SETI To Scour the Moon For Alien Footprints? 167
astroengine writes "Although we have an entire universe to seek out the proverbial alien needle in a haystack, perhaps looking in our own backyard would be a good place to start. That's the conclusions reached by Paul Davies and Robert Wagner of Arizona State University, anyway. The pair have published a paper in the journal Acta Astronautica detailing how SETI could carry out a low-cost crowdsourcing program (a la SETI@Home) to scour the lunar surface for alien artifacts, thereby gaining clues on whether intelligent aliens are out there and whether they've paid the solar system a visit in the moon's recent history."
Oh For Fuck's Sake (Score:4, Insightful)
Behind a paywall, don't bother. (Score:5, Informative)
It's behind a paywall, don't bother. disregard. A pity, sounds like an interesting idea, would have been nice to read about it.
Re:Behind a paywall, don't bother. (Score:4, Informative)
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Hmm unless I'm reading that link wrong, thats not "the paper" its a press release about the paper after being run thru a journalist filter.
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http://zeenews.india.com/news/space/soon-seti-to-search-the-moon-for-alien-artifacts_749128.html [india.com]
http://www.slashgear.com/seti-to-check-moon-for-signs-of-aliens-28204769/ [slashgear.com]
http://news.discovery.com/space/seti-to-scour-the-moon-for-alien-tech-111227.html [discovery.com]
I wonder if they'll find Daneel there?
Our own backyard? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Oh Crap, captured by the intense gravity and burned up in the dense atmosphere
Re:Our own backyard? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Our own backyard? (Score:5, Funny)
The stuff the Apollo crews left there is still in good condition - imagine what state it would be in if it were left almost anywhere on Earth
It would have been stolen and fenced on eBay . . . along with those Moon rocks "lost" by NASA . . .
Alien Earth Visitor to his Captain: "I have violated our Prime Directive. I left our technology on Earth. That will influence the development of their culture."
Captain: "Don't worry about it. Someone will steal it and sell on eBay, where no one will believe that it is authentic anyway. These Earthlings are a thieving race."
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Alien Earth Visitor to his Captain: But we can still anally probe them, right?
Captain: Of course. Set your course for the nearest trailer park.
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I appreciate the idea of searching for extraterrestrial artifacts, but the moon does not seem a logical place for aliens to drop off their stuff. If anything, it seems far more likely that the earth would be such a place, seeing as it has life already (and has been far more active over the course of its history) so if it makes sense to search anywhere, it's here. I'm not sure what could really be accomplished by scouring the moon...
The argument in the SETI paper is that the lunar environment can preserve surface artifacts and alterations for millions of years. Plus the search only involves looking at satellite imagery be collected for other reasons. No one is claiming the moon was a more likely destination.
Re:Our own backyard? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why on the moon? Why not in a high orbit around the earth. No need to land anything and it would be easier to spot for any technologically advanced society. Put a really big shinny metal ball in orbit at say 70,000 km and it will stay in orbit for geological time scales and if big enough be visible with a telescope from earth. How bit it needs to be will depend on how shiny and how bit of a telescope you are using. It doesn't have to be heavy just big.
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Why on the moon? Why not in a high orbit around the earth.
You mean, like this one? [huffingtonpost.com] ;)
Re:Our own backyard? (Score:5, Informative)
That came from low earth orbit. Nothing from a very high orbit has fallen. For instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguard_1 [wikipedia.org] is expected to last 200+years and has a much lower orbit than the one I mentioned or one could look at the rather large natural satellite that has been in orbit around the Earth for a very long time.
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Actually, that mystery was solved back in 1991 when the first one fell. Here's a really in-depth article about it:
http://fernlea.tripod.com/tank.html [tripod.com]
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But if it's visible with a telescope from earth, then those earth lifeforms would be able to see it long before they developed the means to go look at it up-close. Maybe the Aliens want to wait for us to naturally develop both the desire and the ability to go into space and explore other celestial bodies before we stumble across an artifact from them.
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If this were the case, the opposite side of the moon would be a good candidate, as might putting it in Earth's orbit, but located on the opposite side of the sun from us.
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Exactly, just like the monolith in 2001.
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Understood. Still, station-keeping is a solveable problem for any civilization wandering the cosmos placing such things for space-faring species to discover.
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Until we where very developed we would have no idea that it was not natural. Frankly our extremely large moon already surved that function very well. Not to mention that the very act of developing larger and larger telescopes shows a desire to explore other celestial bodies.
Simple truth is that trying to decide what is hidden enough for an alien race that is capable of interstellar flight is a fools errand. But then again it is also most likely a fools errand to look for artifacts on the moon. My choice is
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Simple truth is that trying to decide what is hidden enough for an alien race that is capable of interstellar flight is a fools errand.
Especially since according to everything we know so far, interstellar flight is impoossible.
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No manned interstellar flight is currently impossible. No real reason that robotic missions are impossible.
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No real reason that robotic missions are impossible.
Voyager has been travelling for forty years and is just now at the edge of the solar system. If it were headed to Proxima Centuri it wouldn't arrive for millinea. It takes ten to twenty minutes, depending on where the respective planets are in their orbits, for a radio signal to reach the Mars rovers.
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So? Voyager is not the fastest space craft we could build even then. It is not the fastest space craft we could build today. Today with an unlimited budget we could build a nuclear powered ion drive and maybe reach Proxima in a century or two. In the future we may go even faster with a laser pumped solar sail.
So no not impossible but very difficult and possibly impractical today for us. A century or so of progress and it may become practical if not before then.
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Exactly!! And make it look like a disproportionately large moon! No one will ever miss the obvious alien gigundous moon orbiting Earth! Oh, wait...
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OK, maybe aliens are more likely to have visited the Earth than the Moon.
So: Where on the Earth are we likely to be able to see undisturbed footprints (or pawprints or tentacleprints or whatever) dating back more than a few days, weeks, months, or (if we're lucky) years? It would have to be some place without other living things that would obscure those footprints by walking all over them, and a place without air or water to erode them. It would also have to be lacking in indigenous lifeforms (ever) that c
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the moon does not seem a logical place for aliens to drop off their stuff. If anything, it seems far more likely that the earth would be such a place, seeing as it has life already
Precisely why the lifeless moon is a better place. That way the local riff-raff is less likely to steal your stuff.
Re:Our own backyard? (Score:5, Interesting)
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If clear evidence of extraterrestrials is ever found can you imagine the gigantic shit storm it would create? Just watching all the various religions running around in circles trying to fit the fact into their sacred canons would be hilarious.
I've studied quite a bit of comparative religion, and I think you're just wrong about this.
Can you name a single religion that would really have a big problem with it, and explain why?
Re:Our own backyard? (Score:4, Interesting)
Christianity != Catholicism (Score:2)
Christianity was not created as a control mechanism to give people at the top power and wealth. You're thinking of Catholicism. They are not the same thing. Of course, the Catholic church claims to be the authorized Christian religion, and has done many things while claiming to act in God's name--but their claiming things does not make such things true. The Christianity that Jesus proclaimed is not like that at all. Catholicism is a human distortion of God's plan--the same could be said for other "vers
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The Christianity that Jesus proclaimed is not like that at all. Catholicism is a human distortion of God's plan--the same could be said for all "versions" of Christianity.
FTFY.
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I'm not sure what you mean by that. If you believe that God's plan included sending Jesus to redeem the world from sin, then you should believe that God's plan does include Christianity. If you mean that no one is perfect, so no one perfectly practices God's plan, I won't argue with that--but that's not the point. If you mean that Jesus himself didn't call it "Christianity," that's not the point either.
The point is that we have God's word, and He gives us wisdom when we ask for it, so we can do our best
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And before you say "faith," consider that this is the same answer given by those following the versions you claim are distorted.
Such an answer would really be saying that one had faith in oneself, rather than faith in God. And I know that I am full of error, so I don't lean on faith in myself.
It's impossible for humans to approach anything without any bias; we are all products of our upbringing and culture, and we all "see through tinted lenses."
This is why we don't rely on ourselves but the word of God, i.e. Scripture. One should do one's best to follow God's commands as found in Scripture--not men's commands. It doesn't matter
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That's an interesting idea. Doesn't make much sense though. Where are you getting this stuff? ÂAnd which Scriptures are you referring to? Oh, and which Roman government? If you're going to spout conspiracy theories you should at least be specific.
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Most main stream religions seem to pontificate about how God created man in is own image
Only if you only count Abrahamic religions as "mainstream". There are millions upon millions of Bhuddists and Hindus, you know. AND, if and when we do find ET, do you really think he's going to be a Vulcan? Look at the diversity of life on earth, all of which has a common evolution. The sci-fi idea (usually in movies and TV, seldom in literature) that ET will look anything at all like us is ludicrous, even more ludicrous
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Pick up a history book and you will find plenty of examples of people using religion to coerce and control a subject population.
That's true, but religion isn't the culprit here, any more than a chain saw is the culprit in a murder. That's not what a chain saw is designed to do, but it can be used for it.
You might as well blame state-sanctioned athiesm for the horrors of Stalin or Pol Pot. Of course, it wasn't athiesm that caused those atrocities, any more than it was religion that caused the atrocities you
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Exactly. Any such new information would be integrated so fast... well, really fast. Blink of an eye. "Of course there is life in the stars, just as prophesied by our spiritual leader in verse blah-blah-blah." The only people who would be labelled heretics would be any earthling who would suggest that the aliens could possibly be atheists.
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If there are extraterrestrials found at some point and they are vastly different from us then whose image did God create them in?
Whose image were squids and starfish and platypuses and kiwis created in? And how is a mockingbird any different than an ET life form in this respect?
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I tend to think that if we do find an intelligent ET, it will be so alien to us that we won't even realize it's intelligent and may not even realise it's alive at all. It's only recently that they discovered that birds can use tools, and that dolphins and whales are remarkably intelligent.
Considering the vast distance betwen even the closest stars, and the incredibly vast distances between galaxies, that the probably that earth is the only place with life is incredibly tiny, and that we're the only intellig
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Just watching all the various religions running around in circles trying to fit the fact into their sacred canons would be hilarious
In a sense, the whole idea behind any religion is to assimilate various contradictions and conundrums and take ownership of them. A religion that didn't rely on inexplicable weird stuff wouldn't last long.
With Christianity, for instance, nothing we'll ever find in the Universe is going to be harder to retcon than what's already written in the Bible, but that hasn't kept the Ch
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If clear evidence of extraterrestrials is ever found can you imagine the gigantic shit storm it would create?
I'm a Christian, and I think the liklihood that this rock is the only one one bering life is improbable. On the other hand, there are so many here at slashdot that are 100% certain we will find ET. Such faith! Me, I think it's unlikely we'll not find ET sooner or later, but it's not unthinkable that this is the only place with life.
Back in the day anyone claiming the Earth was round and not flat were
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Re:Our own backyard? (Score:4, Funny)
Hmm, they travel a minimum of 4 lightyears to get here, and they are worried about the earth's gravity well? I don't think so.
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Check your ego human.
I can believe aliens quarantining/visiting earth if it's not a huge effort. But traveling for generations just to anal probe a bunch of noofies, hippies and rednecks?
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On to a planet, not off. Much easier that way.
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This does kind of have the smell of a big secret about to brake and rather admit to lying for years and years, they just say, ohh, look what we found, surprise, surprise. Apparently some countries heading into space aren't into this whole let's keep it a secret deal, it might affect the whole power base.
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This does kind of have the smell of a big secret about to brake
I think you just said the exact opposite of what you thought you said.
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If it's spider-like critters that look like rocks, I'll literally scream
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The conspiracy theorists that believe that the moon landings did occur, also believe that the astronauts saw underground installations in the sides of the larger craters (lots of lights), as well as rather large "menacing craft" watching them as they walked on the surface.
Fascinating concept for a sci-fi story at least . Not sure if living in the edge of a crater would provide that much protection from stray asteroids, because they could still coming in at an angle. Perhaps shielding from solar radiation wo
Paging James P Hogan! (Score:3)
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I also found 'Inherit the Stars' to be a good read.
For the curious, 'Inherit the Stars' is available for free at the Baen Free Library [baen.com], and the rest of the series is available for purchase from Baen for $4-$6.00 USD for each book.
Also check out 'Mutineer's Moon' (Dahak series) for another interesting premise, also free at the Baen Free Library.
crowdsourcing may add a lot of work here (Score:3)
Not sure how feasible this would be to crowdsource. Wouldn't you need some reasonably trained eyeballs to avoid the cost and time of researching the "ooo I see a footprint" dead-ends?
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At each iteration all the weights can be adjusted based on the experts input about the specific grid point he or she is looking at.
Image of Apollo 17 landing site (Score:3)
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Alaska and Hawaii had become states by the time of the lunar landings.
Send in the crowds (Score:1)
Crowdsourcing on the Moon could solve the population problem on Earth.
Feel free to start here: (Score:5, Funny)
This may give them a leg up on the process:
http://www.marsanomalyresearch.com/evidence-directories/7-moon/moon-directory.htm [marsanomalyresearch.com]
bullseye? (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't read the article, but wouldn't it be better to plant non-visual clues if we were trying to signal to an alien civilization?
Maybe... concentric rings of something weird for the moon, like an obscure U isotope? with something cool buried at the bullseye?
A bored physicist spending too much time with a cyclotron separator on a lonely posting on the far end of the galaxy could be pretty entertaining if he got a bit squirrely in carrying out his mission. How about some weird isotope that is mostly stable and can only be made in a reactor? Maybe some Tc-98? The Ru-98 decay product is stable, and a high concentration of Ru-98 laying about would be almost as bizarre as finding Tc-98 laying about.
I think driving a mass spectrometer around the planets and moons would be an interesting scientific study regardless of SETI implications.
For that matter, if "they" planted a decorative geometric care package of Tc-98 on the moon, I'm not entirely clear why "they" couldn't have done something similar here, somewhere geologically stable-ish.
Interestingly enough, more than 100 yrs ago all this Tc-98 talk would have been meaningless. Its hard to say how future techs might find even weirder stuff. If there is any real world prime directive, it might not rely on being observed, the galactic "you must be this tall for the ride" chart might be observing something really weird once we have quantum computers or a convenient portable intense hand held source of higgs particles.
I would imagine a really bored physicist could do other odd Fortean stuff, like bury a giant freaking microwave waveguide turned into an interdigital filter with passbands such that you whack it with a strong white noise source the resulting output displayed on a spectrum analyzer is a crazy morse code/rs-232 like signal saying "hi", or maybe "dig here for care package". Even just burying radar retroreflectors in a geometric pattern would totally freak out the radar guys.
Note to boss: Do not send vlm on boring interplanetary field posting or he's really going to intensely F with the native's heads once he goes bonkers, or more bonkers anyway.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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That's totally the premise from the latest transformers movie.. and I never thought I would say that they actually did a more convincing job in that movie than the above site...
Somehow this reminds me of: (Score:5, Funny)
A drunk loses the keys to his house and is looking for them under a lamppost. A policeman comes over and asks what he's doing.
"I'm looking for my keys" he says. "I lost them over there".
The policeman looks puzzled. "Then why are you looking for them all the way over here?"
"Because the light is so much better".
Where did the drunk look for his keys? (Score:4, Interesting)
Near the lamppost.
Why?
"Because that's where the light is!"
Sort of the same reasoning is at play here, we are looking for the "keys" on the moon not because that's the best way to find SETI but because well it's "easy" (just crowd source it) and cheap (as long as we've already got hi-res photos of much of the moons surface).
It should not be viewed as a replacement for other more serious efforts (that will actually cost money).
Crowdsourcing is free, so why not (Score:2)
I would say it's pretty much pointless, but won't do any harm.
Why do I think it's pointless? Well, I don't think that aliens visited. While I don't doubt very much there's life elsewhere, maybe even intelligent life, maybe even life with a civilisation that came up with technology, I doubt very much that faster-than-light travel is possible. Still, who knows?
IF there were aliens visiting our system, having them leave some sign on the Moon isn't that silly an idea. Things there will last a long time and if t
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Of course if you crowdsource such a search there will be no shortage of idiots seeing things in perfectly natural shadows and whatever. Better use software to look for straight lines and geometric shapes. I doubt it will find anything worthwhile, but it's surely fun and shouldn't be too hard to do anyway.
While it's true that idiots will find "strange" things in natural phenomenon, that isn't necessarily a bad thing if you set the hit threshold appropriately high. Once a block is assigned as being possible, you might then schedule that same block to be reviewed by additional users (more than normal, and much faster) to speed up identification. As long as one or two idiots can't waste a ton of time, the actual scientists can then perform a review.
Software generally needs to be told what to look for while huma
Not only recent visits, but long past (Score:2)
This is not really a bad idea, considering as well the moon has little erosion, you wouldnt just be looking for something in the recent history, but considering the moon is 4.5 billion years old, there is a possibility that someone could have been there in the past. It is sort of ridiculous to assume that if intelligent life did visit the moon that it would have done so, just in the past few years, or that, some past vist there long ago would be of no interest, of course it would be of interest. Also consid
Do it soon (Score:2)
The moon is no longer really out of reach of private activity. For the moment it still takes noticeable economic activity, but don't count it staying that way.
umm (Score:2)
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We all get to go to the moon and look for aliens? (Score:2)
Great! Where do I sign up?
(No, I didn't read the article)
If they can cross interstellar space... (Score:2)
Ok, WHERE on the moon should we look? (Score:2)
Let's assume that the Aliens DID leave us some thing on the moon for us to find and it's pretty small and non-obvious from a distance (like a giant set of intersecting lines at the center of a huge circle). Don't ask me why, maybe they were lazy or they didn't want something that could be discovered by just looking through a telescope on earth.
Aside from the ideas previously expressed using some sort of technological marker (radioactivity, isotopes or, as in "2001" a magnetic anomaly) where would they put
I Think It Unlikely... (Score:2)
That any advanced alien race has *ever* visited the vicinity of our world. As Douglas Adams put it, "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
That's not to say I don't think that extraterrestrial life exists. It almost certainly does. Is some of that life intelligent? Maybe. Is that intelligent life (barring superluminal space travel) close enough t
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That any advanced alien race has *ever* visited the vicinity of our world. As Douglas Adams put it, "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
Yeah, but size of space is just n^3, which is easily outpaced by exponential population growth. In other words, if interstellar expansion of a civilization is possible, this civilization will fill the galaxy in matter of millions to hundreds of millions of years, depending on speed of interstellar travel (size of our galaxy is in the scale of mere hundred thousand light years). And assuming no available "infinite" energy sources ("hyperspace tap", "infinite zero-point energy", "portable white holes", "quark
This will cause great harm to science! (Score:2)
This is an incredibly stupid idea, so much so that it's making me suspect that SETI people don't really care about science. The obvious problem is that we don't know what "alien footprints" look like. Therefore, the searchers are basically supposed to report anything which looks significant or weird to them.
Here is what I predict: We won't discover an alien capsule, but we'll definitely see formations where aliens arranged rocks to look like
Too much science fiction? (Score:2)
The "aliens have visited the moon" is a pretty common trope in SF (2001: A Space Odyssey [wikipedia.org], In the Ocean of Night [wikipedia.org], Inherit the Stars [wikipedia.org], and many others).
While this makes a tolerable MacGuffin, somebody probably needs to tell these guys that it's not real.
not LNT? (Score:2)
Re:first (Score:5, Insightful)
Oceans destroy artifacts on the scale of years. One year in the Atlantic is worth a billion years on the moon.
Re:first (Score:5, Informative)
Its probably easier to get to the moon than the bottom of the deepest oceans. An unmanned space craft doesn't have to deal with much pressure in space. the difference between space and earth sea level is only about 14psi. The bottom of the ocean has pressures over 15,000 psi
Besides, with plate techtonics, the ocean floor isn't really that old. Of the 4.5 billion years earth has been around, the atlantic ocean was only around for a few hundred million years.
The moon however, is pretty much a solid rock, there no known movements of its surface
There has also been life down in the oceans for over 3 billion years leaving its own traces
Re:first (Score:5, Informative)
The moon however, is pretty much a solid rock, there no known movements of its surface
Oh, except for all the crap that has been sandblasting it since the dawn of time. Every time a new crater is formed, everything that is ejected out of the hole blankets the area around it, and the ground will quiver like a bell from the impact. While there doesn't appear to be any current tectonic activity, the surface of the moon is far from static.
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Re:first (Score:5, Informative)
Its probably easier to get to the moon than the bottom of the deepest oceans.
I don't think so. It takes ~1970 technology to reach the moon, along with a monstrous budget, yet it only takes a small budget and 1960 technology to reach the deepest point in the ocean:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe_Trieste [wikipedia.org]
Re:first (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think so. It takes ~1970 technology to reach the moon, along with a monstrous budget, yet it only takes a small budget and 1960 technology to reach the deepest point in the ocean:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe_Trieste [wikipedia.org]
And how long do you think you'd take to survey the entire sea-bed that way?
I'm not saying it would be a bad idea; if nothing else it would probably find some interesting old wrecks, but I'd be surprised if it was as fast and cheap as surveying the lunar surface at resolutions high enough to spot any kind of alien prescence. That said, I very much doubt there's anything to see up there.
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And how long do you think you'd take to survey the entire sea-bed that way?
I never said it was fast, I was just countering the earlier assertion that it's easier to get to the moon than the bottom of the deepest ocean, because we did the latter a full decade before the former, with a much smaller budget too. And our moon missions didn't exactly cover a lot of territory on the moon, either, they just landed at a pre-selected spot, walked around a bit (drove around in some later missions), collected some roc
Re:first (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is most of the ocean is dark. Like, really, really, dark. The depth alone isn't a problem. The darkness, combined with the extremely limited visibility, is. You can see the entire surface of the moon from, well, just step outside on a night with a full moon. The bottom of ocean? Not so much. You can even make a precise survey of the lunar surface's height using laser rangefinding. Down to about 40m (vertical, 100m horizontal), which isn't bad at all. The closest thing for the ocean is sonar, and that is nowhere near as precise.
Don't remember where I heard it, but some scientist once commented that we know more about the surface of Mars than we do about our own ocean. It is surprisingly difficult to survey the ocean. According to the NOAA: "Yet for all of our reliance on the ocean, 95 percent of this realm remains unexplored, unseen by human eyes." (source [noaa.gov]). There is a reason we are still discovering new life in the ocean (and a lot of it too).
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I was just countering the earlier assertion that it's easier to get to the moon than the bottom of the deepest ocean, because we did the latter a full decade before the former, with a much smaller budget too. And our moon missions didn't exactly cover a lot of territory on the moon, either
Lunar Orbiter surveyed pretty much the entire moon in the mid-60s. The resolution wasn't enough to see alien footprints, but that was limited by the camera technology of the time.
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You wouldn't use ROV technology - or at least, I wouldn't use ROV technology.
Note : an ROV, as the term is conventionally used in the industry for which it was invented, is a mobile, self propelled platform capable of carrying both sensors (cameras,
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Re:first (Score:5, Insightful)
24 people have been to the moon, 2 to the bottom of the ocean. There are currently satellites orbiting the moon, there is nothing man made swimming around the bottom of the ocean right now. The first unmanned vehicle to go down there was in 1995, the last in 2009.
You can communicate with the moon in less than 2 seconds using radio waves. It takes 7 seconds for sonar to reach the bottom of the ocean.
There's apparently a $10,000,000 prize if you can get there twice
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There's apparently a $10,000,000 prize if you can get there twice
To the bottom of the ocean? Doubtful, and citation needed. If some guys in 1960 can build a craft that takes actual humans down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and go down there successfully, it would be pretty trivial for someone to do the same thing now twice in a row.
As for nothing swimming around down there, how do you know? There's lots of private companies that operate ROVs for various reasons, such as treasure hunting. They don
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I didn't provide a citation because it was one click [wikipedia.org] away from the link you provided previously.
Cables aren't very robust. The first unmanned vehicle to go down there is MIA after its cable broke in 2003. Its replacement hasn't ventured to the bottom of challenger deep yet.
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I accidentally left out the entire word "seriously" there.
But you get the idea.
--
BMO
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