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NASA Sending Probe to Saturn
Plissken writes "Nasa along with the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency have launched a towards Saturn in hopes of obtaining vital data to help understand the mysterious, vast region. The Cassini-Huygens mission is composed of two elements: The Cassini orbiter that will orbit Saturn and it's moons for four years, and the Huygens probe will dive into the depths of Titan and land on it's surface. If all goes well, more than 200 scientists worldwide will study the data collected."
someone tell me the data is public domain... anyone?
Well it seems that CowboyNeal has just awoken from a five year coma. The Cassini-Huygens satellite is currently nearing the end of its seven-year voyage to Saturn! It was launched on way back in October 1997 and will arrive in July 2004. In December 2004 the Huygens probe will be ejected from the orbiter and will descend into Titan's cloudy atmosphere. For those that care, there is a huge archive of Cassini Jupiter data availible. Sadly, there are few (if any) Jupiter publications as it seems a few NASA engineers & scientists are still mucking around with the calibration.
But that just raises a less tractable question, how do you guess what to look for?
It's very likely that there is life out there which is not similar to ours... but where do we look?
Examining everything is impossible... there are just too many places to look, and too many things to look for. We are unlikely to find those (non-relationship-guide-human-females) Silicon-based Venusians unless they were broadcasting in English on FM frequencies. And even then, we'd probably not notice.
Looking for things like us gives us a target to work towards.
And every little while, there is something slightly off the main track which is interesting, and we find out more about our universe. Maybe even discover silicon-based life in an environment similar to ours somewhere. That could then open our eyes to what to look for to find silicon-based life elsewhere. Then we turn to Venus and see what was staring us in the face all along.
So we are not assuming that "all life is created in our image". We are just using all the models of life we currently know of to start our search.
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
But if we found life on Titan, it would likely be in the very early stages and it wouldn't be particularly interesting. So I don't see why we're making a huge fuss over it.
Taking this logic to the extreme, we should only bother to look for not just life, but actuall civilications at least as advanced as our own.. right?
Wrong! By looking somewhere close and looking for something roughtly simular to the various forms of life we know from earth we can learn a lot. First and foremost, we'll learn that the earth isn't anything special. There is life out there, not just in our imagination, not just around distant stars, but basicly right out there in our own back yard. True, there could exist siliconbased life in the volcanoes on Venus - possible with a life-chemestry analog to the one we find in creatures here on earth that lives near black smokers - but it's a good idea to go look places where we and our probes can surive first, isn't it?
And maybe we are looking in the right place for the right thing. You never know before you actually takes a look...
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Considering that space exploration resourses are limited we have to look for life in places where it has high probabilities of existing AND we have to be able to get to those places easily. Life perhaps could exist on places on venus, but the best spacecraft don't last even a few hours on venus so looking for life there would be futile and destined for failure. Titan on the other hand is chemically similar to early earth and if it has an ocean then that would have spread life all over the whole moon so no matter where the probe lands, if life exists it has a good chance of finding it.
We already do need another system for space comms. On Starband, using regular TCP/IP, you only get 56k modem speeds. You must use their special modified TCP/IP drivers that are Windows-only to be able to get broadband level download speeds. TCP/IP, as currently implemented, does not lend itself to high latency connections.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
You almost make it sound like I-point-out-stupid-Americans exercises are bad.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Like dude...you can assume "there's guaranteed to be more life *somewhere* in the galaxy" all you want, nobody is gonna believe you until we actually find some (proof of) life on/in a place other than earth.
:)
:) How does either one see/know that the other is alive? How does a silicon-based lifeform perceive the world? Does it actually have senses? Do those senses overlap our own?
:)
:o
;)
Let's start by looking in the obvious places first.
It doesn't matter so much WHAT we find, as long as we find something. Then we can see whether [we|life on earth] is a fluke or not. (And we can see whether or not there are/have been paralllellls in the development of either - or whether one is the origin of the other...etc etc
And obviously, by looking in obvious (and familiar) places, we increase the probability that we will actually recognize the life-forms that we find!
e.g.
Silicon life-forms? Sure...eh..ok...how do you know it's alive? What might be a hundred years to carbon-based life-forms might be 1 second of comparative time to a silicon based-lifeform (or even the inverse of that
Let's start by finding alien bacteria and stuff like that....much easier
Oh, just a thought:
** If NASA *DO* find signs of life on another planet then I think the same thing will happen as what happened with the so-called 'martian' bacteria that supposedly arrived on earth by hopping on a comet/asteroid/rock -> We will end up with endless arguments over cross-contamination and whether or not we put those bugs there in the first place.
Space might be freakin' cold and a very convenient vacuum, but it doesn't stop pollen and bacteria and god knows what else from happily travelling along with our space-probes
(And I need someone to confirm this: Was there stuff growing on the outside of ol' MIR? or is that a myth?)
I was going to add another bit on how religious groups might get upset when the scientific community announces they've found life on other planets....but that's just asking for a troll-rating (:o (Hmm...some cults/sects would be ecstatic I'd imagine
How can this be so uninteresting? Finding life on other worlds, even in our own solar system, would be an extraordinary discovery. I suspect it would teach us quite a lot about the possible origins of life, where life can start, how it evolves... Maybe we will find something, maybe we wont. Either way we will learn a lot about our interplanetary space around us.
I can think of two reasons, the first is purely for the novelty of it - Titan has an atmosphere, no other satellite does.
The second is more important. Titan appears to have a mixture of organic compounds and nitrogen in its atmosphere, which would make it very similar to the primordial atmosphere on Earth. if we can look at the chemistry of the Titan atmosphere and see what is happening to the compounds on Titan under the influence of solar radiation, we can start to work out what happened on Earth all those billions of years ago.
I don't think anyone is seriously expecting to find life on Titan, the surface temperature is so low that most chemistry has effectively ground to a halt.
And even if you aren't excited at the mission, think of the awe-inspiring pictures we're going to get of Saturn and its rings.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Why you ask? NASA has been suffering in the last decade (or few) because Joe-public just doesn't see space exploration at 'neat' anymore. Why bother to go out into space when there is nothing but rocks and dust. If even the simplist form of life could be found somewhere other than Earth, It may re-ignite the passion of the general public to reach out and see what we can find. The space program may recieve not only the money, but the intrest of our nation, or the world again.
The problem is *not* that some one is using the "wrong" measurement system. There will always be two different mesurement systems: Kalvin/Fahrenheit/Celcius whatever, you have to be able to handle the conversion correctly. That's where the problem was.