I cannot believe this has not already happened at least a few times. Over 400 hundred people have been sent into space with a large portion of them being sent up for extended stays. I think the odds speak for themselves.
And even saying something like 'hey nice day out, btw. did you know the hyperfine transition for H is 1.4GHz' would be mostly meaningless since Hz depends upon the definition of seconds which is a measure of time we just dreamed up anyway. In order for it to have any meaning you'd have to say something like "oh did you know that the hyperfine transition of H emits EM radiation at a frequency of 1.4 billion cycles every 9,192,631,770 periods of the EM radiation emitted by the hyperfine transition of Cesium-133?". And to an advanced civilization all you're really going to be saying is "hey did you know the sky's blue?", not a very exciting conversation...
"So, you have to be a pothead to enjoy this book? And isn't that the same as a new ager?"
Absolutely NOT! Carl Sagan himself used Marijuana....regularly! If you've ever read any of his books you'd know that he was a brilliant scientist, purely rational and logical, a true skeptic at heart. He hated the sloppy thinking and unquestioning credulousness of 'New-Agers'. Weather or not he would like to be called a pot-head I can only wonder but he most certainly was not a New-Ager idiot.
Images of the enounter may be found here along with live updated status reports here. Looking closely at the overexposed image on the bottom of the first page you can actually make out vapor jets emanating from the surface of Wild produced by the vaporizing ice and dust heated by the sun.
I submit that it IS a radical proposition. I have heard the theory that the flu is caused by alien viruses and I think it is total bunk. The specificity of the influenza virus's surface hemagglutinin protein for binding to human cellular surface proteins (in order to gain entry to the cell and hijack it for virus replication) is so high, I cannot imgine it occuring by chance from some as yet unproven space borne virus(no viable extrateresstrial organism has ever been found in meteorites or dust that has fallen to earth, in fact the only POSSIBLE specimin of extraterestrial bacteria was found in a mars meteorite in fossilized form).
Why would a pathogen from another planet (comet, moon, solar system, whatever) be harmful to us at all anyway. Viruses and bacteria that are infectious to humans have evolved alongside humans in order to exploit our susceptability to thier particualr specialized modes of infection, thereby increasing thier own survival. It seems to me that alien biologic agents, which hadn't the opportunity to evolve parasitism to Earth Life would look at humans in the same way a housefly would observe a sea cucumber. Inacessable and foreign inert material.
Sir, I wish to solicit you for a possible exchange of similar electric appliance! I will gladly offer you utilisation of an iGrammo (45 second playback model) for your '04 Mac!! Respectable gentlemen are urged to reply with serious disquisitions only, as this apparatus may be potentially be used to play back musical composition containing lascivious lyrics...Ladies know your limits!
I emailed him from the address given in the article (not something I'd usually even consider doing but given the extremely poor quality of the article I did) and his reply follows:
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 13:13:40 -0800 From: Perlman, David [ Add to Address Book | Block Address | Report as Spam ] To: Subject: RE: Quadrantids Article
That article was written by me carelessly and in haste; we will publish a brief correction tomorrow, but I can only apologize for its total confusion. I've emailed everyone who complained and can only apologize again --it is far below my usual standards. -----Original Message----- From: roch1west@excite.com [mailto:roch1west@excite.com] Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2003 12:49 PM To: Perlman, David Subject: Quadrantids Article
I do believe this: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/ 12/31/MNGCC4152J1.DTL is the most poorly written science article I've ever read. It's too hard even to understand what you may have been trying to convey to the reader here; just plain bad. Somehow it was posted to Slashdot anyway though. Have fun reading the comments there! http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/3 1/1754258&mode=thread&tid=134&tid=160
I second this. Why is the above post only at +2? This is one of the most poorly written science articles I've ever read. The journalist who wrote it seems to have absolutely no understanding even of basic science concepts in astronomy but that apparently didn't stop him from writing a total nonsense article on the subject! What an idiot.
That would have made no difference. The critical issue with atmospheric entry is WHERE in the atmosphere it enters, this was controlled very very accurately by pointing Beagle2 before it was released by Mars Express. Once thats done Bagle simply follows newtons laws to its entry point. Beagle 2 was "spun up" before it left Mars express to stabilize its attitude so it would enter the atmosphere with the correct side down but even if this failed it wouldn't really matter all that much. Attude of Beagle on initial entry dosen't matter because as soon as it starts to hit the top of the atmosphere it will right itself so the heat shield is pointed down; the same way that a pencil dropped from a tall building will always land point down.
"Never let your emotions get tangled up with something as silly as a space probe. It isn't healthy. So Beagle 2 fails. Big whoop. Deal with it and move on."
I guess I'm "unhealthy" then. So be it.
Beagle 2 was more than a "silly space probe". Like all of our other space probes meant to do basic exploratory science, which are our civilizations very first infant steps into the incomprehensible vastness of the cosmos, Beagle was alive. It was alive with the hope of the scientist who spent months designing and refining a tiny instrument aboard its manipulator arm that just maybe, this instrument after travelling millions of miles might detect the faintest trace of life, the first on a planet outside of our own. It was alive with the wonder of all the schoolkid geeks who followed the program in their classrooms that maybe someday they might be the first person to step off of a lander into a fine red dust and look out upon stark desolate vistas of the first planet humans visit outside of their own. And it was alive with the excitement of all the rest of us who followed the mission, who rooted for the underdog and thought of the possibilities that await us in the cold inky depths of space.
So maybe I'm just being "silly" but I think only beasts could remain indifferent to the nature of the universe which created them. And even though Beagle2 would have only revealed to us a tiny fraction of a dot of that universe, it likely would have increased our understanding of it by thousands of times.
It is programmed to recharge them automatically...if the solar arrays properly opened. That said let's face facts, Beagle 2 is dead. And despite all the insipid 'pfft it was British what do you expect' jokes already posted to this story, I think this result should be marked as a very dissapointing and unfortunate outcome. Think of the scientists who have spent the past ~6 years of their lives working on this project (Collin Pillinger being the most notable). This must be positively crushing for them. The engineering on the lander was absolutely incredible, look at the design of the instruments Beagle2 carried, some of them are downright elegant; a tiny single chip radiation detector, a hot thin film wind speed and direction monitor, a fully functional gas chromatograph that could nearly fit in your hand, there is a dust sensor, UV sensors, microscope with multispectral LED illumination, a mossbauer spectrometer, an atmospheric gas oxidation sensor little more than a centimeter across, a subsurface burrowing mole, pressure and temperature sensors, and a high resolution CCD camera.
Contrast this with the NASA Mars Rovers' 3 experiments and the fact that all the science on Beagle2 had to be squeezed into less than ~100 Lb. while the Rovers weigh 10X that and there's no denying the unbelievable effort that the scientists and engineers must have put into its assembly.
This is a sad day for science that could have been, but also a testament to what could be done given limited resources and a small budget.
This has been said before in some above posts but obviously needs to be said again, BEAGLE WAS NOT IN ANY DANGER FROM THE DUST STORM ON MARS. The dust storm which started on ~ December 14th. has been winding down (look at the Mars Global Surveyor's Thermal Emission Spectrometer images to see current atmospheric dust levels) in the past week and was nowhere near the beagle 2 landing site for most of its duration anyway. Anyway, the USSR's Mars 3 Lander probe is thought to have probably never even transmitted anything from the surface at all. It's suspected that they just wanted to be the first to claim 'first mars surface transmission' and made up the story that the probe actually transmitted a picture which just happened to be nearly completely black(how convienient). I hope Beagle 2 is still alive and on the surface but if it did die it was almost certainly a failure of one of the many(non-redundant to save mass)entry descent and landing system devices, and not a dust storm which is at fault.
Am I the only one that did a double take on reading:
"Neither satellite radio company promises to freeze its current prices or percentage of ads. XM, in fact, already offers the first premium premium channel - a Playboy channel for an additional $3 monthly, the first step toward a future filled with tiered, ever more expensive packages."
I mean what's ON that station....
"ooh yeah baby, that's it, uh huh, faster, ohh yeah...**and now a message from Mr. Hefner: Please open your eyes and pay attention to the road while driving, thank you**...ohhhhh yes that's how I like it mmmmmhm....."
I am not sure the indirect drive(you mean laser driven right?) is very promising for much other than the simulation of the high X-Ray fluxes found in nuclear weapons. However, the Direct drive laser implosions done with the addition of the injection of an ultrashort laser pulse at the implostion stagnation time are very promising. We're building one of these ultrashort pulse lines at the OMEGA laser right now. Even considering the promise this method holds for fusion ignition I can't see how this method will ever be used for producing electricity. It's just not suited for it. The blast from the exploding target destroys the optical quality of your final optics for the lasers after just a hundred shots or so and you're going to need implosion rates of at least a few Hz for practical power generation. Another problem is laser medium heating. In the OMEGA laser you can only take a shot once every hour or so due to the thermal expansion of the Nd:glass medium spoiling the optical quality of the beam. Yet another issue is the abysmal efficiency of the laser itself (barely 1% if I recall), when I said "ignition" earlier keep in mind that means that was done with the actual laser energy hitting the target not the energy used to fire the laser, that's another hundred fold improvement on efficiency (or target gain) you need to account for. I work as a technician on OMEGA and think that it's a really great experimental facility but a power generation plant it never could be.
Sorry but you must be on a different planet with more advanced fusion technology than ours. Ignition has NEVER been achieved, certainly not for minutes. The definition of ignition is a plasma undergoing fusion at a rate sufficient that the alpha particles alone are enough to heat and continually sustain the reaction. You are confusing this with the sate of breakeven, where more energy is given out by the fusion reaction than is put in, and even then stable modes are only sustained for a few seconds at most.
Yes, the "fusion power will be workable in N years" mantra that's been heard from many sources for the past 40 years is frustrating, and considering that here it is 2003 and we still havent even reached ignition in any laboratory reactor is dissapointing to say the least. However, it is important to note that during this time fusion research hase come a VERY long way. I don't see how this progress can continue forever with no results.
can you say more about this? Your link is broken. I've never heard of the sphere project, the only tokamak I've ever heard of breaking even was the JET at ~13MW.
excuse me but why is this modded +5 informative? The Z-machine is no more modern than 10 years more modern than the tokamak and it sure as hell isn't efficient (in terms of fusion production) by any means. It's barely producing a million neutrons in its implosions; billions of times less than the energy input into the implosion.
"...That nuclear material could have an unmeasureable detrimental effect on any life there is there"
Doubtful, Europa's surface is continually bombarded by huge amounts of radiation accelerated by Jupiter's magnetic field(created by the Io flux torus), it is almost certinaly quite sterile.
Even assuming the radioactive reactor eventually gets subducted back down into the oceans of Europa, big deal, Europa's oceans are thought to be at least 2 times as voluminous as all of Earth's oceans combined. One relatively small nuclear reactor (small relative to a nuclear power plant reactor anyway) diluted in a volume of water that vast is not going to be an issue at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel bad for the scientists working on Beagle 2, but this sure is fun.
I cannot believe this has not already happened at least a few times. Over 400 hundred people have been sent into space with a large portion of them being sent up for extended stays. I think the odds speak for themselves.
very favorably?
And even saying something like 'hey nice day out, btw. did you know the hyperfine transition for H is 1.4GHz' would be mostly meaningless since Hz depends upon the definition of seconds which is a measure of time we just dreamed up anyway. In order for it to have any meaning you'd have to say something like "oh did you know that the hyperfine transition of H emits EM radiation at a frequency of 1.4 billion cycles every 9,192,631,770 periods of the EM radiation emitted by the hyperfine transition of Cesium-133?". And to an advanced civilization all you're really going to be saying is "hey did you know the sky's blue?", not a very exciting conversation...
"So, you have to be a pothead to enjoy this book? And isn't that the same as a new ager?"
....regularly! If you've ever read any of his books you'd know that he was a brilliant scientist, purely rational and logical, a true skeptic at heart. He hated the sloppy thinking and unquestioning credulousness of 'New-Agers'. Weather or not he would like to be called a pot-head I can only wonder but he most certainly was not a New-Ager idiot.
Absolutely NOT! Carl Sagan himself used Marijuana
...just relayed from the Rover through a Mars Odyssey uplink can be found here!
Images of the enounter may be found here along with live updated status reports here. Looking closely at the overexposed image on the bottom of the first page you can actually make out vapor jets emanating from the surface of Wild produced by the vaporizing ice and dust heated by the sun.
I submit that it IS a radical proposition. I have heard the theory that the flu is caused by alien viruses and I think it is total bunk. The specificity of the influenza virus's surface hemagglutinin protein for binding to human cellular surface proteins (in order to gain entry to the cell and hijack it for virus replication) is so high, I cannot imgine it occuring by chance from some as yet unproven space borne virus(no viable extrateresstrial organism has ever been found in meteorites or dust that has fallen to earth, in fact the only POSSIBLE specimin of extraterestrial bacteria was found in a mars meteorite in fossilized form).
Why would a pathogen from another planet (comet, moon, solar system, whatever) be harmful to us at all anyway. Viruses and bacteria that are infectious to humans have evolved alongside humans in order to exploit our susceptability to thier particualr specialized modes of infection, thereby increasing thier own survival. It seems to me that alien biologic agents, which hadn't the opportunity to evolve parasitism to Earth Life would look at humans in the same way a housefly would observe a sea cucumber. Inacessable and foreign inert material.
Sir, I wish to solicit you for a possible exchange of similar electric appliance! I will gladly offer you utilisation of an iGrammo (45 second playback model) for your '04 Mac!! Respectable gentlemen are urged to reply with serious disquisitions only, as this apparatus may be potentially be used to play back musical composition containing lascivious lyrics...Ladies know your limits!
I emailed him from the address given in the article (not something I'd usually even consider doing but given the extremely poor quality of the article I did) and his reply follows:
/ 12/31/MNGCC4152J1.DTL is the most poorly written science article I've ever read. It's too hard even to understand what you may have been trying to convey to the reader here; just plain bad. Somehow it was posted to Slashdot anyway though. Have fun reading the comments there! http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/3 1/1754258&mode=thread&tid=134&tid=160
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 13:13:40 -0800
From: Perlman, David
[ Add to Address Book | Block Address | Report as Spam ]
To:
Subject: RE: Quadrantids Article
That article was written by me carelessly and in haste; we will publish a brief correction tomorrow, but I can only apologize for its total confusion. I've emailed everyone who complained and can only apologize again --it is far below my usual standards.
-----Original Message-----
From: roch1west@excite.com [mailto:roch1west@excite.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2003 12:49 PM
To: Perlman, David
Subject: Quadrantids Article
I do believe this: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003
I second this. Why is the above post only at +2? This is one of the most poorly written science articles I've ever read. The journalist who wrote it seems to have absolutely no understanding even of basic science concepts in astronomy but that apparently didn't stop him from writing a total nonsense article on the subject! What an idiot.
That would have made no difference. The critical issue with atmospheric entry is WHERE in the atmosphere it enters, this was controlled very very accurately by pointing Beagle2 before it was released by Mars Express. Once thats done Bagle simply follows newtons laws to its entry point. Beagle 2 was "spun up" before it left Mars express to stabilize its attitude so it would enter the atmosphere with the correct side down but even if this failed it wouldn't really matter all that much. Attude of Beagle on initial entry dosen't matter because as soon as it starts to hit the top of the atmosphere it will right itself so the heat shield is pointed down; the same way that a pencil dropped from a tall building will always land point down.
"Never let your emotions get tangled up with something as silly as a space probe. It isn't healthy. So Beagle 2 fails. Big whoop. Deal with it and move on."
I guess I'm "unhealthy" then. So be it.
Beagle 2 was more than a "silly space probe". Like all of our other space probes meant to do basic exploratory science, which are our civilizations very first infant steps into the incomprehensible vastness of the cosmos, Beagle was alive. It was alive with the hope of the scientist who spent months designing and refining a tiny instrument aboard its manipulator arm that just maybe, this instrument after travelling millions of miles might detect the faintest trace of life, the first on a planet outside of our own. It was alive with the wonder of all the schoolkid geeks who followed the program in their classrooms that maybe someday they might be the first person to step off of a lander into a fine red dust and look out upon stark desolate vistas of the first planet humans visit outside of their own. And it was alive with the excitement of all the rest of us who followed the mission, who rooted for the underdog and thought of the possibilities that await us in the cold inky depths of space.
So maybe I'm just being "silly" but I think only beasts could remain indifferent to the nature of the universe which created them. And even though Beagle2 would have only revealed to us a tiny fraction of a dot of that universe, it likely would have increased our understanding of it by thousands of times.
It is programmed to recharge them automatically...if the solar arrays properly opened. That said let's face facts, Beagle 2 is dead. And despite all the insipid 'pfft it was British what do you expect' jokes already posted to this story, I think this result should be marked as a very dissapointing and unfortunate outcome. Think of the scientists who have spent the past ~6 years of their lives working on this project (Collin Pillinger being the most notable). This must be positively crushing for them. The engineering on the lander was absolutely incredible, look at the design of the instruments Beagle2 carried, some of them are downright elegant; a tiny single chip radiation detector, a hot thin film wind speed and direction monitor, a fully functional gas chromatograph that could nearly fit in your hand, there is a dust sensor, UV sensors, microscope with multispectral LED illumination, a mossbauer spectrometer, an atmospheric gas oxidation sensor little more than a centimeter across, a subsurface burrowing mole, pressure and temperature sensors, and a high resolution CCD camera.
Contrast this with the NASA Mars Rovers' 3 experiments and the fact that all the science on Beagle2 had to be squeezed into less than ~100 Lb. while the Rovers weigh 10X that and there's no denying the unbelievable effort that the scientists and engineers must have put into its assembly.
This is a sad day for science that could have been, but also a testament to what could be done given limited resources and a small budget.
This has been said before in some above posts but obviously needs to be said again, BEAGLE WAS NOT IN ANY DANGER FROM THE DUST STORM ON MARS. The dust storm which started on ~ December 14th. has been winding down (look at the Mars Global Surveyor's Thermal Emission Spectrometer images to see current atmospheric dust levels) in the past week and was nowhere near the beagle 2 landing site for most of its duration anyway. Anyway, the USSR's Mars 3 Lander probe is thought to have probably never even transmitted anything from the surface at all. It's suspected that they just wanted to be the first to claim 'first mars surface transmission' and made up the story that the probe actually transmitted a picture which just happened to be nearly completely black(how convienient). I hope Beagle 2 is still alive and on the surface but if it did die it was almost certainly a failure of one of the many(non-redundant to save mass)entry descent and landing system devices, and not a dust storm which is at fault.
Am I the only one that did a double take on reading:
...ohhhhh yes that's how I like it mmmmmhm....."
"Neither satellite radio company promises to freeze its current prices or percentage of ads. XM, in fact, already offers the first premium premium channel - a Playboy channel for an additional $3 monthly, the first step toward a future filled with tiered, ever more expensive packages."
I mean what's ON that station....
"ooh yeah baby, that's it, uh huh, faster, ohh yeah...**and now a message from Mr. Hefner: Please open your eyes and pay attention to the road while driving, thank you**
I am not sure the indirect drive(you mean laser driven right?) is very promising for much other than the simulation of the high X-Ray fluxes found in nuclear weapons. However, the Direct drive laser implosions done with the addition of the injection of an ultrashort laser pulse at the implostion stagnation time are very promising. We're building one of these ultrashort pulse lines at the OMEGA laser right now.
Even considering the promise this method holds for fusion ignition I can't see how this method will ever be used for producing electricity. It's just not suited for it. The blast from the exploding target destroys the optical quality of your final optics for the lasers after just a hundred shots or so and you're going to need implosion rates of at least a few Hz for practical power generation. Another problem is laser medium heating. In the OMEGA laser you can only take a shot once every hour or so due to the thermal expansion of the Nd:glass medium spoiling the optical quality of the beam. Yet another issue is the abysmal efficiency of the laser itself (barely 1% if I recall), when I said "ignition" earlier keep in mind that means that was done with the actual laser energy hitting the target not the energy used to fire the laser, that's another hundred fold improvement on efficiency (or target gain) you need to account for. I work as a technician on OMEGA and think that it's a really great experimental facility but a power generation plant it never could be.
Sorry but you must be on a different planet with more advanced fusion technology than ours. Ignition has NEVER been achieved, certainly not for minutes. The definition of ignition is a plasma undergoing fusion at a rate sufficient that the alpha particles alone are enough to heat and continually sustain the reaction. You are confusing this with the sate of breakeven, where more energy is given out by the fusion reaction than is put in, and even then stable modes are only sustained for a few seconds at most.
Yes, the "fusion power will be workable in N years" mantra that's been heard from many sources for the past 40 years is frustrating, and considering that here it is 2003 and we still havent even reached ignition in any laboratory reactor is dissapointing to say the least. However, it is important to note that during this time fusion research hase come a VERY long way. I don't see how this progress can continue forever with no results.
can you say more about this? Your link is broken. I've never heard of the sphere project, the only tokamak I've ever heard of breaking even was the JET at ~13MW.
excuse me but why is this modded +5 informative? The Z-machine is no more modern than 10 years more modern than the tokamak and it sure as hell isn't efficient (in terms of fusion production) by any means. It's barely producing a million neutrons in its implosions; billions of times less than the energy input into the implosion.
They're simple radiators. They heat up and emit infrared radiation into the cold (~3K) blackbody of 'empty' space.
"...That nuclear material could have an unmeasureable detrimental effect on any life there is there"
Doubtful, Europa's surface is continually bombarded by huge amounts of radiation accelerated by Jupiter's magnetic field(created by the Io flux torus), it is almost certinaly quite sterile.
Even assuming the radioactive reactor eventually gets subducted back down into the oceans of Europa, big deal, Europa's oceans are thought to be at least 2 times as voluminous as all of Earth's oceans combined. One relatively small nuclear reactor (small relative to a nuclear power plant reactor anyway) diluted in a volume of water that vast is not going to be an issue at all.
The mission site has much more detailed interesting information.