the "determined state" of knowledge after reading the headline is identical to that of before reading the headline.
nothing has implicitly changed.
Nooooo... Nothing has explicitly changed, so if you read the headline literally and with a deliberate lack of context, provided by either the summary or personal knowledge, it could mean nothing has changed.
However even the simplest of person could see that saying "could be habitable" in the context of our cold and mostly lifeless solar system implicitly suggests a degree of habitability higher than the default which is an extremely remote definition of "could". That's why it's a news item. So implicitly, yes something has changed.
But good job on using your vast intellect to fail to understand something extremely simple. And you think the headline should be changed based on that deliberate lack of understanding. See what literalism and pedantry get you when applied outside of the few narrow contexts in which they are appropriate? They get you failure.
i hope you one day understand that "nothing has changed" relative to the possibility implied by "could" out of any deterministic context is completely correct.
Deterministic context, what? I'm sorry, which definition are you using and how is it relevant? If you're talking definition 2, the state of being determined, then this isn't a deterministic context (as the word "could" itself implies).
The conditional probability ("conditional" means based on knowledge) of Enceladus' potential habitability for life has gone up base on our increased knowledge. So in a factual context, "nothing has changed" is still completely wrong.
The only way it could be correct is if you don't acknowledge any states but "100% sure life exists", "100% sure it doesn't" and "other".
the correct headline as written by an informed editor, such as yourself, would thus read, "increase in our knowledge regarding saturn moon".
And this knowledge in particular was of the environment on the moon being more habitable to life than previously thought. Your headline isn't very good because it gives no indication of what this knowledge told us, and it did indeed tell us something. And yes, I am informed, and I think the current headline is fine.
only someone who is either uniformed, irresponsible, or lying would write the headline in it's current form.
Only a fool or someone deliberately playing one would believe that about the headline in it's current form. So, stop.
we aren't "sure" that forms of "life" don't exist that thrive in environments we wouldn't currently consider "hospitable" to them.
True, and? Do you still not see how this represents an increase in our knowledge, and therefore a change in the conditional probability of life being hosted by Enceladus in favor of it?
i was pointing out the lack of deterministic scientific information in the headline.
By feigning an inability to see variations in degree of "could"? Or what? I mean it's a headline. Of course it doesn't contain much scientific information.
Anyway, I just hope you understand that "nothing has changed" is very wrong. Any semantic nits you want to pick beyond that are fine with me.
Eh, what's the rush? Everyone knows that the xenomorph takes on characteristics of its host. Oh noes... An alien with all the powers of a baby! Just don't burp it (acid spit-up would be nasty) and we'll be fine I think.
For me it's as simple as survival. As long as humanity is confined to a single planet, we're vulnerable to being wiped out by a planetary scale disaster.
Okay, but we're a long, looong way from having 100% completely self-sufficient off-world colonies that it doesn't even make sense to start. The chain of technologies necessary to allow a human to survive in space is ridiculously long and at the moment completely infeasible to implement outside of the hospitable environment of our home planet. And that even applies after some global disaster. It pretty much would take the destruction of the earth for it to be less suitable for human life than any other rock in the solar system.
Certainly a "get to Mars in 10 years" plan makes zero sense in this context, since such a rushed mission would absolutely not be the foundation for a permanent off-world colony, much less a self-sufficient one.
And any colony that isn't self sufficient isn't a back-up to preserve the human species in case the earth is destroyed. It's just a place to recreate a really depressing novel in a sci-fi setting.
Personally, even for the purpose of eventually giving humans another place to live besides earth, the current plan is much better than one with the specific goal of reaching Mars. New propulsion systems, in-space construction and assembly, these are things we will need for a future off-world colony to be feasible. Trying to implement such a colony starting today would be silly. Wait until we can at least access LEO cheaply before worrying about landing habitats on Mars or building them in space.
Except it wasn't silly, it was one of the best examples of defeating a computer through logic ever. It wasn't just some self-contradictory piece of logic that made Joshua go into an infinite loop or go offline while saying "does not compute". It was a challenge to beat itself at Tic-Tac-Toe with a lesson which Joshua learned and then intuitively applied to Thermonuclear War. It wasn't a logic-bomb, it was logic. Joshua learned that nuclear war was futile.
Compare with all the examples from E.g. Star Trek where the contradictory logic causes the computers to fail.
Personally, I think that trope page should list Wargames as averting the trope.:P
The biggest problem with having a specific mission in mind, like say "land an astronaut on Mars in 20 years", is that to actually implement such an ambitious mission you have to start making decisions today that tie you into a particular technology development path. You would have to take existing technology, and figure out what could be improved or created to accomplish the specific task set out in the time frame set out. Not only would this limit the development of NASA to that specific path, it would also mean that any new technologies invented by others may not be usable even if they're better. You can't just go changing the technology behind a mission like that every time something shiny and new comes out like it's Duke Nukem Forever.
The basic research and technology development that the new plan calls for is the right thing to do. Personally I would much rather spend the next ten or twenty years building up an arsenal of space technology, then pick the most suitable from that for a Mars mission, or whatever else we're capable of doing then.
Yeah, because the likeliness of life on another planet evolving exactly like on ours, in practically zero.
It wouldn't have to be exactly like ours to be able to be roughly describes as prokaryotic. It's an obvious stage for any biological life to go through. But really I was just saying "prokaryote" as an example of simple life.
Despite certain (pseudo-)"scientists" (with arrogance and limited imagination) being unable to think otherwise.
Uh it's not that they're unable to think otherwise. It's that if you're going to look for life, it only makes sense to look for the kind of life that you know is possible and can identify. And the "kind" is simply self-organizing organic (meaning hydrocarbon based) molecules. Which chemistry strongly suggests requires liquid water. It's not really that specific, but based on what we know can work in broadest terms. It's pragmatism, not limited imagination.
You can say "It might not be organic, it could be like something we've never even imagined!" Which is hypothetically true, but useless on its own. So go ahead, Mr. Non-pseudo-non-quotes-scientist, actually propose something we can look for, some testable hypothesis.
Yeah.
I bet $100 that we won't even recognize the first extraterrestrial life we'll ever see.
I'm curious how you would be able to call that bet.:)
But you know you may be right. For all the good that statement does us.
You get that the point of the comic is about prematurely assuming your search is over, which is completely the opposite of what we're doing, right? So take heart. The search goes on, and we're using every tool we know of to do so, and looking for new tools as well.
Yeah, it's only showing up again because Cassini made another Enceladus flyby in late 09 and they're just releasing the pictures.
This JPL article gives a better idea of what was new this flyby.
A new map that combines heat data with visible-light images shows a 40-kilometer (25-mile) segment of the longest tiger stripe, known as Baghdad Sulcus. The map illustrates the correlation, at the highest resolution yet seen, between the geologically youthful surface fractures and the anomalously warm temperatures that have been recorded in the south polar region. The broad swaths of heat previously detected by the infrared spectrometer appear to be confined to a narrow, intense region no more than a kilometer (half a mile) wide along the fracture.
So basically, higher resolution images have allowed them to isolate the heat that they detected earlier (from the 2005 flyby) as a "broad swath" to specifically the cracks in the surface from which water is spewing, confirming their previous hypothesis.
Possibly 500 million years or more and Enceladus doesn't have that as well.
Possibly. But we've found prokaryote fossils from only 1 billion years after the earth's crust formed. So either life got busy evolving right away, or it doesn't necessarily take that long. Frankly I would avoid drawing strong conclusions either way based on the current state of abiogenesis theories.
Besides, in the larger picture of "how often to potentially habitable environments arise and what forms do they take?" I find this very exciting even under the most likely case that we find no evidence of life on this moon. We've gone from a model of the solar system where every rock that wasn't ours being right-out as far as life having a chance, to having a variety of environments that at least hypothetically could support it. Then I start thinking about our infant search for exoplanets and I get even more excited.
Something changed all right. Our knowledge of conditions on Enceledus went from basically zilch to what you're reading about today thanks to the Casini probe.
We weren't "sure" that it couldn't be hospitable to life because we didn't know very much about it, but for things that far away from the sun more or less the default estimation of habitability is "not likely".
The conditions on Enceladus are believed to be short lived. It hasn't been going on for billions of years so complex life forms can not have had time to evolve.
And... you wouldn't be impressed by simple life forms?
Okay, well, that's cool, but why you were paying any attention at all is beyond me. We're pretty sure there's no complex life anywhere else in the solar system.
Personally I'd be gobsmacked, flabbergasted, and impressed to all hell if we found even the most primitive of prokaryote.
The tagline says, "News for Nerds." If it said, "Link Aggregator for Nerds," you might have an argument.
So because it has the word "News" in the pithy tagline, Slashdot has the same obligations to provide unbiased news as a public good as organizations granted broadcast licenses by the FCC?
If what something is called changed what something is, then you'd have a point. But as anyone can see, Slashdot is not a news site, it's a site that links to news and other things elsewhere based on extremely biased criterion and with no pretense of neutral coverage. So it doesn't really matter that to you the word "News" appearing as a descriptor on the website means it is necessarily news source akin to NPR, and that "reports news" necessarily implies an obligation to report unbiased news. It's a semantic argument at best, and semantics aren't reality.
It's not a conflict of interest when it only goes against what you imagine the site's interests should be.
Minor clarification: No reaction mass required. Which is a pretty big deal. And can be fuel-free if you have another source of energy like solar that is sufficient, which I'm sure is what you were going for.
Correct me if I'm wrong (and I probably am) but don't you GAIN speed as you fall into the sun's gravity well?
Yes, and if we could just set the space junk in space with no momentum, the sun's gravity would be all we need.
But any space junk launched from earth is starting with a solar orbital velocity of ~30km/s. Redirecting a rocket from that orbit into one that intersects the sun takes a lot of energy.
Huh? If "they" also includes the cell phone network, and the cell phone network isn't connected to the internet, then how could the cell phone network attack the public internet?
"They" most definitely does not include the cell phone network.
The cell phone network is connected to the internet. Aside from the super-obvious way that it has to be for you to get to Youtube on your iPhone, it is also connected in the sense that the cell network is (for obvious reasons) connected to the phone network, and the phone network is the internet and has been for quite some time now.
Wikipedia defines it as, "A conflict of interest (COI) occurs when an individual or organization is involved in multiple interests, one of which could possibly corrupt the motivation for an act in the other."
Slashdot reports news. Thinkgeek sells products. Using a news site to generate sales at a site they also own is a conflict of interest.
Only according to baggage you are bringing with the phrase "reports news", like Slashdot is an analogue of NPR or CNN. It isn't. It's a link aggregator, that sometimes links news, sometimes links products, and sometimes just nerdy stuff. Slashdot has never been impartial and unbiased by self-interest, nor pretended to be. So how can a lack of impartiality be a corruption of their motivation, when it was never presumed to be part of their motivation in the first place?
Slashdot linking to stuff that brings them revenue is in no way a corruption. The only thing it may have corrupted is your imagined ideal of Slashdot. Which is only for the better.
Slashdot Mirror
the "determined state" of knowledge after reading the headline is identical to that of before reading the headline.
nothing has implicitly changed.
Nooooo... Nothing has explicitly changed, so if you read the headline literally and with a deliberate lack of context, provided by either the summary or personal knowledge, it could mean nothing has changed.
However even the simplest of person could see that saying "could be habitable" in the context of our cold and mostly lifeless solar system implicitly suggests a degree of habitability higher than the default which is an extremely remote definition of "could". That's why it's a news item. So implicitly, yes something has changed.
But good job on using your vast intellect to fail to understand something extremely simple. And you think the headline should be changed based on that deliberate lack of understanding. See what literalism and pedantry get you when applied outside of the few narrow contexts in which they are appropriate? They get you failure.
i hope you one day understand that "nothing has changed" relative to the possibility implied by "could" out of any deterministic context is completely correct.
Deterministic context, what? I'm sorry, which definition are you using and how is it relevant? If you're talking definition 2, the state of being determined, then this isn't a deterministic context (as the word "could" itself implies).
The conditional probability ("conditional" means based on knowledge) of Enceladus' potential habitability for life has gone up base on our increased knowledge. So in a factual context, "nothing has changed" is still completely wrong.
The only way it could be correct is if you don't acknowledge any states but "100% sure life exists", "100% sure it doesn't" and "other".
the correct headline as written by an informed editor, such as yourself, would thus read, "increase in our knowledge regarding saturn moon".
And this knowledge in particular was of the environment on the moon being more habitable to life than previously thought. Your headline isn't very good because it gives no indication of what this knowledge told us, and it did indeed tell us something. And yes, I am informed, and I think the current headline is fine.
only someone who is either uniformed, irresponsible, or lying would write the headline in it's current form.
Only a fool or someone deliberately playing one would believe that about the headline in it's current form. So, stop.
we aren't "sure" that forms of "life" don't exist that thrive in environments we wouldn't currently consider "hospitable" to them.
True, and? Do you still not see how this represents an increase in our knowledge, and therefore a change in the conditional probability of life being hosted by Enceladus in favor of it?
i was pointing out the lack of deterministic scientific information in the headline.
By feigning an inability to see variations in degree of "could"? Or what? I mean it's a headline. Of course it doesn't contain much scientific information.
Anyway, I just hope you understand that "nothing has changed" is very wrong. Any semantic nits you want to pick beyond that are fine with me.
Make it Xeno-babies and I think you have a hit!
We'll fight them on Mars so we don't have to fight them here!
The best part is, al Qaeda doesn't have spacesuits so they'll all just suffocate!
It's genius!
Eh, what's the rush? Everyone knows that the xenomorph takes on characteristics of its host. Oh noes... An alien with all the powers of a baby! Just don't burp it (acid spit-up would be nasty) and we'll be fine I think.
For me it's as simple as survival. As long as humanity is confined to a single planet, we're vulnerable to being wiped out by a planetary scale disaster.
Okay, but we're a long, looong way from having 100% completely self-sufficient off-world colonies that it doesn't even make sense to start. The chain of technologies necessary to allow a human to survive in space is ridiculously long and at the moment completely infeasible to implement outside of the hospitable environment of our home planet. And that even applies after some global disaster. It pretty much would take the destruction of the earth for it to be less suitable for human life than any other rock in the solar system.
Certainly a "get to Mars in 10 years" plan makes zero sense in this context, since such a rushed mission would absolutely not be the foundation for a permanent off-world colony, much less a self-sufficient one.
And any colony that isn't self sufficient isn't a back-up to preserve the human species in case the earth is destroyed. It's just a place to recreate a really depressing novel in a sci-fi setting.
Personally, even for the purpose of eventually giving humans another place to live besides earth, the current plan is much better than one with the specific goal of reaching Mars. New propulsion systems, in-space construction and assembly, these are things we will need for a future off-world colony to be feasible. Trying to implement such a colony starting today would be silly. Wait until we can at least access LEO cheaply before worrying about landing habitats on Mars or building them in space.
We all know what happens when rebel forces gain access to technical readouts of military hardware.
Yeah, brothers and sisters kissing. >_
On the plus side, I found a place that does that.
On the down side, it's the IT dept. for Big Gay Al's Big Gay Animal Sanctuary, and Al does the interviews himself.
Except it wasn't silly, it was one of the best examples of defeating a computer through logic ever. It wasn't just some self-contradictory piece of logic that made Joshua go into an infinite loop or go offline while saying "does not compute". It was a challenge to beat itself at Tic-Tac-Toe with a lesson which Joshua learned and then intuitively applied to Thermonuclear War. It wasn't a logic-bomb, it was logic. Joshua learned that nuclear war was futile.
Compare with all the examples from E.g. Star Trek where the contradictory logic causes the computers to fail.
Personally, I think that trope page should list Wargames as averting the trope. :P
Completely agreed.
The biggest problem with having a specific mission in mind, like say "land an astronaut on Mars in 20 years", is that to actually implement such an ambitious mission you have to start making decisions today that tie you into a particular technology development path. You would have to take existing technology, and figure out what could be improved or created to accomplish the specific task set out in the time frame set out. Not only would this limit the development of NASA to that specific path, it would also mean that any new technologies invented by others may not be usable even if they're better. You can't just go changing the technology behind a mission like that every time something shiny and new comes out like it's Duke Nukem Forever.
The basic research and technology development that the new plan calls for is the right thing to do. Personally I would much rather spend the next ten or twenty years building up an arsenal of space technology, then pick the most suitable from that for a Mars mission, or whatever else we're capable of doing then.
Yeah, because the likeliness of life on another planet evolving exactly like on ours, in practically zero.
It wouldn't have to be exactly like ours to be able to be roughly describes as prokaryotic. It's an obvious stage for any biological life to go through. But really I was just saying "prokaryote" as an example of simple life.
Despite certain (pseudo-)"scientists" (with arrogance and limited imagination) being unable to think otherwise.
Uh it's not that they're unable to think otherwise. It's that if you're going to look for life, it only makes sense to look for the kind of life that you know is possible and can identify. And the "kind" is simply self-organizing organic (meaning hydrocarbon based) molecules. Which chemistry strongly suggests requires liquid water. It's not really that specific, but based on what we know can work in broadest terms. It's pragmatism, not limited imagination.
You can say "It might not be organic, it could be like something we've never even imagined!" Which is hypothetically true, but useless on its own. So go ahead, Mr. Non-pseudo-non-quotes-scientist, actually propose something we can look for, some testable hypothesis.
Yeah.
I bet $100 that we won't even recognize the first extraterrestrial life we'll ever see.
I'm curious how you would be able to call that bet. :)
But you know you may be right. For all the good that statement does us.
Or, as xkcd said it: http://xkcd.com/638/
You get that the point of the comic is about prematurely assuming your search is over, which is completely the opposite of what we're doing, right? So take heart. The search goes on, and we're using every tool we know of to do so, and looking for new tools as well.
Yeah, it's only showing up again because Cassini made another Enceladus flyby in late 09 and they're just releasing the pictures.
This JPL article gives a better idea of what was new this flyby.
So basically, higher resolution images have allowed them to isolate the heat that they detected earlier (from the 2005 flyby) as a "broad swath" to specifically the cracks in the surface from which water is spewing, confirming their previous hypothesis.
Possibly 500 million years or more and Enceladus doesn't have that as well.
Possibly. But we've found prokaryote fossils from only 1 billion years after the earth's crust formed. So either life got busy evolving right away, or it doesn't necessarily take that long. Frankly I would avoid drawing strong conclusions either way based on the current state of abiogenesis theories.
Besides, in the larger picture of "how often to potentially habitable environments arise and what forms do they take?" I find this very exciting even under the most likely case that we find no evidence of life on this moon. We've gone from a model of the solar system where every rock that wasn't ours being right-out as far as life having a chance, to having a variety of environments that at least hypothetically could support it. Then I start thinking about our infant search for exoplanets and I get even more excited.
OK, I'm going to go take high school physics now.
Hehe. Don't need physics for that one, just need to have rear-ended someone or been rear-ended. :)
But take physics anyway! Newtonian mechanics is fun, fairly intuitive, and can even be pretty practical.
Umm... Huh?
Something changed all right. Our knowledge of conditions on Enceledus went from basically zilch to what you're reading about today thanks to the Casini probe.
We weren't "sure" that it couldn't be hospitable to life because we didn't know very much about it, but for things that far away from the sun more or less the default estimation of habitability is "not likely".
The conditions on Enceladus are believed to be short lived. It hasn't been going on for billions of years so complex life forms can not have had time to evolve.
And... you wouldn't be impressed by simple life forms?
Okay, well, that's cool, but why you were paying any attention at all is beyond me. We're pretty sure there's no complex life anywhere else in the solar system.
Personally I'd be gobsmacked, flabbergasted, and impressed to all hell if we found even the most primitive of prokaryote.
I never even took high school physics, but show me a two-body collision in which the direction of travel was not "toward each other"...
No problem, since it's quite trivial. The 'O's below are traveling at a speed represented by the length of the arrows.
O-------> O--->
So you're saying the OP was run through while writing his post? Then he wouldn't have bothered to type "AARRRGH", he would have just said it!
The intellectual dishonesty is breathtaking.
Intellectual dishonesty is one of their primary forms of intellectual property!
The tagline says, "News for Nerds." If it said, "Link Aggregator for Nerds," you might have an argument.
So because it has the word "News" in the pithy tagline, Slashdot has the same obligations to provide unbiased news as a public good as organizations granted broadcast licenses by the FCC?
If what something is called changed what something is, then you'd have a point. But as anyone can see, Slashdot is not a news site, it's a site that links to news and other things elsewhere based on extremely biased criterion and with no pretense of neutral coverage. So it doesn't really matter that to you the word "News" appearing as a descriptor on the website means it is necessarily news source akin to NPR, and that "reports news" necessarily implies an obligation to report unbiased news. It's a semantic argument at best, and semantics aren't reality.
It's not a conflict of interest when it only goes against what you imagine the site's interests should be.
No fuel required.
Minor clarification: No reaction mass required. Which is a pretty big deal. And can be fuel-free if you have another source of energy like solar that is sufficient, which I'm sure is what you were going for.
Correct me if I'm wrong (and I probably am) but don't you GAIN speed as you fall into the sun's gravity well?
Yes, and if we could just set the space junk in space with no momentum, the sun's gravity would be all we need.
But any space junk launched from earth is starting with a solar orbital velocity of ~30km/s. Redirecting a rocket from that orbit into one that intersects the sun takes a lot of energy.
Huh? If "they" also includes the cell phone network, and the cell phone network isn't connected to the internet, then how could the cell phone network attack the public internet?
"They" most definitely does not include the cell phone network.
The cell phone network is connected to the internet. Aside from the super-obvious way that it has to be for you to get to Youtube on your iPhone, it is also connected in the sense that the cell network is (for obvious reasons) connected to the phone network, and the phone network is the internet and has been for quite some time now.
Wikipedia defines it as, "A conflict of interest (COI) occurs when an individual or organization is involved in multiple interests, one of which could possibly corrupt the motivation for an act in the other."
Slashdot reports news. Thinkgeek sells products. Using a news site to generate sales at a site they also own is a conflict of interest.
Only according to baggage you are bringing with the phrase "reports news", like Slashdot is an analogue of NPR or CNN. It isn't. It's a link aggregator, that sometimes links news, sometimes links products, and sometimes just nerdy stuff. Slashdot has never been impartial and unbiased by self-interest, nor pretended to be. So how can a lack of impartiality be a corruption of their motivation, when it was never presumed to be part of their motivation in the first place?
Slashdot linking to stuff that brings them revenue is in no way a corruption. The only thing it may have corrupted is your imagined ideal of Slashdot. Which is only for the better.