>But given this is a robotic submersible, why does it need air conditioners and lights? But it still needs to be able to move around. If it gets into a large area of homogenous water, like the Gulf Stream, what's it gonna do? Even in a perfect environment with steep thermal contrasts, I don't think it can buoyancy-glide it's way out of even a minor current. In the Gulf Stream, it's gonna flounder.
Egads! Are you saying this device was engineered without consideration for usage? What leads you to this conclusion?
After reading the blurb I'm left to imagine that those young men are clicking ads on porn sites. I could be wrong, and if I read the article I may learn something.
Your typical sub has like 10 to 80 thousand horsepower. This sub, on a good day, might do 2% of that. Not exactly a barn-burner. And not even enough to run the lights and air-conditioners.
True that!
But given this is a robotic submersible, why does it need air conditioners and lights?
Yeah, and a god, too. Ok, not absolutely seen, but compared to a loud mouth like you I sure am.
Just for the record: I never said or implied that I am a psychologist OR a biologist. But I suppose it never occurs to someone like you, that it is possible to learn certain aspects of many fields without being an expert.
So you felt compelled to pontificate that the reason I posted was to be funny. That was a clumsy rhetorical attempt to be dismissive and calls into question your ability to analyze the text in front of your eyes. Your level of expertise is suspect now in three fields: psychology, biology and rhetoric.
Since you imply I claim to be a psychologist
Implied? Oh, not at all! That's not possible, by definition.
I had to infer it when I read your declaration that my motive for writing the post was to "be funny." If you are claiming to know the motive behind a post written here, then we must infer that you are claiming some measure of authority and experience in knowing the motives of people you have never met. And that led to my conclusion that you are not actually a psychologist, because a professional would not make such claims.
My conclusion is you are just another blowhard.
AND a biologist you seem to have read some of my other posts. Apparently not the one where I talked with a zookeeper during a guided zoo tour. HE might have been a biologist. HE told me the zoo tigers could leave their contraptions at will. HE told me that they are by far weaker than the free living variety. And even if he did not, the latter is common sense. Zoo tigers don't have to hunt and they usually don't fight. The only thing they do is either sunbathing, eating or sleeping. A human in this situation gets fat and soft. The tigers don't get fat, because their food is strictly controlled. But they still get soft (for a tiger).
So, you took a zoo tour, and the zoo-keeper? docent? biologist? bus-driver? said tigers can escape captivity at will. And yet the San Francisco Zoo event shocked us! Apparently, tigers cannot escape their enclosures at will, generally. We know this from a world of zoos and a lack of tiger escapes.
Finally, you seem to want to compare tigers in cages to tigers in the wild, which has no logical relation to any point I made. Your point is so obvious that no one would argue it. I certainly did not.
I compared caged tigers of the 1930s with caged tigers of today, and concluded that today's cats are more able to escape their enclosures than their predecessors.
So, we talk at cross purposes, and raise the level of invective. To what end? You tell me...
Yep, the information would be highly useful to terrorists - they could probably shoot down the satellites with their AKs!
If someone were conducting a war against you, and you knew they used satellite imaging to track your movements, and you knew the timing of the satellites over your turf, I think you could come up with some effective strategies for creating disinformation, or avoiding detection.
You know, so you could aim your AKs at ground targets with less risk to you and greater harm to the target.
And, given that it is nigh-impossible to change a satellite's orbit after launch, you could benefit today from information gleaned in 2004.
Anyone checked on the health of the sat-watchin' dozen? Perhaps they have been dispatched, CIA-style. You know, to keep terrorists from getting their hands on the info, and to protect the children.
Yes, I know, you are only fishing for 'funny', but I must still answer. Tigers in zoos are the equivalent of couch potatoes. Compared to the wild living variety untrained and weak. Weak of course only for a tiger.
Ah-ha! A psychologist AND a biologist in one package! Credentialed in neither, I assume.
My rhetorical comparison of 1930's-vintage big cats with today's big cats is a reflection both on the lost habitat and its impact on these animals, as well as 70+ years advancement in the science of zoology and its application to the general health of captive big cats.
The pit that served to keep big cats captive for decades was proven no longer adequate. Thus, the couch-potato tiger of today is more capable and in better health than the couch potato tigers that preceded it. And it only took taunting by a few mooks to make it evident.
All compressed into one efficient, pithy statement.
I saw a show where engineers modeled a battle between a giant crocodile and a bevy of meerkat. First they modeled it on a computer, then they built robotics to mimic certain actions, like the croc chomping down on a dozen meerkat, or several meerkat crawling through the croc's butt into its colon, where their claws made short work of the soft tissue.
You know, I'm thinking it might be cool to model that zoo incident in a similar fashion. And it could come in handy at the trial(s).
Apparently, big cats could not jump as high when that pit was dug and the wall built as part of the WPA oo-building project during the Great Depression.
Modern cats are the ones who have survived decades of man's aggressive hunting and removal of habitat, so you should expect they are the fittest. All the lazy, zoo-apt cats are long gone.
Some idiot might stick his tongue into a power socket in your home?
Well, we know babies stick fingers into power sockets. And if a baby is in your home, it's probably your issue. So you would have the choice--protect your kid from your power sockets, or join the Darwin Awards.
(And, you CAN use plastic inserts to protect that baby, so you can have your lamp and light it, too.)
Au contraire! The taunting angle is what makes this story fascinating and worth discussing.
You see, that tiger not only escaped and killed, it then hunted down the other two mooks, who had fled to another part of the park. So, something they said must have really pissed off that cat, and cats generally don't pay attention to what ANYONE says, much less drunken mooks.
Perhaps these guys had seen Night at the Museum, in which the security guard dishes up some serious taunting, eventually leading to a dinosaur roaming the city. That movie makes it OK to taunt a monkey and cavemen. And Mongolians. And diorama-folk.
This story is also a metaphor for one society's subjugation of another, or even the racial imbalance of our prison system, where taunting leads to violence. Maybe it is even metaphor for this year's Superbowl, where the NFL is the zoo administration, the Pats are the mooks, and the Giants are a caged tiger, yearning to pounce and dominate.
Besides, where is your outrage for the shooting of the tiger? If zoo staff had done their jobs that cat could have been returned to its cage to await trial, much as errant pit bulls are put on trial. But a really bad zoo administration exposed that unknowing cat to the lethal harm of a cop with a weapon drawn.
And any mook from the street knows how dangerous THAT can be...
All God's children everywhere should go forth, each of us, to make our own music to share with the rest of the world. And let the world judge the value of that music, for if we are all of us spending our days making music to share freely, then greed and theft become no more than lyrical codas.
Make the music, bruddas and sistas. And toil in the fields as you sing, for the corporatist farmers have gone off to make music as well, and a tuneful soul is a hungry soul. And we shall all spend our days in the fields, working for food and singing our songs. And in the evening, we all go to the temple to record and upload our songs, to share with all.
The Age of Aquarius is upon us, then, in the form of musical communism.
You have conflated cross-breeding with the work being done by these scientists. They have not just moved around bits of DNA, they have concocted a means for introducing new components into the DNA code. This becomes essentially life that is alien to Earth biology.
Combine this with work going on to introduce organisms that use proteins and enzymes that are beyond the range of all of earth's current life forms, and you have the basis for creating life that is impervious to all known biological agents.
So, while few of us fear Angus beef or white-shelled eggs, many of us fear pandemics of viruses that will kill hundreds of millions, maybe billions, and if engineered with these new components, might be unstoppable.
I got a new Blu-ray player for $0, thrown in with a plasma TV I bought two weeks ago. And that's with 5 movies (of course, the selection of movies is extremely limited).
The price doesn't drop much more than that.
(Yeah, and I'm gettin' my HDMI cable online, 'cuz the retailers are too greedy.)
Within 30 years many of the original Y2K DoomBrood will have died off, or entered a state of dementia, brought on by decades of muddy thinking.
And the doombrood spawn--what few there may be--will have robot slaves created specifically for remediation. That, and a legacy of faulty numerology will keep them from crying TEOTWAWKI in every newsgroup.
Mod up a fleet a Roombas to carry minature bomb-sniffers or even spectral-analysis units (beam that data to a central CPU for the intense processing needed). Let Roombas approach shoes, sniff them and move on. Central CPU directs them back for another whiff if need be.
Load those Roombas with floor wax and you have the cleanest, safest airport in the county.
You may donate my winnings to the NASA program dedicated to robotic missions on Mars.
Recovering from faulty, aged filmstock has astronomical costs? You lack perspective. Go rent the DVD of My Fair Lady and you will see a brilliant documentary of how this film was rescued from failing filmstock and how the images were repaired, and how the audio was restored.
The restoration cost was not high enough to prevent the release of this movie on DVD. And the disk sells at discount prices. So, there is profit to be made restoring one print and replicating digitally.
Excellent tools exist today for restoring damaged analog original prints, whereas we have very few tools or techniques for restoring damaged digital works. We focus on recovering damaged media (disks, platters, tape) to the point where we can interpret ones or zeroes, and that's about all.
As to your off-the-cuff dismissal of a study conducted by film archival experts, (and YOUR credentials are what, precisely?) I'll have to point out that your analysis fails to take into account datacenter operating costs--humans, power, HVAC, obsolescence, redundancy. You also failed to account for the mass of digital data generated with each film. Essentially, each digital film IS a library of data much larger than the film itself, all of which consumes time, power and human resource to preserve.
You mentioned a simplistic use of checksums as a means of validating data. You failed to mention data format changes over time and the labor needed to convert older formats to newer formats. You also failed to mention what to do when a checksum test fails. How many backup copies can you rely on, and how much labor went into assuring that those backup copies were made correctly and remain accessible.
For these reasons I don't find the study absurd at all.
The young people here don't understand what the old fogeys know.
That box of family photos you haul out once or twice a year to share with others around the settee? Cost is one cardboard box and some space in the back of the closet. Brew a pot of coffee, place ladyfingers on some small plates, open the box and pass around the memories. Instant gratification, if you used instant coffee. And the photos look just as good, if not better, 30 years down the pike. Can't find that photo you remember, just dig down deeper in the box, you'll find it quickly.
Those photo collections you digitized and put on your hard disk, or uploaded to flickr, or left in your camera? Gotta run the electric. Gotta keep upgrading your PC because of planned obsolescence built into the software and OS. Can't easily share the pix around the settee, and - don't get ladyfinger crumbs in the keyboard, Uncle Fred! - there are no notes written on the pix so you're not certain when and where and who, and you can't find the photo you are looking for? Tough for you--all those sequentially numbered file names make no sense.
And the technique for cutting out that rat bastard who divorced your sister is more pleasing when you can snip him away with shears, rather than trying to photoshop him out of your collection.
So the family box of photos is the more pleasing and cost-effective way of storing and sharing photos.
Compare, then, the cost of running a storage vault in a salt mine vs. the cost of running banks of storage devices in a salt mine for 30 years.
The salt mine keeps the temperature low, so you don't need refrigeration equipment. All you need is to keep the vault dry and secure.
Running a data center has much higher operating costs AND you know that ALL the equipment you install today will have become obsolete and been replaced in 30 years. Maybe it cycles every decade. And, over 30 years that electric bill keeps coming. And you need to keep a higher degree of security, because digital media is so damned tempting. Once it is stolen, it is easily replicated and shared.
So, don't be so quick to dismiss the study. Think it through and the light will come on.
For reference, the 49ers want to build a stadium in Santa Clara. Estimated electric bill over 30 years is $100 million.
I think I would like to go into the storage business. If this is even halfway true, then it looks like very little real cost, and boatloads of profit...
I suppose you might think that if you had an abandoned salt mine among your assets. Consider the downside, though! You have collected digital data and 25 years after first storage clients come knocking to retrieve that data. And you don't have it, or you don't have all of it. Or you have it all in a format that cannot be played through theater projectors without several steps of conversion.
Or, in a fit of cost-reduction pressure 7 years into your venture, you decided to compress all your videos with Divx and you then destroyed the original files.
Aw, give it up. We all know that professional film production will fall into the hands of kids with cellphone cams. And they don't expect to pay for anything!
Supernovas have long been assumed to be a fixed brightness and thus been used to measure distances on a galactic scale by how bright they are. Recent research may refute that assumption which could explain this result. It would also invalidate many other theories and force us to rethink almost our entire theory of cosmology.
Oh, no you don't! You're not dragging Velikovsky out of the closet again!
Another slashdot article about a month ago suggested that the type of collisions needed to create our moon were relatively rare, based on dust analysis of new systems. However, 20 Mars-sized proto-planets seems like it would create pretty good chances for moon-creating collisions. (Although gas giants probably hog most.)
This is all very interesting, and I'm having trouble understanding HOW such major collisions could take place across such a vast amount of space. If all this material orbited the Sun, were the orbits of the 20 first-gen planets so elliptical that they crossed paths? If that's the case, what eventually changed the orbits of the second-gen planets such that there are no more collisions? Or was it all a honkin' great mass of asteroids and protoplanets moving in orbits influenced by frequent collisions with other small objects in the cloud?
You're telling me that you need years of training to pick up rocks? Something's wrong with this picture.
You're telling me that you need humans to pick up rocks? That's a picture straight from 1972.
Best to send machines to do that job, and do the analysis as well. What's that?! You now say you need earthbound machines to conduct analysis? How utterly hidebound!
The thing about robots, whether autonomous or semi-autonomous or controlled remotely, is that you can upgrade their intelligence or operating logic or AI while they are on the mission.
Rock transport and storage near the lab unit is simplified and, because the mission is not returning to earth, the analysis lab can be sophisticated enough to be able to do any high-end experiment that earthbound PhDs can dream up. Make the lab modular and the consummables easy to reload, and you can send refresh the lab's stocks with fairly simple supply missions.
The robotic transporters, flyers and orbiters can grow in sophistication on subsequent missions such that ANY geology ANYWHERE on the surface can be brought to a lab.
Taking this approach would result in science being done much like the Hubble telescope program. Scientists from around the globe can use the resources to conduct worthy experiments, and the knowledge gathered will skyrocket.
On the other hand, if we sink our limited resource into manned missions, we will develop thinner diapers, new flavors of Tang, bring back a few rocks from one tiny landing zone, and suffer anguish and self-doubt as human rock-gatherers die at various points. The science will be limited to verifying the result that humans are best left to Earth and that machines are much better at gathering and analyzing rock.
Slashdot Mirror
Egads! Are you saying this device was engineered without consideration for usage? What leads you to this conclusion?
After reading the blurb I'm left to imagine that those young men are clicking ads on porn sites. I could be wrong, and if I read the article I may learn something.
But, I've got a hunch that I'm stickin' with...
True that!
But given this is a robotic submersible, why does it need air conditioners and lights?
So you felt compelled to pontificate that the reason I posted was to be funny. That was a clumsy rhetorical attempt to be dismissive and calls into question your ability to analyze the text in front of your eyes. Your level of expertise is suspect now in three fields: psychology, biology and rhetoric.
Implied? Oh, not at all! That's not possible, by definition.
I had to infer it when I read your declaration that my motive for writing the post was to "be funny." If you are claiming to know the motive behind a post written here, then we must infer that you are claiming some measure of authority and experience in knowing the motives of people you have never met. And that led to my conclusion that you are not actually a psychologist, because a professional would not make such claims.
My conclusion is you are just another blowhard.
So, you took a zoo tour, and the zoo-keeper? docent? biologist? bus-driver? said tigers can escape captivity at will. And yet the San Francisco Zoo event shocked us! Apparently, tigers cannot escape their enclosures at will, generally. We know this from a world of zoos and a lack of tiger escapes.
Finally, you seem to want to compare tigers in cages to tigers in the wild, which has no logical relation to any point I made. Your point is so obvious that no one would argue it. I certainly did not.
I compared caged tigers of the 1930s with caged tigers of today, and concluded that today's cats are more able to escape their enclosures than their predecessors.
So, we talk at cross purposes, and raise the level of invective. To what end? You tell me...
If someone were conducting a war against you, and you knew they used satellite imaging to track your movements, and you knew the timing of the satellites over your turf, I think you could come up with some effective strategies for creating disinformation, or avoiding detection.
You know, so you could aim your AKs at ground targets with less risk to you and greater harm to the target.
And, given that it is nigh-impossible to change a satellite's orbit after launch, you could benefit today from information gleaned in 2004.
I'm just sayin'...
Say... no activity since 2004?
Anyone checked on the health of the sat-watchin' dozen? Perhaps they have been dispatched, CIA-style. You know, to keep terrorists from getting their hands on the info, and to protect the children.
Ah-ha! A psychologist AND a biologist in one package! Credentialed in neither, I assume.
My rhetorical comparison of 1930's-vintage big cats with today's big cats is a reflection both on the lost habitat and its impact on these animals, as well as 70+ years advancement in the science of zoology and its application to the general health of captive big cats.
The pit that served to keep big cats captive for decades was proven no longer adequate. Thus, the couch-potato tiger of today is more capable and in better health than the couch potato tigers that preceded it. And it only took taunting by a few mooks to make it evident.
All compressed into one efficient, pithy statement.
Yeah, that Discovery Channel really rocks!
I saw a show where engineers modeled a battle between a giant crocodile and a bevy of meerkat. First they modeled it on a computer, then they built robotics to mimic certain actions, like the croc chomping down on a dozen meerkat, or several meerkat crawling through the croc's butt into its colon, where their claws made short work of the soft tissue.
You know, I'm thinking it might be cool to model that zoo incident in a similar fashion. And it could come in handy at the trial(s).
Apparently, big cats could not jump as high when that pit was dug and the wall built as part of the WPA oo-building project during the Great Depression.
Modern cats are the ones who have survived decades of man's aggressive hunting and removal of habitat, so you should expect they are the fittest. All the lazy, zoo-apt cats are long gone.
Some idiot might stick his tongue into a power socket in your home?
Well, we know babies stick fingers into power sockets. And if a baby is in your home, it's probably your issue. So you would have the choice--protect your kid from your power sockets, or join the Darwin Awards.
(And, you CAN use plastic inserts to protect that baby, so you can have your lamp and light it, too.)
Au contraire! The taunting angle is what makes this story fascinating and worth discussing.
You see, that tiger not only escaped and killed, it then hunted down the other two mooks, who had fled to another part of the park. So, something they said must have really pissed off that cat, and cats generally don't pay attention to what ANYONE says, much less drunken mooks.
Perhaps these guys had seen Night at the Museum, in which the security guard dishes up some serious taunting, eventually leading to a dinosaur roaming the city. That movie makes it OK to taunt a monkey and cavemen. And Mongolians. And diorama-folk.
This story is also a metaphor for one society's subjugation of another, or even the racial imbalance of our prison system, where taunting leads to violence. Maybe it is even metaphor for this year's Superbowl, where the NFL is the zoo administration, the Pats are the mooks, and the Giants are a caged tiger, yearning to pounce and dominate.
Besides, where is your outrage for the shooting of the tiger? If zoo staff had done their jobs that cat could have been returned to its cage to await trial, much as errant pit bulls are put on trial. But a really bad zoo administration exposed that unknowing cat to the lethal harm of a cop with a weapon drawn.
And any mook from the street knows how dangerous THAT can be...
Amen to that, bruddah.
All God's children everywhere should go forth, each of us, to make our own music to share with the rest of the world. And let the world judge the value of that music, for if we are all of us spending our days making music to share freely, then greed and theft become no more than lyrical codas.
Make the music, bruddas and sistas. And toil in the fields as you sing, for the corporatist farmers have gone off to make music as well, and a tuneful soul is a hungry soul. And we shall all spend our days in the fields, working for food and singing our songs. And in the evening, we all go to the temple to record and upload our songs, to share with all.
The Age of Aquarius is upon us, then, in the form of musical communism.
You have conflated cross-breeding with the work being done by these scientists. They have not just moved around bits of DNA, they have concocted a means for introducing new components into the DNA code. This becomes essentially life that is alien to Earth biology.
Combine this with work going on to introduce organisms that use proteins and enzymes that are beyond the range of all of earth's current life forms, and you have the basis for creating life that is impervious to all known biological agents.
So, while few of us fear Angus beef or white-shelled eggs, many of us fear pandemics of viruses that will kill hundreds of millions, maybe billions, and if engineered with these new components, might be unstoppable.
I got a new Blu-ray player for $0, thrown in with a plasma TV I bought two weeks ago. And that's with 5 movies (of course, the selection of movies is extremely limited).
The price doesn't drop much more than that.
(Yeah, and I'm gettin' my HDMI cable online, 'cuz the retailers are too greedy.)
Within 30 years many of the original Y2K DoomBrood will have died off, or entered a state of dementia, brought on by decades of muddy thinking.
And the doombrood spawn--what few there may be--will have robot slaves created specifically for remediation. That, and a legacy of faulty numerology will keep them from crying TEOTWAWKI in every newsgroup.
Good riddance!
Literally!
Mod up a fleet a Roombas to carry minature bomb-sniffers or even spectral-analysis units (beam that data to a central CPU for the intense processing needed). Let Roombas approach shoes, sniff them and move on. Central CPU directs them back for another whiff if need be.
Load those Roombas with floor wax and you have the cleanest, safest airport in the county.
You may donate my winnings to the NASA program dedicated to robotic missions on Mars.
Recovering from faulty, aged filmstock has astronomical costs? You lack perspective. Go rent the DVD of My Fair Lady and you will see a brilliant documentary of how this film was rescued from failing filmstock and how the images were repaired, and how the audio was restored.
The restoration cost was not high enough to prevent the release of this movie on DVD. And the disk sells at discount prices. So, there is profit to be made restoring one print and replicating digitally.
Excellent tools exist today for restoring damaged analog original prints, whereas we have very few tools or techniques for restoring damaged digital works. We focus on recovering damaged media (disks, platters, tape) to the point where we can interpret ones or zeroes, and that's about all.
As to your off-the-cuff dismissal of a study conducted by film archival experts, (and YOUR credentials are what, precisely?) I'll have to point out that your analysis fails to take into account datacenter operating costs--humans, power, HVAC, obsolescence, redundancy. You also failed to account for the mass of digital data generated with each film. Essentially, each digital film IS a library of data much larger than the film itself, all of which consumes time, power and human resource to preserve.
You mentioned a simplistic use of checksums as a means of validating data. You failed to mention data format changes over time and the labor needed to convert older formats to newer formats. You also failed to mention what to do when a checksum test fails. How many backup copies can you rely on, and how much labor went into assuring that those backup copies were made correctly and remain accessible.
For these reasons I don't find the study absurd at all.
The young people here don't understand what the old fogeys know.
That box of family photos you haul out once or twice a year to share with others around the settee? Cost is one cardboard box and some space in the back of the closet. Brew a pot of coffee, place ladyfingers on some small plates, open the box and pass around the memories. Instant gratification, if you used instant coffee. And the photos look just as good, if not better, 30 years down the pike. Can't find that photo you remember, just dig down deeper in the box, you'll find it quickly.
Those photo collections you digitized and put on your hard disk, or uploaded to flickr, or left in your camera? Gotta run the electric. Gotta keep upgrading your PC because of planned obsolescence built into the software and OS. Can't easily share the pix around the settee, and - don't get ladyfinger crumbs in the keyboard, Uncle Fred! - there are no notes written on the pix so you're not certain when and where and who, and you can't find the photo you are looking for? Tough for you--all those sequentially numbered file names make no sense.
And the technique for cutting out that rat bastard who divorced your sister is more pleasing when you can snip him away with shears, rather than trying to photoshop him out of your collection.
So the family box of photos is the more pleasing and cost-effective way of storing and sharing photos.
Compare, then, the cost of running a storage vault in a salt mine vs. the cost of running banks of storage devices in a salt mine for 30 years.
The salt mine keeps the temperature low, so you don't need refrigeration equipment. All you need is to keep the vault dry and secure.
Running a data center has much higher operating costs AND you know that ALL the equipment you install today will have become obsolete and been replaced in 30 years. Maybe it cycles every decade.
And, over 30 years that electric bill keeps coming. And you need to keep a higher degree of security, because digital media is so damned tempting. Once it is stolen, it is easily replicated and shared.
So, don't be so quick to dismiss the study. Think it through and the light will come on.
For reference, the 49ers want to build a stadium in Santa Clara. Estimated electric bill over 30 years is $100 million.
I suppose you might think that if you had an abandoned salt mine among your assets. Consider the downside, though! You have collected digital data and 25 years after first storage clients come knocking to retrieve that data. And you don't have it, or you don't have all of it. Or you have it all in a format that cannot be played through theater projectors without several steps of conversion.
Or, in a fit of cost-reduction pressure 7 years into your venture, you decided to compress all your videos with Divx and you then destroyed the original files.
Aw, give it up. We all know that professional film production will fall into the hands of kids with cellphone cams. And they don't expect to pay for anything!
Oh, no you don't! You're not dragging Velikovsky out of the closet again!
This is all very interesting, and I'm having trouble understanding HOW such major collisions could take place across such a vast amount of space. If all this material orbited the Sun, were the orbits of the 20 first-gen planets so elliptical that they crossed paths? If that's the case, what eventually changed the orbits of the second-gen planets such that there are no more collisions?
Or was it all a honkin' great mass of asteroids and protoplanets moving in orbits influenced by frequent collisions with other small objects in the cloud?
You're telling me that you need humans to pick up rocks? That's a picture straight from 1972.
Best to send machines to do that job, and do the analysis as well. What's that?! You now say you need earthbound machines to conduct analysis? How utterly hidebound!
The thing about robots, whether autonomous or semi-autonomous or controlled remotely, is that you can upgrade their intelligence or operating logic or AI while they are on the mission.
Rock transport and storage near the lab unit is simplified and, because the mission is not returning to earth, the analysis lab can be sophisticated enough to be able to do any high-end experiment that earthbound PhDs can dream up. Make the lab modular and the consummables easy to reload, and you can send refresh the lab's stocks with fairly simple supply missions.
The robotic transporters, flyers and orbiters can grow in sophistication on subsequent missions such that ANY geology ANYWHERE on the surface can be brought to a lab.
Taking this approach would result in science being done much like the Hubble telescope program. Scientists from around the globe can use the resources to conduct worthy experiments, and the knowledge gathered will skyrocket.
On the other hand, if we sink our limited resource into manned missions, we will develop thinner diapers, new flavors of Tang, bring back a few rocks from one tiny landing zone, and suffer anguish and self-doubt as human rock-gatherers die at various points. The science will be limited to verifying the result that humans are best left to Earth and that machines are much better at gathering and analyzing rock.
Dang. One black hole can blast an entire galaxy?!
It's a wonder we are here at all...