Many people here seem to think this kind of missions are quite useless and especially to the Pluto; the small, frozen planetary body far far away.
In my opinion it is one of the most interesting planets in the solar system. We know almost nothing about it. Anyway, the facts we know about of it's size, mass and possible compounds it consists of, are really interesting. Like already said here, the planet is believed to have an atmosphere which is now in a gaseous state because the planet is close enough to the sun (it has a weird, a bit like asteroid or comet style orbit but it's much bigger than any of them). When the planet moves on, it also get's more far away from the sun and the atmosphere is going get frozen. Or to put it the other way, it's gonna lose it's atmosphere for some 200 years.
The mission doesn't have so much time.. The probe should be sent now or really soon to get to the planet in time when there is still an atmosphere.
As a conclusion, I think the planet is WEIRD and that makes it a perfect and an interesting case of study from which we could learn something (at least scientifically).
In addition, the probe would not be there to only study Pluto, but also general conditions in that part of the Solar System - the Kuiper disk. It would also study some astoroid bodies there etc... We don't know almost anything about the Kuiper disk either.
This SETI@home-accelerator sound like really cool idea. I don't think it has any "real" use but as far as I know the SETI@home project really works quite well as it supposed to work and gives an unbelievable amount of free processing power to the project. This is the way SETI should be done, in my opinion. If you are interested, you can contribute and that's it. This piece of hardware is really interesting thing if you are enthusiast to the project. I don't think it's just taking stupid people's money. Sounds like a nice scientific toy made by some real computer science, Linux & SETI enthusiasts.
About the SETI program itself... Well, I'm not expecting any results really anyway. The way they search may really well be a wrong way and it has so many things why it might never give any results even if we were surrounded by (extraterrestial) intelligent life but I still think it's cool to anyway do this kind of project work. It's a good idea to try.
About this card again, I think it's really cool and funny thing even though it doesn't have so much real use. Of course, it's meant for people with enthusiast to this thing and some money. But even I am considering to buy one sometime. And I really don't have "extra money". We'll see...
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Many people here seem to think this kind of missions are quite useless and especially to the Pluto; the small, frozen planetary body far far away.
In my opinion it is one of the most interesting planets in the solar system. We know almost nothing about it. Anyway, the facts we know about of it's size, mass and possible compounds it consists of, are really interesting. Like already said here, the planet is believed to have an atmosphere which is now in a gaseous state because the planet is close enough to the sun (it has a weird, a bit like asteroid or comet style orbit but it's much bigger than any of them). When the planet moves on, it also get's more far away from the sun and the atmosphere is going get frozen. Or to put it the other way, it's gonna lose it's atmosphere for some 200 years.
The mission doesn't have so much time.. The probe should be sent now or really soon to get to the planet in time when there is still an atmosphere.
As a conclusion, I think the planet is WEIRD and that makes it a perfect and an interesting case of study from which we could learn something (at least scientifically).
In addition, the probe would not be there to only study Pluto, but also general conditions in that part of the Solar System - the Kuiper disk. It would also study some astoroid bodies there etc... We don't know almost anything about the Kuiper disk either.
This SETI@home-accelerator sound like really cool idea. I don't think it has any "real" use but as far as I know the SETI@home project really works quite well as it supposed to work and gives an unbelievable amount of free processing power to the project. This is the way SETI should be done, in my opinion. If you are interested, you can contribute and that's it. This piece of hardware is really interesting thing if you are enthusiast to the project. I don't think it's just taking stupid people's money. Sounds like a nice scientific toy made by some real computer science, Linux & SETI enthusiasts.
About the SETI program itself... Well, I'm not expecting any results really anyway. The way they search may really well be a wrong way and it has so many things why it might never give any results even if we were surrounded by (extraterrestial) intelligent life but I still think it's cool to anyway do this kind of project work. It's a good idea to try.
About this card again, I think it's really cool and funny thing even though it doesn't have so much real use. Of course, it's meant for people with enthusiast to this thing and some money. But even I am considering to buy one sometime. And I really don't have "extra money". We'll see...