Slashdot Mirror

> 40% of NASA's budget was going to global warming research

Where did you get that number, by the way ?

I can't really find it in their 2016 budget. https://www.nasa.gov/sites/def...

It would be interesting to get a similar car analogy for volcanoes!

https://earthobservatory.nasa....

http://sciencing.com/major-sou...

https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/vhp...

http://www.nationalgeographic....

https://www.nasa.gov/audience/...

TLDR: Antarctica is a desert.

https://www.nasa.gov/topics/ea...

The phrase "potentially hazardous" does not mean that it will be hazardous on this particular pass. It means that it is in a orbit that makes repeated close passes near Earth, so it potentially may be hazardous on a future pass.

the asteroid hasn't been this close to Earth since 1890, and it won't be this close again until 2500. How much closer will it be 483 years from now? We've got a lot more shit to worry about than this...

That's the definition of the word. The word is not defined as "objects to panic about right now."

If you don't want to worry about a potentially hazardous object, you don't have to. That does not mean it is not potentially hazardous. It just means you're not worrying about it.

More detailed definition here: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/about/neo_groups.html

https://eclipse.aas.org/eye-sa...

You can wear welding masks as long as they are shade 14:

https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/s...

Experts suggests that one widely available filter for safe solar viewing is welders glass of sufficiently high number. The only ones that are safe for direct viewing of the Sun with your eyes are those of Shade 12 or higher.

- NASA AAS

Myself, I used a Thousand Oaks SolarView filter on a C8.

First, ob disclaimer (in Bones' voice) : I'm a doctor, Jim, not an orbital mechanics expert.

all by itself unless acted upon by an outside force.

- That's the whole purpose of the ISS being in such a low orbit : there's still a significant (although extremely tiny) outside force in the form of atmospheric drag.
This has the immense benefit that this orbit is more or less cleaned of debris thanks to the drag.
But it also means that the ISS needs to regularly do compensations.

- There might still be other outside force that are necessary :
I suppose that once in a while, ISS must do small correction of its orbit to be sure not to be on a collision course if the debris observation network notices one not yet cleared debris of significant mass/size.
(Now, I don't have the faintest idea how much time in advance are these dangerous objects detected, and thus how long is the window of opportunity to do the manoeuvre so that later, once the ISS and the debris are in close vicinity, the risks of collision have been successfully reduced under the acceptable limit by the earlier manoeuvre).

- Last but not least : I'm pretty sure that the maintenance of the complex equipment (including all the various life support systems) is not just a lone astronaut's job but is a big team collaboration involving all the people directly in the station AND all lots of people on the ground. The non availability of ground crew can probably make some class of problems that might happen much more difficult to solve for the small crew currently in orbit.

First, ob disclaimer (in Bones' voice) : I'm a doctor, Jim, not an orbital mechanics expert.

all by itself unless acted upon by an outside force.

- That's the whole purpose of the ISS being in such a low orbit : there's still a significant (although extremely tiny) outside force in the form of atmospheric drag.
This has the immense benefit that this orbit is more or less cleaned of debris thanks to the drag.
But it also means that the ISS needs to regularly do compensations.

- There might still be other outside force that are necessary :
I suppose that once in a while, ISS must do small correction of its orbit to be sure not to be on a collision course if the debris observation network notices one not yet cleared debris of significant mass/size.
(Now, I don't have the faintest idea how much time in advance are these dangerous objects detected, and thus how long is the window of opportunity to do the manoeuvre so that later, once the ISS and the debris are in close vicinity, the risks of collision have been successfully reduced under the acceptable limit by the earlier manoeuvre).

- Last but not least : I'm pretty sure that the maintenance of the complex equipment (including all the various life support systems) is not just a lone astronaut's job but is a big team collaboration involving all the people directly in the station AND all lots of people on the ground. The non availability of ground crew can probably make some class of problems that might happen much more difficult to solve for the small crew currently in orbit.

Those damn government scientists with their gold-plated Corollas.
They ought to get into climate studies where the real graft is!

The greatest contributor to CO2 is carbon monoxide.

For the sake of charity I'm forced to assume that this is not what you meant to say. Carbon monoxide has a negligible influence on climate. It absorbs little energy directly and only persists in the atmosphere for about a month. See the summary here, or the full paper here.[pdf]

This is why some people are skeptical.

I hope that by "some people" you are excluding yourself from the group of people who would take a page of celebrity quotations as a credible argument of any sort. "Some people" are "skeptical" because they have no use for objective reality. Mostly they have no idea what they're even saying, and they refuse to expose themselves to enough information about the subject to make a remotely sensible objection. Saying, "AGW isn't happening," is a non-statement. Humans are dumping huge amounts of a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, which will result in warming. If you're disputing that fact, what part are you disputing? That humans are releasing gigatons of carbon, or that it's a greenhouse gas? Keeping in mind that the heat properties of CO2 can be verified in your basement. What part of thermodynamics is wrong? What term is missing from our radiative transfer equations? What hidden mechanism would transfer excess heat from the Earth? It's like saying that gravity is wrong -- it's not a claim in itself, and it's not to say that you're automatically a crackpot, but you do need to account for a couple contrary observations in your theory, and your explanation should probably be better than "I dunno, but it's still wrong!"

Personally, I maintain some hope that AGW will turn out to be milder than anticipated. The 3.7 W/m^2 is a pretty hard lower bound due to thermodynamics, but the H2O feedbacks allow for a fairly wide range of scenarios. It would be nice if Dr. Lindzen's Iris hypothesis were credible. As things are, however, there's just not a lot of room for alternate theories. Any unknown effects would have to be extremely large to offset the warming signal, and extremely subtle to not have been noticed to date in any of the atmospheres that we have studied. Given that our atmospheric physics equations describe extraterrestrial atmospheres well, including the atmosphere of the Sun, the amount of special pleading that would be required seems effectively infinite.

NASA produced a book some few years ago on the history of flight suits called Dressing for Altitude. It's not the world's most riveting read, but it is freely available online and it may (somewhat ironically) have the best design and typography of any book I've read.

Also in a similarly space-related bent, if anyone here has not read John Clark's Ignition! then they should certainly do so. The subtitle of the book should probably be "The secret history of rocket fuel", but the author went for "An informal history of liquid rocket propellants" instead.

It should be immediately obvious to anyone who examined it under any sort of microscope (regardless of their sensory inputs) that there's analog data encoded there on the grooves. They shouldn't even need "instructions" to recognize that and digitize the data. A spectral analysis should show variations in frequencies, with all sorts of clustering. Regardless of what senses they perceive through, they should be able to map it to one or more of them - either as 1d data, or in 2d as a spectrogram. Enough analysis should allow them to determine that most of the audio is acoustic vibrations, so they'd map it to whatever method they best use when studying or perceiving acoustic vibrations.

Analysis of the the image section should readily show that there are 115 distinct groupings, each comprised of 3 similar patterns of 512 separate signals, and that each separate signal is correlated with but subtly different to the one before it. This should suggest 115 groupings of 2-axis data measured over 3 related but distinct parameters. Which they can then map to whatever they use best to perceive 2-axis or 3-axis data. Again, further analysis should be able to figure out analogues of certain images to natural phenomenon that they recognize (for example, images of planets and moons, or the solar spectrum diagram). This would then let them figure out that the images represent optical data on specific frequencies of light in the visual spectrum, which they could then map to however they best prefer to represent light in that spectrum.

In short, I have no doubt that they could properly "read" the records. It's more a question of how much they could actually understand of the content. The silhouettes look to be particularly confusing. And even "natural place" images could be highly deceptive - for example, this island. If they knew nothing of trees, that might be percieved as a type of aa lava on top two dissimilar layered volcanic or sedimentary features.

The map of Antartica has an "East" and "West" half. There is no such thing. Everything not in the center is in the South. The part that is close to South America is just as much West as it is East. The part that is closer to Australia is also just as much West as it is East.

However, people that actually study antarctica apparently have a different opinion:

"Although the Antarctic Ice Sheet is a continuous mass of ice, but it is sometimes helpful to think of it as two separate masses known as the West Antarctic and East Antarctic ice sheets, which are separated by the Transantarctics. Ice on the west side of this line flows west, while the opposite happens east of the divide."

I hope people don't listen to your advice. They may permanently damage their eyes. As a result, they may sue you. From https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/... :

The only time that the Sun can be viewed safely with the naked eye is during a total eclipse, when the Moon completely covers the disk of the Sun. It is never safe to look at a partial or annular eclipse, or the partial phases of a total solar eclipse, without the proper equipment and techniques. Even when 99% of the Sun's surface (the photosphere) is obscured during the partial phases of a solar eclipse, the remaining crescent Sun is still intense enough to cause a retinal burn, even though illumination levels are comparable to twilight [Chou, 1981, 1996; Marsh, 1982]. Failure to use proper observing methods may result in permanent eye damage or severe visual loss. This can have important adverse effects on career choices and earning potential, since it has been shown that most individuals who sustain eclipse-related eye injuries are children and young adults [Penner and McNair, 1966; Chou and Krailo, 1981].

- Tungsten Cermet Reactors presentation.
- Dumbo: A pachydermal rocket motor paper.

The Mars Pathfinder used ruggedized COTS Motorola modems.

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-...

It's the first thing that pops up if you google "animated temperature anomaly map"

Feel free to also google the multitude of peer-reviewed data that demonstrates the same, such as this:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

(third time I've cited this paper so far today)

I do have a glaring opinion, based upon actual, real, peer-reviewed results. Those results are true whether I hold a glaring opinion on them or not.

It's unfortunate that the GP post says "every prognosis has come true". There are many metastudies about global warming that look at different studies' predictions and average the expected temperature change graphs, so it stands to reason that some fraction of them have to be somewhat less accurate than the others. Nevertheless, here is a link that summarizes global warming and other changes, like ocean acidification, since 2000. https://climate.nasa.gov/evide...

"And it will be even if we halt all activity right now."

And apparently if we stop all industrial activity immediately the Earth will get even hotter than it is now.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/l...

Damned if we do, damned if we don't.

The real doomsday scenario for climate change isn't some places becoming dryer, or wetter, or hotter, or colder, or fish and coral dying off, or sea levels rising and displacing coastal communities - it's changes in the composition of our atmosphere. 50 to 80% of the oxygen we breathe comes from oceanic phytoplankton. Imagine a scenario driven by climate change where increasing carbon dioxide dissolved into the oceans and creates carbonic acid, increasing the oceanic acidity level; then increased temperatures cause ice melts that mess up salinity levels of the ocean and disrupt the great conveyer belt; finally due to these disruptions the phytoplankton experiences a massive die-off and the atmospheric oxygen levels are reduced to levels similar to, say, the top of Everest today. NYC and London and Hong Kong being under meters of water would be a disaster, but wouldn't be unsurmountable. Humanity being unable to breathe could make us extinct. (Disclosure - I'm not climate or biology scientist. This is all just person supposition.)

See this link: Content of the Universe 2016

So, the problem is that there is so much of it, you would think we'd see it perturbing stallar orbits more, it it were concentated in many, many discrete points of star gravitational influence. There would be a lot more stars orbiting pulsar type objects, perhaps?

A real cosmologist would know the odds of the galaxy looking the way it does if all the extra mass were in scattered black holes of a certain size. Probably low.

don't you worry your pretty little head. mozilla's crack team of developers and project leaders are working very hard to just kill off the whole damn browser, and have been for about 2 1/2 years now. give them another six months to finish digging the grave.

on august 21st, i'm switching full time to pale moon. seemed like an appropriate time to do it.

Turns out there's more than one horse in the barn. You don't leave the barn door open just because one got out. We've not had any problems. Every impact so far? Great, we've survived them. Heck, hundreds of people survive a drunk drive every night. We still try to stop them if we can. And no, the serious people looking have done more than just guess or blow smoke.

Don't conflate them with the people full of shit.

The SAFEST way to view the eclipse is INDIRECTLY, not looking directly at the sun.
Instructions:
https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/s...
https://www.timeanddate.com/ec...

Welding glass filters may work - but one needs to get the right shade. "Only goggles made for electric arc welding can be used to observe the sun, and they must have a shade scale number of 12 or higher. Shade 13 is ideal for solar viewing, but that shade is typically not sold in stores, Fienberg added."

NASA recommends #14 welding glass.

Yes a piece of welding glass works great but make sure you use at least a #14 glass per NASA recommendations. This is widely available through welding supply companies. Not all welding eye protection is adequate for looking at the Sun.

The point is that SpaceX is planning on using this version of Dragon for the commercial crew program, so NASA's requirements are VERY relevant to what SpaceX decides to develop. Since NASA's requirements for powered landings are more than SpaceX wanted to meet, they decided not to spend the money to do it.

True, but NASA seems to have taken the position "We're not even going to bother looking to see if there is anything of significance."

Actually, their official position is something along the lines of "these tapes are so molded to shit they're quite frankly a health hazard, we already have known backups of the labelled tapes, so we're not going to spend the time and money trying to scrape data off tapes that are probably completely unreadable anyway."

From the published discussions they decided that because there was no evidence of historically significant data it wasn't worth the effort to try to restore the severely molded tapes.

Here's the full discussion of the find and analysis of the tapes (which were found to be too badly damaged by mold to attempt data recovery). All sounds pretty reasonable, no point spending a lot of money on discarded hardware and damaged tapes that there are existing better copies of.

Apaprently the tapes were in extremely poor condition (mold etc)

The northern hemisphere spring thaw has been advancing by about one day per year since 1988:
- https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqne...
- http://www.foodnutritionscienc...
- http://climatechange.lta.org/c...
- http://flatheadcore.org/featur...
- https://earthobservatory.nasa....
- http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

Perhaps you should read the links you post. Spring thaw of 'snow' and 'ice' in mountains or far south of the arctic circle are completely irrelevant for what is going north of the arctic circle.

I'm not sure what you're referring to. The first link I posted, for example was not about "snow and ice in mountains," it was about "boreal forests and tundra". ("Boreal" means "northern", but in context it's almost always used to mean the far north, Arctic and subarctic. By the way, your post says "north of the arctic circle," but I was talking about Russia. Much of Russia is subarctic, but very little is "north of the Arctic circle".)

Here is a quote from that first link, saying specifically what it was covering:

"Research scientists have been studying freeze/thaw dynamics in North America and Eurasia's boreal forests and tundra to decipher effects on the timing and length of the growing season. These regions encompass almost 30 percent of global land area. ... Large expanses of boreal forest and tundra are underlain by permafrost, a layer of permanently frozen soil found underneath the active, seasonally thawed soil.

Are you really such an idiot? None of you links has on the first glance ANYTHING to do with what we where talking about before. Who cars that land that already is farmland is thawing a week or two more early? You claimed that climate change would create new farmland in Russia, which it won't.

Are we talking about the same thing?

The northern hemisphere spring thaw has been advancing by about one day per year since 1988:
- https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqne...
- http://www.foodnutritionscienc...
- http://climatechange.lta.org/c...
- http://flatheadcore.org/featur...
- https://earthobservatory.nasa....
- http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

Perhaps you should read the links you post. Spring thaw of 'snow' and 'ice' in mountains or far south of the arctic circle are completely irrelevant for what is going north of the arctic circle.

I'm not sure what you're referring to. The first link I posted, for example was not about "snow and ice in mountains," it was about "boreal forests and tundra". ("Boreal" means "northern", but in context it's almost always used to mean the far north, Arctic and subarctic. By the way, your post says "north of the arctic circle," but I was talking about Russia. Much of Russia is subarctic, but very little is "north of the Arctic circle".)

Here is a quote from that first link, saying specifically what it was covering:

"Research scientists have been studying freeze/thaw dynamics in North America and Eurasia's boreal forests and tundra to decipher effects on the timing and length of the growing season. These regions encompass almost 30 percent of global land area. ... Large expanses of boreal forest and tundra are underlain by permafrost, a layer of permanently frozen soil found underneath the active, seasonally thawed soil.

Are you really such an idiot? None of you links has on the first glance ANYTHING to do with what we where talking about before. Who cars that land that already is farmland is thawing a week or two more early? You claimed that climate change would create new farmland in Russia, which it won't.

Are we talking about the same thing?

The northern hemisphere spring thaw has been advancing by about one day per year since 1988:
- https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqne...
- http://www.foodnutritionscienc...
- http://climatechange.lta.org/c...
- http://flatheadcore.org/featur...
- https://earthobservatory.nasa....
- http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

Perhaps you should read the links you post. Spring thaw of 'snow' and 'ice' in mountains or far south of the arctic circle are completely irrelevant for what is going north of the arctic circle.

I'm not sure what you're referring to. The first link I posted, for example was not about "snow and ice in mountains," it was about "boreal forests and tundra". ("Boreal" means "northern", but in context it's almost always used to mean the far north, Arctic and subarctic. By the way, your post says "north of the arctic circle," but I was talking about Russia. Much of Russia is subarctic, but very little is "north of the Arctic circle".)

Here is a quote from that first link, saying specifically what it was covering:

"Research scientists have been studying freeze/thaw dynamics in North America and Eurasia's boreal forests and tundra to decipher effects on the timing and length of the growing season. These regions encompass almost 30 percent of global land area. ... Large expanses of boreal forest and tundra are underlain by permafrost, a layer of permanently frozen soil found underneath the active, seasonally thawed soil.

Are you really such an idiot? None of you links has on the first glance ANYTHING to do with what we where talking about before. Who cars that land that already is farmland is thawing a week or two more early? You claimed that climate change would create new farmland in Russia, which it won't.

Are we talking about the same thing?

The northern hemisphere spring thaw has been advancing by about one day per year since 1988:
- https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqne...
- http://www.foodnutritionscienc...
- http://climatechange.lta.org/c...
- http://flatheadcore.org/featur...
- https://earthobservatory.nasa....
- http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

Perhaps you should read the links you post. Spring thaw of 'snow' and 'ice' in mountains or far south of the arctic circle are completely irrelevant for what is going north of the arctic circle.

I'm not sure what you're referring to. The first link I posted, for example was not about "snow and ice in mountains," it was about "boreal forests and tundra". ("Boreal" means "northern", but in context it's almost always used to mean the far north, Arctic and subarctic. By the way, your post says "north of the arctic circle," but I was talking about Russia. Much of Russia is subarctic, but very little is "north of the Arctic circle".)

Here is a quote from that first link, saying specifically what it was covering:

"Research scientists have been studying freeze/thaw dynamics in North America and Eurasia's boreal forests and tundra to decipher effects on the timing and length of the growing season. These regions encompass almost 30 percent of global land area. ... Large expanses of boreal forest and tundra are underlain by permafrost, a layer of permanently frozen soil found underneath the active, seasonally thawed soil.

Are you really such an idiot? None of you links has on the first glance ANYTHING to do with what we where talking about before. Who cars that land that already is farmland is thawing a week or two more early? You claimed that climate change would create new farmland in Russia, which it won't.

Are we talking about the same thing?

The "shortness of summer" is bounded by temperature, not sunlight
Wrong.
This will happen earlier, and it will stay thawed later.
How many days? 1or 2?

The northern hemisphere spring thaw has been advancing by about one day per year since 1988:
- https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqne...
- http://www.foodnutritionscienc...
- http://climatechange.lta.org/c...
- http://flatheadcore.org/featur...
- https://earthobservatory.nasa....
- http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

Before there is not enough sun, it won't thaw. Plain and simple. And that is depending on the length of the day, not on a magic temperature that comes from somewhere. (where should it come from? Hu? Polar night is polar night and everything is frozen ... )

Tell you what, why don't you do some research here and get back to me when you've learned enough to form an opinion

The "shortness of summer" is bounded by temperature, not sunlight
Wrong.
This will happen earlier, and it will stay thawed later.
How many days? 1or 2?

The northern hemisphere spring thaw has been advancing by about one day per year since 1988:
- https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqne...
- http://www.foodnutritionscienc...
- http://climatechange.lta.org/c...
- http://flatheadcore.org/featur...
- https://earthobservatory.nasa....
- http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

Before there is not enough sun, it won't thaw. Plain and simple. And that is depending on the length of the day, not on a magic temperature that comes from somewhere. (where should it come from? Hu? Polar night is polar night and everything is frozen ... )

Tell you what, why don't you do some research here and get back to me when you've learned enough to form an opinion

Agree. Source... https://www.nasa.gov/mission_p...

One of NASA's missions is to do that kind of research and quite literally give it away to anyone who wants it.

This is completely incorrect. Since 1980, the Bayh–Dole Act allows research agencies to license and profit from the technologies created under Federal grants. https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/60521...

I would have designed the probe to utilize the radiation as a power source, prolonging the mission. I don't understand why the mission planners didn't utilize this obvious power source but I'm sure they had their reasons. I would have done things completely differently.

How would you possibly do that?.

It turns out that, while the radiation is damaging (because each particle has high energy per particle), the actual amount of power represented by the radiation flux is not very high. You can tell that from the fact that Juno doesn't heat up when it crosses the radiation belts.

For what it's worth, here's a paper discussing radiation effects on power systems at Jupiter: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/...

The probe will fail due to radiation exposure, but the orbit was designed to minimize that.

Right. Here's a good picture of the perijove, skimming in under the radiation belts: http://www.catherineq.com/wp-c...

Note that each orbit the perijove has precesses slightly (due to perturbations because Jupiter is not perfectly spherical), so after some time the orbit will go through (instead of under) the belts.

Here's an "infographic" with more information: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/def...

A small area of the planet being radioactive. But that's ok, with no life as we know it, not much weather to blow stuff around, and lots of land mass, we've got plenty of chances at another try.

"Not much weather"? You mean except for the global dust storms that could distribute fallout far and wide? With dust that sticks to everything like styrofoam peanuts?

state unambiguously that he was directed to reach out to the Muslim world to make them feel good about their contributions to science and engineering.

So what?

NASA has always been about public relations. They are the single most popular government agency in the world. They have had their own television network since the early 80s. You seem to have a bug up your ass that one of the many, many areas of outreach was to the second largest group of people on the planet.

Lest you forget, the X Prize was founded by Anousheh Ansari a female muslim immigrant from Iran. Seems like encouraging more people like her is exactly what NASA ought to be doing.

state unambiguously that he was directed to reach out to the Muslim world to make them feel good about their contributions to science and engineering.

So what?

NASA has always been about public relations. They are the single most popular government agency in the world. They have had their own television network since the early 80s. You seem to have a bug up your ass that one of the many, many areas of outreach was to the second largest group of people on the planet.

Lest you forget, the X Prize was founded by Anousheh Ansari a female muslim immigrant from Iran. Seems like encouraging more people like her is exactly what NASA ought to be doing.

state unambiguously that he was directed to reach out to the Muslim world to make them feel good about their contributions to science and engineering.

So what?

NASA has always been about public relations. They are the single most popular government agency in the world. They have had their own television network since the early 80s. You seem to have a bug up your ass that one of the many, many areas of outreach was to the second largest group of people on the planet.

Lest you forget, the X Prize was founded by Anousheh Ansari a female muslim immigrant from Iran. Seems like encouraging more people like her is exactly what NASA ought to be doing.

state unambiguously that he was directed to reach out to the Muslim world to make them feel good about their contributions to science and engineering.

So what?

NASA has always been about public relations. They are the single most popular government agency in the world. They have had their own television network since the early 80s. You seem to have a bug up your ass that one of the many, many areas of outreach was to the second largest group of people on the planet.

Lest you forget, the X Prize was founded by Anousheh Ansari a female muslim immigrant from Iran. Seems like encouraging more people like her is exactly what NASA ought to be doing.

Nothing that is destined to operate much beyond Mars orbit is powered by solar panels.

Well, to be pedantic, Juno is a solar powered orbiter at Jupiter. The average distance to the sun for Mars is 1.5 AU, whereas it is 5.4 AU for Jupiter. But that's pushing the limits of the technology. There's an informative article on the topic from Smithsonian's Air and Space Magazine. You can get a sense of the size of the panels from this video.

NASA's Voyagers 1 and 2 are both going strong after 37 years exposure to micrometeorites in space.

Chalk up an own goal! Voyagers 1 and 2 are powered by RTGs, not solar panels. Nothing that is destined to operate much beyond Mars orbit is powered by solar panels. Inverse square law of solar radiation intensity and all.

And with that your credibility is gone. Thank you for playing the "I don't know what I'm talking about but will push my agenda anyway" game.

I''ve also read that solar can't power the world (not enough sun reaches our surface).

Then you have read incorrectly. We get about 10,000 times as much energy from the sun than we currently use. So by covering 1% of earth's surface with 1% efficient solar panels we could meet our current energy needs. Since 1% efficient panels are absolute garbage (can you even find 1%) it would require even less area so instead we could over 0.05% of earth's surface with 20% efficient panels (chosen because I believe that is the average efficiency of panels now). Now there are some losses from what reaches the upper atmosphere to what we get at the ground but it doesn't affect the calculation in a meaningful way, as in we still get like 7,000 times the amount of energy than we use.