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The images will never be perfect. The page you reference on the space.com article was not the exact image stored on the rover. When the images are transmitted from the Rover back to JPL, there is a transmission loss in the retro-bias diagonal frequency bass carrier that causes the image to be distorted. The fuzzy look we receive is then dithered and poly-metrophased with the dark "shadows" you see. This brings the image back to what we could theoretically predict it would be if the image was proper.

Somewhat offtopic, though much software ON THE GROUND at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is written in Java, but not software on the spacecraft. This doesn't have any problem, but due to Java's slow execution rate on the Rover's computer we actualy lose tetra-physical carbonic exposure rate because the camera simply can't be operated as quickly in Java as if the comman protocol were operated through a more iffecient lower-level language such as C.

Needless to say, I wrote some of the software used for the mission in Java, and it worked very well for our purposes, namely due to platform independence and quick development time. We had a heck of a time with some of the GUI code, however.

The rover runs VxWorks from Wind River. Very solid. Cheers,

Jim Cobgrobbler
Science Activation Planning Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers

The top part of the picture is the actual image. The part along the bottom is a 3D rendering of what it would look like to a low-flying plane.

You can see both images seperately on this page.

Sorry, somehow my link didn't come through.
http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/saturn_five _000313.html

Jon Acheson

As has been done in the past with Soviet missions, both Mars and Venus will get probes, using some spares and the design from the first launch for the second probe.

In this case, the second probe will be launched as Venus Express. This will be launched in Nov 2005, also by Soyuz from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazachstan.

Soyuz is working out so well, that ESA is building Soyuz launch facilities in French Guiana - which is of course MUCH nearer the equator and is E.U. territory. (It's a problem for Russia that Baikonur is no longer in their territory).

Then there's Rosetta, this flagship mission will be launched in a month or so. It's a mission to chase a comet, taking TEN years to catch it! It will also flyby at least one asteroid.

And while there might not be a ready supply of readily available water, they most certainly IS water available. So check out this article.

Now with the water frozen states of water, an abundant fuel supply which will allow electricity and heat to be produced - which the heat can be unuse to unfreeze the water (would only need to develope and outer space frozen particle vacuum to collect the frozen water, bring inside, apply heat.. and you have water -- water yfor you and the plants.

As far as sun light, again, the adbundant supply of energy would provide the electricity for the artifical sun lamp to keep the plants thriving. I mean really! How many people do you know that grown, um, 'plants' in their closet using heat lamps. No light for plants make it harder... not impossible.

Thus, a moon base by 2020 would have absolutely no connection to this in my mind. Frankly, you aren't going to get any militaristic benefit from going to the moon, other than cowing other countries into submission. And we should already be able to do that through other means...

All this, of course, is not to say that I don't support going back to the moon - I do, for scientific reasons - but as a military objective, this whole helium 3 thing is silly right now.

Hard as it is to quantify, Hubble has been:
(Taken from NASA)

Every day, Hubble archives 3 to 5 gigabytes of data and delivers between 10 and 15 gigabytes to astronomers all over the world. See science highlights. As of March 2000, Hubble has:
Taken more than 330,000 separate observations.
Observed more than 25,000 astronomical targets.
Created a data archive of over 7.3 terabytes. (That is like completely filling a PC every day for 10 years.)
Provided data for more than 2,663 scientific papers.

The cost of Hubble? Initial construction has been less than the cost of 1 B2 (approx 2.2 billion according to CNN) and in its lifetime, around 6 billion, by the time it is projected (earlier) to be retired in 2010

I admire your back of envelope calculations, it is indeed very accurate for the Hubble, but quite short on the ISS (which is a very complex project). I don't have to, and didn't exaggerated on anything - these things you read about for interest and the approx figures stay in your head and if there need be, someone would have written it on some authoritative organisation that you can refer to.

The thing is, ISS was intially planned to cost around 9billion in Reagan's era. How it balloned to that is perhaps something someone would write a book about one day.

And now I have wasted another 20min on this, precious Sat time at that!

The wide-ranging RAND study urges the White House to become more engaged in scripting how best to use the ISS, tagging the Earth-circling complex as a $70 billion national investment.

NASA is not going to die. Most people seem to forget that NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. There's an awful lot more going on than a few robotic probes and shuttle launches.

What is abundantly clear, however, is that Bush's "space initiative" is nothing more than smoke and mirrors designed to boost his approval ratings. Let's crunch a few numbers: Bush's plan set aside an additional $12 billion for developing a "Saturn Mark II" launch vehicle with a capsule capable of landings on both the Moon and Mars. Not only is the number ridiculous, but so is the method for obtaining the funds. Bush claims that $1 billion will be allocated by Congress, and the additional $11 billion will be found by restructuring NASA, including ending shuttle flights. So we'll finish up the station by 2010, auction the shuttles on eBay, and be on the Moon by 2015? Riiiight. First of all, NASA won't have any free funds from ending the shuttle program until at least 2010 when the station is complete, and then that only leaves 5 years for development of a completely new vehicle and support system. Even then, the shuttle's budget is only about $4 billion. The remaining $7 billion will have to be earned by cutting into NASA's remaining $11 billion. So once again, the Aeronautics branch of NASA is getting the shaft in favor of a bloated and fatally optimistic manned space program. Sound familiar? It's the shuttle all over again.

Since the federal government seems to be waffling on what it thinks NASA should be doing, I am in favor of a much less glamorous "bottom-up" approach to space exploration. Let the private entrepreneurs build simple craft to get us barely out of the atmosphere. From there, the craft get slightly more sophisticated, and through the magic of technological evolution from several sources, we end up exploring the solar system in ways we can't even dream of now. We can parallel this growth to that of the internet: it started as a large, well funded government program (ARPANET), but it wasn't until the little guy started to find commercial opportunities that it really took off (Amazon, anyone?) If we had relied on the DoD to create the internet for us, we'd be stuck with an online copy of the Library of Congress, distributed through a huge router the size of a steel factory and transmitting over a 9600 baud connection.

While Bush has his head in the sand, the X-Prize and the X-Prize Cup will be ruling the upper atmosphere! I plan on retiring at the Shady Craters Lunar Resort.

And, to keep this little tirade on topic:
The Hubble Telescope has performed beautifully and well beyond its intended lifespan. There are other, better space telescopes in the works. Let's save the shuttle flight for station hardware and let the telescope retire with dignity.

NASA is not going to die. Most people seem to forget that NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. There's an awful lot more going on than a few robotic probes and shuttle launches.

What is abundantly clear, however, is that Bush's "space initiative" is nothing more than smoke and mirrors designed to boost his approval ratings. Let's crunch a few numbers: Bush's plan set aside an additional $12 billion for developing a "Saturn Mark II" launch vehicle with a capsule capable of landings on both the Moon and Mars. Not only is the number ridiculous, but so is the method for obtaining the funds. Bush claims that $1 billion will be allocated by Congress, and the additional $11 billion will be found by restructuring NASA, including ending shuttle flights. So we'll finish up the station by 2010, auction the shuttles on eBay, and be on the Moon by 2015? Riiiight. First of all, NASA won't have any free funds from ending the shuttle program until at least 2010 when the station is complete, and then that only leaves 5 years for development of a completely new vehicle and support system. Even then, the shuttle's budget is only about $4 billion. The remaining $7 billion will have to be earned by cutting into NASA's remaining $11 billion. So once again, the Aeronautics branch of NASA is getting the shaft in favor of a bloated and fatally optimistic manned space program. Sound familiar? It's the shuttle all over again.

Since the federal government seems to be waffling on what it thinks NASA should be doing, I am in favor of a much less glamorous "bottom-up" approach to space exploration. Let the private entrepreneurs build simple craft to get us barely out of the atmosphere. From there, the craft get slightly more sophisticated, and through the magic of technological evolution from several sources, we end up exploring the solar system in ways we can't even dream of now. We can parallel this growth to that of the internet: it started as a large, well funded government program (ARPANET), but it wasn't until the little guy started to find commercial opportunities that it really took off (Amazon, anyone?) If we had relied on the DoD to create the internet for us, we'd be stuck with an online copy of the Library of Congress, distributed through a huge router the size of a steel factory and transmitting over a 9600 baud connection.

While Bush has his head in the sand, the X-Prize and the X-Prize Cup will be ruling the upper atmosphere! I plan on retiring at the Shady Craters Lunar Resort.

And, to keep this little tirade on topic:
The Hubble Telescope has performed beautifully and well beyond its intended lifespan. There are other, better space telescopes in the works. Let's save the shuttle flight for station hardware and let the telescope retire with dignity.

NASA is not going to die. Most people seem to forget that NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. There's an awful lot more going on than a few robotic probes and shuttle launches.

What is abundantly clear, however, is that Bush's "space initiative" is nothing more than smoke and mirrors designed to boost his approval ratings. Let's crunch a few numbers: Bush's plan set aside an additional $12 billion for developing a "Saturn Mark II" launch vehicle with a capsule capable of landings on both the Moon and Mars. Not only is the number ridiculous, but so is the method for obtaining the funds. Bush claims that $1 billion will be allocated by Congress, and the additional $11 billion will be found by restructuring NASA, including ending shuttle flights. So we'll finish up the station by 2010, auction the shuttles on eBay, and be on the Moon by 2015? Riiiight. First of all, NASA won't have any free funds from ending the shuttle program until at least 2010 when the station is complete, and then that only leaves 5 years for development of a completely new vehicle and support system. Even then, the shuttle's budget is only about $4 billion. The remaining $7 billion will have to be earned by cutting into NASA's remaining $11 billion. So once again, the Aeronautics branch of NASA is getting the shaft in favor of a bloated and fatally optimistic manned space program. Sound familiar? It's the shuttle all over again.

Since the federal government seems to be waffling on what it thinks NASA should be doing, I am in favor of a much less glamorous "bottom-up" approach to space exploration. Let the private entrepreneurs build simple craft to get us barely out of the atmosphere. From there, the craft get slightly more sophisticated, and through the magic of technological evolution from several sources, we end up exploring the solar system in ways we can't even dream of now. We can parallel this growth to that of the internet: it started as a large, well funded government program (ARPANET), but it wasn't until the little guy started to find commercial opportunities that it really took off (Amazon, anyone?) If we had relied on the DoD to create the internet for us, we'd be stuck with an online copy of the Library of Congress, distributed through a huge router the size of a steel factory and transmitting over a 9600 baud connection.

While Bush has his head in the sand, the X-Prize and the X-Prize Cup will be ruling the upper atmosphere! I plan on retiring at the Shady Craters Lunar Resort.

And, to keep this little tirade on topic:
The Hubble Telescope has performed beautifully and well beyond its intended lifespan. There are other, better space telescopes in the works. Let's save the shuttle flight for station hardware and let the telescope retire with dignity.

It is incorrect to say Bush has no interest in NASA. Both Bush and Gore were warm to the idea of a Mars trip when they ran in 2000. This article also mentions Bush might increase the size of NASA with defense in mind.

Every new policy venture needs to coincide with an optimal political time for successful passage. Public support is often fickle, since the media prefers to sensationalize rather than educate, so of course he is trying to hype this up. There's nothing wrong with rallying people to something you believe in. It's not sneaky, devious, or transparent, it's leadership.

It doesn't make sense that your support for a space program is contingent on if whoever proposes it feels sincerely about it. That would be similar to the President taking a 400 page budget before Congress, Congress tossing it in the trash, then asking "Gee, we just want to know how you feel about it?" I'm glad that's not the way the world works.

When the cargo ship crashed into Mir while testing automated docking routines, Michael Foale's ears popped from the falling air pressure. Leaks are much easier to find with rushing air and popping ears.

It's like tires. When you have a blow-out, it is easy to see but a slow leak may go undetected for weeks until it overheats on that long trim to the relatives place for the holidays.

Why not link directly to the original article?

On any Google search, you're going to get some irrelevant results. If your eyes are closed, that's all you'll choose to see. But on the search I gave you, the first three pages also held:

US investigates space bomber

Pentagon planning for space bomber

Bush plans 'space bomber'

Pentagon planning for space bomber;
Documents show how X-plane could be used by military

NASA Brings Back Plans To Fly X-37 Demonstrator In Orbit for 270 Days

A Defense Agenda for 21st Century Warfare

Check them out, Mr. Coward.

The odds of humanity being wiped out by an asteroid (we're VERY resourceful, it would have to be a near planet-sized asteroid to kill us all) are on the same level as the odds of pink communist aliens landing here and making us their bitches. In other words, practically non-existant.

Not really, since we think that an asteroid may have done the same thing in the past. (Wiped out most land based life on earth). We don't think that pink communist aliens ever landed on earth, altough if they did it would explain the majority of people who post their political opinions on slashdot.

you want to worry about natural disasters hurting the US, you'd be better off worrying about hurricanes, earthquakes and giant tsunami's. Giant tsunami's are nearly guaranteed to happen (there is geological evidence for them). The most likely cause would be the partial collapsing into the ocean of the island of La Palma, which would result in a wave over 100 foot high that would destroy the coastline of florida up to 5 miles land-inwards. It would be the largest natural disaster in recorded history, and it's just a matter of time before it happens (though the predictions regarding the when range from 2005 to 7005, so...). The difference is that won't wipe out all of humanity, an astrological disaster has the potental. Say this Star goes super nova which it's expected to do at some point (could be tommorow, could be 10,000 years from now). It could effect us if it hypernova's we might be in trouble...or not.

Just because we don't understand or know how bad the problem might be doesn't mean we should stick our heads in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist. While the East Coast of the US getting wiped out by a tsunami would suck, (especially since I live there) humanity getting wiped out would suck worse. While some people might just "not care" if they are going to die, I'd much rather the human race go on after I'm gone.

Have you seen this picture? I think we've invoked the wrath of them thar Martians...

Why not build the space elevator first and then surely lifting all that hardware up into space will be a whole lot cheaper?

No, not computer animation per se, simply the unintuitive use of great technologies like this.

Has anyone tried to *say* CEV? Chev? Chevy? How are we supposed to pronounce it? I swear, it sounds like a suppository.

according to space.com, it kinda looks like a suppository, too.

Bush Mission to Mars: it's all about militarizing space

Excerpts from Bush's "space exploration" speech delivered earlier today:

America is proud of our space program. The risk-takers and visionaries of this agency have expanded human knowledge, have revolutionized our understanding of the universe and produced technological advances that have benefited all of humane's (sic) doing an excellent job.

Certainly, some of it has benefited people who live in affluent nations -- most notably, the aerospace industry, otherwise known as the "defense" industry. The vast majority of mankind, however, lives under conditions of grinding poverty and the advances gained from the space program do not benefit them in the least. In fact, many of the "technological advances" of the aerospace industry have resulted in widespread death and destruction -- for instance, the development and use of stealth bombers and cruise missiles. For untold numbers of Iraqis and Afghans, the American space program translates into GPS guided bombs killing their children.

Our investment in space exploration helped to create our satellite telecommunications network and the Global Positioning System.

See the previous comment.

Our first goal is to complete the International Space Station by 2010. We will finish what we have started.

Bush's "first goal" is to realize plans spelled out by the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, chaired by Donald Rumsfeld in 2001. A report issued by the Commission demands the US "have the option to deploy weapons in space to deter threats to and, if necessary, defend against attacks on U.S. interests." In other words, the US will build a new generation of space-based weapons to further realize Pax Americana. Of course, this will motivate other countries (most notably China) to waste money and precious resouces on developing space weapons of their own, initiating an arms race.

In fact, China has already started its own space weapons program, according to a report released by the Department of Defense. "The report focuses on the current and probable future course of that country's growing military-technological prowess, including the use of space to assure military advantage," Leonard David writes for Space.com. "This year's report cites a comment from Captain Shen Zhongchang from the Chinese Navy Research Institute. He envisions, according to the DoD, a weaker military defeating a superior one by attacking its space-based communications and surveillance systems." For more on the strategic thinking of the Chinese, see Chinese Views of Future Warfare.

[Secretary of the Air Force Pete Aldrich] has tremendous experience in the Department of Defense and the aerospace industry. And he is going to begin this important work right away.

Aldrich does have "tremendous experience" -- he is the overseer of the Defense Departmenta(TM)s Missile Defense Support Group (MDSG) and reports to the DoD's Senior Executive Council (SEC) and the Missile Defense Agency. "The SEC, which is chaired by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and includes the service secretaries and Aldridge, recently was assigned the task of considering whether elements of the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) should move to production and deployment," writes Alaska Missile Defense Early Bird Weekly.

In other words, Reagan's Star Wars reinvented.

"[The] real scandal [of BMDS is] that the defense being developed won't work -- and few in Washington seem to know or ca

Uranus Experiment, Part 2.

Good ol' Space.com has an article on it so you don't have to worry about the spouse looking up your recent visits...

I think Mars is premature until we have something like a space elevator going to get stuff into orbit. Or something to get the cost of getting to orbit under control.

With that, we can afford to take a big ship there. We can put in some infrastructure on Mars ahead of the astronauts getting there.

To send a person to Mars doesn't make sense to me. Spend the money on the space program, but not for this project please.

> fscking up the sun...

Feh. If Terra was 100% Plutonium, it could neither make Sol fart in your general direction nor empty either of her nostrils at your hind quarters like a 12th century Frenchman.

> expensive to hoist

Ah! Uh, railguns perhaps? Oh, or what about that laser rocket? Seems to me that sending the payload up and leaving the propulsion on the ground may be a better solution; I mean, we already know how to build sweet-assed nuclear plants. Why take the uranium with you?

Oh, you mean like the space elevator?

and just a year ago we found out that both poles are mostly water ice.

Destiny was designed and made in the US.

He made an earthquake prediction in Japan based on radio waves, and he actually came pretty close. Close enough that his ideas are worth more investigation.

No prediction of the cosmic microwave background's blackbody temperature prior to the CMBR's discovery was ever thought very likely correct

Predictions were made, though, from Steffan-Boltzmann laws, of blackbody cosmic background radiation in an infinite/static universe configuration by Guillaume in 1896 (5-6K), Eddington in 1926 (3.18K), Regener (2.8K) and Nernst (0.75K on a tired light model).

It is the mere existence of the microwave background -- its omnidirectional uniformity and amazing blackbody spectrum -- that is the prediction of interest. And contrary to assertions from people, these are extremely hard to contrive in other ways. Such alternative sources for the CMBR typically involve a local origin, in which starlight is thermalized by e.g. the intergalactic medium.

I had gathered that inflationary theory was employed to explain the uniformity due to horizon considerations; fluctuations contributing to the anisotropy would have had to be in contact. Without inflationary theory, it would/will be much harder to explain, at least on that basis.

I wasn't aware of a localized requirement for alternate explanations of the CMB, although many of the proponents in the early part of the last century employed them. I've heard in passing of the "whiskers and grains" afficionados, but don't know what to think of them. So the limitations of an alternate explanation would be: high density IGM so that it can be isotropic with an explanation of how it can avoid absorbing extragalactic signals, or low density IGM and a very old universe and an explanation of what would thermalize radiation independently of distance.

Such theories also tend to neglect the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect

One thing I found particularly odd about the effect was its independence from redshift. From an alternate standpoint, I would ask why it could not be considered a constant effect on a constant temperature of background radiation.

(On a side note: I must thank you for giving me some very interesting topics to look up. Here's one link for the S-Z effect for those watching the conversation not in the know. :)

Third, inflation does not give us an age of 13.7 Gyr for the Universe.

Fair enough.

From the WMAP data, NASA scientists precise estimate of 13.7 Gyr +/- 0.2 Gyr. It is said to discount certain models of inflationary theory, but appears to rely on it.

One gets an age of 13.7 Gyr if the Universe is flat, if its energy content is basically all matter, and if the Hubble constant is 50 km/s/Mpc.

The values from NASA give 4% visible matter, 23% dark matter, 73% dark energy, at a Hubble constant of between 68-75 km/s/Mpc, and indicate a flat universe.

If inflation turns out to be complete and utter crap, that does not say anything for or against the Big Bang model, since the Big Bang model does not have inflation as one of its components.

Perhaps not, but a lot has been invested in the inflationary path. It would look bad :)

And when it specifically comes to the acceleration of the expansion, that's been observationally detected, since 1997, by independent groups, and is one of the key pieces of evidence arguing for a nonzero vacuum energy density.

I can imagine how accelerating expansion could be deduced, but I've seen nothing (point me in the right direction?) to indicate that there are observations that would indicate acceleration independently of the current BBT models and equations.

I don't doubt that BBT is self-consistent, but for convincing "outsiders", stock must be taken of which observations whose interpretations shift depending on context, and which ones are more "static". If you've ever argued with a orthodoxie/fundie, you

Article 1, Article 2.

Some scientists that have inspected the calculations believe the experiment is flawed and that they instead measured the speed of light itself (ie: they probably measured the speed of the light they were using to make their observations with, not the speed of the Jupiter distortion).

Correct answer: The speed of gravity is not (yet) a scientifically proved and universally accepted fact. Saying anything else is bad science.

Here's a cool kid's site that has some animations

It's for the LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna). Space.com did a story on it a little while back, and it was in a Scientific American, but I'm not sure which, I have too many lying around. Unfortunantly, it doesn't launch until 2009.

there aren't any fossil fuels on a planet devoid of fossils

Perhaps he's working on the Russian theory that asteroid and comet impacts buried hydrocarbons under the earth's crust? If that theory pans out, then Mars may have even more oil than the Earth, since it hasn't had its near-surface deposits eroded away by liquid water (at least not for a billion years or so).

If that theory is extended, you've got the possibility of huge oil deposits on all the rocky planets and moons -- with the possible exception of our own moon, due to its unique method of formation. That makes Mars especially attractive, since Venus and Mercury have the disadvantage of being hot enough to melt your drilling equipment.

Giant space-based refinery ships bringing petrochemicals to an oil-starved Earth... sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Count me as one of the cynics who thinks that this announcement is motivated by politics rather than interest in science. However, the moonbase idea is at least interesting for the THEORETICAL potential of Helium-3. But there are still a lot of hurdles to overcome before we can even use it as a partial justification for building a moonbase.

It's true that it's possible, but it seems premature. There's so much that can be done with cheap robotic probes, it seems like we should focus there first.

In particular, I'd love to see an attempt with tens of cheap insect-like robots exploring the surface in parallel. Rodney Brooks at MIT has been a leading proponent of this technique.

Don't forget the multimillionaire tourists. It's going to end up like that episode of Futurma where the moon is a cheesy coney-island amusement park, isn't it?

Don't forget the multimillionaire tourists. It's going to end up like that episode of Futurma where the moon is a cheesy coney-island amusement park, isn't it?

this may be possible, but i doubt it. notice that the fate of the polar lander is still being debated from images of the "maybe" crash site.

the Memorial to the Columbia crew that they put on board.


They just announced it today, hence why it is blacked it out in the first images.

The Mars Polar Lander most likely crashed in 1998 so I think it was wise of them to be cautious and realistic about their chances this time. They sent two to improve their chances of getting one down. They went with stuff that worked in 1996 on Pathfinder, airbags, instead of lander legs which proved troublesome. More importantly, they included telemetry on the way down which is more expensive but which means you aren't left with such a guessing game if there is a failure. You at least have a clue how far it got, unlike the Beagle which hasn't been heard from since it left its mother craft; we have no idea whether its chute opened or if it was eaten by a space-probe eating monster. I applaud NASA for being more careful this time and for putting the equivalent of some printfs in there to make sure it wasn't going to slip away quietly this year.

There is a decent article available at space.com with some more information from the press conference and the first color image as well.

a couple articles from 2002 when NASA figured contingency plans in the case of an emergency or budget shortfall.
here here and here

Mission Control Alerts Station Crew to Slow Air Leak By Marcia Dunn AP Aerospace Writer posted: 08:00 pm ET 05 January 2004

1. Sufficient time has passed for any race to colonize the galaxy. So they should be here or in the neighbourhood. Obviously they are not. Either they don't exist, or they don't like to leave home.
2. Sufficient time has passed for a race to be sending out signals, even when they don't like to travel. We don't hear them. Maybe we don't listen to the right frequencies or right spot in the sky, or aliens just don't like to talk. And if you wanted to communicate with someone, wouldn't you use easily detectable signals? You wouldn't send a neutrino beam.
3. Sufficient time has passed for engineering projects we can imagine, but are quite far off for us of course. For example building a gigantic shell around a star to harvest all its energy. It might appear to be magic for us, but you wouldn't foul our detectors. They would certainly indicate something. We would be able to see such star engineering projects in the sky, but we don't. This indicates that there is no intelligent life, or that no one has really advanced very far.

It makes for interesting science fiction though. Solutions:

1. Aliens are just around the corner (Contact, Rendezvous with Rama). We just have to wait a bit longer.
2. Intelligent life is destroyed everytime before it can advance very far (Manifold: Space). That's why we don't see or hear them.
3. Our universe is engineered to be alone (Manifold: Origin).
4. We're truly alone in this galaxy (Manifold: Time).

I can recommend the Manifold series by Stephen Baxter as an enjoyable introduction to Fermi's Paradox where three different solutions are explored.

Sounds like they took what Disney created for its new ride at Epcot and made it interactive.

A recent article on space.com discusses a study that concludes that conditions are ripe for complex life at 10% of stars in our galaxy.

How do you account for the fact that mars is also showing signs of global warming? Sure, it's possible that a bunch of martians are having their own industrial revolution at the same time as ours, but it seems more likely the sun has something to do with it. And sure enough, it turns out the sun is getting hotter. And sunspot activity is changing, and the strength of the sun's magnetic field is changing, and so on. And we don't have good models to account for much of it, and we don't have good data going back more than a few decades on much of it either.

My personal theory is that incrementing the year on our calendars causes global warming. The whole time that people think the planet has gotten hotter, the calendar has been increasing! Coincidence?

My favorite plan

audio discussion of the project

I'm getting HTTP errors

Looks like michael achieved the very difficult simultaneous posted/rejected duo.

Here's the rejected post which amounts to a mixed report on the success of the mission, courtesy of Reuters, Space.com and the BBC:

Reuters and the BBC report that the first U.S. Mars Rover - the Spirit - has landed and radioed a confirmation signal, but has since gone silent. NASA/JPL are waiting to learn if it survived. Space.com reports that the Spirit has indeed landed safely.

Looks like michael achieved the very difficult simultaneous posted/rejected duo.

Here's the rejected post which amounts to a mixed report on the success of the mission, courtesy of Reuters, Space.com and the BBC:

Reuters and the BBC report that the first U.S. Mars Rover - the Spirit - has landed and radioed a confirmation signal, but has since gone silent. NASA/JPL are waiting to learn if it survived. Space.com reports that the Spirit has indeed landed safely.