You can't do infrared from Earth. There is no Earth-based telescope that can do it, nor will there ever be. You know this, so why create complaints you know are bogus?
If it's costing too much, it's because people demanded the lowest bid rather than the best bid and then demanded NASA have a smaller budget AND THEN kept changing NASA's directives.
Give it the money needed to do the job, then get the hell out of the way.
Agreed, but I'd like to see an interferometry array. Space telescopes are necessarily small, so we need multiple to get the resolution and sensitivity.
The U.S. government wastes that on bridges to nowhere, Trump's golfing excursions and funding strip club excursions by the U.S. military.
So, yes, if they don't give a shit about those, then set billion is chump change.
Besides which, it's about the ROI . The military either offers no ROI, or a negative value depending on whether cleaning up the mess afterwards counts. The telescope has positive ROI, so the net cost is below the sticker price.
The U.S. subsidizes coal and oil to the tune of hundreds of billions a year. If you cut the subsidies, you could have a giant flotilla of Webb telescopes as an interferometer.
When you're willing to burn money on ego projects, you don't get to excuse not spending money on real stuff.
You don't need to find the life. NASA engineers established, back in the 60s, that it alters the geology and chemistry of the planet. If you find a discontinuity in the geology for which there's no non-living mechanism, you have established there was life.
Life necessarily creates an n-way dynamic equilibrium at a moderate energy state. You always get two or more streams of molecules that cannot coexist but whose ratio is fluctuating around a non-zero value. Non-life always tends to a static equilibrium of the lowest energy state. You don't get local negative entropy in non-living chemistry, so although you can produce unstable molecules, you can't produce a range of such molecules that react with each other.
Organics is not surprising, they're found on comets and in interstellar clouds. For all we know, these were brought to Mars by comets. The chirality will be interesting, but what is important is what is beneath them. That's protected geology that dates to a time life could have been supported. That's where you want to look for interesting molecules.
However, the organics might be helpful. There may be a point where there's a fairly thick sludge that could have trapped bubbles from the early atmosphere, or loose rocks. Something that can tell us about aspects of conditions that overall geology can't.
In 2024, the Square Kilometre Array will be fully online.
It will be capable of establishing active life on another planet, even at the microbial level, up to around 100 light-years away. If we have detected no life at all by 2030, assuming the telescope allows the data to be analyzed for it, then there is no life to detect.
If there is life out there, we have a decent chance of finding it by 2025 and it's a near-certainty by 2030.
"Think for just one moment and I'm sure that you will see, the moral of this story - that what shall be must be. He who gives his soul to Hell, must dare to pay the price, he versed in divinity must live a noble life - OR ELSE HE IS DAMNED!"
The wages of government stupidity is maybe another century of these releases. Governments can't keep secrets, so they're ethical to within practical limits, or else they are damned.
The IDE is cluttered, gets in the way and is painful to use. It is tedious, requiring the user to build each environment independently. I have to hardcode options, I can't use discovery tools to see what exists or where it is. As an autoconf/cmake replacement, it sucks.
It's slow. Given the choice of VS or Emacs, I would use Emacs every time. Much less overhead, much more real estate.
And that's central to an IDE, your real estate. It's mostly wasted in VS, no matter what you do.
Auto builds slow the computer down and are a bad design choice.
Probably the best IDE I have ever seen for any language on Windows was Borland Turbo Pascal 3's. The Inmos folding editor was superb, Ada's GPS and Eiffel's GUI are decent. Vi and Notepad++ are brilliant (tools should never get in the way). Really, for programming help, Norton Guides were the best I've ever seen.
Their debugger is dreadful. If that's the best you've used, I pity you. I don't use it, even if using VS.
Indeed, I think you'll find Notepad++ beats VS in popularity. More people might own VS with Windows but that's because you can't separate it from the compiler and most competing compilers oblige you to install VS even if you never use it. That's not popularity, that's antitrust.
Actually, no, they haven't. They rate poorly on just about every metric.
Microsoft's tools are available for Linux, but the Top500 list and NASA's recommended tool list feature Intel, LLVM and GCC, not Microsoft.
Microsoft's networking code is not compliant with IETF standards.
If you want highly reliable code, you are more likely to use VST.
Microsoft contributed Z3 to software provers, but Why3 is still the one dominantly used.
Can you tell me the status of Microsoft support for D, Tcl/Tk, Ada/Spark, Prolog, Occam and Objective C? You can talk all you like about them being uncommon, but I can find RAD tools and IDEs for them, along with compilers. If you can't do what I need, you're the worse at what I use.
And it blew it. Not once but multiple times. I do not trust them, they have shown no signs of apologizing for the "Truth" tour, they have shown no signs of apologizing for the fraudulent video in their antitrust trial, they have violated their agreement with the EU regarding browser choice, they have shown no intent of honouring the GPL, the code quality of Linux is inversely proportional to the Microsoft submissions in that release.
Case closed.
I will be copying off those projects of interest to me, along with my own, then deleting my GitHub account.
Would it matter if you were? Religious people don't "believe in" chairs or worship them. Therefore a scientist who has proof of a God should not worship them. Not that any such proof is likely.
The theory of planetary formation contains three types of model - ones that produce predictions you can test in the lab, ones that produce predictions you can test via simulation, and ones that produce predictions you can test via astronomy.
Simulations produce additional predictions which can be tested either in the lab or via astronomical observation, so you always end up with direct observation.
So, no, nothing in real science is by faith and everything that can be done can be done with real science.
Invoke God all you like, but I can find more photos of accretion disks and planets in the process of forming than you can find of God.
Besides, which God? There are 200,000 religions out there and I bet you didn't choose yours by any process better than the one you ridicule others for.
You're assuming there that the dust condenses sequentially, at a uniform rate, from a single seed particle.
What if, and I know this is a wild assumption, none of those assumptions actually held up? That the dust cloud condensed at multiple points in an accelerating fashion in three dimensions?
A quick calculation then shows Pluto as requiring slightly under a century to form.
The sole function of a classification is to group all like things in a way that distinguishes them unambiguously from all unlike things, without respect to space, time, means of observing or observer. In other words, the distinguishing feature must be intrinsic not extrinsic.
If A is the set of all objects in the class, B is the set of all things not in the class, E is the empty set and U is the universal set, A/\ B = E and A \/ B = U.
Since only prediction is valid, the class has a prediction P such that for all elements a in A, P(a) is true. Since only the simplest model is permitted, there must be no adjoining A' for which P(a') is true.
I really don't see the problem in proper hard science ontologies, it's not like a planetary mass is subject to a philosophical debate over what constitutes mass. Rigour and formalism are quite sufficient for this, it's a shame the IAU is incapable of either.
A lot of people rely on proper classification. Those modelling solar system dynamics, astrophysicists, planetary scientists.
If you want to make scientific predictions and then test them, you need the correct model. That's kind of an obvious duh.
If you're in charge of budgets, you want maximum return for the money. Exploring planets yields more science per square foot than an asteroid or comet.
Astronomers just have to point their big shiny... telescopes at big, shiny... things and map them. They don't do anything else that's useful. Unless they were Patrick Moore.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't do infrared from Earth. There is no Earth-based telescope that can do it, nor will there ever be. You know this, so why create complaints you know are bogus?
If it's costing too much, it's because people demanded the lowest bid rather than the best bid and then demanded NASA have a smaller budget AND THEN kept changing NASA's directives.
Give it the money needed to do the job, then get the hell out of the way.
Agreed, but I'd like to see an interferometry array. Space telescopes are necessarily small, so we need multiple to get the resolution and sensitivity.
Go join a Gorean community if you can't handle a modern society.
The U.S. government wastes that on bridges to nowhere, Trump's golfing excursions and funding strip club excursions by the U.S. military.
So, yes, if they don't give a shit about those, then set billion is chump change.
Besides which, it's about the ROI . The military either offers no ROI, or a negative value depending on whether cleaning up the mess afterwards counts. The telescope has positive ROI, so the net cost is below the sticker price.
The U.S. subsidizes coal and oil to the tune of hundreds of billions a year. If you cut the subsidies, you could have a giant flotilla of Webb telescopes as an interferometer.
When you're willing to burn money on ego projects, you don't get to excuse not spending money on real stuff.
Almost nothing makes you stronger. Except fish.
Lolz? I can has cheezburger?
No, ICE is clearly a solid, not a gas.
Silicon words, you don't need carbon.
The Goldstein-Hoyle theory of heavy oils has long been falsified.
No, it didn't. If you're going to try for satire, make it accurate.
You don't need to find the life. NASA engineers established, back in the 60s, that it alters the geology and chemistry of the planet. If you find a discontinuity in the geology for which there's no non-living mechanism, you have established there was life.
Life necessarily creates an n-way dynamic equilibrium at a moderate energy state. You always get two or more streams of molecules that cannot coexist but whose ratio is fluctuating around a non-zero value. Non-life always tends to a static equilibrium of the lowest energy state. You don't get local negative entropy in non-living chemistry, so although you can produce unstable molecules, you can't produce a range of such molecules that react with each other.
Organics is not surprising, they're found on comets and in interstellar clouds. For all we know, these were brought to Mars by comets. The chirality will be interesting, but what is important is what is beneath them. That's protected geology that dates to a time life could have been supported. That's where you want to look for interesting molecules.
However, the organics might be helpful. There may be a point where there's a fairly thick sludge that could have trapped bubbles from the early atmosphere, or loose rocks. Something that can tell us about aspects of conditions that overall geology can't.
Actually, yes you can.
Life always alters the geology and chemistry of a planet, even if it's microbial. And it does so in ways that aren't going to occur in any other way.
http://americanhistory.si.edu/...
Economics is a zero-sum game. So is freedom. So is much of life.
Those are lowest energy state. Organics rarely are. Complex organics never are.
In 2024, the Square Kilometre Array will be fully online.
It will be capable of establishing active life on another planet, even at the microbial level, up to around 100 light-years away. If we have detected no life at all by 2030, assuming the telescope allows the data to be analyzed for it, then there is no life to detect.
If there is life out there, we have a decent chance of finding it by 2025 and it's a near-certainty by 2030.
A Cautionary Tale:
"Think for just one moment and I'm sure that you will see,
the moral of this story - that what shall be must be.
He who gives his soul to Hell, must dare to pay the price,
he versed in divinity must live a noble life -
OR ELSE HE IS DAMNED!"
The wages of government stupidity is maybe another century of these releases. Governments can't keep secrets, so they're ethical to within practical limits, or else they are damned.
The IDE is cluttered, gets in the way and is painful to use. It is tedious, requiring the user to build each environment independently. I have to hardcode options, I can't use discovery tools to see what exists or where it is. As an autoconf/cmake replacement, it sucks.
It's slow. Given the choice of VS or Emacs, I would use Emacs every time. Much less overhead, much more real estate.
And that's central to an IDE, your real estate. It's mostly wasted in VS, no matter what you do.
Auto builds slow the computer down and are a bad design choice.
Probably the best IDE I have ever seen for any language on Windows was Borland Turbo Pascal 3's. The Inmos folding editor was superb, Ada's GPS and Eiffel's GUI are decent. Vi and Notepad++ are brilliant (tools should never get in the way). Really, for programming help, Norton Guides were the best I've ever seen.
Their debugger is dreadful. If that's the best you've used, I pity you. I don't use it, even if using VS.
Indeed, I think you'll find Notepad++ beats VS in popularity. More people might own VS with Windows but that's because you can't separate it from the compiler and most competing compilers oblige you to install VS even if you never use it. That's not popularity, that's antitrust.
Actually, no, they haven't. They rate poorly on just about every metric.
Microsoft's tools are available for Linux, but the Top500 list and NASA's recommended tool list feature Intel, LLVM and GCC, not Microsoft.
Microsoft's networking code is not compliant with IETF standards.
If you want highly reliable code, you are more likely to use VST.
Microsoft contributed Z3 to software provers, but Why3 is still the one dominantly used.
Can you tell me the status of Microsoft support for D, Tcl/Tk, Ada/Spark, Prolog, Occam and Objective C? You can talk all you like about them being uncommon, but I can find RAD tools and IDEs for them, along with compilers. If you can't do what I need, you're the worse at what I use.
And it blew it. Not once but multiple times. I do not trust them, they have shown no signs of apologizing for the "Truth" tour, they have shown no signs of apologizing for the fraudulent video in their antitrust trial, they have violated their agreement with the EU regarding browser choice, they have shown no intent of honouring the GPL, the code quality of Linux is inversely proportional to the Microsoft submissions in that release.
Case closed.
I will be copying off those projects of interest to me, along with my own, then deleting my GitHub account.
Would it matter if you were? Religious people don't "believe in" chairs or worship them. Therefore a scientist who has proof of a God should not worship them. Not that any such proof is likely.
The theory of planetary formation contains three types of model - ones that produce predictions you can test in the lab, ones that produce predictions you can test via simulation, and ones that produce predictions you can test via astronomy.
Simulations produce additional predictions which can be tested either in the lab or via astronomical observation, so you always end up with direct observation.
So, no, nothing in real science is by faith and everything that can be done can be done with real science.
Invoke God all you like, but I can find more photos of accretion disks and planets in the process of forming than you can find of God.
Besides, which God? There are 200,000 religions out there and I bet you didn't choose yours by any process better than the one you ridicule others for.
You're assuming there that the dust condenses sequentially, at a uniform rate, from a single seed particle.
What if, and I know this is a wild assumption, none of those assumptions actually held up? That the dust cloud condensed at multiple points in an accelerating fashion in three dimensions?
A quick calculation then shows Pluto as requiring slightly under a century to form.
Ponies on Slashdot have to be pink and collected from Cute Overload.
Bonus karma for those who remember why.
The sole function of a classification is to group all like things in a way that distinguishes them unambiguously from all unlike things, without respect to space, time, means of observing or observer. In other words, the distinguishing feature must be intrinsic not extrinsic.
If A is the set of all objects in the class, B is the set of all things not in the class, E is the empty set and U is the universal set, A /\ B = E and A \/ B = U.
Since only prediction is valid, the class has a prediction P such that for all elements a in A, P(a) is true. Since only the simplest model is permitted, there must be no adjoining A' for which P(a') is true.
I really don't see the problem in proper hard science ontologies, it's not like a planetary mass is subject to a philosophical debate over what constitutes mass. Rigour and formalism are quite sufficient for this, it's a shame the IAU is incapable of either.
A lot of people rely on proper classification. Those modelling solar system dynamics, astrophysicists, planetary scientists.
If you want to make scientific predictions and then test them, you need the correct model. That's kind of an obvious duh.
If you're in charge of budgets, you want maximum return for the money. Exploring planets yields more science per square foot than an asteroid or comet.
Astronomers just have to point their big shiny... telescopes at big, shiny... things and map them. They don't do anything else that's useful. Unless they were Patrick Moore.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=...