More on the Waterworld Goldilocks Planet 107
goldilocksmission writes with this snippet from Goldilocks Mission: "News spread recently about a super-earth-sized planet that has been recently discovered to contain one of the most essential compounds for life to exist in the universe: water. ... GJ1214b is a massive planet that can house about six earths and is about forty light-years away from us. ... The significant discovery leap of detecting Gliese 581d to the more goldilocks planet oriented GJ1214b is a testament to the advances in the technology of detecting earth-like exoplanets."
Re:Goldilocks? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Goldilocks? (Score:3, Insightful)
We're Goldilocks; we're looking at the porridges and beds... er, planets, and finding ones that are too cold, too hot, too hard, too soft...
and then we find one that's juuuust right.
A planet that's (relatively) close that wouldn't require terraforming? There are no languages that have the words to describe how incredibly valuable such a find would be if we could get there. Humans forever -- even destroying Earth wouldn't stop us.
I've always called Frankenstein's monster a Flesh Golem, but that's just me.
Re:Higher Ice Phases (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:nothing new here (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it isn't. First, his employing university told Galileo that teaching this sort of bleeding-edge science, some of which was outright wrong (including, for instance, his theory of the tides, and his characterizations of pendulums), and furthermore wildly contrasted with the current philisophical-scientific consensus. If you were the dean and your faculty started teaching the Electric Universe, you might be concerned too, even if those kooks ended up being right in another 200 years. Then when he wrote a book on the matter and Urban VIII asked him to try and go for a neutral point of view on things (a la Wikipedia's design standards, perhaps) he called the Pope's geocentrism guy "Simplicio" and made him look like an idiot. Bad political move. Then Urban acted like a typical 17th-century Italian nobleman - if anything, probably he was somewhat mild for that archetype.
A tragedy of politics and underdeveloped notions of scientific rigor in the extant culture, but cults hade nothing to do with it.