The Space Thread

[Joey]

So Pluto is back in the news, I'm bored, and its a pretty big deal.



Up until recently, the best thing we had for a "picture" of Pluto was this:


And its moon Charon? It was even worse:


For people who grew up dreaming of the day we'd know more about the little guy way out in the middle of nowhere, and then watched as it was demoted of its Planetness:


This is pretty awesome to see.

So now, thanks to the New Horizons space probe, which was launched January 19th, 2006, we now pictures that look like this (note the heart shape):

and this:

and Charon get's its close up too!


All thanks to a little yellow probe that's smaller than a Smart Car:


We are blessed with gifs like this:


Fun fact: New Horizons is the Fastest Space Probe ever launched, traveling at speeds up to 60,000km/h.

[rocwell]

It's pretty cool yup, but... where are the aliens hiding?

I bet they already have an iPhone 11.

[Joey]

It's pretty cool yup, but... where are the aliens hiding?

I bet they already have an iPhone 11.

[Apollo]

Very cool story from Pluto. It's too bad those bastards at NASA had to go and demote Pluto a few years ago.

It's pretty cool yup, but... where are the aliens hiding?

I bet they already have an iPhone 11.

Dude they have an iHearyourthoughts 11. *tinfoil hat on*

[Apollo]

So I studied up a little today. Pretty much everything they assumed about Pluto was wrong. There is warmth underneath the surface, probably radioactive in nature. Amazing.

(Speculation) If there is water under the crust there could actually be life on Pluto. It seems like in the last 20 years science has discovered our solar system is a lot different than we initially observed with more primitive instruments. In the next 100 years I think we'll have a lot better idea on whether earth is unique in housing life or if it's a common occurrence in some basic form throughout our solar system in hospitable areas.

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[Miekenstien]

They just found another solar system with a gas giant like Jupiter about the same distance from its' star as our Jupiter and its' star is relatively the same size and age as ours. Pretty cool stuff. It is just gonna suck when vger comes back

[Mr.Z]

Charon looks like the death star....
But, on the topic of aliens; anyone is a fool to believe we are alone in this universe. We know so little of what's out there.

[Miekenstien]

Agreed. It doesn't matter what percentage you give the on life being out there. In the infinite vastness of space it exists. I did read, can't remember whose, thesis on nothing in the milky way along intelligent life sources because they would have realized the makeup and death of stars and realized they have to spread, like we do and would therefore already be here. Brain explosion.

[Apollo]

There was actually a controversial experiment that went to Mars in the 70's(on Viking) that essentially confirmed life in a microbial form on Mars. I can't remember all the details now but NASA discredited the findings.

We now know that Mars still has water, at one time had an atmosphere and surface water. It would have been possibly a lot like earth except who knows about if there was life or life similar to earth at that point. A cataclysm hit Mars, destroyed it's atmosphere, changing it forever.

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[thead]

wasn't necessarily a cataclysm that destroyed Mars. It doesn't have a moon large enough to cause ongoing plate tectonics. Our moon tugs at the core of our planet causing the molten iron to create a magnetic field. The magnetic field protects us from the solar wind blowing our atmosphere right off the planet. Mars has a super weak magnetic field and loses about 1 tonne of atmosphere per year through ionization...once you lose atmospheric pressure liquid water has a hard time existing at surface level, it can only exist as a gas or solid. So as the atmosphere went so to did the water at least any of it that didn't freeze or go sub surface. There are probably large water stores on Mars from about 30 feet below the surface on down.

[Axel]

Sometimes I feel that Earth's inhabitants are just the last ones to leave the party (the Milky Way).

Life absolutely lives on other planets. Only question is how intelligent and how far away.

[rocwell]

NASA's Kepler mission finds the "closest twin to Earth".



Aliens???

[Bendit]

All this existential posting reminded me of this.....some interesting characters in the vid!

[Henry_Chinaski]

Sometimes I feel that Earth's inhabitants are just the last ones to leave the party (the Milky Way).

Life absolutely lives on other planets. Only question is how intelligent and how far away.

Very true. I might also add that I don't get why the most common understanding about aliens is that they're super advanced and way more intelligent than humans. Maybe they aren't. Maybe it's the opposite. Maybe the humans will be the ones attacking some life form somewhere in the universe in order to take their planet? Maybe we will turn out to be the bad guys? Humanity had plenty of practice in that area...

And there's another stereotype that I don't understand. People believe in God and all the rest of variations of super power that created the universe but the very same people think that those who believe aliens exist are crazy. What the hell is with that?

On a more serious note, I read a book (Krauss) that said humans can only observe part of the universe because of all the stardust and whatnot (we're in the outside of our galaxy). So thanks to modern telescopes scientists count somewhere around 400 billion galaxies. Each Galaxy has about 100 million stars... And it turns out (as suspected) we don't even know what's going on in our backyard - the Solar system.


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[Joey]

Sometimes I feel that Earth's inhabitants are just the last ones to leave the party (the Milky Way).

Life absolutely lives on other planets. Only question is how intelligent and how far away.

Might I recommend this awesome read... The Fermi Paradox: We're pretty much screwed... if you feel like feeling REALLY REALLY small. Lol

It breaks down the Fermi Paradox, which in very generic terms is "the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and humanity's lack of contact with, or evidence for, such civilizations", into several different think Groups, but uses the Kardashev Scale (won't even bother trying to explain that...) to come to some pretty crazy and awesome conclusions. Its a long one, but highly recommended.