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26. What about pollinating of plants that are brought as food sources, such as fruits, berries, squash, etc.? Are the colonists going to bring any bees or other pollinators?

27. Are the colonists bringing only food crops with them, or are they also going or bring plants that are used for flavour/seasoning (i.e. crops for direct consumption vs. crops to flavour foods for consumption)?

28. What about wind power, or is the atmosphere of Mars too thin to support this form of energy production? A source of power other than solar would be useful considering that dust storms on Mars have the potential (on rare occasions) cover the entire planet and last for weeks to months; apparently, during Martian dust storms, the dust can make it almost as dark as night, but the wind speeds are high enough to turn a windmill and generate electricity.

29. For the crew members exploring Mars, will they be making use of some kind of stillsuit technology to help in the recycling and reclaiming of their water and processing wastes?

30. What about laws, charters, and constitutions for the crews as the founders of a Martian colony, are they going to be allowed to do this? No government is allowed to own Mars.

(In reference to my question 2, NASA has maps showing suspected thorium deposits on Mars http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/latestimages/PIA04257.html , and it is claimed that experiments with LFTR has shown the potential to produce enough energy from 12 gm of thorium to provide the energy needs of a US citizen for a decade.)

And from the horse's mouth: http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2012/jul/HQ_12-225_Orion_Arrives_KSC.html

NASA Goddard is near Baltimore. They lost power in the storm and are operating under "Code Red": http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/

Quite likely other misbehavior blamed on the leap second is actually the result of the storm (or like Pirate Bay, some unrelated crash).

NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day, http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html, has apparently been down all day; wonder if this is the cause.

Anyone heard from the Space Lab today?

I looked into the literature on supernovas and carbon-14 and found this: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19690024196_1969024196.pdf also see: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0469(1964)021%3C0134%3APOCBSP%3E2.0.CO%3B2

The 775 C-14 spike is 20 times the normal level. According to this paper the closest recent supernova (the Crab Nebula supernova in 1054) was only capable of producing a spike 8% more than normal.

To get a 2000% increase over normal you need a supernova 16 times closer, about 400 light years away, and 250 times brighter than 1054. The angular diameter of such a remnant today would be larger than the full moon, it seems unlikely that there are any dense dust clouds of this visible size for an object like this to hide behind. An obscure reference in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle does no a credible supernova make.

You won't feel anything from vacuum exposure. The first symptom will be unconsciousness when O2-depleted blood hits your brain in about 15 seconds - the brain doesn't have any significant energy reserves and shuts down almost immediately. And you can't compare it to holding your breath because being in vacuum actively sucks O2 and CO2 out of your blood so it acts much more rapidly.

And it's not at all theoretical, NASA did experiments on monkeys and had a technician accidentally exposed to vacuum during spacesuit testing: http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970603.html The same happens in any neutral atmosphere and is an industrial hazard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_asphyxiation#Accidental_deaths

Another close example: chokeholds (particularly the sleeper hold) in martial arts. They work by constricting blood supply to brain, NOT by constricting your air supply. I've been in a chokehold a couple of times during my training - you lose conciseness in several seconds.

it's a big ball of gas. I'm as interested in Jupiter as any nerd, but it's not as likely a source of life as other places in the solar system.

Still its Our Ball of Gas, (until some one/thing capable of stating otherwise shows up), and it would be pretty cool to go looking.

Is the atmosphere such that some sort of balloon with a payload could not float around in it for a considerable time scavenging energy from the winds themselves?
I've read where the wind speeds are horrendously fast, but that might not affect something designed specifically to float in the atmosphere.

Don't make a big deal about gender, just matter of factly show that there are women out there doing interesting jobs like this: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.cfm?all_videos&id=960#fragment-5

Related: exciting video, "Challenges of Getting to Mars: Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzqdoXwLBT8

While I share your notion about systems not necessarily being in steady-state, it's not true that just because a large body and small body pass each other that they must be destined to have the smaller body form a moon, collide, be ejected, or some sort of non-steady-state scenario. There are all sorts of crazy but stable orbital resonances. One of my favorite occurs in Saturn's rings. Awesome, eh? Here's a couple cool plots of their orbits; it's like a spirograph.

The question the researchers have to face is not whether it's stable (well, they have to address that, that's the easy part), but also how it came to be. And that I feel is the part where the default assumption (that everything exists where it formed and everything formed roughly as it is now around the time the star was born) likely leads people astray. It's the same assumption that's lead scientists astray in pretty much every field since the birth of science.

I say we nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure...

Oh, wait, didn't we try something like that already... http://lcross.arc.nasa.gov/observation.htm
(yes, I know no nuclear weapons were involved)

Never have had to think about solar cells on the moon's poles :)

Lots of people have been. There are regions of the rim of Shackleton Crater which are never out of the Sun*, so solar power could be collected there and beamed down into the crater. This is the reason why NASA selected power beaming for a Game Changing Technology award.

* Well, maybe never, or maybe never except for a few days every few years. There are still arguments about the terrain models, so I believe the point is still uncertain. And, of course, you will lose the Sun every time there is a Lunar eclipse (i.e., when the Earth gets in the way).

You are mixing up albedo / reflectivity with ranging. Skin depth / surface detail info is not the same as geodetic accuracy (which is at the 10 cm level at best without a corner cube retroreflector).

Here is an example - suppose I shine a flashlight on my car at night. Can I tell if it is wet ? Yes, because I can see specular reflection from a thin layer of water if it is. That layer may be 100 microns thick; seeing it doesn't mean that I know where I am, or where my car is, or the relative distance between us, to anything like 100 microns.

The LRO has a multi-beam altimeter, with fiber optics to send out 5 shots simultaneously from each laser pulse - see Dave Smith's LEAG presentation, page 6. Each spot is 5 meters across (actually, less now as the orbit has been lowered); with 5 spots they can get the local slope and estimate the terrain roughness per shot. They estimate that they can get 10 cm height accuracy with these multiple beams, when the local slope is less than 3 degrees.

Nasa is not a provider of real jobs, .

This would qualify as either totally dumb (the poster didn't know better) or flamebait/troll (that is: ignoring on purpose the reality for the sake of controversy).

Poe's law would offer an explanation why the mods chose the second.

In case anyone is wondering, here is a list of failures cause by Tin whiskers.

http://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/failures/

Note that we are talking about failures a bit more serious than your netbook, we are talking about communication satellites and NUCLEAR REACTORS. Yes, the people who say nuclear power is unsafe are working to make nuclear power unsafe.

Reminds me of the worldwide Chlorine ban that Greenpeace was proposing in the 80's. (Patrick Moore left Greenpeace over this.) Yea, go drink non-Chlorinated water for a year, I call dibs on your stuff when you're dead from Cholera. People need to THINK about these things.

Then there is the fact that mining Tin is VERY damaging to the environment, much more so than mining Lead.

From NASA's Voyager mission site (link here: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/didyouknow.html):

The sensitivity of our deep-space tracking antennas located around the world is truly amazing. The antennas must capture Voyager information from a signal so weak that the power striking the antenna is only 10 exponent -16 watts (1 part in 10 quadrillion). A modern-day electronic digital watch operates at a power level 20 billion times greater than this feeble level.

One ten-quadrillionth of a watt.

Yeah, "truly amazing" doesn't even begin to cover it. You're right; it IS mindblowing.

So let me summerise this. You are just talking out of your ass.

http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/06/12/2148229/why-smart-people-are-stupid

When he talks about sources, he means sources (as in measurements) not your handwaving arguments.

In the May 6, 2005, issue of the journal Science, the CERES Science Team reported Earthâ(TM)s shortwave albedo has been steadily declining since the Terra CERES instrument began making the measurement in February 2000. Over the 4-year span (2000 through 2004), the CERES instrument measured an albedo decrease of 0.0027, which equals 0.9 watt of energy per square meter retained in the Earth system. The CERES Team is currently unsure what caused this decline in albedo. The team says future research will focus on comparing CERES data to data from other space-based sensors to see if there are any significant changes in Earthâ(TM)s climate system during that time that could account for the change in albedo.

source: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=5484

Seems *real scientists* have blown your handwawing arguments out of the water *years* ago? No?

Aww, how cute! England wants to come out and play. While I am happy to see that our mates from across the pond are getting themselves a nice little number cruncher - it is still little. NASA has a setup called Pleiades:

Total cores: 112,896
Total memory: 191 TB

But here's the real hard-to-fathom point. The sport two 11-dimension hypercube interconnect configurations using Infiniband QDR and DDR networking (mostly DDR). Now DDR is ~4GB/s and QDR is ~8GB/s, but Inifiniband is rarely singily-connected. Usually you multipath using four connections to the switch, which in this case bumps the transfer rate up to 16GB/s for DDR and 32GB/s for QDR. Peak theoretical speed for this system is ~240TB/s.

Oh, and it's running SUSE Linux. That off-the-shelf enough?

Last I checked, the system is running at 90% utilization. This is one heck of a cluster and it isn't just for show. Yet Pleiades only rates as #7 on the TOP500 list of supercomputers worldwide. The new list comes out in a few days. We'll see if they can keep that illustrious position.

Side note: The #1 supercomputer is running an interconnect called "Tofu". Since I'm an Infiniband guy, I'd like to know more. Right now, though, it rates very high on my silliness scale.

Interesting. Compare my data 4 high-energy nucleons w V1's That increase is attracting attention!

translates to

Interesting. Compare my data on high-energy nucleons, received from Voyager 2, with that received from Voyager 1. That sudden increase in the rate of high-energy nucleons received by Voyager 1, compared to both the historical levels at Voyager 1 and the present level at Voyager 2, is attracting attention!

which translates to

Woo-Hoo! Graduation! At last!

Interesting. Compare my data 4 high-energy nucleons w V1's That increase is attracting attention!

translates to

Interesting. Compare my data on high-energy nucleons, received from Voyager 2, with that received from Voyager 1. That sudden increase in the rate of high-energy nucleons received by Voyager 1, compared to both the historical levels at Voyager 1 and the present level at Voyager 2, is attracting attention!

which translates to

Woo-Hoo! Graduation! At last!

And, if you want to know how we know where Mars is to within 10's of meters in real time, read this.

They do have some satellites in orbit, and a couple on the ground that they can still talk to, but I doubt they are relying on these for guidance. Certainly there is no fleet of GPS satellites circling the planet (although if we keep sending landers, that might not be a bad idea).

I think they rely on radar and optical maps produced by predecessors such as Mars Global Surveyor, (no longer working) and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to build camera and radar maps that they can use to set up landing approaches. See: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/multimedia/interactives/

Their site selection is discussed on the above page, as well as a ton of images.

I suspect they are limited to what is reachable from their initial orbit. They can use radar, and optical alignment on stars to establish that first orbit. And if they get that orbit established correctly the rest is probably some huge radar pattern matching exercise.

It seems just getting to the planet is like treading the needle, and getting into a 12 by 4 mile box is astounding precision.

Keep in mind that while Americans are launched into space from Florida, most of the manned spaceflight program is run through the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

So I'd imagine that it's an occupational hazard. If you're a woman and you get your hair done in Texas, it's gonna be big.

The well-known journalistic suffix of "-ish" is used when quoting figures from Wikipedia, where you cannot be sure of veracity, or using woefully vague units like "ton". Wikipedia gives the mass as "approximately 450,000 kg (990,000 lb)", which is 450 tonnes (a non-SI unit acceptable in SI) or 495 short tons, the unit most commonly called "ton" in the US, 446 long tons, the unit used for the displacement of ships and in the UK. NASA, on the other hand, give the much less massive figure of "861,804 lb (390,908 kilograms)" or 391 tonnes, 431 short tons, or 395 long tons. Both sources approximate conversion from kg to lb, so there are four different figures to choose from even if you ignore the vagueness of "ton." Pick your poison.

This is not an example of deploying technology to solve a problem. We just stopped outputting more CFCs, and we are waiting for the nature to take its course, eventually. As of today, the ozone hole is still there, and we're still waiting. You can watch nature's progress here: http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Perfect software doesn't exist and neither will it ever. If someone claims they can, make sure you know where your wallet is. It's like the koan, "If you meet the Buddha, kill him."

Exactly. One of the best examples that comes to mind is the guidance software written for the first space shuttle computer, and even that had bugs. It was also 20x more expensive than the normal going rate at the time, and technically speaking it contained only about one two hundredth less bugs by number of lines of code.

Damn impressive for sure, but far from a zero. It also cost half a billion 1960's dollars!

An interesting read: http://history.nasa.gov/sts1/pages/computer.html

As anyone who has ever used a computer knows, software is seldom error-free. A statistical average for software used in critical systems (flight control, air traffic control, etc.) shows that programs average 10-12 errors for every 1,000 lines of software code. This was clearly unacceptable to NASA for use on the Space Shuttle. As a result, NASA forced one of the most stringent test and verification processes ever undertaken on IBM for the primary avionics system software. 21

The result achieved by the 300 IBM programmers, analysts, engineers, and subcontractors was impressive. An analysis accomplished after the Challenger accident showed that the IBM developed PASS software had a latent defect rate of just 0.11 errors per 1,000 lines of code - for all intents and purposes, it was considered error-free. But this remarkable achievement did not come easily or cheap. In an industry where the average line of code cost the government (at the time of the report) approximately $50 (written, documented, and tested), the Primary Avionics System Software cost NASA slightly over $1,000 per line. A total of $500 million was paid to IBM for the initial development and support of PASS. 22

The problem is you and everyone else is not willing to pay what it actually costs to create bug free code. The space shuttle avionics code was one of the few cases where it was necessary and possible to pay that kind of price. From http://history.nasa.gov/sts1/pages/computer.html:

The result achieved by the 300 IBM programmers, analysts, engineers, and subcontractors was impressive. An analysis accomplished after the Challenger accident showed that the IBM-developed PASS software had a latent defect rate of just 0.11 errors per 1,000 lines of code—for all intents and purposes, it was considered error-free. But this remarkable achievement did not come easily or cheap. In an industry where the average line of code cost the government (at the time of the report) approximately $50 (written, documented, and tested), the Primary Avionics System Software cost NASA slightly over $1,000 per line. A total of $500 million was paid to IBM for the initial development and support of PASS.

When you are ready to pay 20 times the going rate, you may expect (nearly) bug free code. Or you can pay the going rate and the relatively modest cost for fixes.

Whilst dismissing what the Sun is doing...

Yup, the fact that the sun is cooling is definitively the answer to why our planet is getting hotter...

Not to interrupt yer moral soapbox special feelings or anything, but my slider to the right says I'm a third down the page and none of you sister boys has said a damn thing pertaining to black holes, galactic feces being flung about, Lawyers, NASA or nothing.

So with that outa the way, I'll introduce a recentish occurence, http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/?IDNumber=PIA13455. I figure if you can venture a ratio of black holes to stars you can figure odds of being affected by one coming our way.

No fear, have a beer. Don't let my low number fool ya baby, No Viagra needed here.

5) drop something, like a crowbar (AKA come back down again)
6) fire a directed energy weapon at another satellite (AKA come back down again, and again)
7) maneuver and rendezvous with another orbiting body
8) detonate and spread debris throughout orbit

I bet there's a few hundred possibilities I'm missing, but doubling the length of your list without even getting fanciful (like directed energy weapon pointed at the ground, or orbital mind control lasers or something) was trivial.

Yes, a fifth item was missed - interact with stuff in orbit. That covers your 7 and 8. There really aren't very many things you can do. How you do them are numerous, but the details don't generally have to be worried about.

For example, the crowbar. Unless your 'crowbar' is specially designed to ablate in a very predictable manner, and is of sufficient size to actually reach the ground with some real energy, the only advantage it has over throwing rocks at your neighbour is the closeness of said neighbour to your country. For example. Note the size of the 'crowbar' in that picture (where crowbar is defined as some object in space that has been dropped on a terrestrial object). The directed energy weapon has the same limitations.

Really, at our technology level, the only thing worth dropping from space with a weapons advantage are nukes.

Q. How much does it cost to launch a Space Shuttle?
A. The average cost to launch a Space Shuttle is about $450 million per mission.

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/delheavy.htm

Delta IV Heavy ... Launch Price $: 254.000 million in 2004 dollars in 2002 dollars.

http://www.spaceandtech.com/spacedata/elvs/atlas5_specs.shtml

Atlas V Heavy ... US $130 M

I'm with you. A NASA webcast is the closest I'm likely to get to this event: we've had impenetrable cloud cover for nearly a week, and this evening is not likely to clear up.

What happened with Hubble is very well-understood, in terms of the specific event that caused the error, and the management climate that led to multiple tests detecting the error being ignored. In answer to, "Did they really make the same mistake all along the line," yes, yes they did. At least two major tests after the mirror was ground which showed the error were themselves dismissed as flawed.

The Hubble Space Telescope Optical Systems Failure Report, or the "Allen Report", has all the details.

You cant see a Gamma Ray burst.

Yes you can.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1999/ast18may99_1/

Actually GRBs do have a visible component. If one happened close by, we would definitely see it.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1999/ast18may99_1/

How far does "known events" take you? Do they mean "events that have historically caused the effect" or "events that physically could cause the effect"? My guess is the former.

There are no historical events that have caused an event like this. None of the supernovae or solar flares we've seen have had such a large effect on 14C production, so whatever this is, it must be bigger than anything we've seen before, or a different category altogether.

As this NASA HUbble document says "changing to a 2.4-meter mirror would lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing technologies developed for military spy satellites." Hubble and KH-11 were apparently shipped in much the same container (suggesting they're physically pretty similar) and both were integrated at Lockheed's Sunnyvale, CA plant. Given that there are only so many US aerospace contractors able to work on either project, there will have inevitably been some degree of cross-fertilisation between the two. I imagine when the NASA guys get a look at their new toys they'll find it slightly familiar (the way they wouldn't at all if they'd been given two empty Russian equivalents). And when they put out to tender the work to get the things integrated and working, they'll probably end up employing the same people at Loral and Lockheed and Ball who who would have done the same work had these two gone to be recon birds.

The original article links don't provide any useful data to assess the likelihood of either suggested potential cause (supernova or solar flare).

Here is a nice report that does:
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19690024196_1969024196.pdf also see: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0469(1964)021%3C0134%3APOCBSP%3E2.0.CO%3B2

What one finds is that the normal rate of C-14 production is around 2.5 C-14 atoms cm^2/sec, normally 95% of it from solar protons. The large solar flare of 1956 Feb 23, if at an opportune time of reduced shielding (the effective shielding fluctuates), would produce an annualized equivalent of 2.33, which would about double the normal production. The closest recent supernova of 1054 on the other hand is only capable of producing up to perhaps 0.2, only 8% more than normal.

To get a 2000% increase over normal you either need a supernova 16 times closer and 250 times brighter than 1054, or you need one 20-fold super-solar flare, or 20 big normal solar flares at an opportune low shielding period. Whether or not anyone saw or recorded a supernova this close, the remnant would be glaring obvious today - it would be a naked eye object larger than the full moon. On the other hand no one even noticed a solar flare before 1857, except for the auroras seen. It suggests a rare abnormal solar flare, or a rare abnormal series of more typical solar flares is by far the most likely candidate.

As others have noted on this thread, records do exist of strange events in the sky from that time, which might possibly refer to unusual auroras, and records from that time are terribly spotty anyway so the evidence would be expected to be thin, if present at all.

NASA has a fully functional copy of Hubble "sitting around" at Goddard Space Flight Center as well. If something goes wrong in space, fabrication of replacement components and the training of the astronauts that will fix it does not occur in space. It is invaluable to have an exact duplicate on the ground for this reason.

Interestingly, the total 2010 US Space budget was $64.6B. The entire rest of the world combined spent only $22.5B. NASA's 2010 budget was $18.7B. Many programs that people think are NASA projects are actually defense projects. For example, the GPS system is not included in NASA's budget, it's spearheaded by the Air Force Space Command, and comes out of the Defense budget.

Chances are the main satellites that these are duplicates for have been decommissioned, so these are no longer needed. I would guess they are actually two distinct but similar designs, and not two copies of the same design. I would assume NASA already determined that the risk of these satellites failing and NASA being incapable of fixing them is outweighed by the desire to have higher powered telescopes in space.

My mother has worked in the thermal blanket lab at Goddard for years. Several years ago, she got one of the engineers working on the James Webb Space Telescope to take her and I on a tour of the clean room where they are fabricating one of the core components, the micro-shutter array. The micro-shutter array is an array of 65,536 shutters on an area about the size of a postage stamp. We got to go into the clean room and see the entire process. It is very similar to the process used to fabricate semiconductors, and I think they were operating at about the 60nm level. The idea of the micro-shutter array is that each shutter can be independently operated to shut out interfering light sources, so that the telescope can look much further back in space and time for deep fields. These should be spectacular. Instead of imaging the entire shutter area as the Hubble does, JWST will be able to close all but one micro-shutter which should allow very long exposure times, and the ability to see extremely distant objects. More on the array at http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/microshutters.html.

Also, the Hubble is huge. It is a cylinder with a diameter of perhaps 15ft and a height of roughly 40ft. Pictures really don't do it justice, I had no appreciation for the size until I saw it. I know my mother did some of the thermal blanket fabrication (think the tin-foil looking stuff on the outside of spacecraft) for Servicing Mission 4. Disclaimer: This is a cross-post of something I wrote at Hacker News earlier today.

Many of the issues in these threads are discussed in the excellent book Where is Everybody?, which provides fifty solutions to Fermi's Paradox of why the Universe is not teeming with intelligent life.

However, you make an excellent point regarding the recent Heliopause discoveries, which occurred well after Stephen Webb's book came out in 2002. You might want to get in touch with the author and share your insight. I couldn't find an email address for him.

There's only one solution I can think of to the issue of RF transmissions being masked by the Heliopause. And that would be altering the spectrum of the Sun in a recognizable pattern.

For example, shooting a large (like, ridiculously large) amount of nuclear waste into the Sun might cause an alien spectral analysis to show an unexpected band of ionized depleted Uranium along with other elements in spent fuel. If that band appeared and disappeared yearly in a prime number or Fibonacci sequence, an alien astronomer with our level of technology or greater would be able to deduce:

1. The length of the Earth year and, I presume, the distance from the Sun to the Earth if they have their own Kepler mission.

2. The fact that Earth has achieved fission but not fusion nuclear power and related technologies.

3. That Earth has not yet annihilated itself through the discovery of nuclear technology.

4. That Earth is ready to receive a strong, directed communication that can penetrate the Heliopause.

5. What form of communication should be used to send the signal to Earth given the technology it possessed at the time the signal was initially transmitted. Perhaps that would involve altering their own star's spectrum if RF is impossible.

And many other facts.

However, there is a problem. No one seems to have done this yet. If it were possible, surely we would have seen such a beacon by now in all of our spectral analyses of all of the stars visible to us in the Universe.

Unfortunately, that would support solution number 50 in Webb's book: The Rare Earth. Sad, but apparently true at this time.

If we are going to propagate throughout the Galaxy, as we must do anyway to ensure survival within the next billion years before the Sun boils off the Earth's atmosphere, it looks like our civilization will be the one that solve's Fermi's paradox.

Rocket launching is far more dangerous to humans than to wildlife.

The wildlife at Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral seems not too spooked by anything short of an actual launch, and then only briefly.
http://mediaarchive.ksc.nasa.gov/search.cfm?cat=27

I specially like the shot of the Osprey nesting on the parking lot sign.

Rocket launching is far more dangerous to humans than to wildlife.

The wildlife at Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral seems not too spooked by anything short of an actual launch, and then only briefly.
http://mediaarchive.ksc.nasa.gov/search.cfm?cat=27

I specially like the shot of the Osprey nesting on the parking lot sign.

You're right. Even Space Bat faced his death with dignity. Rode the rocket up as far as he could. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts119/launchbat.html

We miss you Space Bat http://www.space-bat.com/

I have a Raspberry Pi, but now I'm more so sitting at the point of wtf do I use this for? I was originally thinking maybe some low power server to run a BNC or something small. Media player is another idea but I have enough devices that will play/stream media hooked up to my television.

Have you considered getting one of the extension boards, which allow for circuit prototyping? I intend to use mine (when it arrives) to process the signal from a Nasa Jove receiver, but there are tons of other circuits you could build. It's probably true that everything you can do with a Pi you could also do with a standard PC; but it seems to me that things like the Pi, which fit on a stand-alone circuit, just seem more... Fun. :-)

As stated below, we meant to type spectacularly. :-)

But let's bite the bait and play little with my foolish:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/29/asteroid-near-misses-earth-space-rocks_n_1553252.html

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news174.html

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120315225625.htm

http://news.discovery.com/space/asteroid-impact-hazard-2040-120228.html :-)

There is a better article from NASA:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/milky-way-collide.html

You do know that there are somewhat credible pessimistic scenarios where the sea level rises at 5 meters per century under conditions pretty much like the ones we are creating right now? The estimates are based on "paleoclimate" studies; best estimates are that there was a time when the sea rose that quickly.

This paper (you may want to click through to linked/referenced papers from it)
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_15/
discusses attempts to discern any lag in sea level rise given the relatively slow (compared to present conditions) climate forcings, and finds none. Essentially, it says that if you fail to see rapid sea level rise in the geological record, that should not comfort you -- it only indicates that the temperature did not rise quickly, but as fast as it did rise, so did the sea level.

This paper
http://people.uncw.edu/grindlayn/GLY550/Fairbanks-Sealevel-1989.pdf
finds that there was a time when the sea level rose 24m in 1000 years at one time, and a second "melt water pulse" appears to have had even higher rates of rise.

All of this is subject to caveats about what is melting (Greenland? Antarctica? Ice sheets?) and the resolution and accuracy of geological proxies. But people aren't just pulling these scary estimates out of their posteriors.

I do not think it would be possible to protect coastal Florida with dikes; the geology there (karst) would literally undermine your efforts. There are water-filled passages connecting the Gulf of Mexico with inland lakes and sinkholes.

Has nature? Yes. There are quite a few meteorites that originated on Mars.

You're an idiot.

First, launch escape systems only work if activated prior to an explosion. It won't save the lives of astronauts after the fact, the abort has to be done prior to the catastrophic event.

Second, of course the the Space Shuttle had Launch abort system. It had "Abort to Landing Site", "Transoceanic Abort Landing", "Abort Once Around", and "Abort to Orbit". Only Abort to Orbit was used in the program (STS-51-F):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes

Additionally, there was equipment and flight software for crew inflight bailout:

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/shutref/escape/inflight.html

This was not available during powered flight.

First of all, the astronauts on the Challenger are suppose to have survived the initial explosion and there's evidence that at least some of them were conscience when they hit the water. NASA hasn't said much about it out of respect for the families. The explosion was calculated to have 'pushed' the shuttle away from the propellent tank that would have given a strong, but survivable 'kick.' The point being, an escape system might get you away from an exploding rocket, provided there's enough mass between the capsule and the failing stage and it reacts fast enough.

On the other hand, I've flown in a stunt plane, open cockpit, seat pack parachute. I can pretty much guarantee you that if the plane is spinning out of control, you're going to be pinned to your seat. You're only going to get out if the plane is flying straight and level. Those G-forces when a plane is spinning out of control is one of the reasons why the survival rate of WW-II bomber crews was so low after a plane was hit. That also makes the shuttle system for inflight bailout was pretty much worthless. So unless your point is that in an explosion, you're pretty much fucked either way, your comment doesn't help much. I know which one I'd fly on, assuming both were in service.

First, launch escape systems only work if activated prior to an explosion. It won't save the lives of astronauts after the fact, the abort has to be done prior to the catastrophic event.

Second, of course the the Space Shuttle had Launch abort system. It had "Abort to Landing Site", "Transoceanic Abort Landing", "Abort Once Around", and "Abort to Orbit". Only Abort to Orbit was used in the program (STS-51-F):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes

Additionally, there was equipment and flight software for crew inflight bailout:

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/shutref/escape/inflight.html

This was not available during powered flight.

Every time you deniers "call us on it", we link again and again and again to the real science. You ask for the data, the data is available. You cast aspersions on the data, and it's independently verified. You fund studies meant to show that there's no warming, the study shows that there really is warming.

When we "call you on it", you disappear into the woods.

Forgive the self reply, but this would have been a bit off topic to the other sub comments: Here's just further evidence via news article I saw today from NASA, to support my claim that they're "Not Dead Yet!" (tm)

J-2X Engine Continues to Set Standards

Testing of the next-generation J-2X rocket engine continues to set standards. Last fall, the engine attained 100 percent power in just its fourth test and became the fastest U.S. rocket engine to achieve a full-flight duration test, hitting that 500-second mark in its eighth test.
...
The J-2X engine is the first human-rated liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen rocket engine to be developed in four decades. It will power the upper stage of NASA's Space Launch System, an advanced heavy-lift rocket that will provide an entirely new national capability for human exploration beyond Earth's orbit.

(boldness mine.... for now)
Dead? I think not. Though I LOVE the previously proposed idea of space pirates, I just can't bring myself to ignore evidence to the contrary... Long Live "publicly" funded space exploration!