Firstly, cops and lawyers are not supposed to presume innocence. The justice system is, and the Court as an entity is supposed to presume it at a trial, but the prosecutors have no such limitation.
You are missing the point here. Prosecutors shouldn't presume innocence or guilt. They should make an honest assessment of all the available evidence and try to find out for themselves if the person is guilty or not. If they think he isn't they should drop the case even and especially if there's some chance to get a conviction. I really can't see how this attitude would hurt the justice system.
The 'eliminate world hunger' or 'find cure for cancer' crowd still has priority over these random funds but I wouldn't mind killing off the human exploration project and using its budget to fund all of these missions (and use the remaining 50% for astronomy, e.g searching for Earth-like planets or Near Earth Asteroids).
Even worse than wrong the Reuters article neglects to tell the interesting story of how this planet was found. Or less optimistically why the authors think it's there.
Astronomers have used various methods to find extra-solar planets but the two most successful ones are the radial velocity method and the transit method.
The RV method can be described at looking at how the star wobbles as a planet moves around it. Transits are simply partial eclipses. As the planet moves in front of the star it blocks out some of its light.
In 2004 a Neptune mass planet was found around this star with the radial velocity method. It was on an elliptic, 2.6 day orbit. This was surprising because they estimated that the orbit should become circular in a mere hundred million years due to tidal dissipation and the star is at least 6 billion years old. There had to be a second planet perturbing the Neptune-size planet, allowing it to retain its non-circular orbit. In the meantime they also looked for transits but they were out of luck, GJ 436b (the Neptune size planet) wasn't transiting. It wasn't just that they didn't see a transit they actually ruled it out. But in 2007 another team looked at the same star and now saw GJ 436b transiting. Apparently the plane of the planet's orbit shifted significantly in 3 years. This is impossible without having another planet in the system. From this they calculated the mass and orbit of the perturbing planet.
Finally they went back to the radial velocity data and tried to see if there was any indication of this perturbing planet. And there it was. It could be just noise but it matched up with their earlier calculation pretty well. So the change in the Neptune sized planets orbital inclination and the radial velocity data both point in the same direction which makes them pretty confident that there is a planet there with these characteristics.
Aside from the enormous harm that taxations place upon the economy (taxation leads to what is known as a deadweight loss, which must be offset against the benefits of whatever is being taxed), carbon sinking is not even possible given the engineering capacity we as humans have. Furthermore, even if it *were* possible, there is no way to know what damage the CO2 does in the meantime while it is being sinked. I'm sorry but you have no idea what you are talking about and probably neither do the mods who modded you insightful. Taxation leads to deadweight loss in competitve markets without externalities. Where there are externalities taxation can be the right tool to force the market to consume at the optimum level.
Emission of greenhouse gases is the ultimate externality since every single person Earth pays for your consumption.
Taxation is also the fairest way to deal with the issue. Regulation just favours the politically powerful. Environment-conscious thinking rewards freeloaders and actually encourages them to pollute more by driving the price of fossil fuels down (there's still some benefit to the environment but less then the sacrifice you make).
If I have a quibble with GP it's that he's probably underestimating the real cost. The Green Party in Germany had a similar proposal maybe 10 years ago. They calculated that after the tax the cost of fuel would increase 5 fold. Even their own electorate found that hard to accept. I'm pretty sure the majority of SUV owners would not want to pay 3 times as much for gas as they do now.
Of course the problem is not economic it's political. There's a minor issue of trying to find the acceptable level of greenhouse gas emissions (i.e: how much of the future are we willing to sacrifice for greater prosperity now). GPs answer is simple: there should no (net) emission at all. This is probably an overkill but it's one possible answer.
The more serious issue is information. Those who prefer higher emission levels, either because they make money selling fossil fuels or because they care less about future generations have successfully convinced society that the cost of high emissions was lower than it really was. I believe many people were/are actually mislead into supporting policies they wouldn't have had they knew their real consequences. So GPs proposal wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell because most people simply don't think there's a need for drastic action. It could actually be counterproductive if it failed. But if it was somehow accepted it would be the most efficient way possible to reach zero emissions.
The funny thing is that it was manned spaceflight that got me interested in physics and astronomy in the first place, which I'm studying now. Even now, I'd love to see a strong and meaningful space exploration program focusing on building bases and developping new technologies, generally things that will allow us to do stuff in space (or more accurately not here on Earth). But I also realize that any real progress requires huge commitments, not just financially but politically too. Basically you need to convince a plurality that it's a meaningful goal and worth the investment. You can't convince them by saying that it will create jobs because at one point you might need to cut some of those jobs to move forward. Ironically it's easier to get support for a bad program than a good one.
Britain is certainly in no position to fund an exploration program on its own and a good cooperation of EU members is even less likely than a good US program. Realistically any progress will come from the private sector first through turism then maybe asteroid mining. That progress is bound to be slower than what could be achieved by spending NASA's exploration and manned spacelifght budget (about 10 bn USD yearly) in the best possible way. But if NASA spent that money efficiently it probably wouldn't be there in the first place.
Well, the problem is that it's not terribly useful and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Glamour, inspiration and yes, national pride, were supposed to replace real results. The problem isn't that manned spaceflight fails at these - it doesn't - just that they are a poor substitute for real progress in the first place.
At this point human spaceflight is at best a propaganda exercise and at worst a complete waste of money. Why should the UK change their stance on the issue? Has human spaceflight become more interesting in the last 20 years? More strategically important? More affordable?
I realize human spaceflight is inspiring but that in itself isn't enough to justify the expenses.
It depends on their distance. The problem isn't so much that a planet would get ripped apart (it would have to be pretty close for that) but that if the two stars are too close than any orbit in the habitable zone would be unstable.
There are basically two ways to have stable orbits in a binary system in the habitable zone. In the first case the stars are very close to each other and the planet orbits both of them. In the second they are fairly distant and the planet is in orbit around one of them. It doesn't have to be a huge distance either, Alpha Centauri A and B are 11 AU from each other at their closest approach, yet an Earth sized planet could have formed and be stable in the habitble zone around either of them.
Cassini-Huygens is much more than a 350 kg probe. The main part of the mission is the Cassini spacecraft (weighing over 2 tonnes btw) which has been orbiting Saturn for three and a half years. About half of the cost was actually development, mostly for instruments on Cassini.
This doesn't invalidate your argument but I don't want people to think that all we got for $3bn is a lander that worked for 1 hour.
Oh, I don't mean it was a complete waste. Just a huge waste. Compare the operational costs of the Shuttle to the amount NASA spent on R&D related to manned spaceflight. I claim that at least 80% of the amount spent on the Shuttle in the last 20 years were actually wasted. If the US had had no manned spaceflight capability in the last 20 years not much would have been lost. And if only half of that had been spent on developing a new vehicle manned spaceflight would be better off.
But the real problem is that it is hard to set a realistic goal for "space exploration". "Building infrastructure" is worthwhile but politically inconvenient. A lot of people work on servicing and operating the shuttle who would basically become useless in a program that is centered on developing new technologies.
The really interesting goals, like extending human presence throughout the solar system and beyond, are horribly expensive. You can advance in small steps but, as it turns out, just staying at the same place costs a large chunk of money. If you want to stay on Mars there has to be a good reason for it. How are you going to justify the billions spent every year on supplying a Martian base? If you can't it will just be abandoned and you'll be back on square one (Earth orbit, at best). Until someone comes up with a program to "put a Woman or a Man on a moon of Jupiter before the end of the century".
That's what makes space tourism intriguing. That it has the hope of sustainable development. There's no such hope for government funded spaceflight in this century in my opinion.
Is there any particular reason for the animosity between LIGO and LISA? Ok, you're working on the same problem but this seems to run deeper.
It's also possible that ultimately ground based detectors will turn out to be more useful than satellites for some reason(*) in which case all the engineering work done at LIGO now will come in handy.
*data transfer requirements for example
If you disagree with this statement, go ahead -- explain why you feel that a vehicle with this low delta-V, horrible ISP, and proportionally high mass that faces bare minimal reentry heating -- advances the state of the art.
Maybe it doesn't. But the money people pay to fly on it will.
I'm not from the US and I believe NASA's manned program has been a waste since the lunar landings. Of course I still got a pretty good show for a reasonable cost (nil for me) but if my government, or more realistically the EU, was spending $4bn a year on an exploration program that never left the orbit of Earth I'd be pretty pissed.
Of course NASA does a lot of interesting science. Just nothing that has to do with manned spaceflight.
Because we can send robots there for half the cost
Even less than that actually. The European Space Agency's SMART-1 cost just over 100 million USD. Ok, it didn't include a rover but it still compares very favourably to a Shuttle flight in term of science. Nasa spent about 4bn$ in 2007 on the Shuttle for 3 flights.
Or look at the Mars Exploration Rovers which has cost about 500 million USD apiece. I doubt we could have a human Mars mission for 50 billion and in some ways a couple of days on the surface might result in less, not more, science for 100 times the cost. Even if subsequent missions cost less, it would probably still be a lot more than robotic missions. And unfortunately there's no Moore's Law for astronauts.
There might be some good reasons for human space exploration but science is sure not one of them.
[blockquote]I have a hard time believing in the government as shadowy cabal that is capable of concealing vast conspiracies for years or decades at a time.[/blockquote]
Yeah. Usually they get caught and still get away with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly, cops and lawyers are not supposed to presume innocence. The justice system is, and the Court as an entity is supposed to presume it at a trial, but the prosecutors have no such limitation.
You are missing the point here. Prosecutors shouldn't presume innocence or guilt. They should make an honest assessment of all the available evidence and try to find out for themselves if the person is guilty or not. If they think he isn't they should drop the case even and especially if there's some chance to get a conviction. I really can't see how this attitude would hurt the justice system.
The 'eliminate world hunger' or 'find cure for cancer' crowd still has priority over these random funds but I wouldn't mind killing off the human exploration project and using its budget to fund all of these missions (and use the remaining 50% for astronomy, e.g searching for Earth-like planets or Near Earth Asteroids).
Scratch that, it might or it might not. But it was found differently and they didn't see a transit yet.
Even worse than wrong the Reuters article neglects to tell the interesting story of how this planet was found. Or less optimistically why the authors think it's there.
Astronomers have used various methods to find extra-solar planets but the two most successful ones are the radial velocity method and the transit method.
The RV method can be described at looking at how the star wobbles as a planet moves around it. Transits are simply partial eclipses. As the planet moves in front of the star it blocks out some of its light.
In 2004 a Neptune mass planet was found around this star with the radial velocity method. It was on an elliptic, 2.6 day orbit. This was surprising because they estimated that the orbit should become circular in a mere hundred million years due to tidal dissipation and the star is at least 6 billion years old. There had to be a second planet perturbing the Neptune-size planet, allowing it to retain its non-circular orbit. In the meantime they also looked for transits but they were out of luck, GJ 436b (the Neptune size planet) wasn't transiting. It wasn't just that they didn't see a transit they actually ruled it out. But in 2007 another team looked at the same star and now saw GJ 436b transiting. Apparently the plane of the planet's orbit shifted significantly in 3 years. This is impossible without having another planet in the system. From this they calculated the mass and orbit of the perturbing planet.
Finally they went back to the radial velocity data and tried to see if there was any indication of this perturbing planet. And there it was. It could be just noise but it matched up with their earlier calculation pretty well. So the change in the Neptune sized planets orbital inclination and the radial velocity data both point in the same direction which makes them pretty confident that there is a planet there with these characteristics.
You can, if it passes between you and the star. This one apparently doesn't.
Emission of greenhouse gases is the ultimate externality since every single person Earth pays for your consumption.
Taxation is also the fairest way to deal with the issue. Regulation just favours the politically powerful. Environment-conscious thinking rewards freeloaders and actually encourages them to pollute more by driving the price of fossil fuels down (there's still some benefit to the environment but less then the sacrifice you make).
If I have a quibble with GP it's that he's probably underestimating the real cost. The Green Party in Germany had a similar proposal maybe 10 years ago. They calculated that after the tax the cost of fuel would increase 5 fold. Even their own electorate found that hard to accept. I'm pretty sure the majority of SUV owners would not want to pay 3 times as much for gas as they do now.
Of course the problem is not economic it's political. There's a minor issue of trying to find the acceptable level of greenhouse gas emissions (i.e: how much of the future are we willing to sacrifice for greater prosperity now). GPs answer is simple: there should no (net) emission at all. This is probably an overkill but it's one possible answer.
The more serious issue is information. Those who prefer higher emission levels, either because they make money selling fossil fuels or because they care less about future generations have successfully convinced society that the cost of high emissions was lower than it really was. I believe many people were/are actually mislead into supporting policies they wouldn't have had they knew their real consequences. So GPs proposal wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell because most people simply don't think there's a need for drastic action. It could actually be counterproductive if it failed. But if it was somehow accepted it would be the most efficient way possible to reach zero emissions.
The funny thing is that it was manned spaceflight that got me interested in physics and astronomy in the first place, which I'm studying now. Even now, I'd love to see a strong and meaningful space exploration program focusing on building bases and developping new technologies, generally things that will allow us to do stuff in space (or more accurately not here on Earth). But I also realize that any real progress requires huge commitments, not just financially but politically too. Basically you need to convince a plurality that it's a meaningful goal and worth the investment. You can't convince them by saying that it will create jobs because at one point you might need to cut some of those jobs to move forward. Ironically it's easier to get support for a bad program than a good one.
Britain is certainly in no position to fund an exploration program on its own and a good cooperation of EU members is even less likely than a good US program. Realistically any progress will come from the private sector first through turism then maybe asteroid mining. That progress is bound to be slower than what could be achieved by spending NASA's exploration and manned spacelifght budget (about 10 bn USD yearly) in the best possible way. But if NASA spent that money efficiently it probably wouldn't be there in the first place.
Good thing Isabella had the vision to send Colombus first to the Canaries and then to the Sahara desert. Oh, wait...
Well, the problem is that it's not terribly useful and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Glamour, inspiration and yes, national pride, were supposed to replace real results. The problem isn't that manned spaceflight fails at these - it doesn't - just that they are a poor substitute for real progress in the first place.
At this point human spaceflight is at best a propaganda exercise and at worst a complete waste of money. Why should the UK change their stance on the issue? Has human spaceflight become more interesting in the last 20 years? More strategically important? More affordable?
I realize human spaceflight is inspiring but that in itself isn't enough to justify the expenses.
It depends on their distance. The problem isn't so much that a planet would get ripped apart (it would have to be pretty close for that) but that if the two stars are too close than any orbit in the habitable zone would be unstable. There are basically two ways to have stable orbits in a binary system in the habitable zone. In the first case the stars are very close to each other and the planet orbits both of them. In the second they are fairly distant and the planet is in orbit around one of them. It doesn't have to be a huge distance either, Alpha Centauri A and B are 11 AU from each other at their closest approach, yet an Earth sized planet could have formed and be stable in the habitble zone around either of them.
Cassini-Huygens is much more than a 350 kg probe. The main part of the mission is the Cassini spacecraft (weighing over 2 tonnes btw) which has been orbiting Saturn for three and a half years. About half of the cost was actually development, mostly for instruments on Cassini. This doesn't invalidate your argument but I don't want people to think that all we got for $3bn is a lander that worked for 1 hour.
Oh, I don't mean it was a complete waste. Just a huge waste. Compare the operational costs of the Shuttle to the amount NASA spent on R&D related to manned spaceflight. I claim that at least 80% of the amount spent on the Shuttle in the last 20 years were actually wasted. If the US had had no manned spaceflight capability in the last 20 years not much would have been lost. And if only half of that had been spent on developing a new vehicle manned spaceflight would be better off.
But the real problem is that it is hard to set a realistic goal for "space exploration". "Building infrastructure" is worthwhile but politically inconvenient. A lot of people work on servicing and operating the shuttle who would basically become useless in a program that is centered on developing new technologies.
The really interesting goals, like extending human presence throughout the solar system and beyond, are horribly expensive. You can advance in small steps but, as it turns out, just staying at the same place costs a large chunk of money. If you want to stay on Mars there has to be a good reason for it. How are you going to justify the billions spent every year on supplying a Martian base? If you can't it will just be abandoned and you'll be back on square one (Earth orbit, at best). Until someone comes up with a program to "put a Woman or a Man on a moon of Jupiter before the end of the century".
That's what makes space tourism intriguing. That it has the hope of sustainable development. There's no such hope for government funded spaceflight in this century in my opinion.
Is there any particular reason for the animosity between LIGO and LISA? Ok, you're working on the same problem but this seems to run deeper. It's also possible that ultimately ground based detectors will turn out to be more useful than satellites for some reason(*) in which case all the engineering work done at LIGO now will come in handy. *data transfer requirements for example
I'm not from the US and I believe NASA's manned program has been a waste since the lunar landings. Of course I still got a pretty good show for a reasonable cost (nil for me) but if my government, or more realistically the EU, was spending $4bn a year on an exploration program that never left the orbit of Earth I'd be pretty pissed. Of course NASA does a lot of interesting science. Just nothing that has to do with manned spaceflight.
No doubt it would be interesting if it hit. For now it's much more likely to miss so it's not really news to the wider audience.
What's your point?
Not a wiki but there's http://planetmath.org/
If he was really just doing his job it reflects quite badly on his superiors.
[blockquote]I have a hard time believing in the government as shadowy cabal that is capable of concealing vast conspiracies for years or decades at a time.[/blockquote] Yeah. Usually they get caught and still get away with it.