On October 20, 1980, the meter was redefined. The definition states that the meter is the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second. The speed of light is c = 299,792,458 m/s.
So if Martian seconds are longer, then you would change the time interval to match, and the meter would stay the same length.
One thing nobody seems to get: They didn't just sit down and decide to define a Martian second arbitrarily. The guys at JPL are smart. If it was more convenient to measure Martian sols in terrestrial units, they would.
The main reason to have Martian sols be exactly 24 units long has to do with celestial navigation and orbiting the planet. Go read Zubrin's Case for Mars if you want the gritty details.
Unlike most of the posters so far, who seem to be discussing some other series by some other author.
I liked the Praxis. I like most of Williams' books. Why? He's a mutant. He never writes the same book twice, and he jumps freely between genres. Like cyberpunk? Read Hardwired. Want apocalypse fiction? Read the Rift.
I like not knowing what he's going to do next. The Praxis is the first book in a series, which Williams hasn't done previously. If it seems stilted and cliched so far, wait.
Geostationary orbits experience shadowing by the Earth every so often, something you'd want to avoid. IIRC, it's up to twenty minutes a day for something like three months out of the year.
I don't have my references handy, but the main reason to prefer an elliptic orbit is due to the ground track of the satellite. A geostationary orbit ground track is a single point. The ground track for a highly elliptic orbit with a total orbital period equal to the Earth's would look like an ellipse on the ground. As it orbits, the satellite would slowly move along that path, keeping the receiving station in the middle.
You would have to continually bend the transmission beam, but not by much.
Construction of the power sat in HEEO avoids shadowing by the Earth, and makes returning construction materials from Earth-crossing asteriods much easier - all you have to do is dip the package into the atmosphere a couple times, and you've achieved HEEO. To get something from an asteriod or even the Moon into GEO requires more total delta-v, even using atmospheric braking.
SSO isn't a good idea because it means re-aiming the power beam produced by the collector continously. HEEO swings in as close as 300km and as far away as 20,000km. SSOs tend to be 800-1000 km. If you manage the orbital period of a HEEO right, you get something similar to a Molniya orbit, where the apogee remains fixed. In effect, this lets out hypothetical power sat use a single receiving station, bending the beam as the satellite moves first ahead, then behind a fixed point on the Eath's surface.
Right - as you pointed out, the Moon is good for a few things: Radio and optical observatories.
I'm still not convinced that putting solar collectors at the high latitudes is a good idea. The main problem is beaming back the power that's been collected. From HEEO, you can use a power maser, and have a beam footprint on the Earth of only a few kilometers. The Moon is much further away, and even if the beam only spreads 0.1%, that leaves a few hundred kilometers of Earth covered by microwave energy. Not that it would be dangerous, but it'd be a pain to build a collector that big. And though the data from Clementine hint at water in shadowed craters, how are we going to get at it? Ice at those temperatures is harder than concrete - and if it's mixed with the regolith, as it would be if it condensed from vapor, then it's ten times worse.
I do think radio observatories on the lunar farside are a good idea - but we don't need a manned base to support them.
Field testing of techniques for a manned Mars mission is simply impossible on the Moon - the gravity, the atmosphere, the types of prospecting tools and techniques - all these things are drastically different on the Moon. If we want to practice going to Mars, there are places on Earth that do a better job of simulating the environment. That's certainly closer to home than sending people to the Moon.
Don't get me wrong - some of this plan has merit. But I don't think NASA, or any other government agency, is going to be able to exploit off-Earth resources effectively.
The Moon is just not worth it in terms of energy and materials - if you want solar collectors, a better place for them is in HEEO (highly elliptic Earth orbit), which experiences 99% sunshine, versus 50% for a location on the lunar surface. Add to that the difficulty in breaking down the highly oxidized lunar regolith, and the transporting the equipment to do so to the Moon, and you have one very expensive mining operation.
The Moon may be useful as a platform for observatories (both optical and radio), but it's important to recognize that those are not commercially viable enterprises.
Now, if you want to build things in space (solar collectors, colonies, etc), the best place to go looking for materials is the NEOs (Near Earth objects) that pass close to the Earth on a regular basis. About half of the NEOs out there are main belt asteriods that have had their orbits perturbed by Jupiter. The other half are extinct comets that have been pulled into short-term orbits and had all the ice in the first few meters of their surface removed. Between these two, you have everything you need: metals, organics, water, clays, salts, etc. All things that the Moon is severely lacking in. It has been remarked upon that the slag left over from processing the average NEO would be worht more than regolith.
You have a reasonable expection of privacy when speaking on the phone... alas, that privacy has become a victim of 1980s anti-drug hysteria and the radical right agenda that has followed, one that now interprets a private communication as being 'property' of one's employer merely because it happened to be conducted using a piece of company equipment (the telephone)... at one end.
You should have a reasonable expectation of privacy in conducting correspondence via email, but again, the same flawed logic has been applied to extend property rights over the medium to include property rights over the content (your correspondence), merely because the medium is new (a computer network) and ignoring two centuries of precedent to the contrary in every other communications medium (including, until the 1980s, telephony).
Why is this "flawed logic"? In the specific case of computer networks, I can see a valid argument being made that your employer has the right to review your use of their resources. The situation is similar for phone service. This is not the same as saying you have no right to privacy at work.
Don't call me a dupe of some supposed "right-wing agenda", make a good arguement. That'll convince me a lot quicker than ranting against "libertarian excesses". Unfortunately, this is Slashdot, and most mods wouldn't know a good arguement if it gave them a lap-dance at a strip club.
I posted instead of modding. Does this make me a good person?
This is really a great find, and an unintended one at that. Shuttles don't carry "black box" flight data recorders like commercial aircraft do. A data recorder, while useful in an accident, was thought unlikely to survive re-entry in a catastrophic event.
Why, then, does Columbia have the OEX recorder? Simple - Columbia was one of the first Shuttles to fly to orbit, and the engineers at NASA wanted a data recorder on board so they could examine and validate some characteristics of the vehicle design.
The OEX recorder contains far more information than a simple "black box". Finding it, intact, will greatly aid the understanding of what went wrong, and hopefully lead to increased safety on future Shuttle flights. Perhaps, something similar to the OEX recorder will be integrated into the other Shuttles, since it looks like a data recorder can survive re-entry.
Watching 80% of the rocket fall away in stages - all those millions of dollars in raw materials - just goes to show how wasteful our current launch systems are
You haven't priced metals recently, have you? The raw materials for a decent sized rocket cost at most a hundred thousand dollars - not even a million. What's expensive is the production of the parts from those raw materials. That problem is easily licked - make a few thousand rockets, and the production cost drops dramatically. I lost exact count, but the total number of launches of all types from Earth in the last 50 years is something less than five thousand. We are still in the very early stages of the Space Age.
Re:Good idea for nuclear waste?
on
Going Up?
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· Score: 1
Not true - once you get past the midpoint of a long cable like this, you accelerate toward the end. All you do is let go at the right time.
In short - yes. But it won't have any major effect. The number of seconds in a year already fluctuates as large weather systems (El Nino) change the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. Like a spinning ballet dancer extending her arms, excess water in the atmosphere near the Equator causes the Earth's rotation to slow. However, the total change is miniscule - something like half a nanosecond per year. Particle physicists and others who need extremely accurate measures of time make adjustments for these effects. The rest of us don't notice.
OK, for those of you who think this is just a rip-off of NASA's Shuttle: It's not
Most importantly:
The American shuttle design was studied intensively by Russian rocket scientists, but important aspects of it were rejected based on Soviet engineering analysis and technology.
Space hardware is notoriously NOT modular - a design that works on American solid-fuel boosters doesn't work on Russian liquid-fuel boosters. Furthermore, and more importantly, all of the control systems on Buran were designed and built solely by the Soviets. This allowed Burtan to do something the US Shuttle can't - fly to space and back unmanned.
From the pics at the BBC, this is a slightly different design than Buran - note the vertical control surfaces are on the wingtips instead of a single tailfin. Interestingly, this looks a lot like some of the early Shuttle designs - the current Shuttle, which was designed to service a space station, was redesigned to replace a station, and now services a station.
I wonder if this might be used as an alternative to the Soyuz capsules the Russians currently use for unmanned resupply of the ISS - it could conceivably be flown entirely from the ground, a capability demonstrated by Buran (a capability the Shuttle doesn't have).
The point of electric cars is to move the polluting emissions from the cars to the generating plants, where it can be controlled more closely. There are already very tight limits on how much sulphur, etc. can go out the chimney at your average coal/oil/natural gas generating plant.
Nuclear plants are another story. It may very well be possible to design a reactor that produces no waste - that is an engineering matter. Building the thing is a political matter, and thus not subject to the dictates of reason.
Solar (terrestrial or space-based), wind, and hydroelectric power aren't being built fast enough to keep up with demand, mainly due to their low output and high cost.
One thing the article ignores is the development of small fuel cells that can use methanol as fuel directly. Methanol (or ethanol) can easily be made from corn, soybeans, or industrial hemp. Such fuel cells could power small devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and laptops for days instead of hours on a few deciliters of alcohol, without noxious ozone and nitrous oxide emmissions.
Cosmic rays are not a problem on journeys of less than half a year - a round trip to Mars and back exposes an astronaut to less radiation from cosmic rays than people living in Aspen, CO, will recieve in their lifetime.
The biggest radiation hazard comes not in the form of cosmic rays but gamma and x-rays from large solar flares. The prompt does from a solar flare could exceed 100 rem total, which would kill a crew in a cycler such as Aldrin seems to advocate.
As for the muscular degeneration problem, there isn't one. Yes, in microgravity astronauts experience muscule and bone loss. However, there is a lot of things that can be done to slow this process, without resorting to centrifuges to simulate gravity (which is probably the easiest solution...). Soviet cosmonauts who spent between 6 and 18 months in orbit have shown rapid recovery from the effects of microgravity exposure.
The greatest problem facing a manned mission to Mars seems to be public apathy and lack of focus at NASA. This is why heroic figures like Buzz Aldrin are getting involved, to bring the discussion to the public view, and motivate the appointed officals who oversee the manned space program.
"It's not just the patents themselves. It's how these patents are being enforced," said Michael Watson
Information may or may not want to be free, but it costs a lot of money to do this kind of research. Patenting gene sequences and describing their function as intellectual property offers a way to recoup the high cost of R&D.
The problem is, some (not all) biotech companies are enforcing their IP like some (not all) software companies do - sue first and ask questions later.
Now, I'm sure I'll get flamed by the Slahdot crowd that thinks everything should be "Open Source", but there are fundamental differences between computer science and genetic science.
OK, you could use this as a rather inefficient way of getting software to remote area - have a text-to-speech program "read" the code, broadcast it on the radio, and tape it at your location. Then, play the recording back to a voice-recognition program (should be easier if the speech was computer-generated). You could probably even do this a double speed or more, right? Only, how the heck do you implement error correcting?
Microbes cannot live on the Moon, but they can survive there. The microbes found on the Surveyor had been exposed to vacuum, radiation, and cold. They were in a dormant state, much like the bacteria found in a huge salt deposits deep underground (can't find this link at the moment.) They did not come from the Moon, they were a result of a flawed decontamination procedure.
Recent evidence is reshaping how we think about life - from the ice caps to deep underground, life is found. But all of these life forms obey the laws of molecular biology and thermodynamics as we understand them. There may be a billion different way to reproduce, but DNA and RNA seem to be favored.
Of course, as new evidence is gathered, new theories are proposed. It may be that the most prevalent form of life is a plasma cloud, or clays that form repeating layers in cold, still waters.
No one is talking about introducing this or any other organism to Mars in this article - it is simply making the point that life can be found in a wide variety of habitats where we might not know to look for it. Stringent protocols are in place to prevent the spread of Terran microbes to other planets.
Life might be present on Mars under the ice caps or deep underground in a geothermal "Eden", and could thrive in a hypothetical Europan sea. Some of these environmental conditions (subzero ice) are present on Earth - by studying them, we learn what to look for, an important step if we send robotic or manned missions.
I for one would like to see a serious program of robotic exploration of Mars and Europa as a precursor to manned missions there. Researching extreme conditions on Earth is a step in the right direction.
Gee, if they have a telescope that can see stuff on the moon in that kind of detail, does that mean that they can now confirm that the moon landing wasn't faked?
Uh... what? Nobody's talking about about looking at the Moon at a high resolution - merely measuring the distance from the Earth to the Moon with high precision. You don't need to see the mirrors the Apollo landers left to use them. The beam spot size of a laser projected from Earth is a few kilometers wide when it gets to the Moon.
Why do you like [insert YOUR favorite here] so much?
Anyone can, if they want, find something bad about something you like. I like anime because I think it is a refreshing change from the dreck that spills from American studios. Yes, some anime is boring, and badly translated, and badly drawn, and some people know WAY too much about it, but everything is the same way.
How many people lined up in the cold to buy tickets for Lord of the Rings? Or Harry Potter? Or to go to a Baptist revival? Or a book signing? Or a software convention? Or.... You get the idea.
For most people, television and movies are passive entertainment. For the obsessed, however, it becomes active. Instead of just seeing something, the begin to live it. Anime is not alone in this. Witness the Trekkie phenomena, or the following some soap operas have. For otakus (a term which, in Japan, carries a strong negative connotation) of any sort, the world on the screen is real.
The point is that nearly everyone has something they obsess over, whether they do it quietly or not. It's not fair to condemn someone just because they happen to like something that you don't.
-----------
An enlightened man might use a Mac to edit a movie, Windows to play a game, and UNIX to write software. If his neighbor uses Windows to edit a movie, and a Mac to play a game, the enlightened man will accept, and perhaps even celebrate these differences. If someone tells the enlightened man that he should be using Windows 3.1 (the One True OS) the enlightened man will feel free to call that man an idiot. If the same man simply states that Windows 3.1 has always worked for him and he sees no reason upgrade, the enlightened man will nod his assent, and offer the man his copy of MS Word 1.0.
For those of you who don't yet know, Disney has NO plans to release any more of Miyazaki's films, despite owning the US distribution rights to 11 of his films.
There's a petition here to get Disney to at least release some of these films on home video.
Disney's position is based on the poor performance of Princess Mononoke in the US. That release grossed just over $2 million in the US (it grossed over $150 million in Japan). However, it should be noted that Princess Mononoke was a limited release (I drove over 150 miles to see it - twice!), with little advertising before it came out.
There is hope however. A previous petition convinced Disney to add the Japanese language track and literal English translation to the DVD relese of Mononoke.
I haven't been in any B-52's for any length of time, but I've climbed in a few at airshows and such, and I want to know what the Air Force intends to do about the SMELL. Any pilot who flies the BUFF (Big Ugly Fat F*cker) will tell you - the interior smells BAD - imagine a 50-year collection of stale sweat, spilled lunches, and toilet overflows. It truly is enough to make one gag.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahem.
On October 20, 1980, the meter was redefined. The definition states that the meter is the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second. The speed of light is c = 299,792,458 m/s.
So if Martian seconds are longer, then you would change the time interval to match, and the meter would stay the same length.
One thing nobody seems to get: They didn't just sit down and decide to define a Martian second arbitrarily. The guys at JPL are smart. If it was more convenient to measure Martian sols in terrestrial units, they would.
The main reason to have Martian sols be exactly 24 units long has to do with celestial navigation and orbiting the planet. Go read Zubrin's Case for Mars if you want the gritty details.
Unlike most of the posters so far, who seem to be discussing some other series by some other author.
I liked the Praxis. I like most of Williams' books. Why? He's a mutant. He never writes the same book twice, and he jumps freely between genres. Like cyberpunk? Read Hardwired. Want apocalypse fiction? Read the Rift.
I like not knowing what he's going to do next. The Praxis is the first book in a series, which Williams hasn't done previously. If it seems stilted and cliched so far, wait.
Geostationary orbits experience shadowing by the Earth every so often, something you'd want to avoid. IIRC, it's up to twenty minutes a day for something like three months out of the year.
I don't have my references handy, but the main reason to prefer an elliptic orbit is due to the ground track of the satellite. A geostationary orbit ground track is a single point. The ground track for a highly elliptic orbit with a total orbital period equal to the Earth's would look like an ellipse on the ground. As it orbits, the satellite would slowly move along that path, keeping the receiving station in the middle.
You would have to continually bend the transmission beam, but not by much.
Construction of the power sat in HEEO avoids shadowing by the Earth, and makes returning construction materials from Earth-crossing asteriods much easier - all you have to do is dip the package into the atmosphere a couple times, and you've achieved HEEO. To get something from an asteriod or even the Moon into GEO requires more total delta-v, even using atmospheric braking.
SSO isn't a good idea because it means re-aiming the power beam produced by the collector continously. HEEO swings in as close as 300km and as far away as 20,000km. SSOs tend to be 800-1000 km. If you manage the orbital period of a HEEO right, you get something similar to a Molniya orbit, where the apogee remains fixed. In effect, this lets out hypothetical power sat use a single receiving station, bending the beam as the satellite moves first ahead, then behind a fixed point on the Eath's surface.
Right - as you pointed out, the Moon is good for a few things: Radio and optical observatories.
I'm still not convinced that putting solar collectors at the high latitudes is a good idea. The main problem is beaming back the power that's been collected. From HEEO, you can use a power maser, and have a beam footprint on the Earth of only a few kilometers. The Moon is much further away, and even if the beam only spreads 0.1%, that leaves a few hundred kilometers of Earth covered by microwave energy. Not that it would be dangerous, but it'd be a pain to build a collector that big. And though the data from Clementine hint at water in shadowed craters, how are we going to get at it? Ice at those temperatures is harder than concrete - and if it's mixed with the regolith, as it would be if it condensed from vapor, then it's ten times worse.
I do think radio observatories on the lunar farside are a good idea - but we don't need a manned base to support them.
Field testing of techniques for a manned Mars mission is simply impossible on the Moon - the gravity, the atmosphere, the types of prospecting tools and techniques - all these things are drastically different on the Moon. If we want to practice going to Mars, there are places on Earth that do a better job of simulating the environment. That's certainly closer to home than sending people to the Moon.
Don't get me wrong - some of this plan has merit. But I don't think NASA, or any other government agency, is going to be able to exploit off-Earth resources effectively.
The Moon is just not worth it in terms of energy and materials - if you want solar collectors, a better place for them is in HEEO (highly elliptic Earth orbit), which experiences 99% sunshine, versus 50% for a location on the lunar surface. Add to that the difficulty in breaking down the highly oxidized lunar regolith, and the transporting the equipment to do so to the Moon, and you have one very expensive mining operation.
The Moon may be useful as a platform for observatories (both optical and radio), but it's important to recognize that those are not commercially viable enterprises.
Now, if you want to build things in space (solar collectors, colonies, etc), the best place to go looking for materials is the NEOs (Near Earth objects) that pass close to the Earth on a regular basis. About half of the NEOs out there are main belt asteriods that have had their orbits perturbed by Jupiter. The other half are extinct comets that have been pulled into short-term orbits and had all the ice in the first few meters of their surface removed. Between these two, you have everything you need: metals, organics, water, clays, salts, etc. All things that the Moon is severely lacking in. It has been remarked upon that the slag left over from processing the average NEO would be worht more than regolith.
Why is this "flawed logic"? In the specific case of computer networks, I can see a valid argument being made that your employer has the right to review your use of their resources. The situation is similar for phone service. This is not the same as saying you have no right to privacy at work.
Don't call me a dupe of some supposed "right-wing agenda", make a good arguement. That'll convince me a lot quicker than ranting against "libertarian excesses". Unfortunately, this is Slashdot, and most mods wouldn't know a good arguement if it gave them a lap-dance at a strip club.
I posted instead of modding. Does this make me a good person?
This is really a great find, and an unintended one at that. Shuttles don't carry "black box" flight data recorders like commercial aircraft do. A data recorder, while useful in an accident, was thought unlikely to survive re-entry in a catastrophic event.
Why, then, does Columbia have the OEX recorder? Simple - Columbia was one of the first Shuttles to fly to orbit, and the engineers at NASA wanted a data recorder on board so they could examine and validate some characteristics of the vehicle design.
The OEX recorder contains far more information than a simple "black box". Finding it, intact, will greatly aid the understanding of what went wrong, and hopefully lead to increased safety on future Shuttle flights. Perhaps, something similar to the OEX recorder will be integrated into the other Shuttles, since it looks like a data recorder can survive re-entry.
You haven't priced metals recently, have you? The raw materials for a decent sized rocket cost at most a hundred thousand dollars - not even a million. What's expensive is the production of the parts from those raw materials. That problem is easily licked - make a few thousand rockets, and the production cost drops dramatically. I lost exact count, but the total number of launches of all types from Earth in the last 50 years is something less than five thousand. We are still in the very early stages of the Space Age.
Not true - once you get past the midpoint of a long cable like this, you accelerate toward the end. All you do is let go at the right time.
In short - yes. But it won't have any major effect. The number of seconds in a year already fluctuates as large weather systems (El Nino) change the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. Like a spinning ballet dancer extending her arms, excess water in the atmosphere near the Equator causes the Earth's rotation to slow. However, the total change is miniscule - something like half a nanosecond per year. Particle physicists and others who need extremely accurate measures of time make adjustments for these effects. The rest of us don't notice.
....that the link above points to Management Partners and Associates and not The Motion Picture Association of America
Most importantly:Space hardware is notoriously NOT modular - a design that works on American solid-fuel boosters doesn't work on Russian liquid-fuel boosters. Furthermore, and more importantly, all of the control systems on Buran were designed and built solely by the Soviets. This allowed Burtan to do something the US Shuttle can't - fly to space and back unmanned.
From the pics at the BBC, this is a slightly different design than Buran - note the vertical control surfaces are on the wingtips instead of a single tailfin. Interestingly, this looks a lot like some of the early Shuttle designs - the current Shuttle, which was designed to service a space station, was redesigned to replace a station, and now services a station.
I wonder if this might be used as an alternative to the Soyuz capsules the Russians currently use for unmanned resupply of the ISS - it could conceivably be flown entirely from the ground, a capability demonstrated by Buran (a capability the Shuttle doesn't have).
Not me, I'm afraid - I'm violently allergic to marijuana, as I discovered when I moved into a dorm room formerly occupied by two hemp "enthusiasts".
The point of electric cars is to move the polluting emissions from the cars to the generating plants, where it can be controlled more closely. There are already very tight limits on how much sulphur, etc. can go out the chimney at your average coal/oil/natural gas generating plant.
Nuclear plants are another story. It may very well be possible to design a reactor that produces no waste - that is an engineering matter. Building the thing is a political matter, and thus not subject to the dictates of reason.
Solar (terrestrial or space-based), wind, and hydroelectric power aren't being built fast enough to keep up with demand, mainly due to their low output and high cost.
One thing the article ignores is the development of small fuel cells that can use methanol as fuel directly. Methanol (or ethanol) can easily be made from corn, soybeans, or industrial hemp. Such fuel cells could power small devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and laptops for days instead of hours on a few deciliters of alcohol, without noxious ozone and nitrous oxide emmissions.
Cosmic rays are not a problem on journeys of less than half a year - a round trip to Mars and back exposes an astronaut to less radiation from cosmic rays than people living in Aspen, CO, will recieve in their lifetime.
The biggest radiation hazard comes not in the form of cosmic rays but gamma and x-rays from large solar flares. The prompt does from a solar flare could exceed 100 rem total, which would kill a crew in a cycler such as Aldrin seems to advocate.
As for the muscular degeneration problem, there isn't one. Yes, in microgravity astronauts experience muscule and bone loss. However, there is a lot of things that can be done to slow this process, without resorting to centrifuges to simulate gravity (which is probably the easiest solution...). Soviet cosmonauts who spent between 6 and 18 months in orbit have shown rapid recovery from the effects of microgravity exposure.
The greatest problem facing a manned mission to Mars seems to be public apathy and lack of focus at NASA. This is why heroic figures like Buzz Aldrin are getting involved, to bring the discussion to the public view, and motivate the appointed officals who oversee the manned space program.
The problem is, some (not all) biotech companies are enforcing their IP like some (not all) software companies do - sue first and ask questions later.
Now, I'm sure I'll get flamed by the Slahdot crowd that thinks everything should be "Open Source", but there are fundamental differences between computer science and genetic science.
OK, you could use this as a rather inefficient way of getting software to remote area - have a text-to-speech program "read" the code, broadcast it on the radio, and tape it at your location. Then, play the recording back to a voice-recognition program (should be easier if the speech was computer-generated). You could probably even do this a double speed or more, right? Only, how the heck do you implement error correcting?
Microbes cannot live on the Moon, but they can survive there. The microbes found on the Surveyor had been exposed to vacuum, radiation, and cold. They were in a dormant state, much like the bacteria found in a huge salt deposits deep underground (can't find this link at the moment.) They did not come from the Moon, they were a result of a flawed decontamination procedure.
Recent evidence is reshaping how we think about life - from the ice caps to deep underground, life is found. But all of these life forms obey the laws of molecular biology and thermodynamics as we understand them. There may be a billion different way to reproduce, but DNA and RNA seem to be favored.
Of course, as new evidence is gathered, new theories are proposed. It may be that the most prevalent form of life is a plasma cloud, or clays that form repeating layers in cold, still waters.
No one is talking about introducing this or any other organism to Mars in this article - it is simply making the point that life can be found in a wide variety of habitats where we might not know to look for it. Stringent protocols are in place to prevent the spread of Terran microbes to other planets.
Life might be present on Mars under the ice caps or deep underground in a geothermal "Eden", and could thrive in a hypothetical Europan sea. Some of these environmental conditions (subzero ice) are present on Earth - by studying them, we learn what to look for, an important step if we send robotic or manned missions.
I for one would like to see a serious program of robotic exploration of Mars and Europa as a precursor to manned missions there. Researching extreme conditions on Earth is a step in the right direction.
Anyone can, if they want, find something bad about something you like. I like anime because I think it is a refreshing change from the dreck that spills from American studios. Yes, some anime is boring, and badly translated, and badly drawn, and some people know WAY too much about it, but everything is the same way.
How many people lined up in the cold to buy tickets for Lord of the Rings? Or Harry Potter? Or to go to a Baptist revival? Or a book signing? Or a software convention? Or.... You get the idea.
For most people, television and movies are passive entertainment. For the obsessed, however, it becomes active. Instead of just seeing something, the begin to live it. Anime is not alone in this. Witness the Trekkie phenomena, or the following some soap operas have. For otakus (a term which, in Japan, carries a strong negative connotation) of any sort, the world on the screen is real.
The point is that nearly everyone has something they obsess over, whether they do it quietly or not. It's not fair to condemn someone just because they happen to like something that you don't.
-----------
From the website of Rev. Jim Huber, Heretic
For those of you who don't yet know, Disney has NO plans to release any more of Miyazaki's films, despite owning the US distribution rights to 11 of his films.
There's a petition here to get Disney to at least release some of these films on home video.
Disney's position is based on the poor performance of Princess Mononoke in the US. That release grossed just over $2 million in the US (it grossed over $150 million in Japan). However, it should be noted that Princess Mononoke was a limited release (I drove over 150 miles to see it - twice!), with little advertising before it came out.
There is hope however. A previous petition convinced Disney to add the Japanese language track and literal English translation to the DVD relese of Mononoke.
I haven't been in any B-52's for any length of time, but I've climbed in a few at airshows and such, and I want to know what the Air Force intends to do about the SMELL. Any pilot who flies the BUFF (Big Ugly Fat F*cker) will tell you - the interior smells BAD - imagine a 50-year collection of stale sweat, spilled lunches, and toilet overflows. It truly is enough to make one gag.