Prove that there is no life on Europa. How? To prove that it exists, they have to find one sample. To prove that it doesn't, they have to scour the planet with a fine-tooth comb, looking for one little amino acid, assuming that Europan life even uses such systems. Even if we did do so, who's to say there's not some silicon-flourine based bit of protein down there mocking our hubris. Hell, we haven't even proved that there's no life on Venus yet. Its a pretty safe bet that there's not, but you can't prove it. Maybe there's some insectoid critter with diamond for skin and liquid lead for blood on Venus that noone knows about. Europa is just the single most-likely heavanly body in the Solar system to contain life, so its the best place to start looking.
The best way to prove somethign doesn't exist is to look for it as hard as you can and not find it.
Many believe that life on Earth did not originate anywhere near the sun. In fact, rather far from the sun indeed. Deep-sea geothermal vents were, possibly, the original source of life. High pressure, abundant rare chemicals, and heat energy were the environment of the vents, and are considered to be decent conditions for the primordial sandwitch (like the primordial soup, but it grows on a rock, pressed down by the geothermal pressure). While Europan water would have prescious little sunlight, it may have vents, or pressure pockets, or something that would generate such conditions as the planet is slowly turned inside out by the tidal forces of Jupiter keep it volatile.
Europa could be a habitable planet one day. The conditions under the ice could be similar to conditions under Earths oceans. It would probably be much easier to survive under an ocean, where oxygen can be extracted from the water, then in space. If the local life doesn't exist, or is negligable, then Earthborn deepsea life could be imported to survive here. And who says humans have to inhabit planets anyways? there are plenty of possibilities for living in the asteroid belt, where most rescources (except for organic ones) are cheap and onhand. We're nowhere near that sort of possibility, we can't even get ISS working, but how will we get there without first researching living in space with projects like ISS?
I know this is a troll, but I also know that there're those who really have this opinion, so I'll bite. Ummm, howbout satellites, for example? If not for the space-race with the russians, the extensive launching system for our satellites would not have been developed. They're a major contribution to our communication infrastructure, weather research, international reconnaisance (if you like military spending, hows that?), GPS for god's sake. These benefits were not apparent at the time of Sputnik, just as the benefits of Europa are not apparent now.
Could you imagine the medical and material science possibilities of finding another naturally-developed form of life? Look at the myriad uses of crude-oil. The massive amount of pharmaceuticals developed from esoteric wildlife. Imagine if we find something equally useful on Europa. Sure, it'd have to be pretty damned important to merit importing it across space, but if we didn't check, we'd never know at all. We won't find ET, but we could find something we can use.
I do agree that most space research is, by and large, abstract knowledge. But some of it has very real possibilities. International space station is such a possibility. If we can make a sustainable orbital platform in orbit, where else can we build one? Around Europa? In the asteroid belt for its rescources? NCC-1701-E wasn't built in a day. If you ever want it to happen, you have to give people a chance to get there.
Agreed. The word "cock" is a particularly common problem I encounter. For one, while I rarely use the word "cock" to describle poultry, others do, particularly in older literature, so I can't give certain quotations on censored messageboards. And, most annoyingly, the word "cockpit" is also usually censored. This is quite annoying when discussing jet planes in the Transformers Quake Message Board, for example. While these problems are minor, they're deliberate withholdings of service caused by a little squeamishness at foul language.
I was tryin' to remember the kid's first name... Tim didn't sound right, o'course Bruce always calls him by his last name anyways.... damn, if they don't get a good actor for Bruce Wayne then this movie will suck. Still, Beyond is a great series, and with Stephenson giving pointers on cyberpunk it'll make a must see.
Oh, and to all you guys who keep making posts about Robin and the previous Batman movies - Read The Fscking Article, its only a page long, it wont kill you.
We need a -1 -> Impatient moderation, to stop the first-posters and people who just want to be opinionated so they don't bother to actually read the articles.
Have you seen Batman: Beyond? Its gothic Cyberpunk stuff, with techno music, cybernetics, hover vehicles, VR, AI's, robotics, and most of the other fun trimmings of a cyberpunk setting (save for some lack of a consistent Metaverse-style network). Stephenson is in his element in Batman: Beyond, he's just gotta add the tights and supervillains. Besides that, Stephen originally intended Snow Crash to be a comic book. With that in mind, doesn't it makes sense that he work with a comic-book turned movie?
Okay, a) I've seen the display of the future, but by a promise to a friend I can't talk about it, sufficed to say its not anything like what they've got in mind.
The display/input system on this is really lacking. When they discribe the "desktop keyboard system" I see the keyboards from startrek. Desktop flatpanel touchscreens. This a Bad Move. For one thing, a desktop is a crappy display. There's a reason we have our monitors on stands, pointing towards us, we don't like to look down all the time. A flatpanel has the serious weakness that you always have to look at the keyboard. I don't know about you, but I type by feel, and look at the screen. If the screen is totally flat and featureless, the only way to see the keys is to stare at your hands all the time. Bad system, our eyes have more important business. This sort of thing is okay as a pointing device, but not for text input, unless your really really concerned about space, like in palmtops.
Secondly, the idea of a frisbee-shape is just silly. Would ppl seriously design a radial internal architechture just for eyecandy? I mean, its silly. Imagine having to mass produce all the parts and drives to be arced, and totally standardise all desktops. While a disk-shaped case is reasonable, the internals will follow a normal grid-pattern, and therefore the disk-shape will be larger then normal boxy units.
While I've got nothing against D&D, I really don't like how they're timing this whole revival thing just in time to have the D&D movie steal the fire from the first Lord of the Rings movie. There's real hardcore fantasy for you.
Yeah, Chief could've been clearer about that when he posted the article. Too many people scream "radiation, eek!" and think of Chernobyl when they hear those words.
Bungie bought abuse? I'd wondered what happened to it when crack dot com went under. Kewl. Abuse has a really complex and detailed level editor, reminds me of a 2d-platform Quake, and its got network deatmatch play if you can find the right version (network is windows only, sorry). Excellent ambience too, can get really scary at times.
X4 is for PC, and it was originally developed for the playstation (x3 was for snes) so its got spectacular graphics, deep plotline, and really good gameplay. You can play Zero through the whole game too, not just intermittently like in x3.
Heheh, Strider 2 also just came out, and that's 2d. It uses some 3d graphics, like backgrounds (most objects are 2d sprites though), but that's all they are, the gameplay is all 2d. Damn good 2d at that, very fast-paced action, kinda feels like Sonic the Hedgehog with a broadsword sometimes. The game has its problems, but Playstation hosts a lot of retro-remakes, many of which stay 2d.
Yah, that was a little bit of an overstatement, wasnt' it? Meanwhile though, you have to admit that Freespace was no triumph of originality. While it was awesome eyecandy, I played it pretty far, and it basically didn't feel too different from X-wing Alliance, which I had acquired at about the same time. This is kinda silly, since Alliance is really just a remake of the old X-wing with new ships. So why the hell was Freespace touted as this big, original game? Its still the same boring crap (chase ship and shoot at it, keep chasing and chasing).... You can't even play these games in a straight deathmatch, it just doesn't work. You either get endless jousting (chicken with guns) or pointlessly flying around each other in a circle. Unless you have a larger objective then kill the other players, it gets really old really fast.
The most annoying part is the way people refer to these as "space sims" when they've got very little to do with space at all. Only space game I've played with anything like realistic physics is Independance war. Irony - Spacewar has inertial physics. You keep sliding the way you're moving. Freespace does not. Therefore, Spacewar is, from a gameplay aspect, more realistic then Freespace. More fun too, in my opinion.
I just think the fundamental weakness of most Starfighter games is the inability to fire your weapons in a direction other then that which you are moving. You are always moving towards your target, so you have to cease fire if you want to dodge. You are always either attacking or dodging, never both. FPS games, because you can strafe, you can do both. Inertial physics would solve that. Strafing jets on fighters would solve that. A turret system that didn't suck would solve that. But instead, they all just end up with the same old sht.
Re:There are more original titles than that...
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Vanishing Game Genres
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Umm, I think Warcraft 1 came out before C&C..... its kinda tragic really. I mean, Dune 2 was a ground breaking game, and yet its sequels have been totally derivative and unoriginal. Just slapping a new graphics engine and making some minor revisions each time. This is why I still prefer TA. Its not pretty, but its one of the few games where I don't bitch about the interface (*cough*, *starcraft*, *cough*) non-stop.
Battlezone is the other approach, a hybrid FPS and RTS. While the game was certainly, massively flawed (no multiplayer teamplay, the inconsistent and confusing pilot resource) overall, its great fun once you get into it. I'd love to see that sort of genre expanded more (getting a new box soon, look forward to tryin Bzone II).
Actually, I prefer Doom 2 to Quake's system anyways. Doom is more inertial, (you slide around more), doom marines run faster, the weapons are weaker so fights can last, the turning rate is limited so getting behind your opponent can be a serious advantage, and there's vertical autoaiming so people who aren't used to the mouse can still survive without having to get fried trying to aim up+down (though I use the mouse anyways). And yes, Doom does have its weaknesses, such as the "searching for hidden" spacebar-clicking crap. But overall, I prefer the fighting-style of Doom to the later games. The weapon-spread is a little weak (shotgun and pistol are useless, BFG is ridiculous), but that can be fixed with a good deHacked patch (for example, my patch makes a auto-shotgun out of the weak, normal shotgun, a weapon that sucks all of your bullets in one shot out of the minigun, and an uzi out of the pistol).
With the new openGL versions, Doom's eyecandy is pretty good. Sure, the levels are low-poly orhtogonal messes, and the monsters are all sprites (though I kinda prefer sprites sometimes) but the smoke-trailed glowing rocket is just as cool looking as the ones in UT, more even when you see it in the context of Doom.
Amen. I noticed the Descent-ignoring right off, and even Descent is really the only the first textured 3d environment. While Carmack did make many achievements (damn good 3d engines) gameplay wasn't usually high on that list. I mean, Doom was innovative, a good approach to making a pseudo3d engine that was still fast on a weak box, allowing for 3d gameplay in 2d graphics. By the time of Quake, it was "Oh, doom with 3d models and internet play. Neat!"
Not to slight his talents, making a hit game that had such a tremendous impact is no small feat, but don't try to paint him as some godly innovater. Quake was a synthesis of its surroundings, not an original concept. He's a damn good programmer that we (the gamers) are lucky to have in the games field.
Heheh, its funny... While I'm a longtime PS fan, Squaresoft RPGs and EA Sports games are the two largest categories of games that I avoid like the plague. Long live esoteric oddball deathmatch games (Armored Core, Unholy War, Critical Depth, ect).
Its more the american vs. Japanese mentality. Japanese RPG's are based on anime, which is why the graphics often look cartoony. Unfortunately , Japanese RPG's are hopelessly stuck in a rut. I've seen a short list of games that have done anything beyond FF3/6 with eyecandy and a new (inferior) storyline. Where a game tries to be innovative (Parasite Eve) they're often too tied to RPG traditions (Eve's combat system was an idiotic hybrid of adventure and RPG).... My fave RPG is still Star Control II, an American game, because they were'nt afraid to play around with the interface and play style, as opposed to just tinkering with the plot.
Slashdot Mirror
Prove that there is no life on Europa. How? To prove that it exists, they have to find one sample. To prove that it doesn't, they have to scour the planet with a fine-tooth comb, looking for one little amino acid, assuming that Europan life even uses such systems. Even if we did do so, who's to say there's not some silicon-flourine based bit of protein down there mocking our hubris. Hell, we haven't even proved that there's no life on Venus yet. Its a pretty safe bet that there's not, but you can't prove it. Maybe there's some insectoid critter with diamond for skin and liquid lead for blood on Venus that noone knows about. Europa is just the single most-likely heavanly body in the Solar system to contain life, so its the best place to start looking.
The best way to prove somethign doesn't exist is to look for it as hard as you can and not find it.
Yes its perfect!!!
Wait, no, IIRC, astronauts are required to have 20/20 vision, and therefore would not be using contacts, unless for stylish colourings. Darn.
Many believe that life on Earth did not originate anywhere near the sun. In fact, rather far from the sun indeed. Deep-sea geothermal vents were, possibly, the original source of life. High pressure, abundant rare chemicals, and heat energy were the environment of the vents, and are considered to be decent conditions for the primordial sandwitch (like the primordial soup, but it grows on a rock, pressed down by the geothermal pressure). While Europan water would have prescious little sunlight, it may have vents, or pressure pockets, or something that would generate such conditions as the planet is slowly turned inside out by the tidal forces of Jupiter keep it volatile.
Europa could be a habitable planet one day. The conditions under the ice could be similar to conditions under Earths oceans. It would probably be much easier to survive under an ocean, where oxygen can be extracted from the water, then in space. If the local life doesn't exist, or is negligable, then Earthborn deepsea life could be imported to survive here. And who says humans have to inhabit planets anyways? there are plenty of possibilities for living in the asteroid belt, where most rescources (except for organic ones) are cheap and onhand. We're nowhere near that sort of possibility, we can't even get ISS working, but how will we get there without first researching living in space with projects like ISS?
I know this is a troll, but I also know that there're those who really have this opinion, so I'll bite. Ummm, howbout satellites, for example? If not for the space-race with the russians, the extensive launching system for our satellites would not have been developed. They're a major contribution to our communication infrastructure, weather research, international reconnaisance (if you like military spending, hows that?), GPS for god's sake. These benefits were not apparent at the time of Sputnik, just as the benefits of Europa are not apparent now.
Could you imagine the medical and material science possibilities of finding another naturally-developed form of life? Look at the myriad uses of crude-oil. The massive amount of pharmaceuticals developed from esoteric wildlife. Imagine if we find something equally useful on Europa. Sure, it'd have to be pretty damned important to merit importing it across space, but if we didn't check, we'd never know at all. We won't find ET, but we could find something we can use.
I do agree that most space research is, by and large, abstract knowledge. But some of it has very real possibilities. International space station is such a possibility. If we can make a sustainable orbital platform in orbit, where else can we build one? Around Europa? In the asteroid belt for its rescources? NCC-1701-E wasn't built in a day. If you ever want it to happen, you have to give people a chance to get there.
Agreed. The word "cock" is a particularly common problem I encounter. For one, while I rarely use the word "cock" to describle poultry, others do, particularly in older literature, so I can't give certain quotations on censored messageboards. And, most annoyingly, the word "cockpit" is also usually censored. This is quite annoying when discussing jet planes in the Transformers Quake Message Board, for example. While these problems are minor, they're deliberate withholdings of service caused by a little squeamishness at foul language.
I was tryin' to remember the kid's first name... Tim didn't sound right, o'course Bruce always calls him by his last name anyways.... damn, if they don't get a good actor for Bruce Wayne then this movie will suck. Still, Beyond is a great series, and with Stephenson giving pointers on cyberpunk it'll make a must see.
Oh, and to all you guys who keep making posts about Robin and the previous Batman movies - Read The Fscking Article, its only a page long, it wont kill you.
We need a -1 -> Impatient moderation, to stop the first-posters and people who just want to be opinionated so they don't bother to actually read the articles.
Have you seen Batman: Beyond? Its gothic Cyberpunk stuff, with techno music, cybernetics, hover vehicles, VR, AI's, robotics, and most of the other fun trimmings of a cyberpunk setting (save for some lack of a consistent Metaverse-style network). Stephenson is in his element in Batman: Beyond, he's just gotta add the tights and supervillains. Besides that, Stephen originally intended Snow Crash to be a comic book. With that in mind, doesn't it makes sense that he work with a comic-book turned movie?
Okay, a) I've seen the display of the future, but by a promise to a friend I can't talk about it, sufficed to say its not anything like what they've got in mind.
The display/input system on this is really lacking. When they discribe the "desktop keyboard system" I see the keyboards from startrek. Desktop flatpanel touchscreens. This a Bad Move. For one thing, a desktop is a crappy display. There's a reason we have our monitors on stands, pointing towards us, we don't like to look down all the time. A flatpanel has the serious weakness that you always have to look at the keyboard. I don't know about you, but I type by feel, and look at the screen. If the screen is totally flat and featureless, the only way to see the keys is to stare at your hands all the time. Bad system, our eyes have more important business. This sort of thing is okay as a pointing device, but not for text input, unless your really really concerned about space, like in palmtops.
Secondly, the idea of a frisbee-shape is just silly. Would ppl seriously design a radial internal architechture just for eyecandy? I mean, its silly. Imagine having to mass produce all the parts and drives to be arced, and totally standardise all desktops. While a disk-shaped case is reasonable, the internals will follow a normal grid-pattern, and therefore the disk-shape will be larger then normal boxy units.
While I've got nothing against D&D, I really don't like how they're timing this whole revival thing just in time to have the D&D movie steal the fire from the first Lord of the Rings movie. There's real hardcore fantasy for you.
Heheheh, Grade 13 computer programming class of Westdale Secondary School - 1998 - Descent, Warcraft II, and Duke Nukem 3d. Damn that was fun.
'ocourse, now that the network is restricted, they all just play Liero.
Yeah, Chief could've been clearer about that when he posted the article. Too many people scream "radiation, eek!" and think of Chernobyl when they hear those words.
Bungie bought abuse? I'd wondered what happened to it when crack dot com went under. Kewl. Abuse has a really complex and detailed level editor, reminds me of a 2d-platform Quake, and its got network deatmatch play if you can find the right version (network is windows only, sorry). Excellent ambience too, can get really scary at times.
X4 is for PC, and it was originally developed for the playstation (x3 was for snes) so its got spectacular graphics, deep plotline, and really good gameplay. You can play Zero through the whole game too, not just intermittently like in x3.
Heheh, Strider 2 also just came out, and that's 2d. It uses some 3d graphics, like backgrounds (most objects are 2d sprites though), but that's all they are, the gameplay is all 2d. Damn good 2d at that, very fast-paced action, kinda feels like Sonic the Hedgehog with a broadsword sometimes. The game has its problems, but Playstation hosts a lot of retro-remakes, many of which stay 2d.
Yah, that was a little bit of an overstatement, wasnt' it? Meanwhile though, you have to admit that Freespace was no triumph of originality. While it was awesome eyecandy, I played it pretty far, and it basically didn't feel too different from X-wing Alliance, which I had acquired at about the same time. This is kinda silly, since Alliance is really just a remake of the old X-wing with new ships. So why the hell was Freespace touted as this big, original game? Its still the same boring crap (chase ship and shoot at it, keep chasing and chasing).... You can't even play these games in a straight deathmatch, it just doesn't work. You either get endless jousting (chicken with guns) or pointlessly flying around each other in a circle. Unless you have a larger objective then kill the other players, it gets really old really fast.
The most annoying part is the way people refer to these as "space sims" when they've got very little to do with space at all. Only space game I've played with anything like realistic physics is Independance war. Irony - Spacewar has inertial physics. You keep sliding the way you're moving. Freespace does not. Therefore, Spacewar is, from a gameplay aspect, more realistic then Freespace. More fun too, in my opinion.
I just think the fundamental weakness of most Starfighter games is the inability to fire your weapons in a direction other then that which you are moving. You are always moving towards your target, so you have to cease fire if you want to dodge. You are always either attacking or dodging, never both. FPS games, because you can strafe, you can do both. Inertial physics would solve that. Strafing jets on fighters would solve that. A turret system that didn't suck would solve that. But instead, they all just end up with the same old sht.
Umm, I think Warcraft 1 came out before C&C..... its kinda tragic really. I mean, Dune 2 was a ground breaking game, and yet its sequels have been totally derivative and unoriginal. Just slapping a new graphics engine and making some minor revisions each time. This is why I still prefer TA. Its not pretty, but its one of the few games where I don't bitch about the interface (*cough*, *starcraft*, *cough*) non-stop.
Battlezone is the other approach, a hybrid FPS and RTS. While the game was certainly, massively flawed (no multiplayer teamplay, the inconsistent and confusing pilot resource) overall, its great fun once you get into it. I'd love to see that sort of genre expanded more (getting a new box soon, look forward to tryin Bzone II).
Actually, I prefer Doom 2 to Quake's system anyways. Doom is more inertial, (you slide around more), doom marines run faster, the weapons are weaker so fights can last, the turning rate is limited so getting behind your opponent can be a serious advantage, and there's vertical autoaiming so people who aren't used to the mouse can still survive without having to get fried trying to aim up+down (though I use the mouse anyways). And yes, Doom does have its weaknesses, such as the "searching for hidden" spacebar-clicking crap. But overall, I prefer the fighting-style of Doom to the later games. The weapon-spread is a little weak (shotgun and pistol are useless, BFG is ridiculous), but that can be fixed with a good deHacked patch (for example, my patch makes a auto-shotgun out of the weak, normal shotgun, a weapon that sucks all of your bullets in one shot out of the minigun, and an uzi out of the pistol).
With the new openGL versions, Doom's eyecandy is pretty good. Sure, the levels are low-poly orhtogonal messes, and the monsters are all sprites (though I kinda prefer sprites sometimes) but the smoke-trailed glowing rocket is just as cool looking as the ones in UT, more even when you see it in the context of Doom.
Heheheh, Gamera and Mozilla. That's awesome! We need more cheezy Japanese monsters on Linux.
Amen. I noticed the Descent-ignoring right off, and even Descent is really the only the first textured 3d environment. While Carmack did make many achievements (damn good 3d engines) gameplay wasn't usually high on that list. I mean, Doom was innovative, a good approach to making a pseudo3d engine that was still fast on a weak box, allowing for 3d gameplay in 2d graphics. By the time of Quake, it was "Oh, doom with 3d models and internet play. Neat!" Not to slight his talents, making a hit game that had such a tremendous impact is no small feat, but don't try to paint him as some godly innovater. Quake was a synthesis of its surroundings, not an original concept. He's a damn good programmer that we (the gamers) are lucky to have in the games field.
Heheh, its funny... While I'm a longtime PS fan, Squaresoft RPGs and EA Sports games are the two largest categories of games that I avoid like the plague. Long live esoteric oddball deathmatch games (Armored Core, Unholy War, Critical Depth, ect).
One problem - They don't need to win. They just need a long, drawn out legal battle to force the defendant to surrender to save his or her wallet.
Umm, he wasn't writeing it phonetically, he was speaking the individual letters (you know, ay,bee,see,dee,ee,eff,jee)?
Its more the american vs. Japanese mentality. Japanese RPG's are based on anime, which is why the graphics often look cartoony. Unfortunately , Japanese RPG's are hopelessly stuck in a rut. I've seen a short list of games that have done anything beyond FF3/6 with eyecandy and a new (inferior) storyline. Where a game tries to be innovative (Parasite Eve) they're often too tied to RPG traditions (Eve's combat system was an idiotic hybrid of adventure and RPG).... My fave RPG is still Star Control II, an American game, because they were'nt afraid to play around with the interface and play style, as opposed to just tinkering with the plot.