Slashdot Mirror
Voyager 2 Set to Reach Termination Shock
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "A computer model simulation developed at UC Riverside has predicted that in late 2007 to early 2008, the interplanetary spacecraft Voyager 2 will cross the termination shock, the spherical shell around the solar system that marks where the solar wind slows down to subsonic speed. At the termination shock, located at 7-8.5 billion miles from the sun, the solar wind is decelerated to less than the speed of sound. The boundary of the termination shock is not fixed, however, but wobbly, fluctuating in both time and distance from the sun, depending on solar activity. Because of this fluctuation, the spacecraft is also predicted to cross the boundary again in middle 2008. The article abstract is available from The Astrophysical Journal."
speed of sound... wait a minute? In which medium? I don't think there is much atmosphere up there...
What exactly is the speed of sound in a vacuum?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
but can someone describe in layman's term what will that mean for the probe (if anything), will it change course/direction? can this negatively affect the mission/spacecraft itself?
Perhaps a better subject line would've been "Voyager 2 Surfin' the termination shock wave!"
Does it travel back in time/come out the other side/anything else cool, or is it just like hitting a bug on the windshield? News at 11.
stuff |
this is the kind of thing scientists predict all the time and observe in lab experiments... but this device is actually GOING to the edge of a solar system... it's someplace human made instruments haven't been. Science at it's very purest form, simply going and observing something nobody has actually seen before.
Why do you go on vacation to foreign places.. aren't postcards and Discovery channel good enough? It's a whole lot different to say "we were there" than guessing what it would be like from a long distance.
Now that the tailwind has slowed down.
There's a Voyager 2?! Oh God no; come back Enterprise, all is forgiven...
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
"The boundary of the termination shock is [...] wobbly, fluctuating in both time and distance from the sun"
Are you SURE that it fluctuates in time from the sun, or do you actually mean that it fluctuates (only) in distance from the sun? Then there's this beautiful piece of prose:
"... Voyager 2 will cross the termination shock, the spherical shell around the solar system that marks where the solar wind slows down to subsonic speed. At the termination shock [...] the solar wind is decelerated to less than the speed of sound."
And finally:
"Because of this fluctuation, the spacecraft is also predicted to cross the boundary again in middle 2008."
Ignoring the poor English, care to explain the logic behind this? Surely, going from inside to outside, Voyager 2 will have to cross the boundary an odd number of times? Ladies and gentlemen, I suggest that this is worst article EVAR on slashdot. I rest my case.
It means Janeway's going to have to pretend to be thrown all over the place while bits of the ship fall off.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Anyone else notice the related stories on the news site?
Nov. 6, 2003: Voyager Spacecraft Approaches Solar System's Final Frontier
Dec. 19, 2000: Most Distant Spacecraft May Reach Shock Zone Soon
May 25, 2005: Voyager Spacecraft Enters Solar System's Final Frontier
Besides the speculation, will we even know when the boundary is crossed? Do they expect data to indicate a transition, or do we even know if the instruments can detect such a thing?
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Speaking as someone working on the project, posting anonymously for obvious reasons, I can give a little info. When the spacecraft reaches termination shock, it is quite likely that all the transistors will fall off the pcb's that make up the electronics. Chances are this isn't so bad, as their are lots of backup resistors, but if theres a leak in the spacecraft's petrol tank then it might be ignited by some arcing currents, which would probably throw it off course a bit.
No, it is not. It is the interstellar medium. Read: termination shock.
>Why do you go on vacation to foreign places..
I think you will find he is an american, and therefore that doesn't apply.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
I would expect that something called "Termination Shock" would have some dramatic effect on an object crossing it. Is this the case? It doesn't sound like it based on what I read. Sounds like a more appropriate name would be "Subsonic Solar Wind Boundary". But what fun is that?
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
The speed of sound on earth is about 0.3 km/s. In the interstellar medium, it is tens of km/s.
Sir Mix-a-lot? Is that you?
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
they will be used to get data from voyager 2 on conditions at the edge of the solar system
however, a wobbly spacetime continuum means that voyager 2 must be running linux
because the wobbly spacetime is an infinite loop, only linux can escape it in 5 seconds
but time at the termination shock is slow enough that 5 seconds will be 2 years
proud caffeine whore
The speed of sound isn't a constant, and space isn't a total vacuum.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
This is pure, over the horizon, is the earth round or flat, kind of stuff. While no one is expecting anything extraordinary, you never really know until you go and look.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Why do you go on vacation to foreign places...
OMG, underage Taiwanese hookers...in space?I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The speed of sound goes DOWN with reducing density , not up. Theres no way the speed in an almost vacuum could be hundreds of times higher than at sea level. Even in rock it only manages a few km/s. Perhaps the author meant 100m/s but even then I'd be suspicious since in intersteller space the gas molecules rarely touch each other so theres no physical way for sound to propagate anyway.
"Other posters are saying..."
That's only because it's what Wikipedia says. The speed of sound in the interstellar medium depends on the density of the medium, which varies, so it's different everywhere.
Four, just four small space probes.
Sorry dude, all the space ships you see on TV are just FX. We are not (yet) exploring the galaxy. Will we get any new data about "termination shock" or whatnot? Yeah! We may confirm that there exists this termination shock we expect to find there, or we may find our theories are wrong and there is not such "thing".
Want to see the actual orbital trajectories of the Voyager probes for yourself in 3d type of thing? Because you can, if you use my nBody modeling software.
If you go here:
http://code.google.com/p/nmod/downloads/list
and get the windows installer or linux source for my nbody modeling kit, and then download this:
http://www.politespider.com/nbo/time_series.zip
And unzip it to save you the bother of having to actually generate your own time series (3d time series model of the solar system), which can take a while. You can then watch both Voyager probes follow their orbits (with 24th august 2006 as their starting date), for 20,000 days of travel time.
This isn't a program with a scrummy easy interface I'm afraid, the viewer is console opengl. But there are instructions here:
http://code.google.com/p/nmod/wiki/nbview
And it's not too hard once you get the hang of it.
The orbits do not take termination shock into account, this is pure Newtonian motion. The dataset for the solar system has taken months to put together. It's incomplete, It only has our moon (zoom in for ages with Earth centred and you'll see it), the others have been tricky to get right.
Once it gets there and crossing is a non-event, we will see that there is nothing of interest out there. Voyager 2 is just crossing into vast, bleak nothingness.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Uh. That is wrong. The solar wind is a gas plasma, and as such has a defined (though somewhat complicated to work out) speed of sound*. It also fills the space surrounding Sol. It is in effect the "atmosphere" of the Sol star system, however one that itself travels at supersonic speed outward from Sol. The termination shock is where it goes subsonic and becomes pretty much indistinguishable from the interstellar medium, the "atmosphere" of the galaxy. (There is an intergalactic medium too, which is really not dense at all).
* Speed of sound in a material is the speed at which information propagates through collisions between constituent particles. In a supersonic flow, no information can propagate upstream through collisions, the flow just changes weirdly and suddenly at "shocks" (the math works out, honest) - a "sonic boom" is a travelling shock attached to a supersonic aeroplane in a generally subsonic medium sweeping past you.
Once to get outside the boundary, twice if the boundary expands and catches back up with it, and thrice to once again get outside the boundary.
Just a thought.
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
What is the speed of sound in a vacuum? Kinda existential...
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
It's going to reach the edge of the simulation, where it'll get rendered in lower resolution.
-- Only information exists, the rest is just smoke and mirrors.
I am looking forward to the interstellar probe mission, which is specifically designed to explore the interstellar medium.
Unfortunately it will probably not happen in my lifetime, unless we stop putting in charge of the budget people who think that a talk between a teacher in LEO and school-children on earth is more "inspiring" than fundamental research.
What you are refering to is Voyager 1. TFA is about Voyager 2. They are two different vehicles.
<wikipedia href="Heliosphere">
Evidence presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in May 2005 by Dr. Ed Stone suggests that the Voyager 1 spacecraft passed termination shock in December 2004, when it was about 94 AU from the sun, by virtue of the change in magnetic readings taken from the craft. In contrast, Voyager 2 began detecting returning particles when it was only 76 AU from the sun, in May 2006. This implies that the heliosphere may be irregularly shaped, bulging outwards in the sun's northern hemisphere and pushed inward in the south.
</wikipedia>
That's garbage. Space is not a total vacuum, it's true. However, the density of particles of matter in space is, for the most part, so low that space can be treated as a vacuum. It's like rounding 0.1xE-25 to just 0.
And as for the whole thing about sound travelling faster in space, you just made that up. Light (and other electromagnetic phenomena) do travel faster in a vacuum like space (perhaps you've confused the two). Sound, however, is caused waves of physical compression. In other words, one particle bumps into the next, which bumps into the next, and so on. Sound travels faster and farther through more solid materials. It has a certain speed and a certain distance it will travel in air, a faster speed and greater distance in water, and an even faster speed and greater distance through concrete. It has no speed or distance at all in space, because what little matter there is isn't close enough to touch the next peice of matter, and you can't set up the compression wave.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
...it will land with a "kerPLUNK!" into a half full goblet of mead at the foot of Zeus.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
As another reply already noted, this is the interstellar medium, which should be a good deal dense than the space between galaxies and galaxy clusters.
Next, how does sound transmit? Well, sound is a density/pressure wave, right? All I need is for the free particles to be interacting somehow to set one up. Turns out, the interstellar medium isn't a gas like you're used to thinking of, it's a plasma. The important point here being that because the electrons are not bound to the atoms, the effective "size" of the atoms goes up (that is, the disntance over which they interact with neighboring atoms). Thus you should be able to get sound waves more easily than you would suspect from a regular gas that is that sparse.
Should've gone diesel...I'm just sayin'... :P
I agree that this is a very pure and useful form of science. However, what I don't understand is why we don't do this more often. Why haven't we been sending out a probe every year, or at least every five years, upgraded with the best propulsion systems and scientific instruments we can put on it? These two probes were launched 30 years ago, and while they still work, technology improved a lot over the decades. If it takes 30 years to get to the termination shock, it seems like they took an awfully big risk sending just two probes and then sitting tight. If something went wrong or failed, you have just one probe left, or maybe none if it was an issue common to the two of them. And then you have to wait 30 years to get back to where you were. In addition, science usually likes many repeated observations of phenomena more than just a few, and repeatedly launching probes in different directions would have helped establish even more reliablity for all data returned.
I just don't understand why we don't do this more often. I would have to think we could build a better, sturdier probe with a faster propulsion system, longer lasting power sources and far more powerful scientific devices. Unless perhaps we have launched another probe that will eventually have this mission (but maybe is doing something else on the way for now), I just don't understand why we don't do this again.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
The nukes are way down on power, so most of the instrumentation is not running. We will get some though.
It would be interesting to see a new voyager sent out. In particular, obtain bigger nukes, use bigger rockets (perhaps the ares IV/V), and finally, add ION drives. I do not know how long it would take to reach the edge again, but if done right, it could reach there in a fraction of the time and obtain more useful data. If nothing else, this would be the kind of science that Russia or China should consider doing. For some odd reason USSR/Russia really does not do that much with long term Science missions. They have never sent anything real deep. For the most part, they appear to be only interested in places that we can send mankind to.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
While it's not as DENSE, since sound is just energy, the atoms carry the energy (and the vacuum between transmits the energy) but there's not enough atoms to really stimulate your eardrum. That is, provided you could take your helmet off in the relative vacuum of space and survive, there's just simply not enough mass present to allow stimulation of our aural system.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The Pioneers were dead when the left the solar system. The Voyagers are still sending data.
Clear, Dark Skies
We will soon be intergalactic litterbugs.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
Once for Voyager 1, then once again for Voyager 2, making twice.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Whats that? To visit space, I don't have to fly on VirginSpaceLines, I can just goto SoCal? (if you don't get the joke, leave the site now)
Alternate humorous statement:
So can we send some of the excess "stars" we have here into space to help fill that interstellar void? I think we have way more than we need now. (Bonus points are credited for this option too, as many in SoCal are just waiting for the spaceship to take them away anyways)
2^3 * 31 * 647
I have heard that some stores use the cents part of the price to indicate a category of pricing. For example, $x.99 is regularly priced, $x.98 is sale priced, $x.97 is clearance priced, etc.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
A termination shock/shockwave/bore/hydraulic jump occurs when the bulk speed of a fluid drops below the wave propagation speed.
Run a tap in to a flat sink (like a kitchen sink) and you see a circular pattern (if the sink is flat) some distance from around where the water hits the sink. The pattern should have shallow fast moving awater close to where the jst hist the sink, and deeper slower water on the other side of the circle.
The "jump" where the water goes from fast to slow is the same kind of object as a termination shock. For extra fun, stick an object in the slow water, and see how waves propagate ahead of it (against the flow). Then see how it doesn't happen in the fast water.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I can't wait to see the pictures of the Restaurant.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
So what is the relevance of the speed of sound in a near perfect vacuum? Not to mention the idea of a shock wave in nothing.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Actually no. The spacecraft would have crossed the boundary twice and the boundary would have overtaken the spacecraft once.
You can say you crossed the threshold of a door by walking through it. But if you stand still and the door suddenly flies past you, I don't think you can claim that you crossed the threshold.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
The speed of sound is different depending on the medium. The speed of sound where?
Indeed, that was quite ambiguous in the summary. Whereas people here keep talking about what the speed of sound in plasma/intersolar whatever is, I think we need not to look any further the not so science-savvy author trying to give us an estimate of the speed he's talking about in layman terms, that is, the speed of sound at the sea level.
You just got troll'd!
So why is Voyager 1 continuously beaming back: "Remember, aperture science take your daughter to work day is the perfect time to have her tested.." and "The Cake Is A LIE!" And When does Voyager 6 launch? :)
Remember, it's not paranoia if they really ARE out to get you...
".. because the speed of sound in space is zero"
This is wrong. The speed of sound in space is actually very high. Much higher than here on earth. Because of the very low pressures there the amplitude of the sound waves are very low. So low you could never hear anything. But the speed is 100 or 1000 times faster. Space is a near perfect, not a perfect vacuum.
Think of it this way... There are objects as big a stars floating around why would yu not expect there is be also small thing floating around like gas molecules.
The root cause of this is grade school science. They teach "there is no air" and "you need air to make sound". This is good if you are in third grade because they can't understand "10E-12 g/cm^3"
I, for one, plan to welcome our returning creator-seeking V-Ger overlord
I think you will find he is an american, and therefore that doesn't apply.
I'll bite. The USA offers more climate and geographic diversity than most countries due to its size. Lets compare leaving the USA with leaving Europe for a fair comparison.
And yes I have left the continent.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
This is the effect of minute "dust" particles permeating space and absorbing/deflecting light. The effect is less for longer wavelengths which is why we can get a better view of the Galactic centre in the infrared.
Europeans in general don't understand this, and it's probably true for most of the rest of the world. From where I live I can make it to Mexico in about 12 hours of solid driving, or to Canada in about 20 hours, but in most places in the US it's a day or more of travel time to either country. In most of Europe you can be to another country in an hour or two. Now, I've lived in both Italy and Germany (for about a total of 5 years of my life), and when I'd be talking to people, they'd talk about wanting to travel to the US and all the places they'd like to see. Want to see LA, San Francisco, New York, New Orleans, Grand Canyon, Yosemite Valley, Yellowstone, etc., and expect they could manage this in about two weeks, which, by comparison, is like wanting to travel from Moscow to London and hit all the major points in between in that kind of time frame.
The reason why many Americans speak only one language or don't spend a lot of time in other countries is based in this. For a majority of Americans there is only one language besides English that is of any utility, and that is Spanish. I was once fluent in both German and Italian, but since I've been back in the US I have yet to run into a situation where I needed to speak either language. It's not like we can day trip to France or that most businesses can deliver finished products to a foreign country with a simple truck ride of 3 or 4 hours.
So at this point will Voyager 2 hit ludicrous speed or plaid?
In an effort to conform with internet communication standards, please note that the above comment is 100% biased opinion
Actually...
"The Voyager spacecraft will be the third and fourth human spacecraft to fly beyond all the planets in our solar system. Pioneers 10 and 11 preceded Voyager in outstripping the gravitational attraction of the Sun but on February 17, 1998, Voyager 1 passed Pioneer 10 to become the most distant human-made object in space."
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/fastfacts.html
Wikipedia sucks.
How do we know that solar winds slow down to sub sonic speeds if Voyager is the first thing from Earth to reach this point.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
It's possible this could be very important. NOTE: What I'm suggesting here is a long odds sort of thing, not the likelyest scenario, but it's also not impossible, maybe not even all that low probability. Science in general is frequently about a new hypothesis having low probability in the initial stages, and someone still researching it because if that hypothesis works out, it will have major implications. Many of those gambles never pay off, but Nobels get awarded to ones that do.
There were some odd position and velocity data coming back from the Pioneer spacecraft when they reached the same distance from our sun. It's a known anomaly, and some unusual hypothesi exist.
http://www.sixside.com/13_things_that_do_not_make_sense.htm
(about halfway down)
The likelyest scenarios probably involve instrumentation flaws, methods of calculating, and such, basically anything which would affect the data from both craft in the same way. Those scenarios are testable, i.e. by finding bugs in the code. Looking for similar effects with the Voyagers at the least will rule some of these scenarios out, as they are built with very different components from the Pioneer design. If corresponding data anomalies occur here, it will be fair to assume a common cause.
The unlikely but very, very interesting alternatives include some basic 'Laws of Physics' working a bit differently once you get far enough from a star. That's a spectacular claim, and needs a lot of proving, but I'd argue that even if the odds are, say, 100,000 to 1 against, it's worth throwing a few grad students and a cheap Beowulf cluster at the Voyager data for a summer project, to see if it links up with the Pioneer anomalies. If the odds are as good as 1,000 to 1 against, someone with their piled higher and deeper needs to really look at it.
Who is John Cabal?
Well, also, since the speed of sound depends on the density of the medium the sound is traveling through, what exactly is the speed of sound in the perfect vacuum of space? If they're just using sea-level speed of sound as an arbitrary measure to convey it to the common "non scientist consumer" then what's the point? What meaning could the speed of sound possibly have in a place where sound does not exist?
-Steve Tired of voting for the "lesser of two evils?" Come talk about it on www.bothsidesarewrong.com
Oh, and it's its its its its its its its ITS ITS ITS!!!
Bow-ties are cool.
Is that the right terminology? What is the "interstellar medium"? Surely it's not stationary with regards to the sun or earth, is it?
When I first read the headline I thought that they had brought out another Star Trek series and shocked their fans by early termination.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
No no. The article says that due to the expansion/contraction of the barrier, voyager 2 will cross the threshold twice.
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
Thank you for that extremely enlightening explanation. Patient with the OP and well thought out.
Thanks again.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Well I wasn't just trying to be clever with semantics. It seems that the border overtaking the spacecraft is as scientifically interesting as the spacecraft overtaking the border - or is there something physically different about the border overtaking the spacecraft that makes it different and unremarkable?
The threshold and spacecraft will cross each other 3 times, right, not two. So why only talk about two?
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
If your talking high culture then yes Manhattan is pretty much our epicenter. I have only been to DC on guided tours, so the only culture I experienced there was tours of the Smithsonian, government building and monuments.
Now in terms of folk culture, you are wrong. First of all the world epicenter of low culture is Queens NYC, possibly the most ethnically diverse area of its size on the planet. Secondly, if you can't tell the difference between different parts of the country then you need to open your eyes. Compare New York and California for example. Even though a small but sizable portion of the population regularly travels between the LA and NY metro areas, the cities have completely different feels. Try finding good grits in the North East, or decent Italian food in the South, minus a few places with significant migration from New York.
I just love when Americans (who know I am foreigner from the other side of the ocean) ask me whether I went back home for Thanksgiving, and I study in one of the top 25 universities in the USA. I can never understand how people can ace Calc IV without studying and yet they are too ignorant to know that Georgia isn't simply a state. It's nation with a 3000 year old history, no less.I have two counter points to that.
First of all good at math does not mean good at history. If they are that good at math, and don't care for geography, they can survive just fine in college. I know a brilliant Mathematicians and programmer that probably didn't know where Prague was until he had to fly there to enter his physics engine into a competition. I would think that brilliant mathematicians in Georgia that do not study overseas have a narrower world view than you do. Also, I'm also sure Americans that study overseas have a firmer understanding of the world then their classmates.
As far as people asking you how your thanksgiving was, we Americans are known for engaging in mindless smalltalk. Most people probably didn't think out their statement. They also probably didn't care about your holiday. Finally how many of these people know you are in this country alone and not with your family.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Peeing their pants after observing a blip on their sensors that this in fact has happened.
Woot! /. Signed
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
....are you sure that isn't Star Trek in its purest form?
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com
First it tells us twice that the solar wind falls below the speed of sound at the termination shock. Surely saying this once would have sufficed. Even in Montreal where they like to tell you everything twice they at least do it once in English and then again in French.
Then it goes on to claim that the terminator wobbles both in time and space. What the heck does that mean? How can something wobble in time and space?
Squirrel!
I don't go anywhere without my Hasselhoff flanges. I wouldn't think of using anything else on my sub-lightspeed cruiser.
In Soviet Russia, threshold crosses YOU!!
I'm not an actor, but I play one on TV...
I just love when Americans (who know I am foreigner from the other side of the ocean) ask me whether I went back home for Thanksgiving, and I study in one of the top 25 universities in the USA.
It *is* a vacation in this country for most people *regardless of your origin or citizenship*.
You could have gone any number of places without even thinking about doing anything "Thanksgivingish", so it's not really a dumb question. It's just like asking, "What did you do over the weekend".
Not many places in the US interest me. I've seen the natural beauty, but I prefer bumming around cities. US cities....meh...NYC, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco are all interesting but the majority of 'vacation destinations' in the US just don't interest me. I'd rather spend my dough hanging about Rome for 2 weeks than spend 6 weeks touring the US.
Blar.
But then I got a new job.
(Hanging my head in shame at not being able to post anything more insightful than this as everyone else already has.)
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I'll bite. Only someone who goes from Disney Land to Disney World will say that the US lacks cultural diversity. Going from Massachusetts to Arizona is a much larger change than going from say, the US to Holland. Customs are different, climate is different, culture is different. I can honestly say it no longer felt like the "US" I was used to. Then travel over to Florida, and expect different accents, food, customs, traffic, entertainments, etc. And if you really want a shock, go visit a Navajo Reservation... You might argue that they fall under a different government, but they are still within the borders of the US. The Navajo reservation I visited felt far more like El Salvador than like Boston.
Help Fight SPAM today!
I keep imagining that scene in the Truman Show where Truman's boat hits a wall painted like the sky.
My theory is that the terminal shock is just a big wall painted with stars and galaxies all over it. We're going to find out our solar system is just inclosed in a big ball and that we're part of some cosmic reality show.
or else!
No no. The article says that due to the expansion/contraction of the barrier, voyager 2 will cross the threshold twice.
Yeah, sorry about that. I misread something somewhere along the line.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Obviously, you've visited a few cities as a tourist. You've fallen for tourist view of any city, visited landmarks, etc. If you've lived all over the US, you would have realized that large cities have ethnic neighborhoods where English is not always the first language. Polish, Spanish, Italian, Hmong, Irish, etc. Hell, English isn't always understandable from various parts of the country.
I asked my co-worker what she was doing for Thanksgiving. She was going back home... to India. I may even ask her what's she's doing for Christmas even though she's not Christian.
While there are dumb, socially-inept, or culturally unaware Americans, are you sure they know you're from the other side of the ocean? A Georgian (country) accent isn't enough to say you're from another country.
LOL, I love the comment about India being a shithole. Just shows how much you know foreign countries.
I never said that Europe is the pinnacle of human evolution. They have their own set of problems, they let racism take priority over economic interests unlike Americans who are racist but will let you work in the USA if it economically benefits. Europe has fuckloads of bad things about it. But that's not my point...
My point is that culture within the USA tends to be very similar. It's pretty much the same shit everywhere. Strip malls, ghettos and downtowns. There are very few landmarks worth visiting if you are not American. Compare the landmarks in say Washington with any major European city.
The reason why I study in the USA is because I am not a dumb asshole like you. America has a better University system and it has more economic opportunity if you are a non-citizen (compared to Europe). Unlike you, I am not some mad fanatic who gets insulted by every random thing you say about their country. Get over it man, America has no culture. All your public holidays are just consumerist rage fests, you have no real history, you have very few cool landmarks (with the exception of NY). But that doesn't mean USA is a pile of shit, what it lacks in culture it makes up for in economic competitiveness.
It's funny that you talk about genocide considering that USA was founded on the mass eradication of the Native American population.
Chill out man, nation states are a load of bullshit anyways.
Dude cmon, comparing California to NY? You've been living in the USA for way too long. Yeah, of course their different, but look at the scales involved. For 95% of the world population, it's the same shit. Of course, I am not saying that every part of US is identical. If you want differences, try comparing Cairo with Tallin. We'll see how different New York will feel from California.
Regarding the math vs geography thing, I think not knowing about the existence of nation (let alone actually knowing anything about it) is pretty fucking bad. I mean it's common knowledge. It's not rocket science, it's like not knowing about colonialism or communism. I am pretty sure mathematicians in Georgia wouldn't get confused between a local administrative region and a nation.
Regarding the whole Thanksgiving thing. I forgot to mention that the kid implied that I would be going back home to have Turkey with my family, which pretty stupid considering Thankgiving is more about celebrating 'Native American genocide'.
I'm not entirely sure how exactly this is related to Voyager 2 and the termination shock, but your comment is too interesting to pass up.
Your comments seem to focus on the fact that there was extremely limited permanent structure building in the area occupied by the United States 500 years ago. 500 years ago towns in Europe and other places were building structures using ideas and materials there were essentially isolated from each other. This resulted in cities that look significantly different from each other. The US on the other hand already had decent communication and transport systems in place by the time structures of significance were being built. This resulted in a lot of shared ideas and materials being used to build cities, and so less general diversity. There are still a lot of specific differences due to differences in climate, immediate materials, and cultural differences. Still, it's not like the difference between pyramids and castles.
Of course, if I want to see castles and pyramids, I have to spend a small fortune (by my standards) and travel half way around the world. In the US I can go on a road trip and see quite a bit for significantly less money (but still not that many pyramids). There are places in the US where I can barely understand the spoken language because it is so different. The foods (mostly derivatives from all over Europe) vary quite a bit too. This summer I went to see several sets of American Indian ruins there were thousands of years old. I've seen many different buildings of American cultural significance, and enjoyed the differing city planning and building styles. They are certainly not all ghettos and suburbs (but then suburbs are an American culture that I see other countries try to imitate).
You may laugh, but I had to Tallin to find out what/where it was. My geography skills have always been pretty poor, but this isn't surprising. Americans have a hard time learning about the rest of the world because it is so far removed from them. Estonia? Usually you learn about other countries' histories by how they relate to your own. I honestly can't think of how Estonia relates to the US. I've never met anyone from there. I've never knowingly had any economic trading or seen products made in Estonia. It doesn't crop up on movies (except Encino Man from 1992), the news, or TV shows. Relevance of knowing where Estonia is to the American people at large is somewhere close to zero. You have to spend time and effort learning things to live your life, and I'd have to say that most people are better off learning something else.
Yes, I realize that makes me sound like an ego-centric American, but it just makes sense. I don't spend any time learning sewing techniques, and they have a lot more relevance to me in my daily life as a sysadmin then Estonia. My brother speaks Dutch, but has lived in the US for the past decade where he has had exactly zero opportunity to speak to anyone in Dutch (though he has managed to try and sound smart by providing some basic etymology for the random Dutch word we come across). Guess how much time he spends practicing it now? Can you guess how much time I've spent learning words from him?
If Estonia, or whatever other random country, comes up, I'll do exactly what I did tonight. Look it up and learn exactly what I need or what to know about it. Just like I do for everything else.
Genocide? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Thanksgiving traditionally has it's basis in the original European settlers to the Americas being thankful for the local American Indians saving them all from starvation one winter. And while a lot of the European immigrants purposefully killed a lot of them and drove them off their land, they weren't interested so much in genocide as much and just taking all of their land. The Nazis were trying to round up all of the Jews and kill them. That's genocide. Early American immigrants were trying to round them all up on their land and send them someplace else.
It's a vacuum out there. What slowed the solar wind down?
Forgive me, I'm not a science major.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
If you want truly identical cities, compare Manhattan to Quebec. You are right that 95% of the world wouldn't care if you made them realize the difference. However, I pride myself in noticing these things.
Regarding the math vs geography thing, I think not knowing about the existence of nation (let alone actually knowing anything about it) is pretty fucking bad. I mean it's common knowledge. It's not rocket science, it's like not knowing about colonialism or communism. I am pretty sure mathematicians in Georgia wouldn't get confused between a local administrative region and a nation.Regarding the whole Thanksgiving thing. I forgot to mention that the kid implied that I would be going back home to have Turkey with my family, which pretty stupid considering Thankgiving is more about celebrating 'Native American genocide'.
I am sure that there are plenty students that aced the equivalent of CALC IV in the country of Georgia that don't know where the state of Georgia is, or Puerto Rico. No education system in the world can will prevent the creation of idiot savants.
Regarding the origins of Thanksgiving, its realyl has little to do with celebrating the "Native American Genocide". It's origins were that of English Harvest Festival. The puritans, and later colonists were thankful for their crop. As a matter of fact colonial thanksgiving would be scheduled each year to coincide with harvest.
One more thing, Georgia, as with all 50 states is of a higher status than "a local administrative region." Of course I don't expect a foriegner on a student visa such as yourself to understand how our government is supposed to work.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
"The medium IS the message"
Your comments seem to focus on the fact that there was extremely limited permanent structure building in the area occupied by the United States 500 years ago. 500 years ago towns in Europe and other places were building structures using ideas and materials there were essentially isolated from each other. This resulted in cities that look significantly different from each other. The US on the other hand already had decent communication and transport systems in place by the time structures of significance were being built. This resulted in a lot of shared ideas and materials being used to build cities, and so less general diversity. There are still a lot of specific differences due to differences in climate, immediate materials, and cultural differences. Still, it's not like the difference between pyramids and castles.
Of course, if I want to see castles and pyramids, I have to spend a small fortune (by my standards) and travel half way around the world. In the US I can go on a road trip and see quite a bit for significantly less money (but still not that many pyramids). There are places in the US where I can barely understand the spoken language because it is so different. The foods (mostly derivatives from all over Europe) vary quite a bit too. This summer I went to see several sets of American Indian ruins there were thousands of years old. I've seen many different buildings of American cultural significance, and enjoyed the differing city planning and building styles. They are certainly not all ghettos and suburbs (but then suburbs are an American culture that I see other countries try to imitate).
Yeah, I guess when you get to this point, it goes down to a matter of taste. Some ppl might prefer 'the variety' of the USA, while others prefer the 'variety' that the rest of the world has to offer. I am sure the fact that transportation networks in the USA are well developed, the USA is relatively isolated and that Americans are cheap can contribute to people's tastes. Let's put it this way, for me, most of my non-American friends and a majority of my American friends who had the opportunity to travel abroad, USA's cultural level doesn't cut it. I am glad that exploring the USA alone is working out for you and I'd like to check out more of the USA as well, but overall I don't find USA to be as interesting as other places I've been around the world.
You may laugh, but I had to Tallin to find out what/where it was. My geography skills have always been pretty poor, but this isn't surprising. Americans have a hard time learning about the rest of the world because it is so far removed from them. Estonia? Usually you learn about other countries' histories by how they relate to your own. I honestly can't think of how Estonia relates to the US. I've never met anyone from there. I've never knowingly had any economic trading or seen products made in Estonia. It doesn't crop up on movies (except Encino Man from 1992), the news, or TV shows. Relevance of knowing where Estonia is to the American people at large is somewhere close to zero. You have to spend time and effort learning things to live your life, and I'd have to say that most people are better off learning something else.
I would question your assertion about Estonia being removed from USA. I would agree that average American can easily ignore Estonia's (and pretty much 90% of the world's nations') existence and get away with it, but that doesn't mean that it makes sense to ignore it. This kind of attitude is what gets you guys into messes like Afghanistan/Iraq/Vietnam. You guys don't jack shit about these countries and you allow your politicians to do whatever the fuck they want as long as say some BS like "Terror, WMD, Terror, Saddam Hussian, Terror, WMD, Iraq". This kind of attitude is what allowed that fucktard Reagan to get away with the creation of Al-Qaeda/bin Laden. If you want to see how Estonia plays into the bigger picture, just look at what's behind your recent failures in implementing sanctions against
From the wiki article linked in the summary
.. Whats up with that?
", it was announced that Voyager 1 had crossed the termination shock and entered the heliosheath in December 2004, at a distance of 85 AU. In contrast, Voyager II began detecting returning particles suggesting it was entering the termination shock when it was only 76 AU from the sun, in May 2006. This implies that the heliosphere may be irregularly shaped, bulging outwards in the sun's northern hemisphere and pushed inward in the south. "
So
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I hear the USS Enterprise make power-up warp sounds and Darth Vader's Tigh fighters screech across interstellar space with Doppler pitch shifts all the time while in a vacuum. What about that cool rumbling power of Borg cubes?
Also, what about the cataclysmic explosion one hears when a star supernovas with a small dose of trilithium? How could you hear that if sound traveled at zero ft/sec?
From the amount of rabid (and normal) replies, I see I've touched a pretty painful spot for Americans. I wonder what that could mean...
Let's see, you go to a major city in the US, you have buildings, electricity, water, thriving industry and shops, a large wealthy class, high speed internet cafes, etc. You go to Holland, all of those apply, although there are some cultural differences, there is still the "Western City" atmosphere. Now travel to a reservation, say Fort Defiance, and look at the massive poverty, the large unsettled stretches, the falling apart cars, dialup if you find a computer at all, etc. Tell me which one feels more like Massachusetts...
Help Fight SPAM today!
Your assertion that Americans are cheap is a bit of a low blow, it's more that transportation is different. I know lots of people in Europe, and many of them have traveled around Europe quite a bit. Heck, you can get rail passes and travel Europe for relatively small amounts. You don't have that option in the US, and just getting to Europe will cost you more than a few weeks of traveling around Europe. Plane tickets overseas cost a lot of money and time. Because less people can or are inclined to afford it, it produces some isolationist attitudes where people are less likely to travel outside the US anyway.
Heck, I could easily travel around the US for a few weeks for less than one day in Europe.
"From the amount of rabid (and normal) replies, I see I've touched a pretty painful spot for Americans. I wonder what that could mean..."
It means you're being a bit of a dick, but this is an interesting subject. Anyhow, 2 things. One, the diversity of America is different from the diversity of Europe. For one, we have massive ecological and geographic diversity. Some of the taller mountains in the world, deserts, strange natural rock formations, rainforests, vast plains, the largest trees in the world, swamps, canyons, etc. Secondly, the cultural diversity isn't so much that various cities are really different, as much as the people or neighborhoods are often different even within areas. For instance, if I want Russian food I can go to my Russian friend's house. Or Vietnamese, I can go to a Vietnamese friend's house. Chinese, Mexican, same. My parents grew up in an Iraqi neighborhood....in Detroit. Yeah, our houses may look similar, but the people who live in them have very different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. That's often more than you can say for a lot of other places, where foreigners are rarer. Also, on states, they were very nearly all different sovereign countries 200 years ago, so they are more than "local administrative units."
The difference is not in the degree of cultural spread, it's in the way the people are scattered. There are thousands of enclaves in this country. Yeah, okay, so the Ukraine has all kinds of variety. That's great. I'm willing to bet that there are actually groups of both Russian- and Ukranian-speaking Ukranians here. I'm pretty certain that you'll find many different categories of Indians. There are Irish communities, there are African communities (especially in the east). There are very large Asian communities (especially in the west).
It seems ridiculous that you can say there's zero culture in the U.S., then go and talk about all the variety to be found in the rest of the world. The truth is that this is a country filled with groups from everywhere. You might think that this at least means that the U.S. has no culture of its own, but I think that's wrong too. I think that the interactions between all these groups creates something new.
And, by the way, I think that's something that you really only notice if you're a resident, a member of the community. You seem to be seeing a lot of things from the eyes of a tourist -- you see the veneer, but not the nitty-gritty underneath.
In all seriousness, of the 17 countries and states of the US, in how many have you actually done one or both of the following:
A) Attended a wedding or funeral for a local-born person whom you know independently of the rest of your family.
B) Participated in a significant community activity unconnected with a university (e.g, coaching or participating in a sport, participating in local political debates/forums).
The U.S. as a nation has existed for a little over 200 years. The various Native American tribes had no interest in permanently altering the land. England, on the other hand, stretches way back to 1066. Of course they'll have a lot more really cool landmarks. Europe has castles, because they were once a viable means of defense, and were constructed in such a way that they last pretty much forever. If you're looking for recent European landmarks, you'll find the Eiffel Tower, the London Eye, a bunch of sites that are notable mostly because of WWI and WWII, and that's about it. Europe has inherited its rich culture, America just hasn't had the time, and now it may never get the chance to build its own.
Now, don't get me wrong. I have the utmost appreciation for Europe's rich heritage. But we're the historical equivalent of the nouveau riche. The only thing that will put us on an even footing is more time, and blaming the current crop of Americans for that is useless, and only causes more strife. Feel free to keep insulting us individually, though, and for things that we deserve. Nationalism shouldn't excuse stupidity.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
And then bounces back off the glass of some cosmic snow globe.
Assuming you're in the US, then you have a damn good chance of being part of a second bubonic plague.
Global Warming Alarmists will deny that it has any varying influence a mere 93 million miles away on the Earth.
You realise there's a slight difference between a planet with a magnetic field and charged particles in a near vaccuum...
Blank until
Well Said.
My mistake. I meant the island of Montreal, where like NYC you cannot make a right on red. Granted it lacks the sprawl of NYC, but its a port city with a diverse immigrant population. Also both cities are older than their current sovereign governments. I think we just look at cities in different ways. However, I feel that the feel of Montreal is closer to NYC than the feel of LA is to NYC.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
There's certainly no shame in claiming that I believe in Hannes Alfven. He did after all create magnetohydrodynamics.
As I tell my girlfriend all of the time, it's not a competition! The point is that there are very qualified physicists and astrophysicists, both internal and external to the peer review system, that have read what EU Theory states and agree that there is nothing technically wrong with its arguments. What I've noticed over time is that mainstream advocates do not just want to be right; they also demand that they not be challenged. They refuse to accept that there can be any debate about the fundamentals -- like the mathematical modeling of space plasmas. My purpose is not to demonstrate that EU Theory is certainly right. All that I and others wish is to be admitted into a meaningful debate. We want people to talk about the evidence with us. People like Tim Thompson and those on the BAUT Forums have proposed various simplistic arguments that have in the past been designed to dissuade people from looking into the issue. There was, if I remember correctly, a rather simplistic calculation some time ago on BAUT that got passed around a lot that supposedly demonstrated that there was not enough charged particles between us and the nearest star to power the Sun. Since then, as you may be aware, it has been observed that the solar wind's structure consists of many individual flux-tubes. From http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=APCPCS000932000001000026000001:
As you may know, a "flux tube" is conventional astrophysicist speak for the movement of charged particles within filaments. In other words, electrical currents. This is not some loonie crackpot meandering. If you were being rational and objective about it, you would wonder *why* the solar wind has flux tubes. If you were informed of EU Theory or even just laboratory plasma physics, you would also realize that it tends to point to Birkeland Currents, and very importantly, the observation violates quasi-neutrality. Not only is the simplistic calculation completely worthless, but the physical world is look
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
most =/= all
But without degenerating into the inadequacies of generalizations, the point is that for many Europeans it is easy to day trip to other countries cheaply, and it is also likely in day to day business affairs that speaking another language will be of some use. In the US this is not the case. The exception being that speaking Spanish can be useful in some areas.
As for your trip, visiting some cities and landmarks in the west and flying through NY and Chicago hardly makes your point. Other than the cities where you just at the airport, everything you note is within less than a day's driving distance.