sickness, bone loss, muscle degeneration (atrophy) and blood vessel problems during weightlessness.

so apparently the sci.fi is er. sci.fi... :) although if i remember correctly JR Hadden from "Contact" the movie based upon Sagan's book had said that the 0 gravity slowed his cancer, which probably has some biological merit if it were actually in the book (instead of just the movie), which it probably was as Sagan worked very closely with the screen writers et al. (i personally haven't read the book, but believe the movie was one of the last things Sagan took part in, and unfortunately he was unable to see the movie as he died of cancer shortly before its debut...). hmmm... offtopic, but yea, :)

to the best of my [limited] knowledge anyway, please correct me if i'm wrong.

-tid242

Better article explains the discovery: planet size, temperature and distances.

The ability of the Webb to show infrared makes this a whole new view, including a direct image of extrasolar planets. Each wavelength is a universe unto itself--small objects become very prominent in the right band.

Fortunately, astronauts can find the protection they need indoors (from solar storms) ; shelter walls made of lightweight materials provide adequate shielding.

For those needing more on this, go find what you need here or, for something a little more cautious and "NASA" here.

Now only if we can get people to stop running about waving their arms and shouting "The Radiation! The Radiation!" we might get something productive done... Heh! No chance of that I guess, might as well join them...

*waves hands over head, runs about, starts screaming "The Radiation!" and giggling*

Morris Goodman, a professor of anatomy and cell biology at the Wayne State University School of Medicine, says that Varki's findings do point to some role for sialic acid in brain development. However, he cautions, "to say the mutation that caused humans to lose Gc may have resulted in our unique brain evolution may be putting the cart before the horse."