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ESA and NASA Consider Joint Mission To Europa
ewg writes "In defiance of the monolith, the European Space Agency and NASA are in the early planning stages of an automated joint mission to Europa, Jupiter's watery moon. This follows the triumphant Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn's moon Titan. "All these worlds are yours, except Europa...""
What's the difference?
none of those 3 have been any better at predicting the future than a Sci.Fi. book. So why give any weight to them?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You guys are missing the point... We receive the warning *after* we attempt to land there with an automated probe.
I, for one, welcome our new chlorophyll overlords.
I am glad to see cooperation between the two continents. I know it is fashionable to be pro-Europe/Anti-American or Anti-European/Pro-American. However, ultra-nationalism ends up being a detriment to mankind as a whole.
I hope we continue to build bridges between the continents...
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Oh you mean just like how they "stole all the credit" for the cassini huygens mission when they landed huygens on Titan? Yeah. Thought so. If you had a clue, which by the way, you don't, you'd know that we'd probably supply an orbiter which would communicate with an esa lander. The majority of the science data returned coming from the orbiter. The fact that average joe clueless still thinks that space should be one huge dick size comparison is a big part of what's preventing us from doing truly collaborative big science missions on a regular basis and reaping the scientific knowledge just waiting to be taken from such missions.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
There was with Cassini; Huygens was supposed to enter Titan late last year instead of early this year. They had to delay it because a problem with a radio on Cassini was detected that lied in the firmware (while it was able to handle the Doppler shift of the carrier, it was unable to handle doppler-shifted data due to an oversight in the design). The workaround was, simply, to launch at a trajectory that minimizes the doppler shift, which involved an extra pass around Saturn. Since they had planned the route so well that they had extra fuel on arrival, it didn't shorten the planned mission duration.
Of course, one major problem that had a workaround, and one minor problem discovered too late (the loss of one channel of Huygens data) in a mission involving several hundred thousand man-hours? Honestly, that's not bad. I wish most programmers I knew tested their code well enough to have such a good record (I mean, that's the equivalent of a KDE-sized project). Because while software errors generally at worst mean you have to restart your program, an error on a spacecraft mission can mean the mission is lost.
"Here's a fun fact: the moon has turned to blood!" -- Newscaster, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
Fantasy is a sub-genre of Science Fiction. It contains fictional science. That is the definition of Science Fiction. Magic and trolls and what not do not exist in real life therefore a fictional science needs to be created in order to explain it.
That is really stretching the definitions of both magic and science beyond the breaking point. By that definition religion creates fictional science to explain things, which is nonsense. Whether they are truthful or not, religions are not science. Whether magical worlds can be articulated that are perfectly self-consistent (they can, at least to the "dust-mote" level) or not, magic is not science...though as Arthur C. Clark did point out, a sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from science. But that refers to our inability to comprehend, not a fundamental legitimacy of magic as science.
In any event, most fantasy never tries to explain why magic works, and that that does, generally doesn't do so with any semblance of science, Robert Shea's adventures being a notable exception. Which doesn't disprove my point: a few science fiction/fantasy crossover novels that blend the two does not two disparate genres unify, any more than romance and horror are one and the same simply because a few novels have been written that incorporate elements of both.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I really don't think that this would be a problem. How well do you think an independently evolved lifeform from Europa would survive at Earth normal temperatures, in a chemical environment that is totally novel? Much less in a human body...
Rhapsody in Numbers