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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.
"Can we survive 2003?"
I wonder how long it will take to find that one out? I bet a dollar to a donut that we know how that works out before we find out what's going on in the middle of the galaxy, though. any takers?
My life in the land of the rising sun.
the answer to all of it is 42
The way to corrupt a youth is to teach him to hold in higher value them who think alike than those who think differently
Why are explosions in space circular and not spherical?
and just for fun why do space captains always take off their shirts?
10. Why is it so expensive?
9. What was SciFi channel thinking when they cancelled it?
8. What's the easiest way to rationalize putting weapons up there?
7. When will people stop trying to take each others'?
6. Why do I take up so much of it?
5. Why are *you* taking up so much of it?
4. Will adding a loft give me more?
3. Is an illegal apartment a good way to make money off the excess?
2. Is there a downside to replacing all of it with asphalt?
and the #1 mystery about space:
1. Where the hell do I put all this porn??
This list reads more like pop-movie script devices than astronomy.
Number 10 is "will be survive 2003" or will we be destroyed by an asteroid?
Also mentioned is SETI which is interesting to laymen, but not really at the forefront of most astronomers minds.
The whole of the list is just fuzzy headed gobbledygook a high school student turned in for a book report. "The Enigmatic Sun" indeed.
1. Dark Energy It's energy. And its dark. Think Star Trek glowy thing but looking at negatives.
2. Water on Mars. Nope. Only chocolate, toffee, and some sort fo nougatish stuff.
3. The Murky, Mediocre Middle of the Milky Way - A more important question - What is it with chocolate and space?
4. The Origin of Life - Well, when a man and a woman love each other very much....
5. Lunar Secrets - As any fan of classic Trolls knows, the moon is a ridiculous liberal myth. It doesn't exist. That's the secret.
6. Are We Alone? - I was talking about this to Glarg - my venusian friend. He said that he felt that life on other planets was impossible. I'm not so sure
7. The Enigmatic Sun - Enigmatic? the things a bloomin exhibitionist!
8. Age of the Universe - I have the universes Birth Certificate right here. I think its rude to ask a univeses age though.
9. Missing planet - Obviously, the planets are wrong, not the theory. Planets are stupid after all. They just go round and round in circles. Whatr do they know? Anyway, to solve this problem, we plan to destroy Uranus and Neptune.
10. Can We Survive 2003? - I have a theory on this. The ramifications will take a while to work out. Can I tell you in 369 days time?
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.
A lot of the things are based on theories which are tested on computer models. What I'd really like to know, is how these are programmed, that's the great mystery. Because they are all working on past events, and seem to only desire to do so. The quantum leap will happen when enough detailed data is gathered about actual events as they happen, which can then be extrapolated to the past. Now, maybe some of this happens already, but the issue I have with these sites is that they do not cross-link often enough to research papers that explain things to that %age of people who, like me, are thoroughly unsatisfied by the superficiality of such content.
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. This doesn't really prove anything though, does it? e.g. There are a couple of planets missing but they are there, so let's bung in a bit of extra icy matter and UV radiation that will cause it to collapse into Uranus.
The moon creation simulation is the one that gets me. They seem still to be assuming that it's ONE impact that created the moon, and even give the analogy of a small car crashing into an SUV (follow links from moon story). I think it's much more chaotic than that, and is really a big highway pile-up, but where some cars could still run, and were driven away billions of years ago, some have degraded into other rocks and asteroids, and the big bit in the middle coalesced into the moon. But astronomers always simplify for a better comprehension. 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 /dev/random (OK it's more like a predictable Windows TCP/IP stack, but there's some entropy in there), and that's the real problem. How do you simulate all of those?
The real excitement comes when currently forming galaxies can be studied over a long enough period - perhaps by simultaneously studying several galaxies in enough detail to come up with decent fluid/gas dynamics in space.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
1. Captain Dylan Hunt of the starship Andromeda. Always fights in full body armor.
2. Janeway, unfortunately. >:-(
Oh, and mystery number 13: Why do ship computers add sound effects to explosions?
What is dark matter, you ask? God needs to defrag the universe. It's little bits of discarded matter from ages past... just think, random garbled bits of your grandfather could be floating somewhere!
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
I've recently activated the space.com slashbox and I recommend you do too. I like the stories there (tho' i refused to go there back in my pre-phoenix days due to there liberal use of pop-ups), but they don't post news very frequently. I was wondering if some slashdotter knew of a better site that offered a more comprehensive look at all news related to astronomy/spaceflight/etc.?
I'm not the same person who posted the invictive, but I do agree with it. Your post was not funny at all. You might not be an idiot, but you are definetly unfunny.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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
So sure nothing of import happens between dec 27 and 31 2003.
Hrm, I wonder if we'll survive 2002....
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
We don't know exactly how life on earth started, and we never will. All we can do is come up with resonable theories that don't have any holes. They may be right, or maybe not.
Since we can't go back in time, there is no true way to figure out which theory is 'right'. You can only elimnate some theories by disproving them.
The search for the origin of life is really nothing more for the search for the condition of the earth when life began. Once you know what the conditions were, you can create models that will work under those conditions.
Finaly, scientests have been able to create life from nothing in labs for decades, its just that we don't know if the conditions were exactly the same as those of the primordial earth.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Here's a real mystery which we still can't figure out: Anomalous Acceleration of Pioneer space probes. This one, like the dark energy problem, hints at fundamental problems with our view of the universe.
That "one degree of separation" keeps growing and growing and growing and ...
> i mean whats stopping all dead cells coming back to life etc?
Second law of thermodynamics. AFAIK, the only phyical law with a temporal direction.
Speaking of cells is a little bit to generic. Let's reduce it the most simple form known to me: bacteria.
The DNA of bacteria does not age, due to their circular DNA.
(Human cells have a linear DNA, which shortens at each mitosis, which limits the number of replications -> age)
They split, so practically they are two identical bacteria (mutations aside) with the same age.
How do they die? They become defective. It's not like they just stop working out of nothing.
Why don't they become living again? The same reason a broken glass doesn't get whole again.
Thinking of cryogenics: It (currently) doesn't work because in the processs of freezing and defreezing cells are destroyed, but there are creatures (IRC, some frogs), which due to the constitution (word?) of their cells, are able to survive this process.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
I recently read in Discover magazine, that some astrophysicists are openly questioning whether we have the mental prowess to actually understand many of the mysteries in the universe.
For analogy, they talked about Apes. While it is clear that an Ape has intelligence, we do not expect them to start solving differential calculus any time soon. Their intelligence can't even conceive that such a thing exists.
Could it be, they asked, that perhaps some "secrets" of the universe are simply beyond our ability to even know what we don't know; and like the Apes, we are unable to even conceive their solutions?
Food for thought,
John
The drops of water don't know themselves to be a river; and yet the river flows.
1) 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?
2)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. :)
3)The Murky, Mediocre Middle of the Milky Way: Yeah, well, the center of the galaxy is a wee bit far away. Perhaps it would be easier to figure out if we went there. Problem is, 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.
4)The Origin of Life: Oh, so this is up to astronomers to solve now? Like they don't have enough to do... ;)
5)Lunar Secrets: The moon is great. We can learn things from it that we probably don't even know we can learn from it. Yet we haven't been back since the 70s... Isn't that depressing?
6)Are We Alone: No. I would tell you more, but I'd have to kill you. But no. We are not alone.
7)The Enigmatic Sun: Let's build a Dyson's sphere around the sun. Not like the one in TNG, a solid one is not really possible to make. It's more like a lot of somewhat connected space stations orbiting a star.
8)Age of the Universe: 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.
9)Missing Planets: Well the, the "standard model" is not exactly the most accurate one, now is it? ;)
10)Can We Survive 2003: If you think that the risk of being hit is low, glace at the moon sometime. The Earth wouldn't look much different without any forms of erosion to cover up the scars.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Dark Energy - Nobody knows what the heck it is, but it is officially repulsive.
Well, it IS three-eyed alien poop. Of course it's repulsive.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
It's actually a product of the chili dinner I had last night. Talk about repulsive. Bodies in the vicinity move away at a very rapid rate due to its effects.
OK, quiz time, gumbysworld. What fields are determined by Maxwell's scalar and vector potentials? What are the MKS units of these potentials? What are the units of the fields? What other forces are involved in radioactive decay?
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
The list definitely included some good topics, but the mystery that I found most interesting in 2002 is the 'mystery force' that caused course deflections in the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft. Here there is hard evidence that something is acting differently or in addition to what we expect (i.e. gravity, additional planet, etc.), but NASA is unable to explain it.
See this story from last May.
The greatest question of all time is: "Are we alone?"
...and yes I know the dark side of the moon isn't always dark, but we'd want to cut down on earthshine too probably.
That's really the other ultimate goal of space exploration, isn't it? (The first goal is to find us a new place to live after the earth is used up).
But there is such a simple way to answer the question: Take all the cash we are using on rediculous stuff like the ISS and:
BUILD A GIANT TELESCOPE IN SPACE OR ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON.
And I mean BIG.
One so Hugeomegagigantic that it can actually SEE the surface of extra solar earth sized planets in detail to pick out cities, roads, and lights.
And then, if we saw with our own eyes that there was another civilization -- imagine the space program we'd start to have then.
No, he just has a memleak and needs to free() the malloc()s
If I had the ability to mod my own comments I would burn all 50 points in the hope that just one more person would read this book.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
"What does God need with a Starship?"
the Langoliers are for? Aren't they supposed to eat all that stuff up? Including Balki?
then maybe it wouldn't be expanding at an ever increasing rate. And some exercise wouldn't hurt either.
http://www.Slaveway.com
"The age of the universe has been put at 12 billion to 15 billion years for some time now, but every few months a revision or refinement is announced. Hubble Telescope observations yielded in April an estimate of 13-14 billion years."
So.. what was there before? just black? , nothing? Think about it.
[alk]
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
From the article:
> For now, there are no space rocks known to be on
> a collision course with Earth. At the same time,
> there are tons of them out there that have not
> been found.
I think a little math is in order here. Assume that an Extinction-Level-Event asteroid is 8 tons, which is by all means a conservative estimate when you think about it: a full truckload of ceramic iron magnetic cores easily weighs as much, and wouldn't come anywhere near levelling the Eastern Seaboard if dropped from space.
Exactly what is "tons of" these space rocks? Maybe three. Our chances of getting killed in 2003 just tripled to 6 in 150,000,000,000. Better get back to work, digging out those underground shelters, people.
Solomon
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
Here is the details on the first one... The eventual plan, as far as I've heard, is to put a pair (or more) out at the orbit of Jupiter, on opposite sides (maybe near the Jovian L4 and L5 points... though watch out for the Trojans!) of the solar system.
-T http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/future/sim.html
As a professional astronomer, that list is quite different from what I'd give... here's my go:
1. Dark matter - what the hell is it?
2. Dark energy - what is it and why is it the strength it is? (#1 in the article)
3. Short period gamma ray bursts - what the hell are they?
4. Long period gamma ray bursts - what the hell are they?
5. How prevalent is life and intelligent life in the universe? (#6 in the article)
6. Star formation - what determines where and when it happens?
7. Gravitational waves - can we detect them? what will they tell us?
8. Was the universe reionized by stars or quasars, and when?
9. How does solar activity couple to the Earth's climate?
10. How does the feedback from stellar winds and supernovae into the interstellar medium affect it?
[TMB]
Actually color perception is only loosely related to wavelength. What you were taught in highschool was an oversimplification that borders on a lie (as is much of high school science!). Color is really a spatial attribute, not a point one (Google for Edward Land's "Retinex" theory of color preception), and perception of color is not absolute - it depends on the spatially adjacent colors; this isn't an optical illusion - it's the nature of color perception. It doesn't even stop there because color is a compatative attribute - things look "leaf green" because they stimulate your visual cortex in the same say as a leaf, but that is still true if you wear red goggles, and experiments have shown that normal color vision returns after a couple of weeks of wearing colored goggles!
You should also note that humans can only see a fraction of the possible colors (combinations of wavelengths of light) even in the visual part of the spectrum), and there is therefore nothing absolute about what we perceive - it's just what we can differentiate. If instead of having 3 differently tuned color cones in our eye (the cones have bell-curve-like light wavelength response that peak around R/G/B) we had more, then we would be able to differentiate more wavelength combinations. With our eyes the way they are you can differentially stimulate our color cones with only three wavelengths of light, but if we had 4 (peak tuned to R/G/B/Yellow say, or ANY different wavelengths) then you would need 4. Some people in fact do have 4 types of color cones and can therefore differentiate colors that you cannot. Your "red" surface is someone else's patterned one!
That absolute "red" that you are worrying about therefore isn't an irreducible gestalt experience/quale - it's a differential surface attribute detection that a machine will be able to duplicate just fine.
Incidently note also that what you see a color as isn't going to be precisely what I see it as - we may agree on things like "green's a bit like blue and a bit like yellow" that are based on the underlying transducers and brain architecture, but what the color actually looks/feels like is going to be as personal as any other experiental phenomena.
I think the current count of confirmed extra-solar planets (outside our solar system) is in the dozens, if not hundreds.
This has been all over the news in recent years, both tech news and general purpose joe six-pack reporting. Where've you been?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
You know, there's nothing in your whole religious tirade that says anything about acceleration, which is what you purport to be explaining.
And you wonder why people think biblical literalists are idiots.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Guess you've never taken a basic physics or astronomy course. The vast majority of what we know about non-terran objects is from indirect observations. We've never SEEN the surface of a star other than the sun, let alone taken samples from it - yet, most scientists agree that they're not simply pinpoints of light. Indirect observation is where virtually all of our astronomical theories come from.
Extra-solar planets (and current detection methods) are almost universally believed in at this point. By your definition, we haven't even confirmed that other stars exist - maybe they're just fireflies and no one has captured one yet.
Then again, some folks think we never landed on the moon.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Of course there's water on Mars! There are already cats and mice chasing each other up there!
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Well, I don't know if this makes any sence, but after I read the questions, I noticed that two of them kind of explain each other.
1. What is dark energy and why is our universe expanding faster than anticipated.
2. Are there other universes out there.
Sorry for my simplistic view of things, I only took 4 astronomy courses but could it be that existence of other universes explains the dark energy problem? Could it be that in some weird way masses of other universes attract masses of ours?
On the other hand if that is not true, then imagine the following: a bubble bath. You know, where bubbles squeeze each other, they can grow due to air diffusing into them but they can squeeze each other. Is it possible that other universes are squeezing our universe and that the rate of growth is not equal to all sides of the universe but is proportional to the forces and vectors pushing our universe through such a bath full of bubbles?
Screw this, I want to go get myself a bubble bath!
You can't handle the truth.
You might suppose that, but how would you know? You could check the behavior... but what does the behavior tell you? Nothing more than mimicked version.
:)
AFAICT.
-l
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If you look up Informative in the Slashdot Dictionary, there's a picture of this post... :) Thanks a lot, Captain Nitpick!
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Don't go to the site.
They're getting money from that intrusive type of Flash ad that sits over what you're trying to read. These have been far too common recently. If you go to the site and see the ad, you'll only encourage their use.
(They also rub it in by having an onClose popup ad, too. They're just as bad as a porn site!)
And yes, I know, "use Mozilla". If I were on my own computer, I would.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Teenager Acretion model?
I don't think it will work as well as the planetary model.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
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.
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
Not quite. Any dust or gas that formed jupiter would have had to have had thermal equilibrium with the rest of space. I read once what caused the excess heat, but I forgot.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.