Who said the manned space program is NASA's main purpose? Have you read either the Space Act or their mission statement? Earth observation and science has always been a major part of their purpose.
Furthermore, you have no idea how NASA is funded, do you? It's not like if all of NASA's Earth observation activities were shifted to NOAA, Congress would suddenly give NASA more money for the manned space program.
Finally, it's kind of comical that you seem to consider Earth observation satellites "only vaguely space-related at best".
Iran got an advanced centrifuge design from A.Q. Khan that is extremely difficult to operate in practice. (We also interdicted the supply of some of the advanced machine components it requires.) For some reason, they stuck with it, and eventually got it to work. That's why it's taken them so long to get significant enrichment.
Now, if they were on a crash program to build a bomb, they could have abandoned it and pursued a simpler earlier Soviet design. So I agree it's not their first priority. Indeed, the fact that they stuck with the expensive but efficient technology suggests that they want more than to just "build a bomb".
However, that doesn't preclude a dual program, to pursue civilian uses, but retain the option of building a bomb as well. I suspect that's their real intention, and there is evidence that they've done some preliminary weapons work (such as implosion devices and delivery systems, IIRC). Iraq actually used (chemical) WMDs against them in the 1980s, and with all the U.S. activity in the region, they may eventually want a deterrent.
I can't see how this furthers the exploration of space,
It doesn't further exploration of space. My point is that exploration of space is not the only thing NASA does, nor the only thing that it is tasked to do.
which seems to be the very last priority on the budget sheet these days, and the one that gets entirely cut first.
I'm sympathetic to cuts in both exploration and science, but my point is that NASA is supposed to, does, and should, do both.
Furthermore, my reading of this year's NASA budget indicates that Earth Science got a 0.2% cut over the previous year, while Exploration got a 6.5% increase. ("Science" as a whole got a 0.2% increase, due entirely to a 3.7% boost to Planetary Science, which IMHO also counts as space exploration.)
But this isn't scientific discovery, since gravity was already discovered 150 years ago.
Oh good grief. Talk about tortured logic.
Let me explain this to you simply: the scientific purpose of GRACE is not to "discover gravity". It is directly to measure the Earth's gravitational field. Indirectly, it is to discover a lot of things about geoscience (ice dynamics, hydrology, etc.).
I may also point out to you that (as has been noted elsewhere in the comments) the Space Act which chartered NASA explicitly states that part of its mission is to expand human knowledge of the Earth (using spaceborne technology).
Evidently. Read NASA's mission statement. "Scientific discovery" features prominently. GRACE is a space mission, you know. NASA does tons of scientific space missions, both for Earth observing and other observation.
Measuring the melting of the Earth's ice sheets, such as the GRACE mission does, is not a clearly defined goal? And should we just stop doing basic geoscience simply because it's politically controversial?
Partial answer: GRACE has a horizontal spatial resolution of several hundred kilometers. I think its time resolution ends up being monthly, after a lot of post-processing of data from individual orbits (not realtime). So pretty far from what's required. There's talk of a GRACE follow-on mission with 1 angstrom inter-satellite distance resolution (compared to its current micrometer resolution). Not sure what that would translate into in terms of Earth's gravity field resolution.
See here and here. With respect to the Lense-Thirring effect, the first abstract suggests you need both GRACE and LAGEOS, but I don't know if they analyzed GRACE by itself.
Making gravity measurements, building the instruments to make gravity measurements, and the rockets to fly them, ARE their respective fields of expertise.
Because they should be focusing on what my tax dollars pay them to do - develop methods for space exploration and explore space.
Your tax dollars pay them to build and fly the GRACE mission and many other Earth-observing missions. So they already are focusing on what their tax dollars pay them to do. All of which, by the way, fall under NASA's mission statement.
Absolutely. Spaceborne measurements of the Earth's gravitational field are both bad science and contradict NASA's primary mission ("to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research").
GRACE's main use in climate change is to detect the loss of mass from melting glaciers (mostly in Greenland and Antarctica), which results in sea level rise. It can also help map surface currents in the ocean, and track the motion of water through the hydrological cycle.
The size of a black hole is proportional to its mass: its diameter is 6 kilometers per solar mass. You're probably confusing the size of the singularity (zero, or close to it) with the size of the black hole (the event horizon surrounding the singularity).
"Mahdi" is also used in Dune, along with "Lisan al Gaib" and other terms. "Mahdi" is, as someone else pointed out, a real term in Islam, upon which the Fremen mythology was based (Zensunni Wanderers).
The article hardly talks about climate research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which develops the ocean (POP) and ice (CICE and CISM) components of one of the world's leading climate models, CESM. The climate group at Los Alamos got started studying nuclear winter (related work was mentioned in TFA), and built its strength in ocean modeling with new ideas in high performance computing for parallel partial differential equation solvers (fishing for new applications, since they had all these giant supercomputers lying around for nuclear hydrodynamics.). More history here.
Seriously, never heard it, certainly never used it, would have a problem if I did.
You're young, aren't you?
Talk.origins has been around since... the 1980s maybe? At least the 1990s. It was the place for creationism-evolution debates, back when Usenet was the place for Internet discussion.
If you can find some hits for it I would suspect it came in as a contagion from the climatology debate.
That's hilarious. Newsflash: the term "denier" is ancient history in Internet debates.
I think it is relevant to your post, because you express a problem with *disbelief*. Disbelief is the foundation of scientific thinking, it's a core value, it's not a valid criticism.
The point is that it's stupid to disbelieve a scientific theory on the basis of what terminology people who debate it use.
If you dont see that the likes of "Mikes nature trick" is what we should expect from creationists, not scientists, then YOU, sir, have a fundamental misunderstanding of science.
You're conflating one person with an entire field and condemning researchers as a whole on that basis. I thought we we supposed to be arguing about scientific facts here? There's more to climate science than Mike Mann, or the late-Holocene paleotemperature reconstruction community.
I cut my teeth on Kuhn, Popper, and Feyerebend.
Oh, an armchair philosopher of science. That's even funnier than an armchair scientist making grand declarations about what science is.
I didnt say it wasnt legitimite to bring it up. I said it does not in any way constitute proof. And it doesn't.
Fine, we both agree on that. Nobody's claiming that it is, although that seems to be your straw man representation of "global warmers".
There have been any cases where the vast majority of 'scientists' were unanimous - and dead wrong. This is normal and expected. So any headcount of 'scientists' justifies at the very most a very weak inference, nothing more.
In the history of science, there are far more examples of a scientific consensus established over decades being right, than being "dead wrong". (Insofar as theories can be said to be "right", i.e. good approximations.) You just don't read about the boring cases in philosophy or pop-sci books. There aren't any daring scientific rebels who overturned the WKB approximation but driven out of academia for their heresy.
Is that in dispute? Besides popular straw man rhetoric, of course.
Sure. There are all kinds of people who think there is still huge controversy in the scientific community.
I thought it was the projected _catastrophe_ from the AGW that was in question.
Hell, there are still people who dispute the existence of AGW, independent of any "catastrophic" outcomes.
The difference between 0.8 degrees of temperature increase or 6. Those elusive positive feedbacks. I deny those, btw. So does the scientific literature. That hypothesis has very little in support for it, and a lot against.
You don't specify what "catastrophe" is supposed to mean. But the scientific literature, as well as the evidence, quite consistently supports the existence of substantial positive feedbacks, in agreement with the IPCC range of 2-4.5 K per CO2 doubling.
Never heard that language used by anyone on my side in an evolution debate.
Oh come on. Just Google "evolution denier", or search the talk.origins archives.
Don't 'believe' in evolution in any sense that involves faith.
That's nice, but irrelevant to my point.
The analogy is obviously imperfect, but it would be a better fit to compare the creationists and the global warmers together rather than apart.
If you think the people who debate global warming are more akin to creationists than scientists, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of science (as well as the people who debate global warming).
Scientific fact is never, ever established by a vote or a survey of opinions.
That too, is a strawman. Scientific fact isn't established by vote. It is, however, entirely legitimate to bring up the relative balance of scientific opinion on the matter when discussing it with someone who isn't going to sit down and teach themselves climate science.
I'm a professional physicist. There are all kinds of cranks who claim to have disproven quantum mechanics, relativity, etc. It's can be fun to pick apart their arguments, but at some point, when they say "Deepak Chopra has an argument and you have an argument, and I can't evaluate who's right", it's perfectly reasonable to say "Look, quantum mechanics has been working on and tested for a century, and there's a reason why the scientific community as a whole has come to different conclusions than Deepak Chopra".
First, you claim that it will take a hundred years to develop and deploy a new technology and I'm curious as to what the basis is for that number -- I think you pulled it out of your ass.
Come on. Look at fission, a much simpler technology than fusion. That took 30-40 years to deploy after they had working reactors. We're decades away from having a fusion reactor that creates a nontrivial amount of net energy. Hell, look at how long it took to remake the world's economy around even simpler technologies like coal or oil. A good portion of a century.
Second, you seem to be claiming that is it more reasonable to go with existing technologies which are already deployed but do not address the problem of climate change
Existing technologies do address the problem. They are displacing some fossil fuel use and will displace more in the future. They just won't displace all of it on the climate timescales, but that's the best we can hope for.
rather than developing new technologies that actually will address the problem.
Developing radically new technologies will not address the problem on relevant timescales, because they're even further behind the R&D curve than existing technologies. At best, we could hope for incremental improvements on technology (like more efficient solar cells, or nuclear reactors, etc.) exploiting existing economies of scale, experience with engineering, deployment, and maintenance, etc.
You claim the new technologies will not address the problem, I can see your skepticism, but you do not show how the existing technologies will address the problem.
For the purposes of my argument, it is irrelevant whether existing technologies will address the problem. My point is merely that non-existing technologies are even less likely to address the problem than any existing technology.
That's an empty claim, because no existing technology can meet the need. [...] So we have to turn to nonexistent technologies, to research.
To sum up: It is even less feasible to meet this century's non-fossil energy requirements with currently nonexisting technologies than with currently existing technologies. It amazes me that you believe otherwise. No matter how much you research some tech that doesn't exist, it's going to take most of this century to deploy it even to the extent that existing "inadequate" technologies are already deployed. It's a matter of infrastructure and business economics, not technology.
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Who said the manned space program is NASA's main purpose? Have you read either the Space Act or their mission statement? Earth observation and science has always been a major part of their purpose.
Furthermore, you have no idea how NASA is funded, do you? It's not like if all of NASA's Earth observation activities were shifted to NOAA, Congress would suddenly give NASA more money for the manned space program.
Finally, it's kind of comical that you seem to consider Earth observation satellites "only vaguely space-related at best".
Iran got an advanced centrifuge design from A.Q. Khan that is extremely difficult to operate in practice. (We also interdicted the supply of some of the advanced machine components it requires.) For some reason, they stuck with it, and eventually got it to work. That's why it's taken them so long to get significant enrichment.
Now, if they were on a crash program to build a bomb, they could have abandoned it and pursued a simpler earlier Soviet design. So I agree it's not their first priority. Indeed, the fact that they stuck with the expensive but efficient technology suggests that they want more than to just "build a bomb".
However, that doesn't preclude a dual program, to pursue civilian uses, but retain the option of building a bomb as well. I suspect that's their real intention, and there is evidence that they've done some preliminary weapons work (such as implosion devices and delivery systems, IIRC). Iraq actually used (chemical) WMDs against them in the 1980s, and with all the U.S. activity in the region, they may eventually want a deterrent.
I can't see how this furthers the exploration of space,
It doesn't further exploration of space. My point is that exploration of space is not the only thing NASA does, nor the only thing that it is tasked to do.
which seems to be the very last priority on the budget sheet these days, and the one that gets entirely cut first.
I'm sympathetic to cuts in both exploration and science, but my point is that NASA is supposed to, does, and should, do both.
Furthermore, my reading of this year's NASA budget indicates that Earth Science got a 0.2% cut over the previous year, while Exploration got a 6.5% increase. ("Science" as a whole got a 0.2% increase, due entirely to a 3.7% boost to Planetary Science, which IMHO also counts as space exploration.)
But this isn't scientific discovery, since gravity was already discovered 150 years ago.
Oh good grief. Talk about tortured logic.
Let me explain this to you simply: the scientific purpose of GRACE is not to "discover gravity". It is directly to measure the Earth's gravitational field. Indirectly, it is to discover a lot of things about geoscience (ice dynamics, hydrology, etc.).
I may also point out to you that (as has been noted elsewhere in the comments) the Space Act which chartered NASA explicitly states that part of its mission is to expand human knowledge of the Earth (using spaceborne technology).
Bunch of stupid uneducated wankers, obviously.
Evidently. Read NASA's mission statement. "Scientific discovery" features prominently. GRACE is a space mission, you know. NASA does tons of scientific space missions, both for Earth observing and other observation.
That's why I said it looks like you need both LAGEOS and GRACE.
The GRACE gravity field data product has monthly time resolution.
Measuring the melting of the Earth's ice sheets, such as the GRACE mission does, is not a clearly defined goal? And should we just stop doing basic geoscience simply because it's politically controversial?
Partial answer: GRACE has a horizontal spatial resolution of several hundred kilometers. I think its time resolution ends up being monthly, after a lot of post-processing of data from individual orbits (not realtime). So pretty far from what's required. There's talk of a GRACE follow-on mission with 1 angstrom inter-satellite distance resolution (compared to its current micrometer resolution). Not sure what that would translate into in terms of Earth's gravity field resolution.
Scientific discovery using spaceborne instruments, such as GRACE, is part of NASA's core mission.
See here and here. With respect to the Lense-Thirring effect, the first abstract suggests you need both GRACE and LAGEOS, but I don't know if they analyzed GRACE by itself.
Because it's not their field of expertise.
Making gravity measurements, building the instruments to make gravity measurements, and the rockets to fly them, ARE their respective fields of expertise.
Because they should be focusing on what my tax dollars pay them to do - develop methods for space exploration and explore space.
Your tax dollars pay them to build and fly the GRACE mission and many other Earth-observing missions. So they already are focusing on what their tax dollars pay them to do. All of which, by the way, fall under NASA's mission statement.
Absolutely. Spaceborne measurements of the Earth's gravitational field are both bad science and contradict NASA's primary mission ("to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research").
GRACE's main use in climate change is to detect the loss of mass from melting glaciers (mostly in Greenland and Antarctica), which results in sea level rise. It can also help map surface currents in the ocean, and track the motion of water through the hydrological cycle.
What would we need to do to make this kind of shit illegal? A law?
Great idea! We can append it to the Senate cybersecurity bill.
The size of a black hole is proportional to its mass: its diameter is 6 kilometers per solar mass. You're probably confusing the size of the singularity (zero, or close to it) with the size of the black hole (the event horizon surrounding the singularity).
Link
"Mahdi" is also used in Dune, along with "Lisan al Gaib" and other terms. "Mahdi" is, as someone else pointed out, a real term in Islam, upon which the Fremen mythology was based (Zensunni Wanderers).
The article hardly talks about climate research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which develops the ocean (POP) and ice (CICE and CISM) components of one of the world's leading climate models, CESM. The climate group at Los Alamos got started studying nuclear winter (related work was mentioned in TFA), and built its strength in ocean modeling with new ideas in high performance computing for parallel partial differential equation solvers (fishing for new applications, since they had all these giant supercomputers lying around for nuclear hydrodynamics.). More history here.
Seriously, never heard it, certainly never used it, would have a problem if I did.
You're young, aren't you?
Talk.origins has been around since ... the 1980s maybe? At least the 1990s. It was the place for creationism-evolution debates, back when Usenet was the place for Internet discussion.
If you can find some hits for it I would suspect it came in as a contagion from the climatology debate.
That's hilarious. Newsflash: the term "denier" is ancient history in Internet debates.
I think it is relevant to your post, because you express a problem with *disbelief*. Disbelief is the foundation of scientific thinking, it's a core value, it's not a valid criticism.
The point is that it's stupid to disbelieve a scientific theory on the basis of what terminology people who debate it use.
If you dont see that the likes of "Mikes nature trick" is what we should expect from creationists, not scientists, then YOU, sir, have a fundamental misunderstanding of science.
You're conflating one person with an entire field and condemning researchers as a whole on that basis. I thought we we supposed to be arguing about scientific facts here? There's more to climate science than Mike Mann, or the late-Holocene paleotemperature reconstruction community.
I cut my teeth on Kuhn, Popper, and Feyerebend.
Oh, an armchair philosopher of science. That's even funnier than an armchair scientist making grand declarations about what science is.
I didnt say it wasnt legitimite to bring it up. I said it does not in any way constitute proof. And it doesn't.
Fine, we both agree on that. Nobody's claiming that it is, although that seems to be your straw man representation of "global warmers".
There have been any cases where the vast majority of 'scientists' were unanimous - and dead wrong. This is normal and expected. So any headcount of 'scientists' justifies at the very most a very weak inference, nothing more.
In the history of science, there are far more examples of a scientific consensus established over decades being right, than being "dead wrong". (Insofar as theories can be said to be "right", i.e. good approximations.) You just don't read about the boring cases in philosophy or pop-sci books. There aren't any daring scientific rebels who overturned the WKB approximation but driven out of academia for their heresy.
Is that in dispute? Besides popular straw man rhetoric, of course.
Sure. There are all kinds of people who think there is still huge controversy in the scientific community.
I thought it was the projected _catastrophe_ from the AGW that was in question.
Hell, there are still people who dispute the existence of AGW, independent of any "catastrophic" outcomes.
The difference between 0.8 degrees of temperature increase or 6. Those elusive positive feedbacks. I deny those, btw. So does the scientific literature. That hypothesis has very little in support for it, and a lot against.
You don't specify what "catastrophe" is supposed to mean. But the scientific literature, as well as the evidence, quite consistently supports the existence of substantial positive feedbacks, in agreement with the IPCC range of 2-4.5 K per CO2 doubling.
Never heard that language used by anyone on my side in an evolution debate.
Oh come on. Just Google "evolution denier", or search the talk.origins archives.
Don't 'believe' in evolution in any sense that involves faith.
That's nice, but irrelevant to my point.
The analogy is obviously imperfect, but it would be a better fit to compare the creationists and the global warmers together rather than apart.
If you think the people who debate global warming are more akin to creationists than scientists, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of science (as well as the people who debate global warming).
Scientific fact is never, ever established by a vote or a survey of opinions.
That too, is a strawman. Scientific fact isn't established by vote. It is, however, entirely legitimate to bring up the relative balance of scientific opinion on the matter when discussing it with someone who isn't going to sit down and teach themselves climate science.
I'm a professional physicist. There are all kinds of cranks who claim to have disproven quantum mechanics, relativity, etc. It's can be fun to pick apart their arguments, but at some point, when they say "Deepak Chopra has an argument and you have an argument, and I can't evaluate who's right", it's perfectly reasonable to say "Look, quantum mechanics has been working on and tested for a century, and there's a reason why the scientific community as a whole has come to different conclusions than Deepak Chopra".
First, you claim that it will take a hundred years to develop and deploy a new technology and I'm curious as to what the basis is for that number -- I think you pulled it out of your ass.
Come on. Look at fission, a much simpler technology than fusion. That took 30-40 years to deploy after they had working reactors. We're decades away from having a fusion reactor that creates a nontrivial amount of net energy. Hell, look at how long it took to remake the world's economy around even simpler technologies like coal or oil. A good portion of a century.
Second, you seem to be claiming that is it more reasonable to go with existing technologies which are already deployed but do not address the problem of climate change
Existing technologies do address the problem. They are displacing some fossil fuel use and will displace more in the future. They just won't displace all of it on the climate timescales, but that's the best we can hope for.
rather than developing new technologies that actually will address the problem.
Developing radically new technologies will not address the problem on relevant timescales, because they're even further behind the R&D curve than existing technologies. At best, we could hope for incremental improvements on technology (like more efficient solar cells, or nuclear reactors, etc.) exploiting existing economies of scale, experience with engineering, deployment, and maintenance, etc.
You claim the new technologies will not address the problem, I can see your skepticism, but you do not show how the existing technologies will address the problem.
For the purposes of my argument, it is irrelevant whether existing technologies will address the problem. My point is merely that non-existing technologies are even less likely to address the problem than any existing technology.
A 1% change is not worth doing.
No point in researching fusion, then.
No, I'm making a more general point, mostly in response to his claims elsewhere about emissions policy being "changing people's lifestyles".
That's an empty claim, because no existing technology can meet the need. [...] So we have to turn to nonexistent technologies, to research.
To sum up: It is even less feasible to meet this century's non-fossil energy requirements with currently nonexisting technologies than with currently existing technologies. It amazes me that you believe otherwise. No matter how much you research some tech that doesn't exist, it's going to take most of this century to deploy it even to the extent that existing "inadequate" technologies are already deployed. It's a matter of infrastructure and business economics, not technology.