And let's face it, the odds that we're screwing up our only livable habitat in potentially-ugly ways are increasing. Developing the capacity to move at least a few people elsewhere isn't such a terrible idea.
And then do what with them once they're there? If we can terraform any other planet into a habitable place, it's hard to see why we couldn't do it to Earth to undo the environmental damage we've wrought. After all, Earth currently is habitable and anything we're likely to do wouldn't move it further from that mark than the other planets.
William Dunham's books are excellent reads. They're a mix of biography and math, usually focused on the more playful, clever parts of math. (As opposed to the tedious, but necessary bits.) He covers a lot and anyone who reads them with any attention at all would come away with a pretty good conversant knowledge of mathematics.
Sort of. The real effect is in what is solid enough to accrete. Gases don't participate, which is why you find so little hydrogen compounds (water, methane, ammonia) in the inner solar system relative to what you would normally expect and why the giant planets are, well, giants.
I don't believe as it's currently thought that the proto-Sun had a wind during the planet formation stages. If there were, it'd surely hamper the process. (Eventually, it would have done so when it cleared out the system.)
Why would they be the same material? Why is the disk homogenous? The temperature gradient and dynamical gradients could, in fact, cause the disk to differentiate.
Also, I wonder how they get the protoplanetary disk to break up into bands. Saturn's rings aren't really banded as much as you might think. The degree to which they are is largely due to moons (or their on-going generation). Left to themselves, the rings should spread and homogenize.
If the rocky planets formed from a homogenous debris disk, they should all be roughly the same size and orbit the sun in similar circular orbits, Youdin explained.
Uh, why? The disk varies with distance in the standard model. (Orbital speeds, density, composition, etc.) So you wouldn't even really expected the planets to have the same size.
Armitage agreed. "In the standard model the composition varies with distance from the sun," he said.
Huh, that's odd. There was work done about a decade or so ago that said the opposite: there was enough mixing between planetismals in the inner solar system to largely homogenize the compositions. But, then, Phil is an expert in this, so maybe more recent simulations have quashed that.
JMS has stated he wanted to deal with moral issues. He didn't *answer* them and they weren't, as a rule, integral to the arc, but they were very much in the show. B5 particularly did a good job of not choosing a side in the end, but leaving a few arguments floating for the audience to digest.
I might borrow the DVDs off of friends, eventually. But I started feeling disinterested in season 2. It might just not be a show that appeals to my specific tastes, and that's fine. (I'm not begrudging y'all for liking it, of course.)
Hm, interesting. I didn't get the podcast with the creators, but that pretty well accords with the impression I got watching the show. You can tell shows like B5 or Heroes (first season) *knew* where they were going as things slotted into place and BSG just didn't seem to do that in my view.
but if you've watched Battlestar Galactica since it was re-imagined in 2003, there has been no escape.
That's... hyperbolic. I haven't seen an episode of the fourth season yet, nor do I plan to. I just lost interest when I started feeling like the writers didn't know where they were really heading.
So I'm clearly... well, not hostile, but indifferent... to the show, but it should be noted that this "story" is nonsense. SciFi shows have been doing this for, literally, decades. Tackling moral issues of the day was the point of The Twlight Zone and Star Trek (TOS). More recently, Babylon 5 earned a pretty solid reputation for discussing (and very definitely not answering) moral conundra. Even Deep Space Nine (where BSG producer Ron Moore once worked) did a pretty good job with the same thing.
So I suppose if your point is "BSG continues the tradition", then fine. But the tone of the summary and article very much make it sound like this is revolutionary.
How, exactly, is doing what the Pope told him to do snubbing the Pope?
You seem to have a deep-seated animosity towards Galileo that I feel is causing you to ignore contrary evidence that he *wasn't* being a dick as much as simply impolitic and too bold. But I suppose you have your view and I have mine, so there's no point in continuing this. We can't even agree on facts.
Well, it is and it isn't. It's WAY more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 and, as it doesn't break down instantly, does have a notable effect on Earth. (The life expectancy is something like a decade here.) That said, it breaks down into CO2 here, so it largely just adds to the CO2 content.*
That said, Mars has a different chemistry at play since there's virtually no oxygen in the atmosphere. What I want to know is, what's the life expectancy of methane there? The article says "short", but in planetary science terms that could mean millions of years.
* Although all of the freaking over cows emitting methane has me wondering: where do people think the cows GET the methane, ultimately?
Er, no. Just... no. Why would a previous solar system be needed if we can't (by your implicitly logic) form it in ours?
Methane can easily form in the protosolar nebula and because it was so cold far from the protosun, freeze into ices. The ices went on to compose much of the giant planets and their moons. Since carbon is a relatively abundant element in the universe (and hydrogen is obviously even more so), a lot of methane would have formed. All you need to put the two elements into proximity and wait a bit, no need to invoke a previous solar system. (You do need a previous generation of star to make the carbon, though.)
Methane on Mars is a different story. You don't expect methane there in any abundance because a) it never was there in large quantities (no ices in that region) and b) what was delivered there can quite reasonably be expected to have broken down by now.
See, that's what I'm disagreeing with. The Church did have a very definite choice. Galileo was trying to give them an out and help them save face before it become overwelmingly obvious that they were very loudly pushing an erroneous view.
And for the record, as I recall, his tides argument, while false, wasn't obviously so at that time. And there was good reason to believe that the heliocentric model was correct in the form of Kepler's fits to Tycho's data. (Galileo was in correspondence with Kepler, after all.) Additionally, Galileo had himself observed (and publish in Siderius Nucius) his observations of the Galilean moons (clearly orbiting Jupiter, not Earth as the Catholic dogma asserted) and Venus's phases (definitely proof that Venus orbited the Sun, if not direct proof that the Earth did so).
So I'm saying that Galileo wasn't basing his arguments on faith alone and that the Church was fighting on the wrong side even from available information of that time. (The lack of parallax observations, while well-known even tot he Greeks, was also recognized as potential evidence that the stars are simply very distant (even by the Greeks).)
As for being inflammatory, Galileo, though perhaps tactless, wasn't trying to rile anyone up. He was told to include the Pope's arguments for geocentricism in his Dialogues and he was genuinely surprised when it triggered a backlash as it did. (It can't have been that inflammatory, given that the book initially made it past the Church censors and, according to some sources I've seen, even the Pope himself.)
Galileo was finally brought in after he put some of the pope's statements into Simplicio's mouth (making the pope look foolish by proxy). Whether he meant to do that or not is the subject of speculation. However, that's not why Galileo was dragged in. He was dragged in because the Inquisition had it out for him. They had been keeping a file on him for quite a while and even during his trial, they violated their own rules and fabricated records to get him. This doesn't make Galileo's behavior smarter or more diplomatic (he never was a very compromising person, but that's part of what makes him so sexy), but I do not accept that he was really responsible for what happened either.
That, and Galileo published. That's vitally important. In science, you must share your results if you want any credit. If you don't share your great data or your brilliant theory, you're not really doing science, you're engaging in a hobby. Which isn't to say that Harriot didn't do great work, but let's not diminish Galileo's accomplishments. He not only did the work, he stuck his neck out and announced it. (And, in his case, he paid for it.)
When did I state my ideology? I don't believe I did. You're assumption as to what I do and don't believe suggests to me that you're the one running on ideology here and you have difficult to accept that others might have a legitimate, if inconvenient, point.
Also, Summers was canned (I've read in the news) because he kept honking off the faculty (repeatedly, not any once instance) which eventually made it impossible for him to lead. It's the same as any other job and has little to do with academic freedom.
And let go of that poor, overworked caps lock. It makes you sound like a crazy person or, worse, like a TV pundit.
First of all, what got Larry Sommers in trouble was that he said that *after* an entire conference on exactly why what he suggest wasn't true. In other words, he had been ignoring the very meeting he was there to attend. Whether it was sexism (ignoring what he didn't want to hear) or just being rude (which I consider more likely) is an open question.
Second, there are *some* students who learn more from a textbook than from face-to-face, interactive learning. However, research (Kolb, for example) shows that most students need other ways of learning in order to really get material. Sadly, the ones that do learn best in lectures/from textbooks go on to become the next generation of faculty (more or less by default), perpetuating the notion.
I think you need numbers to back that assertion up. I haven't seen stats on the large universities, but at my small, private alma mater, tuition covered about 1/3 of the expenses of educating a single student. Now, I'll grant you that they put more money INTO each student almost certainly. BUT, the tuition was also several times higher than at public universities I saw around that time. And I know for a fact that the single largest source of money for the University of Colorado is contracts and grants (so... faculty getting money).
Your link/quote doesn't disprove the grandparent's statement. What it states is that NASA was created to compete with the Soviets. Competition can be peaceful; consider the Olympics. (In fact, the space race was a way for the two sides to compete head-to-head without ever firing a shot. Far fewer people were killed and we got to prove ourselves to the rest of the world. Seems like a win-win.)
Exactly. I think if we started running our scientific (or, more broadly, non-military) exploration of space via the DoD, it would surely be mis-construed by other nations. That's apart from the high potential for the objectives to shift away from science and general technology to military-specific goals.
Honestly, NASA, for all its flaws, is probably one of the *less* bureaucratic outfits in the Federal government. The DoD has, from what I've seen, a much worse track record at poor choices in spending. And in the end, NASA is an agency we can all be proud of, both as Americans and as a planet. (While the achievements are generally primarily American work, NASA definitely works with other nations. And even in the Apollo era when it was a more American-specific endevour, I think we as a species took communal pride in NASA's work because it wasn't done to materially benefit the US as much as to show what humans could do.)
And note that the planting of the flag was more like the flag atop a mountain than claiming the Moon, in as much we're not allowed to claim the Moon by treaty.
Slashdot Mirror
And let's face it, the odds that we're screwing up our only livable habitat in potentially-ugly ways are increasing. Developing the capacity to move at least a few people elsewhere isn't such a terrible idea.
And then do what with them once they're there? If we can terraform any other planet into a habitable place, it's hard to see why we couldn't do it to Earth to undo the environmental damage we've wrought. After all, Earth currently is habitable and anything we're likely to do wouldn't move it further from that mark than the other planets.
William Dunham's books are excellent reads. They're a mix of biography and math, usually focused on the more playful, clever parts of math. (As opposed to the tedious, but necessary bits.) He covers a lot and anyone who reads them with any attention at all would come away with a pretty good conversant knowledge of mathematics.
Sort of. The real effect is in what is solid enough to accrete. Gases don't participate, which is why you find so little hydrogen compounds (water, methane, ammonia) in the inner solar system relative to what you would normally expect and why the giant planets are, well, giants.
I don't believe as it's currently thought that the proto-Sun had a wind during the planet formation stages. If there were, it'd surely hamper the process. (Eventually, it would have done so when it cleared out the system.)
Actually, it's the reverse. If you put a planet in the disk, it tries to open a gap. (See the Keeler and Encke gaps in Saturn's A ring for examples.)
So that's not it. (And besides, it sounds like these guys are positing the bands form FIRST.)
Why would they be the same material? Why is the disk homogenous? The temperature gradient and dynamical gradients could, in fact, cause the disk to differentiate.
Also, I wonder how they get the protoplanetary disk to break up into bands. Saturn's rings aren't really banded as much as you might think. The degree to which they are is largely due to moons (or their on-going generation). Left to themselves, the rings should spread and homogenize.
If the rocky planets formed from a homogenous debris disk, they should all be roughly the same size and orbit the sun in similar circular orbits, Youdin explained.
Uh, why? The disk varies with distance in the standard model. (Orbital speeds, density, composition, etc.) So you wouldn't even really expected the planets to have the same size.
Armitage agreed. "In the standard model the composition varies with distance from the sun," he said.
Huh, that's odd. There was work done about a decade or so ago that said the opposite: there was enough mixing between planetismals in the inner solar system to largely homogenize the compositions. But, then, Phil is an expert in this, so maybe more recent simulations have quashed that.
JMS has stated he wanted to deal with moral issues. He didn't *answer* them and they weren't, as a rule, integral to the arc, but they were very much in the show. B5 particularly did a good job of not choosing a side in the end, but leaving a few arguments floating for the audience to digest.
I might borrow the DVDs off of friends, eventually. But I started feeling disinterested in season 2. It might just not be a show that appeals to my specific tastes, and that's fine. (I'm not begrudging y'all for liking it, of course.)
Hm, interesting. I didn't get the podcast with the creators, but that pretty well accords with the impression I got watching the show. You can tell shows like B5 or Heroes (first season) *knew* where they were going as things slotted into place and BSG just didn't seem to do that in my view.
but if you've watched Battlestar Galactica since it was re-imagined in 2003, there has been no escape.
That's... hyperbolic. I haven't seen an episode of the fourth season yet, nor do I plan to. I just lost interest when I started feeling like the writers didn't know where they were really heading.
So I'm clearly... well, not hostile, but indifferent... to the show, but it should be noted that this "story" is nonsense. SciFi shows have been doing this for, literally, decades. Tackling moral issues of the day was the point of The Twlight Zone and Star Trek (TOS). More recently, Babylon 5 earned a pretty solid reputation for discussing (and very definitely not answering) moral conundra. Even Deep Space Nine (where BSG producer Ron Moore once worked) did a pretty good job with the same thing.
So I suppose if your point is "BSG continues the tradition", then fine. But the tone of the summary and article very much make it sound like this is revolutionary.
How, exactly, is doing what the Pope told him to do snubbing the Pope?
You seem to have a deep-seated animosity towards Galileo that I feel is causing you to ignore contrary evidence that he *wasn't* being a dick as much as simply impolitic and too bold. But I suppose you have your view and I have mine, so there's no point in continuing this. We can't even agree on facts.
Well, it is and it isn't. It's WAY more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 and, as it doesn't break down instantly, does have a notable effect on Earth. (The life expectancy is something like a decade here.) That said, it breaks down into CO2 here, so it largely just adds to the CO2 content.*
That said, Mars has a different chemistry at play since there's virtually no oxygen in the atmosphere. What I want to know is, what's the life expectancy of methane there? The article says "short", but in planetary science terms that could mean millions of years.
* Although all of the freaking over cows emitting methane has me wondering: where do people think the cows GET the methane, ultimately?
Er, no. Just... no. Why would a previous solar system be needed if we can't (by your implicitly logic) form it in ours?
Methane can easily form in the protosolar nebula and because it was so cold far from the protosun, freeze into ices. The ices went on to compose much of the giant planets and their moons. Since carbon is a relatively abundant element in the universe (and hydrogen is obviously even more so), a lot of methane would have formed. All you need to put the two elements into proximity and wait a bit, no need to invoke a previous solar system. (You do need a previous generation of star to make the carbon, though.)
Methane on Mars is a different story. You don't expect methane there in any abundance because a) it never was there in large quantities (no ices in that region) and b) what was delivered there can quite reasonably be expected to have broken down by now.
Also, Europa has no lakes, methane or otherwise.
See, that's what I'm disagreeing with. The Church did have a very definite choice. Galileo was trying to give them an out and help them save face before it become overwelmingly obvious that they were very loudly pushing an erroneous view.
And for the record, as I recall, his tides argument, while false, wasn't obviously so at that time. And there was good reason to believe that the heliocentric model was correct in the form of Kepler's fits to Tycho's data. (Galileo was in correspondence with Kepler, after all.) Additionally, Galileo had himself observed (and publish in Siderius Nucius) his observations of the Galilean moons (clearly orbiting Jupiter, not Earth as the Catholic dogma asserted) and Venus's phases (definitely proof that Venus orbited the Sun, if not direct proof that the Earth did so).
So I'm saying that Galileo wasn't basing his arguments on faith alone and that the Church was fighting on the wrong side even from available information of that time. (The lack of parallax observations, while well-known even tot he Greeks, was also recognized as potential evidence that the stars are simply very distant (even by the Greeks).)
As for being inflammatory, Galileo, though perhaps tactless, wasn't trying to rile anyone up. He was told to include the Pope's arguments for geocentricism in his Dialogues and he was genuinely surprised when it triggered a backlash as it did. (It can't have been that inflammatory, given that the book initially made it past the Church censors and, according to some sources I've seen, even the Pope himself.)
And his family moved to Florence when he was ten. Galileo himself would live in several cities as an adult.
Galileo was finally brought in after he put some of the pope's statements into Simplicio's mouth (making the pope look foolish by proxy). Whether he meant to do that or not is the subject of speculation. However, that's not why Galileo was dragged in. He was dragged in because the Inquisition had it out for him. They had been keeping a file on him for quite a while and even during his trial, they violated their own rules and fabricated records to get him. This doesn't make Galileo's behavior smarter or more diplomatic (he never was a very compromising person, but that's part of what makes him so sexy), but I do not accept that he was really responsible for what happened either.
That, and Galileo published. That's vitally important. In science, you must share your results if you want any credit. If you don't share your great data or your brilliant theory, you're not really doing science, you're engaging in a hobby. Which isn't to say that Harriot didn't do great work, but let's not diminish Galileo's accomplishments. He not only did the work, he stuck his neck out and announced it. (And, in his case, he paid for it.)
When did I state my ideology? I don't believe I did. You're assumption as to what I do and don't believe suggests to me that you're the one running on ideology here and you have difficult to accept that others might have a legitimate, if inconvenient, point.
Also, Summers was canned (I've read in the news) because he kept honking off the faculty (repeatedly, not any once instance) which eventually made it impossible for him to lead. It's the same as any other job and has little to do with academic freedom.
And let go of that poor, overworked caps lock. It makes you sound like a crazy person or, worse, like a TV pundit.
First of all, what got Larry Sommers in trouble was that he said that *after* an entire conference on exactly why what he suggest wasn't true. In other words, he had been ignoring the very meeting he was there to attend. Whether it was sexism (ignoring what he didn't want to hear) or just being rude (which I consider more likely) is an open question.
Second, there are *some* students who learn more from a textbook than from face-to-face, interactive learning. However, research (Kolb, for example) shows that most students need other ways of learning in order to really get material. Sadly, the ones that do learn best in lectures/from textbooks go on to become the next generation of faculty (more or less by default), perpetuating the notion.
I think you need numbers to back that assertion up. I haven't seen stats on the large universities, but at my small, private alma mater, tuition covered about 1/3 of the expenses of educating a single student. Now, I'll grant you that they put more money INTO each student almost certainly. BUT, the tuition was also several times higher than at public universities I saw around that time. And I know for a fact that the single largest source of money for the University of Colorado is contracts and grants (so... faculty getting money).
Your link/quote doesn't disprove the grandparent's statement. What it states is that NASA was created to compete with the Soviets. Competition can be peaceful; consider the Olympics. (In fact, the space race was a way for the two sides to compete head-to-head without ever firing a shot. Far fewer people were killed and we got to prove ourselves to the rest of the world. Seems like a win-win.)
Exactly. I think if we started running our scientific (or, more broadly, non-military) exploration of space via the DoD, it would surely be mis-construed by other nations. That's apart from the high potential for the objectives to shift away from science and general technology to military-specific goals.
Honestly, NASA, for all its flaws, is probably one of the *less* bureaucratic outfits in the Federal government. The DoD has, from what I've seen, a much worse track record at poor choices in spending. And in the end, NASA is an agency we can all be proud of, both as Americans and as a planet. (While the achievements are generally primarily American work, NASA definitely works with other nations. And even in the Apollo era when it was a more American-specific endevour, I think we as a species took communal pride in NASA's work because it wasn't done to materially benefit the US as much as to show what humans could do.)
"We came in peace for all mankind."
And note that the planting of the flag was more like the flag atop a mountain than claiming the Moon, in as much we're not allowed to claim the Moon by treaty.
Well, that too. Mostly I was thinking that the total lack of long-term consequences of our actions would definitely free up most people's behavior.