Slashdot Mirror
Top 10 Unsolved Space Mysteries
Joe Jordan writes "Space.com is advertising the Top 10 Space Mysteries for 2003, and perhaps for all time, given the current rate of discovery." Some of them are obvious, like the origin of life, and the possibility of alien life forms, but the list is still a good compilation of space's greatest questions.
Trying to get some cheap karma by bashing Microsoft, are you?
Be sure that, everything remaining the same, it is more likely that we will kill ourselves making war, rather than being smashed by an asteroid.
Engage!
Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, somehow, without internal nuclear fusion processes, like stars -- still manage to radiate more energy out into space than they receive directly from the Sun.
It's called 'cooling down', anything that you put in a relatively cold place, such as (for example) 'space', will do it.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I do not think a scientist is rejecting God when they try to look at something like the origin of life. I think a scientist is not asking who did it as much as they are asking how it was done. The agent is not relevent to the scientist; only the method matters.
I think, personally, that God is plain simply too elegant to make the creation of life something which would require the temporary changing of the laws of physics to accomplish. God created the laws of nature also; why not make them ones which make life possible (the gravitation constant, for example, has to be very finely tuned to make life possible).
My God is a God of surprises which does not put answers to all of life's problems in simple, small packages. To me creationism is a form of denial; no worse than the denial of a chronic alcholic who says they don't really have a drinking problem.
Thinking about the immensity of the universe gives me a profound sense of wonder; I really enjoyed reading this list.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
These models are constructed with a lot of blood sweat and tears.
/dev/random
Because they are all working on past events, and seem to only desire to do so.
How do you verify a model? How do you know the laws of motion really work? Usually you carry out an experiemtn then compare it to your model, in this case the experiemtn just so happens to be our backyard (universe etc.).
Most of the models (follow the links in some sections) seem to have given incorrect output - so the real question is what they do then... it's a bit easy, really, to take your model and add a couple of new variables in there until they get it right.
It is not so easy to just add more variables, if you do that than it just becomes an excercise in curve fitting. You have to justify your model within a Physical framework. And just as any program you write you test your model to the limits....this is where it gets interesting and adds to the predictive nature of the model you are building.
This is all very well, but then they go on to insist their model is somehow close to reality. I think it's way too complex for a computer to simulate; every atom has a
NO you don;t have to model every atom, or every quark and lepton interaction. We manage to descripte planetry motion (Kepler's laws) quite easily without going into the Quantum nature of atomic and sub atomic particles, though the boundry of when quantum starts to act as a macroscopic system is a very active research front presently.
The time periods discussed in forming galaxies very long, we have a very limited dataset and we make the best guesses we can.
I can't remeber who said the quote, I think it was Dirac, but it goes somethin like, "We came along in the middle of a chess game without knowing the rules, we've only seen a handful of moves and we are still trying to figure it out!"
The real question is "Can we survive 2002?".
I thought it was 7.5 million years?
I think the people who take Creation literally is failing to see that God (if we assume there is one) was explaining this to people 2000 years ago. They didn't have any chance to understand the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The one-page intro is the abrigded and simplified version that men 2000 years ago could in some way phantom.
It's like trying to explain about having a baby to a kid. You don't start off with the ribonucleic acid (RNA) in a sperm cell and an egg cell joining together and forming deoxynucleic acid (DNA), and how cell division works, and how hormones activate processes and whatever else small details are involved. You keep to the "important" parts and results (like that it takes 9 months and mom will have a big belly).
In the same way, if you are to believe Genisis, God created the earth, the stars and all life on it. Now if he did that by Big Bang, or by snapping his fingers in 4004 BC, is that really "important" in that sense? I don't think so. Guess someone does, though...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
http://www.Slaveway.com
Although we may not be much better than apes, there is one significant difference. We can communicate, more importantly write. Without methods of recording our thoughts for future generations, we would be stuck in the dark ages.
The printing press triggered a revolution. Benjamin Franklin was around about that time, in fact much of his success was due to writing his own newspaper. Instead of quoting the bible all the time (the only book around before then) people had ideas and could share them.
In much the same way the Internet has caused information (and misinformation) to be even more readily accessible. If there is any limitation to the intelligence of humanity it is how well an individual can specialize in one practice in a lifetime. Doctors, Scientists, Engineers, Lawyers etc already spend a significant chunk of their lives learning enough to be productive.
my associative arrays can kick your hash - TCL
Doesn't the low atmospheric pressure of Mars
prevent water from taking liquid form, i.e.
wouldn't it just go from ice to steam?
So you're saying that you believe God didn't create the universe, and instead created a set of rules that caused it to be created? Isn't that the same as creating it, albeit indirectly? You're not making any sense, sir.
You've missed the point entirely.
The poster is not saying that God did not create the universe. He is saying that "Perhaps God did create the universe, and Physics is how he chose to do it!"
There remain a large number of rabid creationists who say "The Physicists are all blasphemous buffoons! GOD created the universe, not some pile of gravity and chemicals and suns!"
The poster is trying to say that given the complexity of a universe that many people assert that God has created, it would not be uncharacteristic of such a God if he were to create the universe not by waving a magic God-Wand, but rather by creating a set of simple, elegant physical laws (i.e. Physics) by which his universe, the planets, and life could arise. This would not, as the rabid creationists seem to think, defile God in any way; rather, it supposes that God is of such awesome intelligence that he foresaw a way to create laws of the universe which would not only lead to the creation of life, but whose selfsame boundaries would also govern such life through the end of time.
It is not an argument against God; it is an argument that God has better taste than to do showy wave-of-the-hand parlor tricks when creating life, the universe, and everything.
If there is a view of "scientific creationism" that I can accept, this is it.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Dark Energy: Does anyone else believe that perhaps dark energy simply does not exist, and our laws of physics and what-not are just totally untrue anywhere except on Earth?
Uh... right. Which is why stellar processes conform to known laws of physics. Copernicus, Gallileo, Newton, et. al. didn't invent basic orbital mechanics from watching things on Earth.
The inaccuracies we're finding are largely in the tiny percentages, although apparantly just large enough to not be thrown away as statistical error. The universe accelerating bit is, to my knowledge, still controversial.
Water on Mars: My vote is yes. There is ice on Mars. Some parts of Mars can get up to 80F. If there was ice in such a place, it would be in liquid form. AKA water
As has been pointed out repeatedly, you fail to take vapor pressure into account. If there is liquid water on Mars, it's certainly nowhere near the surface and hasn't been for eons.
even if we could travel as fast or faster than light, BILLIONS of years would pass on Earth in less than a year's time on the starship
No it wouldn't. If you manage to go at nearly light speed then yes, longer periods of time pass outside than inside, but it still won't be more than ~30,000 years (as one poster pointed out). If you go FTL then your logic is completely incorrect -- current tachyon theory (last I heard) was that you'd actually move backwards in time relative to an outside observer. You'd literally get there before you left. Of course, to the observer you'd appear at some point after you left, because the light is still moving at, yup, light speed.
Of course, other theoretical space-time constructs like wormholes would allow instantaneous travel.
Let's build a Dyson's sphere around the sun
Before you know exactly how a stellar system works? That's a bad idea. Tremendously bad. Oh, and there's no theoretical reason that a solid Dyson sphere wouldn't be possible, but then again we don't know enough theory to actually do it.
Age of the universe would imply that time exists. There are some that believe space-time is really just space, and that time is only something humans perceive
Yes, and there are some that believe that mankind is descended from aliens who visited in 1973 on the top of a volcano in France.
Regardless of whether space-time exists as a cohesive whole or if time and space are independant dimensions, we are inherently limited by how we view them. And we have loads of actual data to back up our theories.
Well the, the "standard model" is not exactly the most accurate one, now is it?
Actually, yes it is. That doesn't mean it's the final model or entirely correct. Which is why there are always theories about how to further refine it.
If you think that the risk of being hit is low, glace at the moon sometime
And when was the last significant lunar impact? Heck, the last significant impact in our solar system was Shoemaker-Levy, and that was a one-in-a-million occurrence. The odds of something hitting Earth is even lower, since we have gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn sweeping the outer solar system of most large asteroids. Even the space.com article admits it's mostly media hype.
Oh, and as for everyone slamming on you - it's because a post full of factual errors got modded up. Welcome to slashdot. The only reason you found entrager's post "tactful" was because it was largely a "me too" post that was equally full of errors.
You can go out and make measurements yourself that demonstrate in a very accurate way how the theories work. It's amazing how much science you can see around you (and measure!) every day, with no equipment except your own body. Science can predict what is possible, and what will happen in certain circumstances, with incredible accuracy. That's not to say that religion has no value, but from a purely pragmatic viewpoint, applying logic and scientific investigation gets you results time after time. Religion may not. What you get out of it depends on how much faith you put into it, and even then, society may discover something the next day which will show beyond reasonable doubt that you were actually wrong about certain beliefs.
One further nitpick: the Big Bang doesn't mean an explosion in the normal sense. Time and space themselves were created. There was no matter at that stage, only energy. There was no sound. Even light, a manifestation of the electromagnetic force, wasn't in the form that we know it today. Yes, there are very specific observations that are extremely hard to explain without such a theory. You won't see detailed explanations for the composition of matter and the way it interacts with itself in most religion's theories of creation. But you'll need to spend years leaning about physics to even understand the big bang theory as it currently stands.
An explanation of why the universe is, is not something that mainstream science claims to have a definate answer to. There's lots of ideas, such as the many-universe theories (which I don't really subscribe to personally) that say something like, "Well, one of the tickets (universes) in the lottery has to win." Or the anthropomorphic ones: "If the universe didn't have intelligent life, then I wouldn't be around to know if I lost." Or a myriad of other ideas that aren't based around a God per se. So in summary, just because it's improbable that a universe would be this way by chance, it doesn't mean that it's impossible, ever.