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That's the least of our problems. Two major astronomical events will happen in four billion years (give or take): the sun will become a red giant and the Milky Way galaxy will collide with the Andromeda galaxy.

http://www.universetoday.com/7...

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

http://www.popsci.com/technolo...

planet boasts a ring system around 200 times larger than that of Saturn, the only planet in our solar system hosting a ring system of its own.

Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune would like to have a word with you.

Planets with Rings

This link and this one for what Newton gave us.

Let's not forget the guy Newton got his optics and celestial mechanics from. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/781...

a calculated and unwarranted troll towards Christians on their numero uno holiday.

A holiday which was forced on people at knife and spear point to co-opt an already existing holiday (nice Christians ya got there), which celebrates the birth of someone who was born sometime in the spring/summer and who has inadvertently led to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people (a billion perhaps?) and which, for the most part, has turned into feeding frenzy of mass marketing Chinese-made cruft to the masses.

Now compare that to Newton who helped get us to the Moon, developed mathematical models to help explore our universe, and who contributed in numerous ways to our understanding of what goes on around us every day such as reflecting telescopes. See for example:

This link and this one for what Newton gave us.

So what did Jesus give us other than death and intolerance, as evidenced by your post?

It's an interesting idea, but getting *TO* Mars isn't the real problem. The biggest problem, that nobody is talking about (because they have no idea how to solve it), is *LANDING* on Mars.

http://www.universetoday.com/7...

The real problem is the combination of Mars’ atmosphere and the size of spacecraft needed for human missions. While the Apollo lunar lander weighed approximately 10 metric tons, a human mission to Mars will require three to six times that mass, given the restraints of staying on the planet for a year. Landing a payload that heavy on Mars is currently impossible, using our existing capabilities. "It’s this ugly, grey zone. There’s too much atmosphere on Mars to land heavy vehicles like we do on the moon, using propulsive technology, and there’s too little atmosphere to land like we do on Earth. Until we come up with a whole new system, landing humans on Mars will be an ugly and scary proposition."

Citation needed for .3%

You'll note that "a ridiculous number of decimal places" is extremely non-specific and could as easily describe .3% as 3 * 10^-17%. However, I was intentionally vague because there's a variety of effects described by Relativity which have been measured in different ways at different times with differing accuracy. A simple number (like 0.3%) is simply wrong without further context. QED probably takes the prize for the most precisely-tested theory ever, but Relativity still qualifies as one of the most well-tested theories ever. Calling it a "bad model" is deeply ignorant.

Relativity is incomplete, in ways that have nothing to do with mass/energy or information exceeding c. On that point it is in agreement with QM.

MAVEN detected large spectrometry spikes for several metallic elements, and several non-metallic ones as well, which persisted for hours after the comet passed by.

Hang on, I will dig up a source.

http://www.universetoday.com/1...

Bam. There you go.

Not for much longer. Russia. China. India.

At the rate Americans are de-funding wasteful gub-mint spending like space exploration and basic research, the whole "put a man on the moon" bit is going to become pathetically out of date. Hope that extra dollar in your job-creator's tax refund is worth it.

Universe Today

http://www.universetoday.com/1...

Apollo 13 should count, but not for what most people know about.

The second stage center engine shut down early due to a thrust chamber sensor reading low pressure. While this did not impact the orbital insertion (the remaining 4 engines fired for an additional 4 minutes to make up for it), the sensor reading that shutdown the engine may have been in error, and is still not understood. However, if this shutdown had not occurred, the vehicle would likely have been lost in just moments after when the shutdown occurred. The center engine was experiencing severe pogo osculations, resulting in the engine flexing the thrust frame up and down by 3 inches, 16 times each second—this motion would have resulted in disintegration of the rocket in short order. The thrust chamber sensor should have been unaffected by the pogo, so that is unlikely to be the cause of the reading that led to the shutdown. So it is possible that while one failure during launch almost destroyed Apollo 13, a second failure actually (temporarily at least) saved the mission.

See this article for more information.

ISS supply mission. Engine explodes. Fails to deliver secondary payload

Primary payload delivered to orbit, secondary lost due to a failed engine re-ignite. This is a partial failure.

ISS supply mission. Maneuvering thrusters fail.

Supply craft captured by ISS due to space x incompetence. This is a failure.

Satellite launch delayed by helium leaks. First stage recovery failure.

Primary payload delivered to orbit after huge delays cutting into profit ability. This demonstrates space x's need to cut corners in order to remain viable.

Test rocket explodes.

Prototype failed due to a production ready component unrelated to the test that could have easily gone off on any of the other flight and again caused delays of their flights cutting into profitability requiring space x to cut corners in the future.

Fixed that for you.

ISS supply mission. Engine explodes. Fails to deliver secondary payload

Primary payload delivered to orbit, secondary lost due to a failed engine re-ignite. This is a partial success.

ISS supply mission. Maneuvering thrusters fail.

Supply craft docked to ISS. This is a success.

Satellite launch delayed by helium leaks. First stage recovery failure.

Primary payload delivered to orbit. This is a success.

Test rocket explodes.

Prototype failed. This is a test. This was not a launch ready first stage. This was not carrying a second stage or payload. This has no relevance.

You're replying to the Anti-SpaceX Nutter, who really appears to believe that every one of their launches was a failure. I'm guessing he thinks those satellites SpaceX launched are just faked in the Arizona desert.

They have had a string of failures.
ISS supply mission. Engine explodes. Fails to deliver secondary payload
ISS supply mission. Maneuvering thrusters fail.
Satellite launch delayed by helium leaks. First stage recovery failure.
Test rocket explodes.

If you could pull musks dick out of your mouth long enough you would notice a long line failures due to shoddy engineer practices caused by cutting corners.

Presumably, you meant the ecliptic

No. From reference.com:

elliptic. 1. pertaining to or having the form of an ellipse.

You're still not correct, but I should have said "plane of the ecliptic," (or "ecliptic plane") rather than just "ecliptic." My apologies for any confusion. However, "elliptic plane" refers to any planar ellipsoid surface, while "plane of the ecliptic" specifically refers to the region in which the sun and the vast majority of other matter in our solar system resides.

That region is a three-dimensional ellipsoid (an example of a planar surface in the shape of an ellipse), is correctly referred to as the "plane of the ecliptic" or the "ecliptic plane" not the "elliptic plane."

I'm sorry I got your panties in a bunch, but you were incorrect. Call me an Astronomy Nazi if you like, but nomenclature is relevant, IMHO.

A good many things have been named after him already, including over a dozen schools, an asteroid, a moon crater, and a new engineering hall at Purdue (his alma mater.)

http://www.universetoday.com/5...

Dormant doesn't have to mean something that will awake, but sure there's probably another word that's less open to misinterpretation. The moon isn't exactly an inert rock on the inside though, it still has magma: http://www.universetoday.com/9...

Given a sufficiently large distance between two discrete points in the universe, the rate of hubble expansion between those points can exceed C.

http://www.universetoday.com/1...

You can think of it this way:

You have a ruler-- You can only move along the ruler at at most, 100 units per second. (we will use this as an analogue for going C) However, for every second, for every 1000 units distance on the ruler, a new unit of distance magically appears. If you have a distance between 2 points that is sufficiently large, (In this case, in excess of 1,000,000 units) more than 100 units will be introduced every second, which is faster than your maximum rate of traversal-- So you will NEVER reach the target-- it receedes faster than you can get to it.

http://www.universetoday.com/1...

Given a sufficiently large distance between two discrete points in the universe, the rate of hubble expansion between those points can exceed C.

http://www.universetoday.com/1...

You can think of it this way:

You have a ruler-- You can only move along the ruler at at most, 100 units per second. (we will use this as an analogue for going C) However, for every second, for every 1000 units distance on the ruler, a new unit of distance magically appears. If you have a distance between 2 points that is sufficiently large, (In this case, in excess of 1,000,000 units) more than 100 units will be introduced every second, which is faster than your maximum rate of traversal-- So you will NEVER reach the target-- it receedes faster than you can get to it.

http://www.universetoday.com/1...

What? Lets run some numbers, instead of pulling them out of our ass:

Surface Area of Land on Earth: 149,000,000 km2 (source)
Earth Population: ~7 billion (source)

Dividing the two, I get about .02 km2 per person. That's not a lot of room, on average. Can we pack more people on the planet? Obviously so, but claiming that the earth is 99% uninhabited seems extreme. Don't forget, we also need land for things like plants and insects and other animals. You know, an ecosystem.

Why not just find a big enough cave or a system of caves which all you would need to do is seal the entrance with a steel door so the cave can be pressurized and oxygen to be flooded in.

In his trilogy beginning with Red Mars , Kim Stanley Robinson had the colonists struggling with the infiltration of ultrafine particles of dust even in sealed plastic habitats. The Martian regolith may be harmful to human lungs. The same fear is held about lunar regolith. Initial habitats will have to be well-sealed from the local environment before further studies can be done.

What is meant here however is that there is no limit to how fast space itself can expand. So say we have two ends of a ruler 1 meter apart. After a while, space itself would expand meaning that the ruler will now be longer than what it was.

No...almost right, but not quite.

Read up on it in on wikipedia, and especially the section on the effect of expansion at small scales. For the most direct answer, see here

The space between your atoms is not getting larger over time. As space expands, nucleic forces prevents the atoms from being moved further apart. It is possible that the expansion will one day become fast enough to overcome the nucleic force...resulting in all matter being ripped apart, and all sorts of other weird badness....but it's not like matter is becoming larger day to day.

Wrong on so many levels.

1) Yes, they are moving away from us at faster than the speed of light. This is well established.

2) As long as the photons reach a region of space receding at less than the speed of light, we can see these galaxies. Good info here

3) "And they fail to mention that they only way we're traveling through space is faster than light, some sort of weird quantum thing, by bending space, or via wormholes" None of which have been shown to exist. And there's some evidence that none of these options can exist.

All you need to do is look at what they're doing to Curiosity's mission planning (they're still not at Mt. Sharp yet because of detours) to see how well the Mars 2020 mission is going to accomplish its primary science objectives. Igneous rock is going to be a tall order for a rover to investigate because it is A) harder than steel (the drill on Curiosity would have a tough time even scratching it) and B) sharper too (Curiosity's wheels are easily damaged by sharp rocks).

To top all this off there really really isn't much mass budget or volume leeway for improvements based on what we learned from Curiosity.

Because the PS3's hardware was stupid.

No, it was not.

It seems that even though it could destroy a city every 100 years, in actual fact I has never happened in recorded history.

Sodom and Gomorrah? Also, keep in mind if this theory is accurate, this was an asteroid strike in the Alps that managed to wipe out a couple of cities in the middle east.

You sir are an idiot. And your mod +5 insightful shows the scientific illiteracy even on Slashdot. There is only one scientific method, and it contains "testable, provable (and proven) hypothesis", also called theories. Yes we do have only one universe and only one earth, but what makes a scientific theory successful is a) the explanatory power and b) testable predictions. How can we test that the earth is in fact 4.5 billion years old? For example by searching for old rocks and date them with the radioactive dating methods (no there is not just carbon-14, Wikipedia lists over 9 methods[1]) and geologists actively trying to find older rocks to push the limit of the age of the earth. Then we confirmed the age of the solar system (4.568 billion years)[4] and it confirms the age of the earth. Furthermore, we actually can see now protoplanetery disks (thanks to the hubble space telescope)[2] that confirms our theory of how a solar systems are formed. Please see How Old Is The Earth, And How Do We Know? [3]

The scientific method deals with models. There are no truths, there are best explanations. Only religion deals with truths and for that you do need faith. But science makes correct predictions, whereas religious "prophecies" are all failures.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
[3] http://www.talkorigins.org/faq...
[4] http://www.universetoday.com/1...

The best guestimate of the amount of oil burned (no coal included) is 135 billion tonnes. The earth has a surface area of 510 million square kilometers. So, about 260g/m^2. That's extra insulation up there, over everywhere, 24/7/365.

Hear, hear! And if their test with landing legs succeeds, we might even be able to skip a few steps toward that goal. It's about time we stopped letting senators design rockets and hired actual rocket scientists to do that instead.

"locked themselves in a room with only the materials known to be on the mission and not only came up with the solution, but instructed some nervous, heat-stroked astronauts to build it."

not really, SkyLab was uninhabited until they got the fix up there.

The finished parasol, built from telescoping aluminum tubes and silver-and-orange fabric of nylon, Mylar and aluminum, was stowed aboard the crew’s Apollo spacecraft. At 9 a.m. on May 25, the crew — Commander Conrad, Joseph P. Kerwin and Paul J. Weitz — took off from the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

but you're still right
the CO2 scrubber solution for Apollo 13 was built in pretty much the way you described.

Using only the type of equipment and tools the crew had on board –including plastic Moon rock bags, cardboard, suit hoses, and duct tape — Smylie and his team conceived a configuration that just might work.

http://www.universetoday.com/6...

According to TFA this star itself was likely born from the death of a genuinely primordial star (which would have started with almost nothing by hydrogen and helium). One of the upshots of this work is that some primordial stars may have produced much less iron than some models have suggested which could explain some discrepancies in the observed isotopic ratios in some old stars. According to the actual article (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12990.html which may be behind a paywall) this star has an apparent visual magnitude of 14.7. This puts this star just in the limits of amateur observations. Charon has an apparent magnitude of around 15.5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon_(moon) and that's been successfully imaged by amateurs (larger apparent magnitude means dimmer because astronomers are silly) http://www.universetoday.com/20351/charon-imaged-by-amateur-astronomers/ , so this star could be looked at by a dedicated amateur in the southern hemisphere.

http://www.universetoday.com/4...

Many people who believe in the flat Earth theory turn to the Bible in order to back up their theory. They quote various passages in order to back up their theories and interpret certain passages literally. Not all of them rely on the Bible though or simply on the Bible. Samuel Shenton who formed the Flat Earth Society, one of the most modern flat earth groups, believed that his beliefs could be proven using common sense and science.

Sounds legit. Teach the Controversy!

There are about 5600 active satellites orbiting out there, and far more debris.

And satellites do collide ... One example: http://www.universetoday.com/2...

There always has been the issue of how much orbiting space junk will finally start causing serious problems for space flight and the flight paths of other satellites, I think this issue has been a concern for so long that Carl Sagan was worrying about it (and it'll be 20 years since his death this year).

There have been hominids for 5m years, proper humans for only 200k years, civilization for just 20k years, and in 100 years we invented a lot of things (from nukes to biological agents) that could end mankind any day, while going rampant sabotaging the earth ecosystem... and things keeps accelerating. What make you think that will be humans around in not in 1 billon nor 1 millon, but only 10k years in the future being very generous?

Yes, laying eggs somewhere else could improve the chances, self-sustaining space colonies is the way to try it more than generation ships, if any of them is ever possible. But that don't have a chance to happen with current culture where profit in the present is more important than having a future.

To put an example, an asteroid impacted earth 2 days ago that wasn't detected till that moment, how much you think is "invested" on mapping any potential space threats compared with, i.e. spying on ourselves, bailing out banks or even denying climate change? When the federal government had budget problems one of the first victims was the NASA program to detect space debris (a good example of a surveillance system that worth it), while the pentagon wasted 5.5billons the night before the shutdown (if we are talking about our survival, that was a waste), And always will be an "emergency" that will divert efforts and attention to something else, even if we have to create it. Unless we figure out a practical, safe way to travel (far) into the future (yes, we could done it doing a relativistic speed trip, or some suspended animation process could be developed, but nothing practical and for masses yet) we should not worry about what will happen in a millon years, is just too out of the reach of mankind.

More importantly, when you as a nation have lost the ability to launch your own rockets, and you can only rent payload from communist states -

Take a look here and try to count how many of the little flags represent the United States.

As far as scientific missions...What about the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Rovers? Don't they count?

Absolutely, it's also not just about our proximity to the sun, it is also about cycles of sun activity....

http://www.universetoday.com/103803/solar-cycle-24-on-track-to-be-the-weakest-in-100-years/
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/images/solar_irradiance.jpg

One of the reasons why climate scientists are off in their predictions is that the sun has been behaving in an odd way and the whole planet for the last few years has been getting far less energy from the sun that it normally does. The fact that the planet has remained in a warming trend during this period only backs up climatologists claims that we're in deep sh*t.

Climate science should be studied, it's fundamentally important to everyone on the planet. Hackus = TROLL

buuuut....
http://www.universetoday.com/14824/distance-from-earth-to-mars/
May. 22, 2016 – 75.3 million km (46.8 million miles)
Jul. 27. 2018 – 57.6 million km (35.8 million miles)
Oct. 13, 2020 – 62.1 million km (38.6 million miles)

Looks like every 2 years is about the closest points anyways.

Antarctica is an archeapelago. Just islands under that ice, not a continent.

WUT?!?

http://www.universetoday.com/102754/what-does-antarctica-look-like-under-the-ice/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Antarctica_surface.jpg

This is not an official CNSA image. It was stitched together by Universe Today from low-resolution stills lifted from a Chinese TV news broadcast.

The image linked to is apparently from the Universe Today. As the linked article says :

To make it easier to see and sense ‘the new view from the Moon’, we have created screen shots from the rather low resolution TV broadcast and assembled them into a photo mosaic of the landing site - see above and below mosaic by Marco Di Lorenzo and Ken Kremer.

That's why it's fuzzy. It's screen scraped from a TV.

OK I answered my own question with some googling.

The age of the exoplanet is not independently derived, but instead, taken from the age of the host star. This too can be difficult to determine. For isolated stars, there are precious few methods (such as gyrochronology) and they generally have large errors associated with them. Thus, instead of looking for isolated stars, astronomers searching for young exoplanets have tended to focus on clusters which can be dated more easily using the main sequence turn off method.

http://www.universetoday.com/76495/the-hunt-for-young-exoplanets/

I can hear the Whovians now.. but wait in "End of Time" when Gallifrey appears next to earth it's only like 5 times the size of the earth.. Jupiter is 1321 times the size of the earth and this planet is 11 times that. Besides all the Timelords would be walking around and looking all squatty like Sontarans.

http://www.universetoday.com/15322/

Saturn has the lowest density of all the planets in the Solar System. The actual number is 0.687 grams per cubic centimeter. This is actually less dense than water; if you had a large enough pool of water, Saturn would float.
Just for comparison, Jupiter has an average density of 1.33 grams per cubic centimeter. So it wouldn’t float on water. And Earth, the densest planet in the Solar System, measures 5.51 grams/cubic centimeter.

Depends on the plasma. http://www.universetoday.com/21826/swift-detects-x-ray-emissions-from-comets/

I guess astronomers were tired of 10 year old kids repeatedly discovering supernovas before they did.

I guess astronomers were tired of 10 year old kids repeatedly discovering supernovas before they did.

I'm thinking more like crushed like a marshmallow in an infinite pressure pressure-cooker.

Or pummeled to death by other matter falling into the black hole.

Or die from the radiation.

Or die from being absorbed into a star falling into said black hole.

Or from the smell of shitting their pants in the space suit once they realize they're falling into a black hole.

Or just from lack of oxygen, dehydration, or starvation, as it's a pretty long trip from here to the nearest black hole. 1600 light years is a long trip, even at the speed of light.

Yes to the above.

Spaghettification is one component of the end game. The gravity delta from head to
toe would tear a human into a true mess.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification

In addition any external mass like the space ship or any maneuvering jet
reaction mass would accelerate to the point of generating astoundingly short
wavelength ionizing radiation and the proteins of life would be totally denatured.

I would discount the smell of poo in the pants as being fatal, stuff happens
as we all know but not fatal except for those that aspirate their vomit and
die of pneumonia. Aspiration pneumonia is a big risk even if a drowning
victim "recovers" a trip to a hospital is a good thing to do.

He'd die of old age.

The nearest black hole is 1600 light-years away. If our astronaught started to journey thence, at the beginning of the Bronze age, it would be conceivable that he'd arrive there sometime in the next couple hundred years - using the fastest of feasibly extrapolated propulsion technologies. This of course, supposing those could have existed after the retreat f European ice-sheets.

Any other planned method to acquire more rapid proximity to a black hole, probably wouldn't work out, either...

I'm thinking more like crushed like a marshmallow in an infinite pressure pressure-cooker.

Or pummeled to death by other matter falling into the black hole.

Or die from the radiation.

Or die from being absorbed into a star falling into said black hole.

Or from the smell of shitting their pants in the space suit once they realize they're falling into a black hole.

Or just from lack of oxygen, dehydration, or starvation, as it's a pretty long trip from here to the nearest black hole. 1600 light years is a long trip, even at the speed of light.

You are quite right about the wobble effect used to help find candidates. It's extremely difficult to get direct pictures, however we have done it. Since it sounds like you have some interest in the subject I'll provide some links for you to read on. Interestingly enough the planet first planet we directly pictured had been captured by Hubble and overlooked for years as we didn't have the technique for combing through the data at the time!

http://www.universetoday.com/26353/new-technique-allows-astronomers-to-discover-exoplanets-in-old-hubble-images/

I like the list of habitable exoplanets, as this is where the future of humanity has to go someday.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/bad_astronomy/2012/11/exoplanet_pictures_astronomers_have_photos_of_alien_planets.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2452217/A-lonely-planet-Giant-gas-world-sun-orbit-floating-space.html

http://www.google.com/imgres?biw=1920&bih=963&tbm=isch&tbnid=kjlHVn7dUiT4lM:&imgrefurl=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3453478/First-direct-pictures-of-planets-outside-our-solar-system.html&docid=WY-uZHkJtvY5FM&imgurl=http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01113/HR_8799_1113907c.jpg&w=460&h=288&ei=qp5aUonvOYnM9QTa1IHICw&zoom=1&ved=1t:3588,r:89,s:0,i:354&iact=rc&page=3&tbnh=178&tbnw=284&start=76&ndsp=38&tx=85&ty=84

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2008/nov/13/first-bona-fide-direct-images-of-exoplanets