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Contractor
Boulder climber
CA
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WBraun's right about NASSA. I heard Neal and Buzz had to get out and ask for directions about three times.
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drljefe
climber
El Presidio San Augustin del Tucson
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we are alone
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StahlBro
Trad climber
San Diego, CA
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Wow, are they all slowly destroying their planets too?
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the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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We DO need to be better stewards of our home planet. We're not living anywhere else for many hundreds or thousands of years, if at all.
But Mars can be 68 degrees F on the equator and there's water there. We may see extended human visitation there in the next hundred years.
There are proposals out there to travel at 10% of the speed of light. If that can be achieved that puts MANY planets within traveling distance of a human lifetime. If we can do long term sleep that further eases the journey.
Like I said in the other thread if we find other planets with life, someone WILL volunteer to settle it, even if it means they will never come back. To be the first human to settle another planet. Some people will sacrifice everything for that. Some people are willing to make a one way trip to Mars right now.
I'm not too concerned with DMTs Avatar scenario. I think for every thousand or million planets that support life there may be one with intelligent life. So we'd colonize a planet with just plant life or simple animal life. It would be really interesting to see if life used the same building blocks and DNA or if it was totally different. When you look at the fossil record and look at evolution it just seems there were hundreds or thousands of special circumstances that led to humans. I'd guess it VERY rare for all that to happen, i.e. goldilocks planet, life starts, intelligent life forms.
And hopefully thousands of years from now humanity would be more compassionate and not destroy other planets.
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HighTraverse
Trad climber
Bay Area
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We may see extended human visitation there in the next hundred years. Assuming our descendants aren't too busy trying to keep this planet cool enough for the survival of the species we depend upon for our own existence.
Water now proven on Mars.
Jupiter's moon Europa, possibly also Callisto
Saturn's rings, moons Encedalus, Tethys (almost entirely made of water ice), Dione and Rhea
Uranus- traces of water ice, plenty of ice of other Hydrogen compounds including methane
Possibly Neptune's core.
And now we come, amazingly, to Pluto, mostly made of water ice. It's moon Charon is ice.
The Kuiper belt has about 70K icy bodies.
The Oort cloud has millions.
Water possibly on our own Moon at the poles, Mercury in deep crevasses.
Only Venus appears left out of the water bearing planets.
Educational even if it's a little sophomoric.
http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/i-see-ice/en/#/review/i-see-ice/page_01.html?r=true
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limpingcrab
Trad climber
the middle of CA
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I've never understood this 1% assumption, there is nothing to support it.
How about a .0000000000001% chance of life and a .0000000000001% chance of intelligent life?
DMT
That's still being very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, generous.
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JC Marin
Trad climber
CA
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Q: Is there intelligent life on other planets?
A: Why would the other planets be any different than this one?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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here's a paper estimating the probability of "complex" and "intelligent" life...
http://lgmacweb.env.uea.ac.uk/ajw/Reprints/watson_astrobiology_preprint.pdf
Implications of an Anthropic Model of Evolution for Emergence of Complex Life and Intelligence
ANDREW J. WATSON
ABSTRACT
Structurally complex life and intelligence evolved late on Earth; models for the evolution of global temperature suggest that, due to the increasing solar luminosity, the future life span of the (eukaryote) biosphere will be “only” about another billion years, a short time compared to the 4 Ga since life began. A simple stochastic model (Carter, 1983) suggests that this timing might be governed by the necessity to pass a small number, n, of very difficult evolutionary steps, with n 10 and a best guess of n 4, in order for intelligent observers like ourselves to evolve. Here I extend the model analysis to derive probability distributions for each step. Past steps should tend to be evenly spaced through Earth’s history, and this is consistent with identification of the steps with some of the major transitions in the evolution of life on Earth. A complementary approach, identifying the critical steps with major reorganizations in Earth’s biogeochemical cycles, suggests that the Archean-Proterozoic and Proterozoic-Phanerozoic transitions might be identified with critical steps. The success of the model lends support to a “Rare Earth” hypothesis (Ward and Brownlee, 2000): structurally complex life is separated from prokaryotes by several very unlikely steps and, hence, will be much less common than prokaryotes. Intelligence is one further unlikely step, so it is much less common still.
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Spider Savage
Mountain climber
The shaggy fringe of Los Angeles
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The earth is flat. Nothing else anywhere.
No one could ever survive a trip across the ocean you'd fall off the edge.
Space is too vast, you can't go faster than the speed of light, etc. etc.
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Bushman
Social climber
Elk Grove, California
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One Billion Earth like planets, we are going to need them.
Where else can we overpopulate?
What would Jesus do?
Jesus ain't got nothin' to do with it.
Sorry...
I haven't finished eating my crab flakes this morning.
Colonizing Mars really is a worthy endeavor though, money not wasted, like on wars. Stepping foot on, exploring, and surviving the missions to the nearby God of War (a scant 100 million miles, give or take) would require our species to step it up a notch. Casualties and failures would be part of the deal, much like space exploration has proven to be so far.
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Gnome Ofthe Diabase
climber
Out Of Bed
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Ah, is this what we need to save the planet from the Human Species?
Dingus Milktoast Gym climber Maestro, Ecosystem Ministry, Fatcrackistan
Jul 25, 2015 - 09:42am PT
. . . .
Many in my generation grew up reading conquistador science fiction, conquer this, battle that, crush kill destroy!!!! All in the name of peace and democracy you understand.
We need to grow out of that stupid attitude. These worlds are not our oysters. Knowledge is one thing. Going to one of them even with a machine, entirely another.
Some Russian dude just donated a cool hundred million dollars to SETI, last week, 10 mil a year for 10 years, to buy radio telescope time, etc. Now that sort of exploration is spot on, imo.
DMT
jstan
climber Jul 24, 2015 - 08:56pm PT
At the rate things are going earth will be broadcasting for less than 100 years out of five billion. Pretty small time window. A blip at best. One part in ten million. If we do hear anything we will know they are a hell of a lot smarter than us.
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Bushman
Social climber
Elk Grove, California
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Mining, gutting, poisoning, and otherwise despoiling a planet in order garner the resources to to get to the next planet, it's a tradition. How else do you think the ancient Venutians got here?
The Kepleroidians might have a thing or two to learn from us.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 9, 2016 - 08:32am PT
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Is this all just useless wheel spinning then?
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Bushman
Social climber
Elk Grove, California
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World Peace?
Those that can't do get promoted, it's the American way.
Send the politicians into the cold dark of space as envoys to alien races to teach what we know...that everyone loves to be told what to do, what to think, what will happen to you if you don't believe them.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 9, 2016 - 09:11am PT
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Chaos is the science of surprises, of the nonlinear and the unpredictable. It teaches us to expect the unexpected. While most traditional science deals with supposedly predictable phenomena like gravity, electricity, or chemical reactions, Chaos Theory deals with nonlinear things that are effectively impossible to predict or control, like turbulence, weather, the stock market, our brain states, and so on. These phenomena are often described by fractal mathematics, which captures the infinite complexity of nature. Many natural objects exhibit fractal properties, including landscapes, clouds, trees, organs, rivers etc, and many of the systems in which we live exhibit complex, chaotic behavior. Recognizing the chaotic, fractal nature of our world can give us new insight, power, and wisdom.
...
The Butterfly Effect: This effect grants the power to cause a hurricane in China to a butterfly flapping its wings in New Mexico. It may take a very long time, but the connection is real. If the butterfly had not flapped its wings at just the right point in space/time, the hurricane would not have happened. A more rigorous way to express this is that small changes in the initial conditions lead to drastic changes in the results. Our lives are an ongoing demonstration of this principle. Who knows what the long-term effects of teaching millions of kids about chaos and fractals will be?
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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I sense a manifest destiny on a cosmic scale.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Our dreams outrace our abilities EVERY TIME.
But maybe if we all work TOGETHER, we can someday hope to catch them.
Nice thought, Jack Handy, BUT:
Deep space exploration is quite beyond our frail bodies' capabilities, unless one chooses to buy into the elongation of our bodies' natural lives by letting us go to sleep for the bulk of the journey to a new solar system; which is crap from the get-go and you know it cuz bodies age as they sleep and no amount of chemicals like they put into Twinkies to preserve them is gonna help.
So we end up with news headlines hundreds of years down the line, that read:
"Dried-up human cadavers due to begin orbiting of EXT-123."
And just WHO is it that gets selected to go for this deep-space ride? Will it be young married couples, or inmates from death row, or orphans only, or members of the banned camp?
Forget all that militaristic crap, like in Avatar. They spent more on that movie's special effects and computer fakery than it would cost to outfit an entire jingoistic fleet. Nobody's gonna OK that kind of expense when we can just let Cameron keep on rollin' his cameras. Cuz WE DON'T REALLY GIVEASH#T ABOUT OTHER CIVILIZATIONS. We barely care enough to keep our own staggering along.
Let's see the gov't fake a military strike at such a vast remove. THAT would be a good subject for a movie, as well. "The Faking of Journey to EXT-123." Rated G.
I vote that we stay home and clean up our act.
LOVE THAT BUTTERFLY!
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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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"If there are alien civilizations in the Universe, why haven't they visited Earth?"
You think Werner is from Earth?
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Gnome Ofthe Diabase
climber
Out Of Bed
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YES, Ghost, Born of Womb and stirred gently, with a sick but true sense of self and a karmic 'wunderkind' of sorts.
His Life Mastery of life and his Better half Too,
both saved my life or stuck my body parts back on my head where they belonged.
If they or he were an alien he would have a-fixed my ear to my left ass-cheek as that is where aliens believe it belongs.
Merry on the other hand may be from across some pond: She danced by me and said;
" he is not holding your rope at all, don't fall our you will surly die"
and then danced up and away @ Bishop's terraces(5.7) circa 1986 or 7
I Knew this and was fine.
I had given him the second line to feed out I was not on belay
HeY Lady....
She was like a dream Gorgeous, tanned, and floating past me in cutoff jean shorts. . .
A Vision
truly
Werner is a lucky duck
If we could go, . . . we would have gone already.
If we went to the moon already we would , Humanity would, be there too.
That we have a Junk camp orbiting in space seems to prove the limits of what is possible.
why are we not camping on the moon ?
It seems like the moon would make a good experimental laboratory?
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