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Antique Fridge Could Keep Venus Rover Cool
Hugh Pickens writes "In the 1970s and 80s, several probes landed on Venus and returned data from the surface but they all expired less than 2 hours after landing because of Venus' tremendous heat. It's hard to keep a rover functioning when temperatures of 450 C are hot enough to melt lead but NASA researchers have designed a refrigeration system that might be able to keep a robotic rover going for as long as 50 Earth days using a reverse Stirling engine. NASA has not committed to a Venus rover mission, but a 2003 National Academies of Science study recommended that high priority be given to a robot mission to investigate the Venusian surface helping to answer such questions as why Venus ended up so different from Earth and if the changes have taken place relatively recently."
I've got an easier solution. Don't make the robot out of lead.
venus is a better terraforming candidate than mars. oh sure, if you want to get somewhere as quickly as possible that is vaguely hospitable to settlement, mars beats venus hands down
but if you want to talk about recreating earthlike conditions (water, temperature, gravity, atmospheric density), i think it would easier (easier, not easy) to precipitate out venus' atmosphere than to bulk up mars'. and if you stood on venus right now, you would weigh roughly the same. big bonus right there
where is all the water going to come from? how the heck do you thin out the venusian atmosphere to earth-like densities? i don't know. but however you do it, it's an easier starting scenario than mars
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If your going to have a Venus probe there is always the chance it will land on the earth and go berserk. So you need a bionic man or woman to fight it. Actually, why are we making Venus probes at all for a bunch of stupid textbook companies. Let them pay for th probe. what we need is to make fembots. I want fembots dammit. Affectionate fembots that can make flapjacks... Now that would be a worthwhile implementation of science.
Isn't it obvious. Venus is Global Warming run amuck. And we're next!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
While stirling engines are certainly old, the idea of using them as refrigerators is just recently catching on. Here in sleep Athens, OH a company called Global Cooling is the forefront producer of such devices (and is still hand-making a good number of them).
The nice little advantage to these coolers is that they operate with very high COP's, and are limited in lower temperature merely by available power and the boiling point of the working gas. In global cooling's case, Helium is typically used, so temperatures down to around 5K are obtainable (at which point the helium liquifies. Yeah. Cold.) Also, control of the device can be very precise, in that instead of a compressor kicking on and off, it operates constantly, quietly, and with good variable control.
LG is beginning to outfit refrigerators with Stirling pumps because they're so much better than current designs - only problem is they're not mass produced yet. Coleman has a portable unit shown here that is quite a nice unit, albeit very pricey.
One of my professors here at school is one of the pioneers of Stirling refrigeration, so I've been exposed to it a lot. If the whole country switched their refrigerators to stirling compressors, California could shut off its power grid and we'd still have a surplus of energy country-wide.
Quiz: True or False -- On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your middle name?
Isn't the real reason we haven't been trying to rover there because it's just not a very interesting place? Wouldn't the rover just beam back "It's hot and everything's melted" over and over lol. If I remember correctly, there's no significant features to even study. You can't have mountains and ancient, dried up rivers and caves when everything's that hot. Mars is far more interesting.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Now that everybody has made the shift to ROHS electronics, who cares if the heat melts lead? They should be able to do it with all COTS parts.
Sounds like operating temperature for tubes. What happened to SED technology? What if you put sensors on the surface with tube-backed technology and keep an orbiter to process and send the info to Earth? In the 60s they had integrated tubes.
Sterling's are older than the 70's. I've been tinkering on using a sterling for cooling off an engine block for a few years now (pretty good results too, allowing me to generate electricity from the previously wasted heat).
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Yeah, an engine, sure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:BetaStirlingTG4web.jpg
Yes, but can this device provide adequate cooling for a pair of NVIDIA 8800's in a brutal "room temperature" environment?
They're going to power the 1) cooling unit for 2) the robot looking for life with 3) plutonium that will 4) generate heat Day 4 prediction: Mutant baby sulphur monsters come play in the pool of liquid robot.
As to the overly dense atmosphere and colonisation of the solar system - one possibility now would be to put up floating cities around or where the pressure equals 1 earth atms, iirc someone at NASA suggested that but I can't find the link now.
Generating energy would be much more efficient via solar pannels because of it's proximity to earth. Or you could use giant vents with exits floating at different heights to drive rotors, and possibly move your cloud city so it is alway in daylight since venus' day is very long.
Unfortunately, the rotation of Venus is ridiculously slow, that would create a problem, not only for human work cycles but, much worse, for managing temperature.
Suppose they create some kind of shield between Venus and the sun, for instance with a swarm of thin foil satellites. The surface temperature would fall down to bearable levels, perhaps to the point of solidifying the CO2, which would make the atmospheric pressure fall. But even assuming that kind of technology, I see no way to get Venus rotating close to the Earth and Mars rates of about 24 hours.
it is easier to destroy than it is to create
;-)
so with atmospheric density, it is easier to start some sort of process that would precipiate mass out of venus's atmosphere than it would be to bulk up mars somehow (and can mars' gravity hold the density?)
as for oxygen, i forgot about that (duh!
but getting oxygen (and water) in sufficient quantities is equally hard and daunting for mars or venus. venus has hydrogen and oxygen locked up just as much as mars does, and will require some chemical/ atomic manipulation to arrive at the proportional quantity we need just as much as mars does. so for oxygen and water, i think you are talking massive difficulties either way right there, it's a wash in comparing the two planets thatways. both will require heavy manipulation, with a huge energy input, using technology far beyond our current comprehension
and in considering gravity, venus wins without a second thought
and something neither of us considered: magnetic fields. on this measure, both mars and venus stink. so any colony on either orb will be irradiated daily. uggh
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
According to TFA, Venus's plate tectonics shut down when the last of its water boiled away. Can any of you geniuses explain to me why water is required for plate tectonics to function?
of course it is difficult to terraform planets. any attempt at terraforming any planet will require commanding and intricately directing massive amounts of energy many orders of mangitude well beyond anything mankind has even dreamed of mastering
but at the same time, ask a roman general 2,000 years ago to consider the existence of jet fighters, air craft carriers, and helicopters and you would get the same level of incredulity as you have now about being in a "magical universe"
which means his problem, and your problem, is that you lack imagination. you're a dullard. you think pointing out that terraforming planets is difficult is a useful comment to make
well shit, thanks for enlightening us. we had no idea, we thought it would be easy. where would we be without you?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I wonder how much Venus would cool if we simply dropped a couple hundred nukes on the surface. It would surely cool it by a few degrees, although I doubt it would cool it to anywhere close to comfortable temperatures.
And how do you pronounce that?
Ven-u-shun?
Ven-u-zian?
Ven-u-sian?
I would rather put a Stirling-cooled robot rover on Venus than pairs of human feet in the dust of the Moon.
Robotic exploration of our solar system is critically important and will achieve much more than a pair of glass-encased Lunar baby blues.
Leo Szilard was later instrumental in launching the US' Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. It was his idea, but he got Einstein to write the letter to President Roosevelt that convinced him to fund the project.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
there are many ways to block radiation
but obviously, you are correct to point out this is a major impediment. but beggars can't be choosers. i don't see any other small rocky orbs close by to consider. mercury is way worse, and the gas giants are, well, gas giants, and their moons are too cold
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
and you get wicked weather at the night/ day interface, a blistering midday, and a chilling midnight. but it won't be as wicked a change as on mercury, because the atmosphere will conduct some heat (little, yes, but some is better than none)
and even with day length considered, venus is still ahead of mars, considering all the other variables, mars comes out a worse prospect still
but you are correct to point out that day length is a big impediment, i forgot to address that
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If Stirling Coolers are so efficient, why are we not using them to cool our homes & office buildings?
and this is why: considering terraforming venus, mars, or any planet, you are already in a realm of technological futurism that is impossible. so, when you say it is impossible to keep an oxygen rich atmosphere off of willing chemical kindling, well, who is to say there wouldn't be some sort of technology by then that could dampen that effect
i mean, in a way, you and sagan are describing the earth: lots of oxygen, lots of kindling. as san diego proved a few weeks ago, that's a problem. and yet the earth maintained this seemingly thermodynamically impossible balance long before there were human firemen running around. so we're not considering an impossible situation when we describe lots of oxygen and lots of carbon lying around. there are a myriad ways to poison and dampen a runaway plantary fire. it's not in the realm of impossible to keep the kindling and oxygen away from each other
look, this whole concept is extremely daunting. with terraforming, we are in the realm of fine-tuned and at the same time massive amounts of energy of an order well beyond anything mankind's technology can remotely comprehend. therefore, keeping oxygen and kindling away from flareup will probablt be an afterthought by the time we even considering mastering what is needed to make this work
i would conjecture that terraforming any planet, including mars and venus, will consist of not just molecular and chemical manipulations, but atomic ones as well. because neither mars, nor venus, nor any other planet will have oxygen in water in the right ratios for mankind, or even in the potential ratios, considering just their atomic oxygen and hydrogen stores. so atomic manipulations will probably be necessary to artificially induce the right ratios. yes: massive amounts of intricately controlled energy in consideration here. so perhaps you could "poison" the atmosphere in terms of making sure there is enough of some inert or interfering chemical that would dampen a potential flareup as the terraforming proceeded. nitrogen, or a nobel gas, for instance
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
we ARE turning our planet into venus
so, perversely and sadly, if we are going to survive to the point where terraforming venus ever becomes possible, to get to that point, we will have had to master the technology to cool down a hot planet already
yet another reason venus is a better candidate: a historically inevitable future technological convergence point. we will come to master the technology to cool down a hot planet no matter what, or we won't be around at all
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The problem with Venus's atmosphere is that there is so damned much of it. In order to get rid of Venus's atmosphere, you need get rid of the mass of something the size of asteroid Vesta. Basically, you need either calcium or something the size of the asteroid Vesta, and gently put it on Venus, and that will precipate the carbon out as calcium carbonate. Or, you could try and find a Vesta sized chunk of hydrogen, and via some chemical wizardry, that will get rid of the carbon dioxide as well and leave water. But even that amount of water wouldn't be nearly as much as in earth's oceans. The Earth has -a lot- of water.
This is my sig.
But there's still hope for this planet!
Sorry but I am not understanding the point of this when NASA has the tech to make chips that can take the high temperatures of Venus. http://arstechnica.com/journals/hardware.ars/2007/09/12/nasa-designs-new-ultra-high-temperature-chips
HA! They don't fool me. Damn thing would probably last 5 years.
What?
We at Venus welcome your cool beer-carrying roverlords. We're damned thirsty over here.
Table-ized A.I.
Why do you need nuclear power onboard when there is all that HEAT around you? Is there no way to convert that to usable energy?
Excuse me while I go slam my head against a wall...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It's hot and nothing is melted. On earth the melting point of rock is lowered by the amount of water they contain. Water acts as a flux. On Venus where the climate is intensely hot and dry, crustal rocks melt at a very high temperature and are very strong. They create some pretty wild landforms (scarps, cliffs...) as a result.
This or this don't seem so boring to me. The Maxwell Montes are higher than the Himalayas. With adiababic cooling their tops will be hundreds of degrees cooler than the planetary mean. Also, with all of the volcanism and mobile lava flows you can expect there to be some amazing lava rivers and lava tube caves.
an ill wind that blows no good
you mean terraforming planets is a fantasy?
we did not know that!
where would we be without you?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
1. Venus was once like Earth is now . 2. Earth was once like Mars is now 3. They had Venusian SUVs that heated up the planet (but no Venusian Al Gore) . 4. Venusian scientists terraformed Earth . 5. Our ancestors moved to Earth (those who did not believe in Venusian Warming, stayed behind) . 6. The rest is history, however, there is serious consideration now for terraforming Mars just in case .
If one assumes that Venus is the sister planet to Earth, formed out of swirling stellar material billions of years ago along with the Earth, then Venus should be about 20 degrees warmer at any given latitude than Earth is. And, in fact, that is what was taught 50 years ago before we had sent any probes to peer beneath Venus' dense cloud cover. When the 900 degree F surface temperatures of Venus were discovered in 1970 by the USSR's Venera 7 probe, Carl Sagan devised his "super greenhouse" theory, which instantly became the standard theory for explaining the extreme surface temperatures on Venus. Sagan's claim was that the less than 2% of solar energy which somehow finds its way through the thick carbon dioxide clouds of Venus to the surface is forever trapped there and cannot re-radiate as infra-red flux, and thus escape (flux is a measurement of an amount of something that flows through a unit area per unit time).
The only competing theory at the time was posited by Immanuel Velikovsky, who pointed to evidence supporting the notion that the planet Venus was a new planet that was still in the process of cooling down. Although Velikovsky's "Worlds in Collision" was so popular with the public that it once held the title of bestseller, the mainstream astrophysical community scoffed at the notion that an outsider whose expertise was in linguistics could offer any value whatsoever to a discussion about Venus' hot temperatures.
Carl Sagan's theory would require that Venus' atmosphere be in something called thermal balance. In other words, in order to rule out the possibility that Venus' heat originates from the planet itself, scientists must establish that the heat absorbed by Venus from the Sun must equal the heat emitted by Venus back into space. If Venus' surface was emitting more infrared light than the sunlight it was receiving, then Sagan's greenhouse theory would be ruled out and scientists would have to consider the possibility that Venus was probably cooling down from some past catastrophic event --a finding that could lend credence to Velikovsky's assertion that Venus was a new planet.
The November 13, 1980, issue of New Scientist contained an article titled, "The mystery of Venus' internal heat". It reads as follows:
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
Your comment is classical pseudoscience tactic: find some problem with actual theories and claim "so my completely ludicrous idiotic shambling on acid must be right!!!!oneone".
And for rest of universe, I would like to present Velikovsky in all ot his (in)famous glory...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Velikovsky
http://skepdic.com/velikov.html
"report the arrival of Venus into our solar system as a comet-like body within the past 10,000 years"
No. Venus was to be expelled from Jupiter. And remind me, what comets have anything in common with Venus? Mass? Temperature? Looks? Materials? Orbital parameters?
What modern Obelix would say today? Of course, "Those crazy Americans!".
Or (c): the apparent brightness of the Sun is measured from Earth, the apparent brightness of Venus is measured from Earth, and a simple inverse square law calculation is done.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
No lead? Who said that?!
Why didn't you just say, "I believe Venus is a comet that entered the solar system in the last 10,000 years and that's why global warming is a liberal conspiracy."? Is it because bitter experience has taught you that padding it out with a thousand extra words makes it less likely that people will notice you're a nutjob?
I forgot to set the tounge-in-cheek flag. Sorry about that.
I read a book once about terraforming Venus by sending probes periodically over decades to inject payloads of hydrogen, algae, and seawater into the atmosphere. The algae would thrive off of the mainly Co2 atmosphere and multiply, producing o2, and gradually lowering the planet's temperature over a long period of time.
The problem with the proposal is I can't remember how they expected to keep water for the algae liquid at 450 degrees.
When something has moving parts -- like a rover would -- it is much more difficult to properly insulate and lubricate the parts away from the heat. So do the firs things first: put a probe down to figure out as much of the array of conditions on Venus that can possibly be reproduced here on planet earth for scientific / technical testing here on terra firma.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
And a good practice run...
How about building a lunar rover capable of wandering over the lunar surface and placing a number of linked web cams at the various Apollo sites and a transmitting web server (or servers) nearby?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I do not have the time or patience to go through the many many many measurements of the thermal parameters of the Venus atmosphere and explain your misconceptions, however, orbiting probes as well as infrared and radiotelescope measurements from Earth have very well confirmed that Venus is very close to thermal equilibrium. It is not correct that there is a large internal heat source contributing significantly to the surface temperature.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I started writing a post illustrating how your analysis is conclusively incorrect, but you're really "not even wrong". Ever. I think this post instead will be more illuminating to the Slashdot readership:
Here's another gem in an illustrious succession from you:
"So long as astrophysicists refuse to follow the changes occurring within the field of comparative mythology -- which is an actual discipline with real scientific methodology -- they cannot claim that their theories were arrived at by rigorous methodology."
Comparative mythology is a science with rigorous methodology, and physics is not? Direct observation, with mathematical modeling, is bunk but translated/copied/forged human religous writings and artifacts, amounting to hearsay and outright lies, are not?
On this forum, you act like a contrarian blowhard with an unsatisfied ego.
You're the same guy we put up with around here espousing the disproven virtues of the Electric Universe cosmology and decrying fusion and the Standard Model.
Same on several bunk-science forums, according to a few seconds with google. I encourage moderators and interested readers to review your post history on Slashdot, and view samples your other writings on the web.
You have an "us-versus-them" mentality that seems to pit you against Carl Sagan an awful lot, as well as other mainstream (and typically famous) scientists. It's as though you're at least as happy to sling mud at someone like Sagan as you are to imagine yourself part of a darkhorse theory of physics as it spreads its wings, blowing away the infantile ignorance and superstitions of old.
Your posts on Slashdot (and elsewhere) score you highly on the crackpot index:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
Clearly you are not a scientist, but a dilettante. You support Velikovskian catastrophism as the origin of Venus, despite evidence both profound and prodigious against. Have you ever calculated an orbit? An orbital? Would you even know how to begin? Do you know what the latter is? Do you know what binding energy is? Do you know what a differential equation is, even? Clearly, no. If the answer were yes, you could see why these things were rejected by accredited scientists as soon as they became testable.
You always seem to find an audience on Slashdot just large enough to make "+5 Insightful". Your delusion is sickening, but the moderation is saddening. You need to learn critical thinking; it's the only thing that has gotten humans from fearful lives on the savanna to somewhat less fearful lives on the internet. As it stands, your abominable, deplorable disinformation is detrimental to human thought and understanding, and thus to human society at large.
On behalf of myself, other Slashdot readers, and the rest of humanity who must endure the machinations of any aspiring tech-folk you might poison or deter from productivity or enlightenment: stop clogging the internets with garbage and start that critical thinking bit.
A few years ago there was a lot of hype about using intense sound waves to set up a standing wave in a special tube in a manner that would produce very efficient refrigeration with no moving parts other than a hefty speaker voice coil. Anyone heard any further developments on that front? It would seem to me that with energy prices skyrocketing, these alternative, energy-saving ideas and others that alt-energy geniuses like Popular Science's Smokey Yunick used to come up with would be receiving lots of new attention. Then again, the oil industry IS one of the biggest lobbying groups on the Hill, so who knows when (if ever) we'll see a large-scale switch to alternate energy sources.
Just how do plutonium batteries work, and how much heat do they really generate? And couldn't the abundant amount of thermal energy in the environment be used to generate electricity using the same process?
A minor fact. For flux constant over time, the total flux emerging from any shell around Venus must be independent of the choice of shell. If Venus was radiating, then the total net flux in upper shells would be exactly as the same as the net flux in the lower shells. So variations in net flux on the way down aren't explained by the hypothesis that Venus itself is 'cooling down'.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I talk about mythology *all* of the time in my postings. There is no trick here. The Slashdot article in question though had little to do with mythology, so it was not the focus of my posting.
I'm not bitter, btw. I'm trying to get people to respond to the arguments of the Electric Universe Theorists, which I've educated myself in, for the purpose of seeing if there are any legitimate arguments that cast doubt upon their theories. Most of the responses I get though tend to be ad hominem attacks, and claims that I am "misleading" people. Most people argue that I am not worth their time. People don't understand that they need to get their licks in now before I go public with my documentary on the subject.
When I find an argument that seems solid, I forward it to the theorists, and they respond in kind. I will typically repost their responses here. What I've found after 1.5 years of doing this is that people are not actually reading what their theory says, and are in fact dismissing the evidence they point to in a piecemeal fashion, unaware that there is a fabric that connects all of these pieces together. What needs to be done is that people need to understand what they are saying -- the entire theory -- so that observations can be evaluated on the basis of both paradigms. But nobody's doing this because there is this general sense that science is heading in the right direction. I feel that, in light of the arguments of the heretics, this is a big mistake.
It's as simple as that, and there's nothing unethical about what I'm doing. In fact, I'm quite sure that people will eventually thank me for my work.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
This seems like a bit of revisionist history here ...
Revercombe and Suomi et. al. thought the upward IR flux was anomalous enough to warrant writing up a highly complex mathematical description of the manner in which all of those sensors had "failed".
If there was no problem, as you seem to suggest, then why bother?
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
You seem to be quite intent to portray me as anti-science.
Sorry; that was not my intent. It was my intent to portray you as unscientific. There is a subtle distinction. It is certainly possible to be scientific (aside: the scientific method is not a thing to believed in, or not) without the assent of "mainstream" science, but not for long. In effect, there is only "science"; there is no "mainstream" vs. "fringe". If there's observation in support of a scientific model, then that is the model that "mainstream" science will accept, ipso facto. If it is apparent to once practitioner of science that a model is optimal, it is so apparent to all practitioners of science. Information travels fast these days, so the lag from the establishment of "proof" (in the sense of supporting evidence) to widespread knowledge of that "proof" is short. The case for EU is weak, and for Velikovsky's folk ramblings, at least doubly so. It's too bad that Sagan was snarky and superficial in debunking Velikovsky's bunk, and a great opportunity to demonstrate careful scientific thinking in (or at least closer to) the public eye was lost.
Comparative mythology is structured similar to the way in which we evaluate court testimony.
Comparative mythology is amenable to the scientific method, which is an even stronger claim than you make. However, it is also true that the "testimony" in question is inherently unreliable. It is possible through fabrication, corruption, mutation, omission, or coercion for that testimony to simply not be so. It is not possible to observe made-up reality. Gravity is a very mysterious force, but at least it is "truthful" in the sense of your analogy. (Re. human hallucinations, dreams, and perception problems: if you're at least moderately careful and use the methods of scientific inquiry). Even if you can observe only an incomplete portion of reality, that portion is "the truth".
...you incorrectly believe that the Garden of Eden is a *religious* concept even though...
The book of Genesis is most interesting for its literary lineage. This paragraph is a real howler though:
...both the historical and fossil records indicate quite clearly that the phenomenon was physical and occurred for the entire world.
The historical and fossil records speak of *vastly* different times: historical record ~8000 years if we're generous, and the fossils of which you speak were formed starting *at least* 80 million years ago, and depending on what you're citing exactly, as much as 250 million years ago. That's a long time even in geological scale, and certainly long enough for the ground those fossils are embedded in to move to all latitudes. If you're talking about the advent of life, and appealing to fossils, what about the 3~3.5 *billion* years of single-celled life forms in the fossil record? They preclude the historical veracity of the creation myth in Genesis, that's what. What about the vast majority of creation myths and folk cosmologies around the world that document different events at different times, instead of the same event (even through allegory) even roughly beginning at the same time?
Perhaps we'd save some time if people actually just read the materials themselves, eh? After all, that appears to be the real problem -- the outright dismissal of data that is enigmatic to numerous disciplines.
It would certainly be nice if people had the hobby of investigating reality or even just the human condition, but there is little time for that in their busy schedules of job-they-don't-love and television. The situation would indeed be better. However, look at what happens when the democratic people of USA, UK, Germany, France, Iran, and Brazil (try to) do things according to their best powers of reasoning: critical thinking takes practice that the majority of humans do not have even on a day-to-day basis, let alone one sufficient for scientific rigor.
Your views on astrophysical observations seem to me very parochial.
I could take the same cheap shot at yours: you seem to consistently prefer "fringe science" and it's tough to distinguish between legitimately reasoned objection and new-age quackery. Is most of physics "wrong" ("off"?) and all these "fringe" ideas improvements? Perhaps most of physics is "right" (-ish, that is of course), and you only take exception to some small portion of it that's clearly wrong? Looks like a duck, walks like a duck... You might not be a duck, the universe may not behave like a duck, but it sure looks like it.
You also completely ignore the fact that many scientists have spent their entire lifetimes unsuccessfully pursuing acceptance of their theories only to have their theories vindicated or co-opted after their death.
Here it is the exception that proves the rule. I do not "completely ignore" that possibility in my ideals nor their execution, and I disagree with your inference that anything I've said amounts to that. Clever, rigorous people don't say "well, the machines that brought gifts from the sky came once when there were landing strips around here, so it's a good bet that was the efficient cause." "Some scientists were scorned during life and posthumously proven correct, so it's at least likely if not necessary that scorned scientists are correct." That's a false generalization.
The entire mess with the source of the aurora was of course the result of a throwaway comment by Lord Kelvin. Kelvin's star power blinded a lot of people to the fact that he was sometimes full of shit. The same thing happened with Carl Sagan and Velikovsky.
In this sense it seems at least that scientific knowledge has become less about "what sells" than it was in the Victorian era of "science celebrities", but it has also made science less accessible to the public. The majority of EU proponents steadfastly ignore the fact that the Standard Model is a more thorough framework, with fewer holes and more supporting evidence than the competing and largely mutually exclusive EU theory. I rather doubt you understand the Standard Model as well as you understand EU, but then even a few very capable physicists have sided with EU's story and not the Standard Model's, so there must be more to this quandary...
Your view that science is pure and virginal, and unaffected by social drama or public preferences and prejudices is a bit naive.
As is your view that the particular "fringe" theories you support are caused, even primarily, by social drama [dogma?] or public preferences and prejudices. Academia is indeed quite "political" in its operation and parochial in its techniques, but not to the extent you appear to believe. I'm familiar with the tenuous, meandering path human knowledge and civilization have taken, and science in particular. I think you fail to take into account just how long a leash science has been on in places where theocracy is not rampant, and even in a few places where it is or was. I think it's inaccurate to say that science is on a leash at all in most of the world today. Even though some American scientists can't get government funding for certain "un-godly" or "hippie" things like stem cell or legitimate environmental research, at least neither church nor state confine or kill people for conducting and disseminating that research on their own coin.
...clearly you can tell that the public *likes*...various esoteric concepts that may defy common sense.
True enough, many of the ideas of astrophysics and cosmology, and many other sciences, are sexy in the eyes of a vast, interested, but lay audience. But they are not considered fantastic in the eyes of (most of) the scientists who study them, even if those very scientists are fascinated enough to make that study their life's work. To most cosmologists, it is EU theory that looks fantastic, because of the observations it fails t
You know, if you weren't so stubborn about reading things that you don't already agree with, you could quite easily find the answer. It's interesting that you will waste your time arguing with me over these things, and yet you won't actually spend the money or time to understand what the theory states. I am confident of my understanding of what is happening because I've expanded my awareness of what they theory says beyond yours. Your carefully-crafted arguments seem to me like one long drawn-out excuse to avoid challenging your own belief system. The idea that you would be preventing me from spreading misinformation on Slashdot is silly when you've yet to fully read what is being alleged.
That's clever. It wasn't meant as a generalization. It was intended as a rebuttal to your allegation that ...
Your perception that I'm making sweeping generalizations is not accurate. The debate over the mathematical modeling of space plasmas is specific in its claims and philosophy and history of science can assist us in reaching a conclusion.
And yet, your thorough framework could come crumbling down like a house of cards at any moment ...
...
...
http://plasmascience.net/tpu/downloadsCosmo/Verschuur-CIV-HI-TPS-Aug2007b.pdf
Or in layman's terms
http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2007/11/big_bang
As a sidenote, Wallace Thornhill's "The Electric Universe" was the first published book
to reference Verschuur's allegations
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
To assist with any investigation of the Deep Impact Mission results that you may decide to take on, if I may, can I recommend the following link?
http://www.suppressedscience.net/news.html
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.