NASA's LCROSS Spacecraft Discovers Life On Earth 171
Matt_dk writes "On Saturday, Aug. 1, 2009, the LCROSS spacecraft successfully completed its first Earth-look calibration of its science payload. 'The Earth-look was very successful' said Tony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist. 'The instruments are all healthy and the science teams was able to collect additional data that will help refine our calibrations of the instruments.' During the Earth observations, the spacecraft's spectrometers were able to detect the signatures of the Earth's water, ozone, methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide and possibly vegetation."
An early false-negative had them worried (Score:3, Funny)
Turns out they were just over Detroit.
Re:An early false-negative had them worried (Score:4, Funny)
I'm offended! If you'd ever actually been to or lived in Detroit you'd know that it's full of rats and cockroaches.
What gets me.... (Score:5, Funny)
I almost fell out of my chair when I read this
Re:What gets me.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:What gets me.... (Score:4, Funny)
We still have vegitation down here? Someone better tell Captain McCrea.
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I dunno. Given a little more jungle clearing, and a little more urban sprawl - we may just get rid of all the pesky vegetation within a couple more decades. I guess we can examine the idea of electrolysis for our oxygen. No biggie, I imagine.
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Have you ever even been to Earth?
It's nowhere even close to being cleared of vegetation.
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Ahem. Yah. I exaggerated a little, maybe. But, take a look around you. If you live in the US, east of the Mississippi, it is a pretty sure bet that you live on old forest land? Virgin forest, without houses, roads, factories, schools, and government buildings. Literally millions of trees have been cut down to make way for people. There should be a Google map or some such thing, showing how deforestation of the earth has progressed over the last - ohhh - 300 years maybe. Even the last 100 years would
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well I thought it said vegetarians - they are different, for sure...
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"Yes! We did it! We did it! After years of searching, billions of dollars invested, and being subject to endless ridicule, we finally achieved our mission! We now have incontrovertible proof of intraterrestrial life!"
"Um ... dude ... I think the goal is to find extraterrestrial life."
Re:What gets me.... (Score:5, Interesting)
They just got a license to use this technology...
Last summer the West Virginia State Police allowed ORINCON to test the ability of hyperspectral optical technology to locate crops of marijuana. Given the success of that test, ORINCON has been invited to participate in this summer's interdiction effort to further validate the technology and demonstrate a more advanced detection unit.
http://cannabisnews.com/news/5/thread5978.shtml [cannabisnews.com]
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So this satalite will be sent out to discover the universes hippys?
Ummmm NO.... Just where the aliens hide their weed...
Re:What gets me.... (Score:5, Informative)
ie, it is a definite detection of something matches what vegetation is expected to be like, but without more detailed info other sources of this anomaly cannot be conclusively ruled out. (unlike the spectral signature of methane, which is a much more binary choice once the SRN on your spectrometer is good enough - if you detect the absorption lines, methane is there in significant amounts, if you don't it isn't.)
Colonization (Score:5, Funny)
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Forget robots, it's high time we put a MAN on the Earth!
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I'm already here. Who do you want me to probe?
Re:Colonization (Score:5, Funny)
During the 1960's and 1970's, we sent several men from the Moon to the Earth. Tragically, all were stranded, and none ever returned to the Moon.
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Would that be thinking inside the box?
Meanwhile, SETI... (Score:4, Funny)
At the same time, we're still waiting from the SETI's calibration and observation to discover any trace of *Intelligence* on earth.
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I know you're joking, but there -have- been positives from SETI that actually came from Earth, so... It has.
greetings (Score:1)
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NASA' LCROSS Spacecraft Discovers Life On Earth (Score:5, Funny)
Sadly, (Score:5, Funny)
It's life, Jim (Score:3, Funny)
It's life, Jim, just as we know it, just as we know it, Jim.
Beam me sideways, Scotty, nobody on this planet knows which way is up.
Pre-empting the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
2 predictions:
* Lots of slashdot users trying to post something witty about why this is a new story
* trolls saying how this is everything we should expect and therefore should ignore.
to all those who disengaged their brain I ask, what would you do in their position? Hope your instruments work as designed without testing them? Either way, please devise a better test for life as we know it than life as we know it.
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2 predictions:
* Lots of slashdot users trying to post something witty about why this is a new story
* trolls saying how this is everything we should expect and therefore should ignore.
to all those who disengaged their brain I ask, what would you do in their position? Hope your instruments work as designed without testing them? Either way, please devise a better test for life as we know it than life as we know it.
Thank you for being one of the first to post a non-redundant non-predictable post actually worth reading and that adds something to the discussion. I was wondering how much more scrolling I was going to have to do. If I had mod points I'd be making liberal use of the 'redundant', 'off topic' and 'overrated' tags around about now.
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Well, both your predictions are wrong. It appears that it's simply attracted about 50 people, all of whom think they are the first person to think of the fact that while it found life, NONE OF IT WAS INTELLIGENT HAW HAW HAW. Apparently a sign of intelligent life is realising that your ideas aren't new and that you've likely been beaten to them, therefore all those posters comments were self-prophecising. Well done chaps.
At any rate, this is a new story because, err ... it wanted to get to the other side. D
Re:Pre-empting the obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
>While we're at it, shouldn't we be spending this money on feeding the starving
No, because there'll always be starving. I wish humanity/life was otherwise I really do, but I don't see a long term solution where resources are finite and the exponential function is applicable.
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My sarcasm attempts were obviously terrible. I was just fufilling your predictions for you and then adding in a bonus bullshit comment that normally gets digitally vomited into comments about expensive and cool space applicatons of science. I don't give a shit about the starving people, I want to get humanity into space. Preferably all the idiots. Or they can stay here. Either way, there is a lot of room out there, and it sucks to be stuck in this pale blue dot with all these fucktards.
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At least for now. There may come a time when the planet is so teeming with people that the limited area of farmable land (even with floating oceanic vertical hydroponic greenhouses) will not
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While we're at it, shouldn't we be spending this money on feeding the starving?
Money doesn't feed people. We already have more than enough food to feed everyone on earth. The problem is the lack of a will to do so.
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Famines in China and Russia were caused by the government imposing collectivisation.
Interesting. Do you have any prove for that?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivization_in_the_Soviet_Union#Ukraine [wikipedia.org]
Most historians agree that the disruption caused by collectivization and the resistance of the peasants significantly contributed to the Great Famine of 1932-1933, especially in Ukraine, a region famous for its rich soil (chernozem). This particular period is called "Holodomor" in Ukrainian. During the similar famines of 1921-1923, numerous campaigns, inside the country, as well as internationally were held to raise money and food in support of the population of the affected regions. Nothing similar was done during the drought of 1932-1933, mainly because the information about the disaster was suppressed by Stalin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor [wikipedia.org]
The Holodomor (translation: death by starvation) refers to the famine of 1932-1933 in the Ukrainian SSR during which millions of people were starved to death because of the Soviet policies, and there were no natural causes for starvation. In fact, Ukraine - unlike other Soviet Republics - enjoyed a bumper wheat crop in 1932. The Holodomor is considered one of the greatest calamities to affect the Ukrainian nation in modern history. Millions of inhabitants of Ukraine died of starvation in an unprecedented peacetime catastrophe. Estimates on the total number of casualties within Soviet Ukraine range mostly from 2.6 million to 10 million.
In fact collectivisation killed so many people that it caused the 1937 census to give the wrong results. The people were responsible were sent to the Gulag as saboteurs ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Census_(1937) [wikipedia.org] )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_farming#People.27s_Republic_of_China [wikipedia.org]
Collective farming began in the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong. It was further pursued during the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to rapidly mobilize the country in an effort to transform China into an industrialized communist society. The policy mistakes associated with this collectivization attempt during the Great Leap Forward resulted in mass starvation. According to many other sources, the death toll due to famine was most likely about 20 to 30 million people. The three years between 1959 and 1962 were known as the "Three Bitter Years" and the Three Years of Natural Disasters.
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Despite these harmful agricultural innovations, the weather in 1958 was very favourable and the harvest promised to be good. Unfortunately, the amount of labour diverted to steel production and construction projects meant that much of the harvest was left to rot uncollected in some areas. This problem was exacerbated by a devastating locust swarm, which was caused when their natural predators were killed en masse as part of the Great Sparrow Campaign. Although actual harvests were reduced, local officials, under tremendous pressure from central authorities to report record harvests in response to the new innovations, competed with each other to announce increasingly exaggerated results. These were used as a basis for determining the amount of grain to be taken by the State to supply the towns and cities, and to export. This left barely enough for the peasants, and in some areas, starvation set in. During 1958â"1960 China continued to be a substantial net exporter of grain, despite the widespread famine experienced in the countryside, as Mao sought to maintain face and convince the outside world of the success of his plans.
In short: SNAFU.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Holodomor [wikipedia.org]
The reasons for the famine are a subject of scholarly and political debate. Some historians theorize that the famine was an unintended consequence of the economic problems associated with radical economic changes implemented during the period of Soviet industrialization. Others claim that the Soviet policies that caused the famine were engineered attack on Ukrainian nationalism. They even go further and suggest that may fall under the legal definition of genocide.
So it's unclear if rapid collectivization, in combination with bad weather and peasants resistance, caused that famine.
I agree that really bad government decisions were a cause in both cases, but I can't see how it can be attributed to collective farming.
Re:Pre-empting the obvious (Score:4, Funny)
2 predictions: * Lots of slashdot users trying to post something witty about why this is a new story * trolls saying how this is everything we should expect and therefore should ignore.
Um, this is Slashdot. That's like betting that a coin toss will be either heads or tails.
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Personally I don't think anyone questioned the QA value of pointing the science instruments at the earth to calibrate them.
Trolls aside, Captain Obvious, what DID you expect?
Stunned-to-silence wonderment?
Calibrating with Earth (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Calibrating with Earth (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. Know of any other data samples we can use?
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No. Do you have a better one?
Hold on, why are they doing this again? (Score:2)
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The Onion ? (Score:2)
I really thought it was an Onion article...
jokes aside... (Score:2)
A far more interesting result would have been if they hadn't been able to detect life on Earth as the inability to do so from such a close distance would make detecting Earth-like life elsewhere in the galaxy a laughable prospect.
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not so much laughable as depressing imo.. the last thing we need are delays in this sort of thing, we should be out there exploring by now. so this is good news.
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A far more interesting result would have been if they hadn't been able to detect life on Earth as the inability to do so from such a close distance would make detecting Earth-like life elsewhere in the galaxy a laughable prospect.
Free oxygen is a pretty good indicator for life. Its just that this spacecraft doesn't work that way.
NASA is trying to say.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Incorrect Title (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not even that. It discovers nothing about life, and certainly not whether it's Earth-like or not, just signatures of life in an atmosphere. For all we know, if that would be due to life, it could very well be extremely non-Earth like, just sharing the characteristic of producing similar atmospheric signatures.
Concentrated plasma charge... (Score:1)
In other news (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA discovers light from the sun, and no atmosphere on the moon.
Could the summary be any more vacuous? It could have been a bit more explanatory about the nature of the satellite. (i.e. to find water on the moon - source: http://lcross.arc.nasa.gov/mission.htm [nasa.gov])
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been done before (Score:4, Interesting)
LCrOSS (Score:2, Informative)
Note to spacefellowship:
I'm going to save google some bandwidth and expand the acronym:
LCrOSS=lunar crater observation & sensing satellite
Thinking TOO HARD..... (Score:1)
Pointless calibration.
So, they just calibrated their instruments to detect massive urbanization, a huge population, and massive amounts of water?!
They should be calibrating for FAR weaker readings, unless they expect to find a civilization just as obvious as ours.
Heck, all they would have needed to do is walk outside, or at least calibrate their instruments to detect far FAR less of what they are looking for.
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Lots of money spent. (Score:2)
.' During the Earth observations, the spacecraft's spectrometers were able to detect the signatures of the Earth's water, ozone, methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide and possibly vegetation."
Just to see a Fart-in-a-jar.
How about intellegence ? (Score:2)
Oil? (Score:5, Funny)
detect the signatures of the Earth's water, ozone, methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide and possibly vegetation
What? No oil detector? This thing is useless!
The UHCD was ditched (Score:3, Funny)
Whew! That was close... (Score:3, Funny)
...if it had found "intelligent life" that would have been a false positive.
Why this is significant/how it works. (Score:2, Informative)
So it mentions that they detect levels of methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide, etc. etc.
In an uninhabited planet, methane and oxygen are two completely incompatible chemicals (over a time period which is considered tiny on astronomical scales, these two chemicals to react to form carbon dioxide.) Therefore, the coexistence of methane and oxygen implies that a process is actively forming these two molecules, so that an equilibrium is reached between production and decay. This process, in other words, is photosyn
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Apparently there world be no baseline metric for finding intelligent life on Slashdot these days.
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Looking for intelligent life on earth. Scanning. Scanning. Scanning...
Segmentation fault. Core dumped.
Re:But is it intelligent? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:But is it intelligent? (Score:5, Funny)
They're outside of the faraday cage basement you're living in.
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And what does say that life has to have the form that we know here on Earth?
What if there is life on a planet that actually uses Fluorine or Chlorine instead of Oxygen? It may not be life as we know it, but the environment may have forced that kind of life to evolve.
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Life is defined as something you can have sex with. I don't think creatures eating chlorine fits the definition, unless you want to bleach your...
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So the only forms of life on Earth are female humans?
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The key is the nucleogenesis [wikipedia.org]. Fluorine is orders of magnitude rarer than oxygen, and chlorine too. Silicon and Sulphur may be better candidates to substitute carbon and oxygen.
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That is assuming an even distribution of the elements.
There is still a potential of different types of life.
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That's like saying this 20 year old car is "relatively new"......as compared to the Model T. To say that it is 'relatively rare' is to suggest that it actually IS, in some fashion, rare. It's not. You'll find it in every active star in the Universe. You'll find it in every (known) living organism. Explain how it's in any way 'rar
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Put down the PS2 controller and go outside.
Beam me up Scotty!! (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Beam me up Scotty!! (Score:5, Funny)
Theres no intelligent live down here!!
Oh, the irony..... ;)
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Re:Beam me up Scotty!! (Score:5, Funny)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam_me_up,_Scotty [wikipedia.org]
"Beam me up Scotty. There's no intelligent life down here."
Was also used in Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future , which is about as close to an "origin" that you would probably find.
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"I just... love scanning for lifeforms!
Lifeforms! (doot-doot-doot-doot)
You tiny little lifeforms! (doot-doot-doot-doot)
You precious little lifeforms! (doot-doot-doot-doot)
Where are you? (deedee-doot-doot-doot-doot-da, deedee-deet!)"
Re:Beam me up Scotty!! (Score:5, Funny)
Really. (Score:2, Insightful)
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If you're triple trolling off the GP and GGP, then a new comic [imageshack.us] needs to be drawn. Also message me your steam name because you're brilliant and I want to buy you a game.
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Theres no intelligent live down here!!
Sure, there is. Knoppix, for one.
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Zargog says that his brother was lynched after he landed in Mississippi - try landing in one of the blue-coloured states!
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Search for Terrestrial Intelligence [totl.net] is currently in progress but has not produced any good evidence of intelligent life on that planetary object yet.
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My first reaction was similar - DUH! After reading more I realized it was an important step. It is a calibration of a true positive. Knowing what Earth looks like on the instruments will help in comparison to measurements of other heavenly bodies.
Like these. [google.com]
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Data is sent back using heavy encoding. Not for the sake of keeping people out, but for the sake of error correction and detection. The Voyager probes used the Extended Golay code when sending imagery back to Earth. From WP: "The extended binary Golay code encodes 12 bits of data in a 24-bit word in such a way that any triple-bit error can be corrected and any quadruple-bit error can be detected."
Radio transmission over astronomical distances is really hard, especially with objects like the massive open