That's not how zero point works! "Perpetual motion" is one thing, "zero point energy" is different.
Let me ask you this: how much work does a hydro-electric plant put into its effort? Not much: you build the plant and boom, you have free energy. What about solar cells? I don't have to do JACK and I get free electricity! How about wind turbines? I'm not doing anything and all of this electricity comes out. Clearly these contraptions must be perpetual energy devices, yes?
Of course not. Zero point is the same as the above devices if you understand how it works. Imagine the zero point energy field as the wind, and a ZPE reactor as a wind turbine to capture ZPE. Free energy, again.
Why is it that people always assume that if X million dollars isn't going towards some lofty goal like America's Space Prize, it will suddenly be re-routed towards a more pragmatic goal like building a better energy system?
It's the biggest fallacy that returns again and again whenever space is mentioned. Get over it people! It's not like the Senate is going "hey, should we fund $10 billion for America's lunar base, or should we put that money into feeding starving children in some loser nation that most Americans can't find on a map?" This is money for science, research, and adventure, and THAT gets headlines. Remember how powerful entertainment is in this country -- and think about how much time it consumes of YOUR life.
Furthermore, developing an energy system is futile. Tesla developed a zero point energy capturing mechanism back in the early 1900s, and you don't see it on the market anywhere now do you. And why is that? Because the big dogs always win out. Some day they will lose, but so far they will continue to crush us with their petroleum empire.
I just wanted to confirm: if I buy this card, throw it into my Linux box, and install MythTV, I will be able to record Discover HD and everything else that's HD? (is Daily Show available in HD?)
Cuz that would just be swell. I'd love to have an HD-DVR for cable!
I second this question. I hate when I see posts about fiber optic Internet services, since as I've lived in four metropolitan areas in the past four years and have NEVER seen anyone offering 10+ Mbps internet! (Raleigh, DC, NYC, and now Seattle) All I see is lame-ass cable modems and DSL. Couldn't they provide us with a map of launchpoints?
There are numerous benefits resulting from this endeavor, and not necessarily the SpaceShipOne per se. There have been numerous projects to get spaceships into orbit using traditional VT (vertical takeoff) that have been axed even with much potential (e.g. X-33). Eventually the SpaceShipOne design will invariably be replaced with a horizontal takeoff craft similar to an airplane, and at a certain altitude a hybrid engine (probably SCRAMJET, actually) will ignite, taking passengers to altitudes that are sub-orbital but high enough that an NYC->SYD flight could be finished in 45 minutes.
This is where the world WAS going, but very slowly and not exactly driven much. The really great thing about SpaceShipOne is not necessarily the design itself but the ATTENTION it is generating and the hope it is putting into people's eyes, most importantly those of INVESTORS! Investors are cold people who look at bottom lines and ROI's like doctors look at vital signs. They don't care about what is really cool and what could be amazing some day, with rare exceptions like Paul Allen and other dreamers. Those rare exceptions are the ones who often have the highest risk but also the greatest ability to influence change. Like the old Apple commercial: here's to the dreamers, the crazy ones,..., those who see things different..... We see genius. Or however the commercial went.
Anyway, the attention we're getting on this front is AMAZING. The X-Prize Cup will continue to influence people to push into space, and companies like Virgin Galactic will actually push hundreds of people into suborbital flight within a few years! And given that humans would always push for more, they will invariably push to LEO flight, then the moon, and then Mars and elsewhere.
It has to start somewhere with a catalyst, and NASA has certainly NOT done its job in this effort (with all honesty, it was never their job to do this with the exception of Apollo).
I would predict that by 2014, you will have global flights with max times of 90 minutes, SAME-DAY global delivery (send a package from NYC at 10 AM and have it arrive an hour later in Rome), regular LEO flights to primitive but functional orbiting hotels, and even the first commercial expedition to the moon, funded by corporate investors and reality TV shows.
The point is that the catalyst has arrived!!!! I've been waiting for this catalyst for YEARS.
God bless everyone who has made this happen---the SpaceShipOne crew, Paul Allen, Peter Diamondis, and especially NASA for having done nothing in 30 years that required us to do it for ourselves.
This sounds like a great idea but I wish I could do it on Mars too. Explore the surface of a different world using high-resolution maps? Awesome way to adventure off this planet without requiring life support.
Yeah but suppose you were an advanced civilization (much more advanced than Earth). You need to communicate light-years' worth of distance in a short amount of time. Rather than waiting for several years for a round-trip message sent with radio, you send an instantaneous gravity wave with the message and can get your response in under a few milliseconds, like pinging a server in Australia from the US.
"Dumb earthlings" is a bit inappopriate; I'd prefer "ignorant earthlings." It's not that we're stupid; we just haven't figured out sub-space communication systems. We know it's possible since it's a well known fact that hyperspace exists, but we haven't really put much effort into cracking the science, since who on earth needs faster-than-light communication anyway.
Laugh all you want, this stuff does exist. I'm sure people laughed when someone proposed the idea of "transmitting a message through the air" or even "sending a document through a telephone wire." Ha, black magic!
Yeah the jury is still out on the speed of gravity. I am worried that the speed of gravity is similar to that of light, or perhaps somewhat faster. But I am hoping that gravitational waves travel instantly throughout the galaxy. If so, then gravitational communication would be a highly desirable means of communicating between any two points in the galaxy.
The US Navy is right now studying using gravity waves to communicate to submarines underwater, although a URL with more information eludes me.
I am hoping someone resolves the issue of whether gravity travels at the speed of light or near it, or whether gravity travels instantly. The typical example is: if the sun disappeared right now, would Earth immediately hurl off into space, free of our orbit, or would it take 8.5 minutes for the loss of the gravitational field to be felt?
But perhaps the most interesting question of this entire thread could be: if gravity waves could be harnessed, could they be shielded too? I hope Podkletnov or Ning Li can find out! Anti-gravity here we come!
This is great to hear because it is believed that an advanced civilization would communicate not with radio waves but with gravity waves. Think about it: gravity waves fly right through anything, whereas standard EM waves are blocked by things like planets and dust clouds in space. This is why SETI@Home is a waste of time in my opinion after five years of constant computing and 3,000+ packets.
Of course, an advanced civilization using gravity waves would eventually switch over to some sort of sub-space/zero-point field communication system that could facilitate instant point-to-point communication between two points anywhere in the galaxy. Guess we'll have to wait for Subspace@Home.
I would do it in a heartbeat if I had the opportunity to return to Earth one day. For the chance to spend 5 years in outer space, encountering environments that no human has encountered before. Sign me up! Although I'd prefer to have a girlfriend/wife along for the trip because five years with no action might be too much for me.
Remember Shackleton's voyage into Antarctica? His periodical advertisement mentioned low pay, bad food, low chance of survival. Hundreds of people applied for the positions, and no man died. Many humans have an innate desire for exploration, and essentially all terrestrial exploration has been completed (the oceans leave lots of room, but I'd rather go into space myself!)
Does the Senate realize that the bulk of bootlegged films that make it on the Net are recorded in other countries? How many new movies have I downloaded that had some form of Chinese or perhaps French sub-titles at the bottom?
I flew from Washington, DC to LAX to Bakersfield and drove to Mojave, all to see this event. Sleeping in my car in a parking lot adjacent to the airport, working on a little more than 4 hours of sleep, and finally returning to the East coast 22 hours later, it was most definitely worth the trip. The parking lots opened at 3, but I was there at 2:30 -- as were hundreds other, and the line to turn left into the airport was a good fifteen minute wait.
I set up camp in a streambed on the front line next to people I didn't know, but over the course of the next few hours everyone knew everyone else. They videorecorded it and I'm on the hunt for an audio copy of the radio transmissions so that we might dub them into the video. If you know of any digital copies, please e-mail me (mikeshafer at gmail com).
The cheers from the public kept us awake at 6:15 as they started to roll out that beautiful White Knight, but the climax was easily the moment when SpaceShipOne fired her rockets around 7:50. It was difficult to see since the White Knight was right outside the sun's corona, but we saw the contrail start and spiral up into the heavens. It was awe-inspiring. Certainly nothing like a space shuttle launch, but just the fact that a private team of a few dozen people put this all together for around $20 million is testimony to the fact that we won't give up in our pursuit of a privatized space program. Godspeed, Burt Rutan, and others on the quest for the X-Prize. Gravity researchers, hurry up with those anti-gravity machines!
Cornell University is going to use its Hybrid Electric Vehicle (http://hev.cornell.edu) as its own entry into DARPA. They want to kick Carnegie Mellon's butt.:)
At my school (Cornell), CS majors have to take a LOT of math, because CS is really an extension of mathematics. Expect to take Calc 1, 2, 3 (Vector calculus), Linear Algebra, and something along the lines of probability or number theory. Also don't forget Discrete Math, Algorithms, Scientific Computing, and Theory of Computing. Programming is useful for some math classes like scientific computing, but you really just need to understand math very well to do well in computer science, especially if you're in a theoretical school.
Remember, computer science != programming. You don't pay however many thousands of dollars to learn how to become a programmer. You could pick up any number of books for under a few hundred dollars and be a good programmer in a few weeks. Computer science is about the fundamentals behind what you're doing.
While other people have tried similar ideas, no one has really brought it into the spotlight as successful, probably due to download speeds. However, perhaps if Netflix uses an improved transmission system such as the proposed FAST TCP, it will make the downloads a bit easier. Furthermore, we are seeing continuous increases in bandwidth by the broadband ISPs who are conforming to pressures of competition. I'm thinking with a 3 Mbps pipe, downloading several movies per week should be no problem, as long as your ISP doesn't mind.
But think about it: we're in the digital age of downloading everything. iTunes has shown to be a tremendous success, and it's only a short while before movies are all downloaded as well. Someone will have to nail the movie download market, and Netflix already has an enormous user population. While people rip and burn Netflix DVD's in a pipelined fashion, there would be no need for such efforts if you could, say, begin watching a movie that's still downloading after only, say, 15 minutes of starting the process. Why would people need to pirate DVD's if they could get whatever they want whenever they want? I'm a big fan of this system and will happily use it, assuming I have a very nice high speed connection.
I'm just hoping they put up archives of Discovery Channel. Movies on Demand -- I love it!
There are other attempts to provide movies on demand like Movielink or whatever, but I haven't heard great things about their qualities. How amazing would it be to have a pipeline of 3 to 4 movies downloading on your machine when you're at work, or hell, when you're at home preparing to watch one! And all for $20 per month. With high-speed broadband services, this is all possible. And this will all be arriving once I probably end up buying my first HDTV. I'll have a DVR, HDTV cable, and videos on demand through Netflix. I love this world! All we need now is antigravity & ZPE and I'm set!
This idea is nothing new: the Coca Cola company almost put a massive ad in space by painting the moon with lasers from Earth, as a Texas-based advertising firm described. It never happened due to incredibly poor taste, no matter how cool the technology. I'm sure this method will meet a similar fate.
Sorry nerdlinger, defender of the people, but it's a standard phrase that people say quite often, like per diem for people on business trips, or ceteris paribus (sp?), or carpe diem. I'm sorry I have to dumb down my expressions for you.
Umm, have you ever heard about black budget projects? The US spends $300 billion per annum on our defense budget building these elaborate technologies when we're not even at war, and the only war we need to fight anymore--the war on terror--can be done for a fraction of that cost. So it looks to me like they have already increased military spending and have done so at such a rate that even the government doesn't know what it's spending money on. It's all so compartmentalized that no one person could track it down.
Perhaps they DID find life, but decided not to tell us, and now that they can tell us, they've decided not to anyway because why would they? It would only add another element to the list of examples involving coverups that go all the way to the top (e.g. Watergate). If 30 years have passed by and no one really cares, eh, why introduce some entropy when we already have enough?
It's amazing that we could land these probes under such harsh conditions, but the British couldn't place Beagle 2 on Mars and the Americans messed up back to back with the MPL and orbiter missions back in 1999/2000. Sadly we could do much more with our space program thirty years ago than we can today on our shoestring budgets.
Yeah but this is 1970's technology that was stripped down as much as possible to save costs on weight. And how can we imagine that our rockets would even function correctly under those terrible conditions? It would be like firing a stream of hot gas within a tank of lava. OK, extreme example, but I never understood that part of the Venus missions. There's a lot to our space exploration programs that have left lots of question marks that scientists have never fully answered for me. Perhaps MJ-12 decreed that we were not ready to handle the truth.
I'm in agreement that there is potential here. Life in the universe is apparently a mathematical certainty, and we'll probably find life on Mars, Europa and Venus, and perhaps even some microbial life in ice on the surface of the moon. I don't rule out the possibility that we've already found life in our solar system and it has been kept quiet, but the question always remains: WHY would they keep it a secret? I think initially during the Cold War, perhaps they didn't want to escalate panic even further, but the war's been over for over a decade now, and if there is anything to report, they should do it.
Personally I think NASA would hesitate to announce life on Mars if they saw a tree growing in front of the Mars Exploration Rovers on the surface right now; hell they would hesitate even if they saw a humanoid walking in front of the rovers! I can see the clipping on SPACE.COM already:
"We see a suspicious looking tall, erect structure on the surface of Mars that is apparently moving, probably due to Martian wind. It apparently has two circular dark objects near its top, which is spherical in shape. It is supported by two pillars (which we nicknamed 'legs' just for kicks) and also has two limb-like growths out of its mid section. We are interested to learn more about this fascinating natural land formation on the surface of Mars, however we have all declared that there is no reason to believe this is in any way life."
I once heard a conspiracy theory that Venus might actually be friendly to Earth beings, and the only evidence was an obvious question about the Venus landers. If the pressure at the surface is 90 bars (90 times that of Earth's surface) and the heat is about 864 degrees (F), how could our puny lander EVER reach the surface of the planet using terrestrial technologies. I don't take interest in most conspiracy theories, but that did spark my curiosity. Can anyone explain? I know the lander survived to the surface for a short amount of time, but even that feat is amazing given the surface conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not how zero point works! "Perpetual motion" is one thing, "zero point energy" is different.
Let me ask you this: how much work does a hydro-electric plant put into its effort? Not much: you build the plant and boom, you have free energy. What about solar cells? I don't have to do JACK and I get free electricity! How about wind turbines? I'm not doing anything and all of this electricity comes out. Clearly these contraptions must be perpetual energy devices, yes?
Of course not. Zero point is the same as the above devices if you understand how it works. Imagine the zero point energy field as the wind, and a ZPE reactor as a wind turbine to capture ZPE. Free energy, again.
Why is it that people always assume that if X million dollars isn't going towards some lofty goal like America's Space Prize, it will suddenly be re-routed towards a more pragmatic goal like building a better energy system?
It's the biggest fallacy that returns again and again whenever space is mentioned. Get over it people! It's not like the Senate is going "hey, should we fund $10 billion for America's lunar base, or should we put that money into feeding starving children in some loser nation that most Americans can't find on a map?" This is money for science, research, and adventure, and THAT gets headlines. Remember how powerful entertainment is in this country -- and think about how much time it consumes of YOUR life.
Furthermore, developing an energy system is futile. Tesla developed a zero point energy capturing mechanism back in the early 1900s, and you don't see it on the market anywhere now do you. And why is that? Because the big dogs always win out. Some day they will lose, but so far they will continue to crush us with their petroleum empire.
I just wanted to confirm: if I buy this card, throw it into my Linux box, and install MythTV, I will be able to record Discover HD and everything else that's HD? (is Daily Show available in HD?)
Cuz that would just be swell. I'd love to have an HD-DVR for cable!
I second this question. I hate when I see posts about fiber optic Internet services, since as I've lived in four metropolitan areas in the past four years and have NEVER seen anyone offering 10+ Mbps internet! (Raleigh, DC, NYC, and now Seattle) All I see is lame-ass cable modems and DSL. Couldn't they provide us with a map of launchpoints?
There are numerous benefits resulting from this endeavor, and not necessarily the SpaceShipOne per se. There have been numerous projects to get spaceships into orbit using traditional VT (vertical takeoff) that have been axed even with much potential (e.g. X-33). Eventually the SpaceShipOne design will invariably be replaced with a horizontal takeoff craft similar to an airplane, and at a certain altitude a hybrid engine (probably SCRAMJET, actually) will ignite, taking passengers to altitudes that are sub-orbital but high enough that an NYC->SYD flight could be finished in 45 minutes.
..., those who see things different. .... We see genius. Or however the commercial went.
This is where the world WAS going, but very slowly and not exactly driven much. The really great thing about SpaceShipOne is not necessarily the design itself but the ATTENTION it is generating and the hope it is putting into people's eyes, most importantly those of INVESTORS! Investors are cold people who look at bottom lines and ROI's like doctors look at vital signs. They don't care about what is really cool and what could be amazing some day, with rare exceptions like Paul Allen and other dreamers. Those rare exceptions are the ones who often have the highest risk but also the greatest ability to influence change. Like the old Apple commercial: here's to the dreamers, the crazy ones,
Anyway, the attention we're getting on this front is AMAZING. The X-Prize Cup will continue to influence people to push into space, and companies like Virgin Galactic will actually push hundreds of people into suborbital flight within a few years! And given that humans would always push for more, they will invariably push to LEO flight, then the moon, and then Mars and elsewhere.
It has to start somewhere with a catalyst, and NASA has certainly NOT done its job in this effort (with all honesty, it was never their job to do this with the exception of Apollo).
I would predict that by 2014, you will have global flights with max times of 90 minutes, SAME-DAY global delivery (send a package from NYC at 10 AM and have it arrive an hour later in Rome), regular LEO flights to primitive but functional orbiting hotels, and even the first commercial expedition to the moon, funded by corporate investors and reality TV shows.
The point is that the catalyst has arrived!!!! I've been waiting for this catalyst for YEARS.
God bless everyone who has made this happen---the SpaceShipOne crew, Paul Allen, Peter Diamondis, and especially NASA for having done nothing in 30 years that required us to do it for ourselves.
Ad Astra Per Aspera!
This sounds like a great idea but I wish I could do it on Mars too. Explore the surface of a different world using high-resolution maps? Awesome way to adventure off this planet without requiring life support.
Yeah but suppose you were an advanced civilization (much more advanced than Earth). You need to communicate light-years' worth of distance in a short amount of time. Rather than waiting for several years for a round-trip message sent with radio, you send an instantaneous gravity wave with the message and can get your response in under a few milliseconds, like pinging a server in Australia from the US.
"Dumb earthlings" is a bit inappopriate; I'd prefer "ignorant earthlings." It's not that we're stupid; we just haven't figured out sub-space communication systems. We know it's possible since it's a well known fact that hyperspace exists, but we haven't really put much effort into cracking the science, since who on earth needs faster-than-light communication anyway.
Laugh all you want, this stuff does exist. I'm sure people laughed when someone proposed the idea of "transmitting a message through the air" or even "sending a document through a telephone wire." Ha, black magic!
Yeah the jury is still out on the speed of gravity. I am worried that the speed of gravity is similar to that of light, or perhaps somewhat faster. But I am hoping that gravitational waves travel instantly throughout the galaxy. If so, then gravitational communication would be a highly desirable means of communicating between any two points in the galaxy.
The US Navy is right now studying using gravity waves to communicate to submarines underwater, although a URL with more information eludes me.
I am hoping someone resolves the issue of whether gravity travels at the speed of light or near it, or whether gravity travels instantly. The typical example is: if the sun disappeared right now, would Earth immediately hurl off into space, free of our orbit, or would it take 8.5 minutes for the loss of the gravitational field to be felt?
But perhaps the most interesting question of this entire thread could be: if gravity waves could be harnessed, could they be shielded too? I hope Podkletnov or Ning Li can find out! Anti-gravity here we come!
This is great to hear because it is believed that an advanced civilization would communicate not with radio waves but with gravity waves. Think about it: gravity waves fly right through anything, whereas standard EM waves are blocked by things like planets and dust clouds in space. This is why SETI@Home is a waste of time in my opinion after five years of constant computing and 3,000+ packets.
Of course, an advanced civilization using gravity waves would eventually switch over to some sort of sub-space/zero-point field communication system that could facilitate instant point-to-point communication between two points anywhere in the galaxy. Guess we'll have to wait for Subspace@Home.
I would do it in a heartbeat if I had the opportunity to return to Earth one day. For the chance to spend 5 years in outer space, encountering environments that no human has encountered before. Sign me up! Although I'd prefer to have a girlfriend/wife along for the trip because five years with no action might be too much for me.
Remember Shackleton's voyage into Antarctica? His periodical advertisement mentioned low pay, bad food, low chance of survival. Hundreds of people applied for the positions, and no man died. Many humans have an innate desire for exploration, and essentially all terrestrial exploration has been completed (the oceans leave lots of room, but I'd rather go into space myself!)
Does the Senate realize that the bulk of bootlegged films that make it on the Net are recorded in other countries? How many new movies have I downloaded that had some form of Chinese or perhaps French sub-titles at the bottom?
I flew from Washington, DC to LAX to Bakersfield and drove to Mojave, all to see this event. Sleeping in my car in a parking lot adjacent to the airport, working on a little more than 4 hours of sleep, and finally returning to the East coast 22 hours later, it was most definitely worth the trip. The parking lots opened at 3, but I was there at 2:30 -- as were hundreds other, and the line to turn left into the airport was a good fifteen minute wait.
I set up camp in a streambed on the front line next to people I didn't know, but over the course of the next few hours everyone knew everyone else. They videorecorded it and I'm on the hunt for an audio copy of the radio transmissions so that we might dub them into the video. If you know of any digital copies, please e-mail me (mikeshafer at gmail com).
The cheers from the public kept us awake at 6:15 as they started to roll out that beautiful White Knight, but the climax was easily the moment when SpaceShipOne fired her rockets around 7:50. It was difficult to see since the White Knight was right outside the sun's corona, but we saw the contrail start and spiral up into the heavens. It was awe-inspiring. Certainly nothing like a space shuttle launch, but just the fact that a private team of a few dozen people put this all together for around $20 million is testimony to the fact that we won't give up in our pursuit of a privatized space program. Godspeed, Burt Rutan, and others on the quest for the X-Prize. Gravity researchers, hurry up with those anti-gravity machines!
Cornell University is going to use its Hybrid Electric Vehicle (http://hev.cornell.edu) as its own entry into DARPA. They want to kick Carnegie Mellon's butt. :)
At my school (Cornell), CS majors have to take a LOT of math, because CS is really an extension of mathematics. Expect to take Calc 1, 2, 3 (Vector calculus), Linear Algebra, and something along the lines of probability or number theory. Also don't forget Discrete Math, Algorithms, Scientific Computing, and Theory of Computing. Programming is useful for some math classes like scientific computing, but you really just need to understand math very well to do well in computer science, especially if you're in a theoretical school.
Remember, computer science != programming. You don't pay however many thousands of dollars to learn how to become a programmer. You could pick up any number of books for under a few hundred dollars and be a good programmer in a few weeks. Computer science is about the fundamentals behind what you're doing.
While other people have tried similar ideas, no one has really brought it into the spotlight as successful, probably due to download speeds. However, perhaps if Netflix uses an improved transmission system such as the proposed FAST TCP, it will make the downloads a bit easier. Furthermore, we are seeing continuous increases in bandwidth by the broadband ISPs who are conforming to pressures of competition. I'm thinking with a 3 Mbps pipe, downloading several movies per week should be no problem, as long as your ISP doesn't mind.
But think about it: we're in the digital age of downloading everything. iTunes has shown to be a tremendous success, and it's only a short while before movies are all downloaded as well. Someone will have to nail the movie download market, and Netflix already has an enormous user population. While people rip and burn Netflix DVD's in a pipelined fashion, there would be no need for such efforts if you could, say, begin watching a movie that's still downloading after only, say, 15 minutes of starting the process. Why would people need to pirate DVD's if they could get whatever they want whenever they want? I'm a big fan of this system and will happily use it, assuming I have a very nice high speed connection.
I'm just hoping they put up archives of Discovery Channel. Movies on Demand -- I love it!
There are other attempts to provide movies on demand like Movielink or whatever, but I haven't heard great things about their qualities. How amazing would it be to have a pipeline of 3 to 4 movies downloading on your machine when you're at work, or hell, when you're at home preparing to watch one! And all for $20 per month. With high-speed broadband services, this is all possible. And this will all be arriving once I probably end up buying my first HDTV. I'll have a DVR, HDTV cable, and videos on demand through Netflix. I love this world! All we need now is antigravity & ZPE and I'm set!
pigeon carries YOU!
This idea is nothing new: the Coca Cola company almost put a massive ad in space by painting the moon with lasers from Earth, as a Texas-based advertising firm described. It never happened due to incredibly poor taste, no matter how cool the technology. I'm sure this method will meet a similar fate.
Sorry nerdlinger, defender of the people, but it's a standard phrase that people say quite often, like per diem for people on business trips, or ceteris paribus (sp?), or carpe diem. I'm sorry I have to dumb down my expressions for you.
Umm, have you ever heard about black budget projects? The US spends $300 billion per annum on our defense budget building these elaborate technologies when we're not even at war, and the only war we need to fight anymore--the war on terror--can be done for a fraction of that cost. So it looks to me like they have already increased military spending and have done so at such a rate that even the government doesn't know what it's spending money on. It's all so compartmentalized that no one person could track it down.
Perhaps they DID find life, but decided not to tell us, and now that they can tell us, they've decided not to anyway because why would they? It would only add another element to the list of examples involving coverups that go all the way to the top (e.g. Watergate). If 30 years have passed by and no one really cares, eh, why introduce some entropy when we already have enough?
It's amazing that we could land these probes under such harsh conditions, but the British couldn't place Beagle 2 on Mars and the Americans messed up back to back with the MPL and orbiter missions back in 1999/2000. Sadly we could do much more with our space program thirty years ago than we can today on our shoestring budgets.
Yeah but this is 1970's technology that was stripped down as much as possible to save costs on weight. And how can we imagine that our rockets would even function correctly under those terrible conditions? It would be like firing a stream of hot gas within a tank of lava. OK, extreme example, but I never understood that part of the Venus missions. There's a lot to our space exploration programs that have left lots of question marks that scientists have never fully answered for me. Perhaps MJ-12 decreed that we were not ready to handle the truth.
I'm in agreement that there is potential here. Life in the universe is apparently a mathematical certainty, and we'll probably find life on Mars, Europa and Venus, and perhaps even some microbial life in ice on the surface of the moon. I don't rule out the possibility that we've already found life in our solar system and it has been kept quiet, but the question always remains: WHY would they keep it a secret? I think initially during the Cold War, perhaps they didn't want to escalate panic even further, but the war's been over for over a decade now, and if there is anything to report, they should do it.
Personally I think NASA would hesitate to announce life on Mars if they saw a tree growing in front of the Mars Exploration Rovers on the surface right now; hell they would hesitate even if they saw a humanoid walking in front of the rovers! I can see the clipping on SPACE.COM already:
"We see a suspicious looking tall, erect structure on the surface of Mars that is apparently moving, probably due to Martian wind. It apparently has two circular dark objects near its top, which is spherical in shape. It is supported by two pillars (which we nicknamed 'legs' just for kicks) and also has two limb-like growths out of its mid section. We are interested to learn more about this fascinating natural land formation on the surface of Mars, however we have all declared that there is no reason to believe this is in any way life."
Yeah, except we did land on the surface something like thirty years ago. Take that, Venus!
I once heard a conspiracy theory that Venus might actually be friendly to Earth beings, and the only evidence was an obvious question about the Venus landers. If the pressure at the surface is 90 bars (90 times that of Earth's surface) and the heat is about 864 degrees (F), how could our puny lander EVER reach the surface of the planet using terrestrial technologies. I don't take interest in most conspiracy theories, but that did spark my curiosity. Can anyone explain? I know the lander survived to the surface for a short amount of time, but even that feat is amazing given the surface conditions.