Why is the landscape around Mars landers always so uninspiring?
It's due to an agreement between NASA and the Cultural Interdiction Wing of the Gyken-JAT Pan-Sapient Meld.
The CIW allows a probe to land now and then . . . as long as it doesn't stray near sites that would make Hu-Mans really want to go to Mars.
Such as the soaring mountains, yawning chasms, spectacular wind-carved rock outcroppings, and the planet's numerous brightly-lit interspecies brothels.
* Daily mega-doses of penis enlargement pills, until their equipment is so capacious that they can't wear pants and lose conciousness from blood running out of their brains every time they get a woody.
* One-Way Ticket to Nigeria, to meet Rev. Motobu, grand-daughter of the former president, after convincing Motobu that the spammer is the son of a millionaire who loves him deeply.
* Starring role in a series of adult films set at a petting zoo. A porcupine and alligator petting zoo.
At some point, I realized that getting into too much detail and realism was a waste of time, if all you needed was an arena for some RPG fun. In fact, it got kind of frustrating to come up with all these fancy, diverse worlds and settings and then have players who only wanted shoot'em'ups and merchant adventures and the like.
'I find it pretty doubtful you've ever used a sim like this in any "home version."'
The daunting academic sims of yesteryear are the playthings of tomorrow.
Ever hear of ACCRETE? It was a very early (early 70s) I first read about it in an old Carl Sagan book. It blew my mind! I remember staring lovingly at the sample outputs in _The Cosmic Connection_ and wishing there were more. Ten years later, I was RUNNING ACCRETE on my home computer!
"Games" like Sim Life and Sim Earth would have been considered serious, powerful simulators a few years earlier. They were prettied up and given game elements (e.g., disasters), but they are based on serious stuff.
OTOH, dagnabbit, I'm no video-game generation chart-o-phobe. I wouldn't MIND seeing the results in the form of a spreadsheet, or plugging in the parameters on the command line.
Like the Anonymous Coward notes, we live on a water-rich world.
The press release doesn't give a lot to go on, but it suggests that some of the resulting worlds will indeed be huge, with great deep oceans. But there could be smaller worlds with oceans, big ones without, etc. An interesting mix . ..
I actually don't have a cat. But I know people who have indoor only cats and far-ranging outdoor beasts. The former don't get beat up as much, but miss out on a lot of visceral carnivore thrills.
Now I have this picture in my head of guy telling people to keep smiling and hold their pose while he plugs another four fresh Compact Flash cards into his camera so he can take another shot.
Charlie Chaplin stuck with silents longer than most, but he did make a few "talkies," such as The Great Dictator.
Although I agree that some will stick with the old stuff.
Possible data point: My sort-of uncle* is a famous photographer, Lee Friedlander. He carries his 35mm camera everywhere, and takes candid shots at family get-togethers. Occasionally a family member will get a print, but it will have a hand-written copyright notice on it, and I'm sure that the negatives are squirreled away somewhere safe.
I don't know his opinion on digital photography per se, but I know he really doesn't like computers.
Robert A. Heinlein. Very prolific and influential SF author, active from the 40s through the 80s. One of the grand old men of the genre.
I read great heaps of RAH in high school and my early college years. One of my "first loves" in SF. I'm less of a fan now, and see a lot of his stuff as dated and politically cranky . . . but his best stuff holds up well.
Have Spacesuit, Will Travel was already mentioned. A great YA novel.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Libertarian moon colony vs. heavy-handed Earth authorities.
Time for the Stars. Under-appreciated YA novel about telepathic twins used to communicate with starships.
Waldo. Actually a novella. Genius-nerd with atrophied muscles, not satisfied with bedrest, builds . . . waldos.
Starship Troopers is a wonderful, obnoxious polemic.
I went into roll-my-eyes-in-disbelief mode when I heard that Battlestar Galactic was being remade. You know, like, please?
What was especially annoying was the fawning by now-grown-ups over the original. BG: TOS was juvenile in the extreme. Potboiler space opera, at best, made especially strange with weird religious elements. (Mormons . . . in . . . Spaaaace!)
When the time came to decide whether to watch the new one, I found it easy to decide not to.
Now, based on the discussions on various sites, I'm feeling sorry I didn't give it a try. The creators of the new show seem to have gone to extraordinary lengths to ditch the silliest elements of the old and make something that isn't Sci-Fi comfort food!
Why not just "give it a try?"
There's a thing I refer to as Brainshare.
Brainshare is the resource taken up by watching a TV show or reading a book series or following some issue.
Many books and shows require very little brainshare. Some, because they are trivial and don't require much thought. Others, because they're nicely packaged and limited: Fun while you watch, but you don't think about them at all once they're over.
As an old-timey SF fan, I hesitate to get involved in a new show, to devote brainshare to it, because I'd be better off doing something else. Sometimes this hesitancy can be a loss. I never got into Buffy, which I understand was a smart and well done show.
Sometimes caution pays off. I'm awful glad I gave up on the Gene Roddenberry-created SF shows (Andromeda, and the one about the seemingly-nice-aliens who visit Earth), which went swiftly downhill after smart beginnings.
Then there's the early plug-pull problem: This happened with Firefly. The first (aired) episode of this filled me with disappointment and dread (train robberies in space!), but I caught a good episode or two, enough to see there was someone with a brain behind it. Then Fox cancelled the series. Bah.
So now I'm wondering if I should bother watching the repeats.
One of the "Making of 2001" type books describes the design process for the Discovery.
At one point it had a nuclear pulse ("Orion") drive.
There was serious thought to giving it whopping big radiators, which would make it look even more like this probe . . . but they didn't want people thinking they were wings!
The design of this probe is a "classic," in the sense that it looks a lot like design proposals for nuclear-ion rockets circa 1960. One of the science encyclopedias I had when I was a kid had nifty pictures of 'em.
Hortas would live on (in) terrestrial planets, but not Earthlike terrestrial planets.
Silicon life is a toughy. You need really special conditions and there are lots of design constraints. (I don't have the references on hand, but as I recall the silicon-life metabolic equivalent of CO2 would be a solid, so your hortas would be breathing out powder.) But Vega's planets might offer as good a place as any.
By Earthlike I believe they mean terrestrial; a rocky world, as opposed to a gas giant.
Other known terrestrial worlds include baked-out Mercury, greenhouse-wracked Venus, and dry, cold Mars. Most people would not consider these "Earthlike" in the Star Trek Class M sense of the word.
That said: Even given the existence of terrestrial planets, Vega isn't a great place to go looking for a habitable, life-bearing world. It's a bright, hot star, which also means that it is a short-lived star. In a few hundred million years, when its potential planets begin to cool to the point where water would condense, Vega would be getting ready to wander off the main sequence and get way unpleasant to be near.
Another strike against life developing on Vega worlds: a greater percentage of its energy output would be in "bluer" wavelengths, including UV. Once it got started, life might adapt to UV, but to get started in the first place it needs some stability. I can see a influx of UV ripping apart delicate chemical chains in Vega Prime's oceans, greatly reducing the chance that life would get a foothold.
All this said, this is hopeful news, because the existence of one planet-forming debris field means there are probably others . . . some around more genial F and G and K class stars.
This is a "teach a man to fish" outfit. They buy livestock -- chicks, pigs, ducks, llamas, whatever -- for poor people. Instead of getting a few meals, they become part of the local economy, becoming producers of meat, fur, eggs, milk, wool, etc.
It's a better deal than just buying food.
And nothing stops you from donating to Heifer (or similar outfits) AND donating to a local food bank.
But give it a chance. Once in a while there's a brilliant episode. Like the one that ends with Brian and a dying elderly friend experiencing a speeded-up virtual-reality life together. Weird, SF-ish, and oddly touching.
The Voyager probes weren't built for speed. They were coasters, zipping from gravity well to gravity well with just a few puffs from the steering jets now and then.
If there were some pressing reason to catch up, we could do it, although it would be pricey due to the current high cost of getting things into orbit. You'd need to get something up there with a motor capable of adding substantial change in velocity. A big liquid fueled motor, or perhaps one of those new-fangled ion drives powered by a really big solar collector or a small reactor.
This is one of those problems that will get easier with time, assuming even modest progress in space propulsion. If we ever get practical fusion drives (theoretical of Isp topping 100,000 seconds!) we could get out there in a couple of years.
Good news: Doesn't take up a lot of desk space.
Bad news: Desk must be extra heavy duty to support all that massiveness.
Worst case scenario: Someone clusters together a bunch of massive small form factor machines; they collapse into a speck of neutronium and fall to the center of the Earth.
Stefan
All these companies want to do is let you know about exciting new products and services that could entertain you, improve your life, and lengthen you genitalia.
Shutting out these innovators . . . well, it smacks of Communism, doesn't it? First TiVO, screening out the ads that broadcasters, our public servants, need to survive. Now this ungrateful attack on champions entreneurship and freedom of choice. Just a bunch of surly, consumer-choice hating Reds is what you all are.
I'm going to tell John Ashcroft what you've been up to so these SpyBot removers can be banned!
Stefan "scared to hell that someone out there might actually be thinking like this" Jones
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I knew that. I was trying to be funny.
Why is the landscape around Mars landers always so uninspiring?
It's due to an agreement between NASA and the Cultural Interdiction Wing of the Gyken-JAT Pan-Sapient Meld.
The CIW allows a probe to land now and then . . . as long as it doesn't stray near sites that would make Hu-Mans really want to go to Mars.
Such as the soaring mountains, yawning chasms, spectacular wind-carved rock outcroppings, and the planet's numerous brightly-lit interspecies brothels.
Stefan
* Daily mega-doses of penis enlargement pills, until their equipment is so capacious that they can't wear pants and lose conciousness from blood running out of their brains every time they get a woody.
* One-Way Ticket to Nigeria, to meet Rev. Motobu, grand-daughter of the former president, after convincing Motobu that the spammer is the son of a millionaire who loves him deeply.
* Starring role in a series of adult films set at a petting zoo. A porcupine and alligator petting zoo.
Stefan
That's where my interest in these things started.
At some point, I realized that getting into too much detail and realism was a waste of time, if all you needed was an arena for some RPG fun. In fact, it got kind of frustrating to come up with all these fancy, diverse worlds and settings and then have players who only wanted shoot'em'ups and merchant adventures and the like.
Stefan
'I find it pretty doubtful you've ever used a sim like this in any "home version."'
The daunting academic sims of yesteryear are the playthings of tomorrow.
Ever hear of ACCRETE? It was a very early (early 70s) I first read about it in an old Carl Sagan book. It blew my mind! I remember staring lovingly at the sample outputs in _The Cosmic Connection_ and wishing there were more. Ten years later, I was RUNNING ACCRETE on my home computer!
"Games" like Sim Life and Sim Earth would have been considered serious, powerful simulators a few years earlier. They were prettied up and given game elements (e.g., disasters), but they are based on serious stuff.
OTOH, dagnabbit, I'm no video-game generation chart-o-phobe. I wouldn't MIND seeing the results in the form of a spreadsheet, or plugging in the parameters on the command line.
Stefan
Like the Anonymous Coward notes, we live on a water-rich world.
.
The press release doesn't give a lot to go on, but it suggests that some of the resulting worlds will indeed be huge, with great deep oceans. But there could be smaller worlds with oceans, big ones without, etc. An interesting mix . .
Stefan
Why?
I actually don't have a cat. But I know people who have indoor only cats and far-ranging outdoor beasts. The former don't get beat up as much, but miss out on a lot of visceral carnivore thrills.
Stefan
Imagine a handheld GPS locator with every city map!
.
Or that you can set to record a timespace waypoint every five minutes.
You could tie one of these to your outdoor cat and see how many owners he has . .
Stefan
Now I have this picture in my head of guy telling people to keep smiling and hold their pose while he plugs another four fresh Compact Flash cards into his camera so he can take another shot.
Stefan
Although I agree that some will stick with the old stuff.
Possible data point: My sort-of uncle* is a famous photographer, Lee Friedlander. He carries his 35mm camera everywhere, and takes candid shots at family get-togethers. Occasionally a family member will get a print, but it will have a hand-written copyright notice on it, and I'm sure that the negatives are squirreled away somewhere safe.
I don't know his opinion on digital photography per se, but I know he really doesn't like computers.
Stefan
* Mother's cousin's husband.
I read great heaps of RAH in high school and my early college years. One of my "first loves" in SF. I'm less of a fan now, and see a lot of his stuff as dated and politically cranky . . . but his best stuff holds up well.
Have Spacesuit, Will Travel was already mentioned. A great YA novel.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Libertarian moon colony vs. heavy-handed Earth authorities.
Time for the Stars. Under-appreciated YA novel about telepathic twins used to communicate with starships.
Waldo. Actually a novella. Genius-nerd with atrophied muscles, not satisfied with bedrest, builds . . . waldos.
Starship Troopers is a wonderful, obnoxious polemic.
Stefan
What was especially annoying was the fawning by now-grown-ups over the original. BG: TOS was juvenile in the extreme. Potboiler space opera, at best, made especially strange with weird religious elements. (Mormons . . . in . . . Spaaaace!)
When the time came to decide whether to watch the new one, I found it easy to decide not to.
Now, based on the discussions on various sites, I'm feeling sorry I didn't give it a try. The creators of the new show seem to have gone to extraordinary lengths to ditch the silliest elements of the old and make something that isn't Sci-Fi comfort food!
Why not just "give it a try?"
There's a thing I refer to as Brainshare.
Brainshare is the resource taken up by watching a TV show or reading a book series or following some issue.
Many books and shows require very little brainshare. Some, because they are trivial and don't require much thought. Others, because they're nicely packaged and limited: Fun while you watch, but you don't think about them at all once they're over.
As an old-timey SF fan, I hesitate to get involved in a new show, to devote brainshare to it, because I'd be better off doing something else. Sometimes this hesitancy can be a loss. I never got into Buffy, which I understand was a smart and well done show.
Sometimes caution pays off. I'm awful glad I gave up on the Gene Roddenberry-created SF shows (Andromeda, and the one about the seemingly-nice-aliens who visit Earth), which went swiftly downhill after smart beginnings.
Then there's the early plug-pull problem: This happened with Firefly. The first (aired) episode of this filled me with disappointment and dread (train robberies in space!), but I caught a good episode or two, enough to see there was someone with a brain behind it. Then Fox cancelled the series. Bah.
So now I'm wondering if I should bother watching the repeats.
Stefan
One of the "Making of 2001" type books describes the design process for the Discovery.
At one point it had a nuclear pulse ("Orion") drive.
There was serious thought to giving it whopping big radiators, which would make it look even more like this probe . . . but they didn't want people thinking they were wings!
The design of this probe is a "classic," in the sense that it looks a lot like design proposals for nuclear-ion rockets circa 1960. One of the science encyclopedias I had when I was a kid had nifty pictures of 'em.
Stefan
Hortas would live on (in) terrestrial planets, but not Earthlike terrestrial planets.
Silicon life is a toughy. You need really special conditions and there are lots of design constraints. (I don't have the references on hand, but as I recall the silicon-life metabolic equivalent of CO2 would be a solid, so your hortas would be breathing out powder.) But Vega's planets might offer as good a place as any.
Stefan "No Kill I!" Jones
By Earthlike I believe they mean terrestrial; a rocky world, as opposed to a gas giant.
Other known terrestrial worlds include baked-out Mercury, greenhouse-wracked Venus, and dry, cold Mars. Most people would not consider these "Earthlike" in the Star Trek Class M sense of the word.
That said: Even given the existence of terrestrial planets, Vega isn't a great place to go looking for a habitable, life-bearing world. It's a bright, hot star, which also means that it is a short-lived star. In a few hundred million years, when its potential planets begin to cool to the point where water would condense, Vega would be getting ready to wander off the main sequence and get way unpleasant to be near.
Another strike against life developing on Vega worlds: a greater percentage of its energy output would be in "bluer" wavelengths, including UV. Once it got started, life might adapt to UV, but to get started in the first place it needs some stability. I can see a influx of UV ripping apart delicate chemical chains in Vega Prime's oceans, greatly reducing the chance that life would get a foothold.
All this said, this is hopeful news, because the existence of one planet-forming debris field means there are probably others . . . some around more genial F and G and K class stars.
Stefan
Well, not really, but that's the first thing that popped into my head when I read "Hi-Tech Crime Agency."
Stefan
This outfit sells an amazing variety of stuff, ranging from surplus crap to scientific instruments:
http://www.sciplus.com/
The item descriptions are a lot of fun to read as well.
Huh?
This is a "teach a man to fish" outfit. They buy livestock -- chicks, pigs, ducks, llamas, whatever -- for poor people. Instead of getting a few meals, they become part of the local economy, becoming producers of meat, fur, eggs, milk, wool, etc.
It's a better deal than just buying food.
And nothing stops you from donating to Heifer (or similar outfits) AND donating to a local food bank.
I did both this year.
Stefan
I can believe that. There were a lot of duds.
But give it a chance. Once in a while there's a brilliant episode. Like the one that ends with Brian and a dying elderly friend experiencing a speeded-up virtual-reality life together. Weird, SF-ish, and oddly touching.
. . . calls on President Bush for a preemptive nuclear strike.
"This isn't about marketing dominance or intellectual property rights," said the movie industry mogul, "They hate our freedom!"
[metallic voice]
"FA-THER! Give me legs!"
[/metallic voice]
Stefan
I learned about these via a collection of papers I read at Carnegie Mellon University. Damned if I remember the title.
But if you google for these phrases, you'll find a lot:
"inertial confinement fusion" propulsion
"magnetic confinement fusion" propulsion
... expensive.
The Voyager probes weren't built for speed. They were coasters, zipping from gravity well to gravity well with just a few puffs from the steering jets now and then.
If there were some pressing reason to catch up, we could do it, although it would be pricey due to the current high cost of getting things into orbit. You'd need to get something up there with a motor capable of adding substantial change in velocity. A big liquid fueled motor, or perhaps one of those new-fangled ion drives powered by a really big solar collector or a small reactor.
This is one of those problems that will get easier with time, assuming even modest progress in space propulsion. If we ever get practical fusion drives (theoretical of Isp topping 100,000 seconds!) we could get out there in a couple of years.
Stefan
Stefan
Good news: Doesn't take up a lot of desk space. Bad news: Desk must be extra heavy duty to support all that massiveness. Worst case scenario: Someone clusters together a bunch of massive small form factor machines; they collapse into a speck of neutronium and fall to the center of the Earth. Stefan
All these companies want to do is let you know about exciting new products and services that could entertain you, improve your life, and lengthen you genitalia.
Shutting out these innovators . . . well, it smacks of Communism, doesn't it? First TiVO, screening out the ads that broadcasters, our public servants, need to survive. Now this ungrateful attack on champions entreneurship and freedom of choice. Just a bunch of surly, consumer-choice hating Reds is what you all are.
I'm going to tell John Ashcroft what you've been up to so these SpyBot removers can be banned!
Stefan "scared to hell that someone out there might actually be thinking like this" Jones