It will _always_ be more cost effective to send robot probes and that includes sample return missions.
Citation required, i.e., show me the numbers.
Granted, a single Lunokhod mission was cheaper (most likely) than a single Apollo mission, but compare a few grams of returned dust samples against hundreds of kilos of samples hand-picked by astronauts with geology training (and in one case, a professional geologist), plus the seismometers, magnetometers, solar wind samples, heat flow instruments, etc, etc emplaced or recovered by the Apollo crews.
How many Lunokhod missions would it take to equal that, and what would they have cost?
It would have taken a lot of Lunokhod missions true, but most likely it would have been at a much lower cost. Not to mention safety. The last three Apollo missions weren't canceled out of cost issues, but the realization that the NASA had been playing a dangerous game of Russian Roulette when they could have easily lost an Apollo crew to solar flares as depicted in the fate of Apollo 18 in Jame's Michner's "Space". The loss of an Apollo crew would have been considered a propaganda disaster in the Cold War tainting the U.S. only real "first" in the space race, so having shown that we could repeatedly send men to the moon, the decision was quietly made to end it at 17.
Nixon's policies ended a war that started in 1940 when Vietnam pussed out and went the side of the Vichy French on an official capacity, but internally, amongst the people, couldn't decide if they want to be vichy(anti-allies), commie(anti-japan), or free(anti-commie/japan); hence, 35 years of war with minor and major powers in play. It could be put even more succinctly by saying it was a multi-decade multi-war over control of a majority of the world's rubber supply. Basically over 5,000,000 people died from 1940-1975 so you can wear rubbers.
Actually, Nixon prolonged that war when it could have ended in 1968. Deciding that a successful peace treaty would have been too big an electoral advantage for the Democrats, he sabotaged the peace conference by targeted messages to both sides of the table, effectively killing the peace process.
I wonder, when astronomers say 11 times the size of Jupiter, does that mean 11 times the radius, the mass, or that you could fill the sphere of its volume with 11 jupiters? Or the circle area as seen from earth?
It would always be by mass, since it's pretty much nearly impossible to actually get a reading on the radius. Also physics pretty much determines what happens when you've got a gas giant of that mass.
Becoming a star requires at a minimum many times the mass of jupiter. As small stars exist, there's therefore a likelihood that there are gas giants almost as big a the minimum to make a star.
A quick google seems to suggest that's 8% the size of the son
As Jupiter is 0.1% size the son, 11x the size of jupiter doesn't seem that big. We should be able to find "planets" up to almost 80x larger
Those are objects known as Brown Dwarfs which would put them at a different category than Jovian planet. I believe that the minimum mass to establish fusion is something on the order of one tenth solar mass. Brown Dwarves radiate Infared radiation due to heat from residual gravitational collapse. Presumably the standard is considerably higher than Jupiter which also radiates more heat than it absorbs from the Sun.
Nice article, but that only says how they get the age of a star. I suppose that puts an upper limit on the age of the planet.
At least if we assume that the planet was formed with the star. But what if the planet had formed around another star, and then was ejected from that system due to some disturbance, to be later captured by the star it is circling now?
That would be kind of tricky. The planet is moving at escape velocity from it's original star, in most cases, encountering another solar system would have it either just passing through, or it would wind up in a very eccentric orbit. which would not necessarily be in the same plane as the local ecliptic.
And what exactly do we know about planet formation? If anything, we have a hunch how our system formed, but it's neither certain nor do we have any clue whether it's the norm. We already know that our system is in some ways "special", from the rather high amount of trans-HE material to its position in the galactic disc to the mere fact that it's not a multi-star system.
Actually we still don't know enough about stellar formation to determine how far from the norm, the Solar System actually is. The reason that we find so many oddball systems and planets is that those are the easiest systems and planets to find. We are in a form golden area of our Galaxy, far enough from the galactic center that we're not subject to it's nasty radiation and stellar activity, yet not so far that we'd lack in heavy elements. Keep in mind also that most planet detection methods rely on the target solar system being oriented edge on towards us so the planet can intercept the star's light by passing between it and us. That's going to leave a lot out.
Aside from the actual task at hand, SETI may produce a plethora of other helpful information as a byproduct. Perhaps the folks at SETI should look into crowdfunding their efforts and in exchange they could provide scientific data an easily consumable formats. They could also take a look at crowdfunding under the Jobs Act (title III).
Only if that information is catalogued, notated, and distributed in a useful manner, which they may not be devoting manpower or other resources to do.
Aside from the task at hand I'm sure there is a plethora of other information that SETI yields. It would be nice if all data was published in an easily consumable format. The resulting data could be a nice carrot to entice people to help crowdfund the effort.
While much of that data is probably useful in a scientific sense, a catalog of emission numbers and coordinates is not exactly the sexy sell to the public that Hubble pictures were.
Yeah cause the aliens have a different EM spectrum to work with.... ST Voyager not picking up the RF signal was ridiculous and only there as a plot device.
"Different EM spectrum." That really makes my day. That's right up there with "Heisenberg Compensator". Lets hear it for Trek Science!
I've been running this screen saver on various machines for years. Last night, I took look at it running data from 2009, and I've been wondering?
Are they recycling old data? And more to the point since there are other Bionic projects out there, is there a more fruitful use for my computer's spare cycles? Something that might actually have an expectation of positive return to humanity.
At the very least, seti is going to have to start sharing time with other more relevant Bionic projects. I'm still thinking of terminating my participation altogether, as much as I still have enthusiasm for space itself.
I won't miss Best Buy much. Polaroid has a future, have you seen their tablets?
The company that Ed Land created ceased to exist years ago. The only thing of i that remains is the brand name, just like Commedore. Speaking of which the latest holder of that, Commedore USA purveyer of curren tech in redressed old boxes seems to have gone dark.
I run an aftermarket radio on my Nexus 4 that enables LTE.
It's not a separate operating system. It is the definitions for the SDR ASIC in the phone. It is not part of the main ARM processor - it's memory is just mapped through it to facilitate programming.
What the hell is wrong with Slashdot these past few years? It seems that ever since the dice buyout the place has just gone in the shitter.
The place was going downhill long before then. It's like anything that's open to the general public. There's always someone who thinks he can garner 15 seconds of Internet fame by posting to geek paranoia.
The phone could probably use the power of the radiowaves in the air to do very low power things like perhaps change an e-ink display slightly.
Wouldn't it be better to power it from ambient light (which was enough to power my calculator 20 years ago, and if there is no light there's no need to change the e-ink display;) ) or motion?
Shake it to wake it!
How much ambient power did your cheap solar calculator generate when it was stuffed inside your pocket?
The SIM firmware runs silently and in the background and by some reports, even when the phone is switched off, it continues to slowly ping cell towers, making your phone trackable unless you remove the battery.
There's no paranoia like Geek paranoia who daily provide living examples of just how dangerous having just a little knowledge can be. You don't need to be paranoid about the radio in your cellphone. Yes your cellphone is trackable. IT HAS TO BE FOR THE THING TO WORK. I don't worry about who can track my phone when it's turned off, because I, like most people who have ditched landlines, don't turn it off. The whole point of having a phone is to be reachable by the folks who need to contact you and for you to reach those you need to contact. There's no point going over board in tracking the hardware because if you're that clandestine, you're just buying a brace of disposables and chucking them regularly as an operating expense. Or not using them at all. There's a lot of easier ways to track you by the incessant data trail you leave by your phone calls, your email, and your incessant tweeting about how paranoid you are about THEM finding you. You want to be untrackable... go chuck ALL of your communication gear... including your WIFI equipped laptop and go live in a cave somewhere.
Its sink or swim for ALL of us on this ship of fools.
Except of course, for those who aren't on the ship in the first place. For example, every implementation of Communism created a class of elites who didn't share in the problems they created for the rest of society..
You mean like the one percenters who don't suffer when they close a factory in Michigan and ship those jobs off to the Far East? They don't exactly suffer when the economy goes into the toilet for the rest of the country. The fact is while the last ten years may have been shit for the rest of society, for them those were the best years they've had since the Gilded Age.``
You pass a law saying that all property now belongs to the state. If they resist the law violently then killing them isn't murder. And if they don't resist then there is no need to kill them.
Communism can be imposed without force, as long as the (currently) rich are as law abiding as they want the poor to be.
Such a system did exist. It was called Feudalism only the state was the King, who parceled out land to his vassals who in turn employed serfs to feed him, his knights and to tithe to his overlords. But technically it was the King who awarded land and who could take it back by decree. That system was changed in a process that involved a lot of legislation with frequent helpings of violence. (As it did when one King would decide that some of the land parcels owned by another king would look a lot better in HIS possession.)
It's tied up with the whole notion of ownership. After all you can say that you "own" a piece of property. But unless you're the only man in the world, there will come a question of who or what invests you with that "right" of ownership. No matter what kind of society you envision, that right will come from a greater whole and there will be expectations demanded as the price of that right, in the form of laws and taxes.
They've probably made a pretty good effort at working out what a recent immigrant from soviet Russia living on US welfare thought was wrong with the USA.
I really don't get this Rand thing. Maybe it's because some see it as a kind of home grown "wisdom" and see everything else as tainted by some form of education.
It's not hard to get. It's selfishness made into a virtue, Individualism glorified to the extreme. Is it really suprising that anything combining those two would find such an audience?
My reply to both you and the parent is that IMHO most people (including Greenspan, and all of Wall Street) misinterpret Rand. If you recall, the protagonists in each of her books is a builder, not a financier. They were virulently opposed to those who used manipulation of the economic and political system for their own gains..
It was Rand who misinterpreted everyone else. Her entire body of work was borne out of need of revenge for the Bosheviks' treatment of her family. In her books, there are three types of people. The Hero figures from Whom All Blessings Flow, the Evil Parasites who appropriate and misuse those gifts, and the cyphers caught in between. Because the Bosheviks preached the doctrine of We (even if they seldom lived up to it.) Rand responded by a lifelong overcompensation to the doctrine of Me. What she forgets is that building societies has always been a cooperative event. Builders have always relied on others for capital, materials, labor, and transport as well as others scale their dreams to reality when reach exceeds grasp. Without them, they're just madmen staring at pieces of paper. Rand's writings found a ready audience for the selfish because it turns their vice into a virtue. But Galt's little valley of Paradise would founder at the moment someone asked. "Who's going to take care of the plumbing today?" Because no matter how advanced your tech gets, there's always going to be some form of menial work required to keep it running. Something that can't be automated, that will require human dirtwork. What Rand forgets or simply chooses to ignore in her elitism, is that those people matter too.
Might be, but what they have to do with spirit of hacking?
I say, just realizing that instead of clicking buttons you can automate your everyday tasks, may be even simply with shell scripts, is already in the spirit of hacking, as well as the next step of realizing you can extend them to do much more interesting things than simply replacing a human clicking on buttons.
Why do you need GPIO to feel that spirit?
More importantly, why do you feel it's so important to knock a path that someone chooses to walk and they find real fulfillment? There's a dedicated culture of tech enthusiasts surrounding the Raspberry PI. No one is asking you to contribute one red schilling. You have your way of doing things, I have mine, and the Pi folks have theirs. As long as we all bear some kind of fruit from our harvests, try celebrating diversity instead of knocking it. You'll make a lot more friends and the world you experience will be a better place for it.
You're right that holding the phone doesn't technically present a danger - but how do you know whether that person is holding their phone to text, check Facebook, on speakerphone, etc. What other reason is there even to have a phone in your hand while driving, other than actually using it? Better to just make it illegal to have the phone in your hand while driving, otherwise it will lead to people being sneaky.
I sometimes use my phone while sat in traffic, but if I get caught then it's my own fault..
It doesn't matter why you're holding it. Need directions? Mount the damm thing and use audio response and hands free mode. If you have to take your eyes off the road for one single instant, then you're doing something wrong. Having been rammed by more than one idiot on his iphone, I've come to the conclusion that there is nothing that you're doing with your phone that can't wait until you're parked.
That applies having the tools and the infrastructure to make use of that knowledge. If you can't store food, you can't eat, and you can't even read, and you and your children are drinking out of infested water, then certain basic needs have to be addressed before we sink funds into giving them wikipedia access.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget gravitational lending .......
"Hey Jupiter, I'm feeling a bit lightheaded.. can you lend some of your gravity please?"
It will _always_ be more cost effective to send robot probes and that includes sample return missions.
Citation required, i.e., show me the numbers.
Granted, a single Lunokhod mission was cheaper (most likely) than a single Apollo mission, but compare a few grams of returned dust samples against hundreds of kilos of samples hand-picked by astronauts with geology training (and in one case, a professional geologist), plus the seismometers, magnetometers, solar wind samples, heat flow instruments, etc, etc emplaced or recovered by the Apollo crews.
How many Lunokhod missions would it take to equal that, and what would they have cost?
It would have taken a lot of Lunokhod missions true, but most likely it would have been at a much lower cost. Not to mention safety. The last three Apollo missions weren't canceled out of cost issues, but the realization that the NASA had been playing a dangerous game of Russian Roulette when they could have easily lost an Apollo crew to solar flares as depicted in the fate of Apollo 18 in Jame's Michner's "Space". The loss of an Apollo crew would have been considered a propaganda disaster in the Cold War tainting the U.S. only real "first" in the space race, so having shown that we could repeatedly send men to the moon, the decision was quietly made to end it at 17.
Our luck with the Ranger program wasn't much better. We sent 9 Ranger probes to the Moon. Only the last three returned any usable photos.
The Russians sent a sample return mission in 1970. Luna 16.
More importantly, the Russians who had ample reason to do so... have never challenged the Apollo accomplishment.
Nixon's policies ended a war that started in 1940 when Vietnam pussed out and went the side of the Vichy French on an official capacity, but internally, amongst the people, couldn't decide if they want to be vichy(anti-allies), commie(anti-japan), or free(anti-commie/japan); hence, 35 years of war with minor and major powers in play. It could be put even more succinctly by saying it was a multi-decade multi-war over control of a majority of the world's rubber supply. Basically over 5,000,000 people died from 1940-1975 so you can wear rubbers.
Actually, Nixon prolonged that war when it could have ended in 1968. Deciding that a successful peace treaty would have been too big an electoral advantage for the Democrats, he sabotaged the peace conference by targeted messages to both sides of the table, effectively killing the peace process.
I wonder, when astronomers say 11 times the size of Jupiter, does that mean 11 times the radius, the mass, or that you could fill the sphere of its volume with 11 jupiters? Or the circle area as seen from earth?
It would always be by mass, since it's pretty much nearly impossible to actually get a reading on the radius. Also physics pretty much determines what happens when you've got a gas giant of that mass.
Mention Star Trek or Doctor Who in a science thread and you effectively Goodwined it.
Becoming a star requires at a minimum many times the mass of jupiter. As small stars exist, there's therefore a likelihood that there are gas giants almost as big a the minimum to make a star.
A quick google seems to suggest that's 8% the size of the son
As Jupiter is 0.1% size the son, 11x the size of jupiter doesn't seem that big. We should be able to find "planets" up to almost 80x larger
http://www.space.com/21420-smallest-star-size-red-dwarf.html http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=jupiter%20mass%20compared%20to%20sun&t=crmtb01
Those are objects known as Brown Dwarfs which would put them at a different category than Jovian planet. I believe that the minimum mass to establish fusion is something on the order of one tenth solar mass. Brown Dwarves radiate Infared radiation due to heat from residual gravitational collapse. Presumably the standard is considerably higher than Jupiter which also radiates more heat than it absorbs from the Sun.
Nice article, but that only says how they get the age of a star. I suppose that puts an upper limit on the age of the planet.
At least if we assume that the planet was formed with the star. But what if the planet had formed around another star, and then was ejected from that system due to some disturbance, to be later captured by the star it is circling now?
That would be kind of tricky. The planet is moving at escape velocity from it's original star, in most cases, encountering another solar system would have it either just passing through, or it would wind up in a very eccentric orbit. which would not necessarily be in the same plane as the local ecliptic.
And what exactly do we know about planet formation? If anything, we have a hunch how our system formed, but it's neither certain nor do we have any clue whether it's the norm. We already know that our system is in some ways "special", from the rather high amount of trans-HE material to its position in the galactic disc to the mere fact that it's not a multi-star system.
Actually we still don't know enough about stellar formation to determine how far from the norm, the Solar System actually is. The reason that we find so many oddball systems and planets is that those are the easiest systems and planets to find. We are in a form golden area of our Galaxy, far enough from the galactic center that we're not subject to it's nasty radiation and stellar activity, yet not so far that we'd lack in heavy elements. Keep in mind also that most planet detection methods rely on the target solar system being oriented edge on towards us so the planet can intercept the star's light by passing between it and us. That's going to leave a lot out.
Aside from the actual task at hand, SETI may produce a plethora of other helpful information as a byproduct. Perhaps the folks at SETI should look into crowdfunding their efforts and in exchange they could provide scientific data an easily consumable formats. They could also take a look at crowdfunding under the Jobs Act (title III).
Only if that information is catalogued, notated, and distributed in a useful manner, which they may not be devoting manpower or other resources to do.
Aside from the task at hand I'm sure there is a plethora of other information that SETI yields. It would be nice if all data was published in an easily consumable format. The resulting data could be a nice carrot to entice people to help crowdfund the effort.
While much of that data is probably useful in a scientific sense, a catalog of emission numbers and coordinates is not exactly the sexy sell to the public that Hubble pictures were.
Yeah cause the aliens have a different EM spectrum to work with.... ST Voyager not picking up the RF signal was ridiculous and only there as a plot device.
"Different EM spectrum." That really makes my day. That's right up there with "Heisenberg Compensator". Lets hear it for Trek Science!
I've been running this screen saver on various machines for years. Last night, I took look at it running data from 2009, and I've been wondering? Are they recycling old data? And more to the point since there are other Bionic projects out there, is there a more fruitful use for my computer's spare cycles? Something that might actually have an expectation of positive return to humanity. At the very least, seti is going to have to start sharing time with other more relevant Bionic projects. I'm still thinking of terminating my participation altogether, as much as I still have enthusiasm for space itself.
I bought a bunch of stuff when it was 70% off
I won't miss Best Buy much. Polaroid has a future, have you seen their tablets?
The company that Ed Land created ceased to exist years ago. The only thing of i that remains is the brand name, just like Commedore. Speaking of which the latest holder of that, Commedore USA purveyer of curren tech in redressed old boxes seems to have gone dark.
I run an aftermarket radio on my Nexus 4 that enables LTE.
It's not a separate operating system. It is the definitions for the SDR ASIC in the phone. It is not part of the main ARM processor - it's memory is just mapped through it to facilitate programming.
What the hell is wrong with Slashdot these past few years? It seems that ever since the dice buyout the place has just gone in the shitter.
The place was going downhill long before then. It's like anything that's open to the general public. There's always someone who thinks he can garner 15 seconds of Internet fame by posting to geek paranoia.
The phone could probably use the power of the radiowaves in the air to do very low power things like perhaps change an e-ink display slightly.
Wouldn't it be better to power it from ambient light (which was enough to power my calculator 20 years ago, and if there is no light there's no need to change the e-ink display ;) ) or motion?
Shake it to wake it!
How much ambient power did your cheap solar calculator generate when it was stuffed inside your pocket?
The SIM firmware runs silently and in the background and by some reports, even when the phone is switched off, it continues to slowly ping cell towers, making your phone trackable unless you remove the battery.
There's no paranoia like Geek paranoia who daily provide living examples of just how dangerous having just a little knowledge can be. You don't need to be paranoid about the radio in your cellphone. Yes your cellphone is trackable. IT HAS TO BE FOR THE THING TO WORK. I don't worry about who can track my phone when it's turned off, because I, like most people who have ditched landlines, don't turn it off. The whole point of having a phone is to be reachable by the folks who need to contact you and for you to reach those you need to contact. There's no point going over board in tracking the hardware because if you're that clandestine, you're just buying a brace of disposables and chucking them regularly as an operating expense. Or not using them at all. There's a lot of easier ways to track you by the incessant data trail you leave by your phone calls, your email, and your incessant tweeting about how paranoid you are about THEM finding you. You want to be untrackable... go chuck ALL of your communication gear... including your WIFI equipped laptop and go live in a cave somewhere.
Its sink or swim for ALL of us on this ship of fools.
Except of course, for those who aren't on the ship in the first place. For example, every implementation of Communism created a class of elites who didn't share in the problems they created for the rest of society. .
You mean like the one percenters who don't suffer when they close a factory in Michigan and ship those jobs off to the Far East? They don't exactly suffer when the economy goes into the toilet for the rest of the country. The fact is while the last ten years may have been shit for the rest of society, for them those were the best years they've had since the Gilded Age.``
You pass a law saying that all property now belongs to the state. If they resist the law violently then killing them isn't murder. And if they don't resist then there is no need to kill them.
Communism can be imposed without force, as long as the (currently) rich are as law abiding as they want the poor to be.
Such a system did exist. It was called Feudalism only the state was the King, who parceled out land to his vassals who in turn employed serfs to feed him, his knights and to tithe to his overlords. But technically it was the King who awarded land and who could take it back by decree. That system was changed in a process that involved a lot of legislation with frequent helpings of violence. (As it did when one King would decide that some of the land parcels owned by another king would look a lot better in HIS possession.) It's tied up with the whole notion of ownership. After all you can say that you "own" a piece of property. But unless you're the only man in the world, there will come a question of who or what invests you with that "right" of ownership. No matter what kind of society you envision, that right will come from a greater whole and there will be expectations demanded as the price of that right, in the form of laws and taxes.
They've probably made a pretty good effort at working out what a recent immigrant from soviet Russia living on US welfare thought was wrong with the USA. I really don't get this Rand thing. Maybe it's because some see it as a kind of home grown "wisdom" and see everything else as tainted by some form of education.
It's not hard to get. It's selfishness made into a virtue, Individualism glorified to the extreme. Is it really suprising that anything combining those two would find such an audience?
My reply to both you and the parent is that IMHO most people (including Greenspan, and all of Wall Street) misinterpret Rand. If you recall, the protagonists in each of her books is a builder, not a financier. They were virulently opposed to those who used manipulation of the economic and political system for their own gains. .
It was Rand who misinterpreted everyone else. Her entire body of work was borne out of need of revenge for the Bosheviks' treatment of her family. In her books, there are three types of people. The Hero figures from Whom All Blessings Flow, the Evil Parasites who appropriate and misuse those gifts, and the cyphers caught in between. Because the Bosheviks preached the doctrine of We (even if they seldom lived up to it.) Rand responded by a lifelong overcompensation to the doctrine of Me. What she forgets is that building societies has always been a cooperative event. Builders have always relied on others for capital, materials, labor, and transport as well as others scale their dreams to reality when reach exceeds grasp. Without them, they're just madmen staring at pieces of paper. Rand's writings found a ready audience for the selfish because it turns their vice into a virtue. But Galt's little valley of Paradise would founder at the moment someone asked. "Who's going to take care of the plumbing today?" Because no matter how advanced your tech gets, there's always going to be some form of menial work required to keep it running. Something that can't be automated, that will require human dirtwork. What Rand forgets or simply chooses to ignore in her elitism, is that those people matter too.
Might be, but what they have to do with spirit of hacking?
I say, just realizing that instead of clicking buttons you can automate your everyday tasks, may be even simply with shell scripts, is already in the spirit of hacking, as well as the next step of realizing you can extend them to do much more interesting things than simply replacing a human clicking on buttons.
Why do you need GPIO to feel that spirit?
More importantly, why do you feel it's so important to knock a path that someone chooses to walk and they find real fulfillment? There's a dedicated culture of tech enthusiasts surrounding the Raspberry PI. No one is asking you to contribute one red schilling. You have your way of doing things, I have mine, and the Pi folks have theirs. As long as we all bear some kind of fruit from our harvests, try celebrating diversity instead of knocking it. You'll make a lot more friends and the world you experience will be a better place for it.
You're right that holding the phone doesn't technically present a danger - but how do you know whether that person is holding their phone to text, check Facebook, on speakerphone, etc. What other reason is there even to have a phone in your hand while driving, other than actually using it? Better to just make it illegal to have the phone in your hand while driving, otherwise it will lead to people being sneaky.
I sometimes use my phone while sat in traffic, but if I get caught then it's my own fault..
It doesn't matter why you're holding it. Need directions? Mount the damm thing and use audio response and hands free mode. If you have to take your eyes off the road for one single instant, then you're doing something wrong. Having been rammed by more than one idiot on his iphone, I've come to the conclusion that there is nothing that you're doing with your phone that can't wait until you're parked.
That applies having the tools and the infrastructure to make use of that knowledge. If you can't store food, you can't eat, and you can't even read, and you and your children are drinking out of infested water, then certain basic needs have to be addressed before we sink funds into giving them wikipedia access.