NASA's Chief Scientist Predicts Evidence For Life Beyond Earth By 2025 160
An anonymous reader writes: Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA, predicts we're not far off from finding evidence for alien life. At a panel discussion yesterday, she said, "I think we're going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years." She added, "We know where to look. We know how to look. In most cases we have the technology, and we're on a path to implementing it." Stofan thinks putting astronauts on Mars will be a big part of that goal. As efficient as robot missions are, she thinks it'll take humans digging and cracking rocks to find definitive evidence for life on other worlds.
We don't know (Score:1, Insightful)
We have no idea how far off we are from finding life on another planet, and we won't know until we actually find it. Miss Stofan should stick to gazing at the stars rather rhan into a crystal ball.
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Re:We don't know (Score:4, Insightful)
Also note that she said "strong indications of life" not actually finding definitive proof of life. I think she's probably talking something along the lines of a spectrum analysis finding a chemical in the atmosphere of a foreign body that's associated with life, or finding some microbes on Europa or something. But if we're going to do it by 2025, we'll need some pretty huge leaps forward, and very fast. And the idea that we'll be putting anyone on Mars by 2025 is laughable. Maybe 2125, and even that's unlikely given the current funding levels of most space programs.
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The 'needing humans for digging and cracking rocks' remark is particularly stupid in light of the fact that the current probes already dig and crack rocks to some extent, and NASA's about to launch a probe that takes digging and rock cracking to a whole new level [wikipedia.org] (although for a different purpose). The concept that humans are some sort of ideal digging, rock cracking system is crazy.
The ability to conduct science using human physical and sensory capabilities is highly limited. Science is conducted using sci
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Robots are proxies, not substitutes (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans operate it either way, the only major difference between a robot and a physical presence is higher latency for robots, and orders of magnitude greater cost for humans.
That is not the only major difference. Humans can create new tools and are vastly more flexible in what they can do than any robot. It's more than mere latency. Furthermore there are some bits of information that simply cannot be obtained by a robot. There is a huge difference between looking through a webcam at an ocean and actually standing at the shore yourself. There is information about humans that can only be obtained by sending humans. There are economic benefits to developing the technology to send humans that go far beyond the mission itself.
Going to other planets isn't just a geology project. There are some things we will only learn if we are there ourselves.
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You cannot understand the ocean through a camera (Score:2)
The difference is a lot smaller when you can move the camera (and other instruments) around, zoom in on any details that the human could see, and you have a team of experts deciding where to look.
The difference is vast between standing somewhere and looking through a webcam and it will never become otherwise. It doesn't matter how good your camera is. You seriously are pretending that you know what the ocean is like because you looked at it through a camera? It's not even close to the same thing. What does it smell like? What does the breeze feel like? How does it feel?
No robot can tell you everything you will learn by standing there yourself. There are biological questions that remote roboti
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The difference is vast between standing somewhere and looking through a webcam and it will never become otherwise. It doesn't matter how good your camera is. You seriously are pretending that you know what the ocean is like because you looked at it through a camera? It's not even close to the same thing. What does it smell like? What does the breeze feel like?
Unfortunately immediately after having smelled an alien ocean or after feeling the Martian breeze a human will need replacing, whereas a robot will remain functional. A human standing on another planet will be sensing everything through mechanical mediation. Gazing through a visor may be preferable to viewing via a remote screen, but you are unlikely to ever be feeling that breeze on your cheek.
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We have no idea how far off we are from finding life on another planet, and we won't know until we actually find it.
Will we even be able to recognize it as life, when we do find it . . . ?
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Yes, when we do find live, it means we've recognized it. We may, of course, overlook life much earlier.
Re:We don't know (Score:5, Interesting)
Good question. NASA seems to be on a search obsessively focused on the concept "liquid water touching bedrock equals life, anywhere without liquid water touching bedrock equals no life". There's so many things wrong with this concept I don't even know where to start. We don't even know if the first forms of life on our own planet developed that way, let alone whether it's common or rare and whether other possibilities are common or rare.
It bothers me because it causes them to obsess over certain bodies (Mars, Europa) while ignoring others. Personally, if I was hunting for life, of all the places in the solar system outside of Earth, I'd pick Titan (which usually gets ignored because it's so cold).
* It's bigger (although not heavier) than Mercury, and has a predominantly nitrogen atmosphere denser than Earth, with a full meteorological cycle.
* We know that there's complex organic chemistry going on en masse there. Today.
* We've detected dozens of types of complex organic chemicals already even with our limited study and we know we're only scratching the surface. Unidentified chemicals around 10000 daltons have been detected in the atmosphere. There's probably even more complex chemicals on the surface. There's so much complex organics there that it blankets the surface in places.
* There's not one type of liquid on Titan but multiple - an underground sea (which reaches the surface through cryovolcanoes, we're pretty certain) and surface seas of hydrocarbons of what appear to be significantly varying compositions.
* Titan's methane is regenerating itself. We don't know why. On Mars they treat the presence of unexpected methane as an incredible sign of possible life, on Titan it's treated just as a "Huh, weird" thing
* Before the details of what was going on on Titan it was theorized in peer-reviewed research that if life existed on Titan, it would most likely consume ethane and acetylene as fuel, burn it with hydrogen instead of oxygen, and produce methane instead of CO2. Subsequent measurements revealed that Titan's surface is unexpectedly ethane-poor, highly acetlyene poor versus how much is being produced in the atmosphere, and one tenative study reveals that hydrogen is disappearing at the surface too.
* A recent study shows that if it reached sufficient concentration, any acrylonitrile dissolved in Titan's hydrocarbon lakes would naturally form membranes with properties almost identical to the properties of phospholipid membranes on Earth. It just so happens that we've already detected acrylonitrile in Titan's atmosphere.
And on and on. Does any of this mean that there "is" life on Titan? No, not at all. But it's orders of magnitude more evidence than we have for life being at any of the other "popular" places like Mars with its peroxide-rich regolith that destroys organics on contact or Europa's undersea ocean that we know virtually zilch about. And there's an awful lot of mysteries about Titan that warrant solving, life or not. For example, even if there was some non-organic catalyst on Titan breaking down acetylene on the surface, it'd sure be amazing and potentially quite useful to know what sort of natural inorganic catalyst could do that at 100K. And even if Titan turns out to be the worst case - a "frozen early Earth" - well, geez, the knowledge we'd gain toward understanding where we came from in studying the organic chemistry there would be amazing.
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In addition to looking for water, NASA also looks for anything out of the ordinary. I don't know what more you could do to find life.
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What I really want to see is a single ambitious Titan mission that could answer nearly all of the questions we have today (while undoubtedly making tons of new ones... ah, the beauty of science ;) ):
* The craft would consist of (beyond its initial boost) a propulsion/communication module, an exploration module, and an ascent module.
* The propulsion module would use its RTG power, plus the power from the RTG of the attached exploration module, to run the ion engine, draining its tank to near
Re:We don't know (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's less " anywhere without liquid water touching bedrock equals no life" than we, at present, have have no direct evidence to suggest life is definitely possible elsewhere, and if it is we will likely have a much more difficult time recognizing it, as well as guessing where, specifically, it might be located (Titan is a big place after all). Basically it's the sort of work that would almost certainly require boots on the ground - its not worth even seriously attempting such a search without a proper laboratory - unless you stumble on a macroscopic colony of something that has experienced convergent evolution to resemble Earth-life, you're unlikely to be able to recognize it with the limited mechanisms available to a probe.
Plus there's the whole factor that we're still uncertain just how likely biogenesis is, while panspermia is almost certainly possible within a star system, and there's a pretty good chance that Earth life or, at the very least, DNA, has littered the surface of the other planets, where it might be able to take root if conditions were similar enough to Earth to support the chemistry.
And of course, finally, there's the fact that we don't yet have the technology to meaningfully explore an ice-world like Titan, or even Europa. Some ideas, sure, but nothing within decades of deployment on current budgets. Plus the time and energy cost of getting a probe there is much greater than to Mars.
Yes, there a certain "I'm looking for my dropped keys under the streetlight, because that's where I can see" aspect to it all, but since we don't actually know where the "keys" might have been "dropped", that's an eminently logical place to start the search.
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In many ways, Titan is an easier world than Mars (no question that Europa is the odd one out, we're nowhere close to being able to get a probe to explore its oceans). If it wasn't for the distance, it'd be far easier and safer. Lower gravity plus a nice thick atmosphere makes it so easy to aerobrake and gives you tons of great ways to get around (balloons, blimps, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, tilt-rotor craft, etc). Moving by air is not only orders of magnitude faster, but - so long as the air is stabl
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Unfortunately, from the air you can't actually do a whole lot more than from low orbit. You can get air samples and better photographs, but unless we're talking large-scale surface-dwelling life forms that won't be enough to spot them. Meanwhile, Titan is MUCH colder Mars, at around 94K average surface temperature, whereas Mars' average is about 218K . Building equipment to operate reliably in those temperatures starts to get difficult. And as you point out, nuclear is really the only viable power source,
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The whole point of "from the air" is that you can land. And take off and land and take off again and again. It's not exactly tricky to raise or lower altitude. ;) And on Titan, low gravity plus a dense atmosphere yields very low terminal velocities, i.e. cushy landings without much effort. But even if you're not talking about landing, you absolutely can do a lot more by virtue of being able to get so much closer to the s
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Corr: stirling, not sterling ;)
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Absolutely, this kind of advocacy undermines science.
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Really? I don't see it - science is as much about the thrill of discovery, and anticipation therof (aka speculation) as it is about the long hours of tedious work and final conclusions. Remove the former and the latter will virtually vanish.
What is does potentially undermine is scientific *authority* among the ignorant, but thanks to the concerted efforts of the Koch brothers and other anti-science campaigns, not to mention decades of science so heavily polluted by politics as to be unrecognizable (food p
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Did Someone let the Koch brother's out of R'lyeh again ? Damn someone better get working on putting that elder sign back in place.
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"We know where to look. We know how to look," Stofan added
Yeah, all it has to do is be there. The fact is, is we have no idea how life began. Until we figure that out, we can only speculate whether it exists anywhere else, whether it was a unique event, or whether it might be a common occurrence. Don't get me wrong - we should look. We should explore for the sake of exploration. But to extrapolate, or make predictions, based a sample of one, when we don't even understand that one sample? It's just wishful t
Not so sure... (Score:1)
humans digging and cracking rocks
Digging and cracking rocks in alien enviroments sounds like a perfect job for semi-/autonomous vehicles. Despite the romance of sending humans to distant planets, robots/remote vehicles are a sound economic alternative.
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The existing rovers on Mars move at an average speed of 30 meters per hour. Average human walking speed is over 100x faster.
When you have a few decades head start, 30 meters/hour beats 3000 meters/hour for a long time.
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The real problem is latency. From Earth, we could control teleoperators on the Moon, but no farther. If a robot on Mars reports that it sees something interesting and Mission Control decides to go drill that rock over there, at least a half hour has to elapse.
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Half an hour is not a lot of time, all things considered.
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Half an hour becomes a significant amount of time if you have to make a number of chained decisions, in which you have to wait for the results of decision A to come back before making decision B, with each cycle taking the full latency round trip..
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We've figured out how to keep a rover alive for several years. That's plenty of time to do a bunch of research. I think the bigger problem is that after a while they run out of interesting things to look at with the instruments they brought. What they really need is better and different instruments. Human presence couldn't help you with that. All it can do is compress the "several years" into "several weeks". Given the time to prepare and execute the entire missions, that's hardly significant, especially be
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The existing rovers on Mars move at an average speed of 30 meters per hour. Average human walking speed is over 100x faster. This is just one of many metrics by which the most advanced and most expensive probes ever created fail to match human performance.
Have you ever seen a field geologist? They do not move at 30 meters per hour. If you're lucky, you can get them to move that far in a day.
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This is how we will approach a task like assaying asteroids for exploitable mineral content. But although actually mining them would be far more robot-intensive than any terrestrial equivalent, we are still going to need some people in the loop.
Well, to be fair... (Score:5, Funny)
If we put humans on Mars, I'm guessing that would be considered life beyond earth. If NASA sends someone who isn't a US Citizen, they would be an alien.
So, really, not too far fetched for the pedantic among us. And, being /., that would be pretty much all of us.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]
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Paint him green and give him a funny looking helmet and we have a deal.
NASA's Chief Scientist Wants More Funding (Score:5, Insightful)
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"I think we're going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years.
Is that really so implausible? There are hints that there is or has been life beyond Earth even in our own planetary system. There is solid evidence for many planets beyond our solar system, and although these discovered planets are usually too large to carry life similar to our own, they strongly hint that there are also smaller planets out there that could carry such life. Yes, Ellen Stofan is speculating,
Translation (Score:4, Funny)
I think we're going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years.
Obligatory XKCD [xkcd.com] translating what that means
And... (Score:3)
- cure AIDS by year 2000
- have an inhabited mission to Jupiter in the early 2000
- have already people living on the Moon / Mars
"Experts" also said the big one (earthquake) in Tokyo had to happen by 2012, and so many other BS that sometimes, statistically, a few prove to be true.
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- Run out of oil
- Run out of food
- Kill all life in the oceans [wikipedia.org]
- Have another ice age [wikipedia.org]
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Ted Danson may have, but who the fuck does he speak for? no one. Are you just pulling out things random people have said and now your claiming that they are experts? And that they speak for the scientific community?
In Ted Danson's case, he testified before Congress [google.com] on behalf of an environmental group [oceana.org], so no, I'm not just pulling out things "random people" have said. These are people who are trying to affect socioeconomic policies by making wild statements they claim are backed by science.
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So, where did Ted Danson actually claim that we were going to kill all ocean life ?
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So, where did Ted Danson actually claim that we were going to kill all ocean life ?
Here's a link to get you started [lmgtfy.com]. After that, I'm sure you can figure out the rest on your own. Go get 'em, Tiger!
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You make a claim and you want me to provide the evidence for it ? That's not how it goes. What Ted Danson says is "The industrial way we fish for seafood is harming the marine habitats that all ocean life depends upon.". That's a bit more accurate than "kill all life in the oceans".
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You make a claim and you want me to provide the evidence for it ? That's not how it goes.
The claim was backed up by the original wikipedia link I provided. My reply after that was a response to your trolling.
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Oh, you mean this one: "In 1988, he said we had 10 years to save the oceans or we would pay the consequences, which would be death.[citation needed]".
I stand corrected of course. Why didn't you just quote that line ?
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Oh seriously, have you been living under a rock for the past 50 years ?
Rachel Carson and DDT ? http://www.21stcenturysciencet... [21stcentur...cetech.com]
Paul Ehrlich and the population bomb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]
Hows your soylent green today ?
Endless peak oil doom ? http://www.wsj.com/articles/wh... [wsj.com]
BTW the first were out of oil doom, dates from the early 1900s
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Endless peak oil doom ?
Conventional oil has already peaked. Shale oil wasn't included in the Peak Oil predictions, but that will peak within a few decades.
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Seriously a Century of being wrong on this and your response is double down ?
Give me a call when we hit peak gas to liquids
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... [wikipedia.org]
from methane hydrates
http://geology.com/articles/me... [geology.com]
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Seriously a Century of being wrong on this
That's not being serious. Hubbert's peak theory wasn't formulated until 1956, and serious claims as to the exact moment of peak oil only appeared in the last decades. Of course, things like methane hydrates are not included in the peak oil discussion. That doesn't make the prediction wrong, just limited in scope. Obviously, when you expand the scope, you have to adjust the predications.
As far as methane hydrates, what's the best guess for when we can capture enough methane hydrates to generate a million bar
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That's not being serious. Hubbert's peak theory wasn't formulated until 1956
Sure it is. The running out of oil scare goes all the way back to the teapot dome scandal. Back then your unconventional oil would have been offshore reserves. You pick a time Ill give you new sources that somehow failed to make their way into the calculation.
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I think it makes more sense to work with the known data, and not count on magical new stuff appearing when we need it. Betting our future on sufficient methane hydrate production is a big gamble. It may work out, of course, and then I'll be happy to hear you say "I told you so".
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I think it makes more sense to work with the known data, and not count on magical new stuff
I find it's even more helpful to not make up your mind before you even look at the data.
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Rachel Carson and DDT ? http://www.21stcenturysciencet... [www.21stce...ciencet...] [21stcentur...cetech.com]
If you want to be taken seriously, here's a tip: don't post links to publications from Lyndon LaRouche's organization in support of your arguments.
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Facts are Facts man, if there is anything in that link you think is inaccurate attack it.
But just for you here is the second link of 700,000 links about Carson on this topic.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/he... [forbes.com]
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" Ted Danson may have, but who the fuck does he speak for?"
He was considered chief environmental scientist for all the same Enlightened Ones who got their energy policy from Peter, Paul and Mary.
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Conflict (Score:2)
Detecting life on Earth (Score:3)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... [wikipedia.org]
No astronauts are getting their asses to Mars (Score:4, Insightful)
Stofan thinks putting astronauts on Mars will be a big part of that goal.
In that case, you're going to be in for a VERY long wait. Man may one day set foot on Mars, but it won't be any time within our liftetimes, and they won't be wearing a NASA patch on their spacesuit.
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they won't be wearing a NASA patch on their spacesuit.
Well it depends how you pronounce it, if you can read Chinese characters.
The Real Question Is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Will they find extra-terrestrial life IN the solar system or Outside it?
Frankly if they find it within the solar system then it would be a more significant find unless, of course, they found evidence of advanced (intelligent) life outside the solar system. It would mean that the universe is absolutely crawling with life; even if the life was somehow related to that on earth (distributed by asteroid impacts?) that would mean that panspermia is a viable method of distributing life over (at least) interplanetary distances.
In addition, it would mean that there would be a chance of someone going and really examining it within what's left of my lifetime!
So let's hope that it's on Mars (doubtful), Europa/Enceladus (possibly) or Titan. Of course if they find life on Titan, it'll have to be so radically different that our own that it'll blow the minds of just about every biologist in the world! Of course they'd be very very happy to find just fossils.
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Life outside the solar system seems more significant than inside it.
I have a feeling that a find of life inside the solar system will end up being something weird along the lines of a virus or bacteria that chemically might qualify as "life" but is so marginal that it only excites a biochemist.
Plus there's the notion that whatever caused life on Earth might have contributed something to life elsewhere in the solar system.
Life outside the solar system seems more likely to be intelligent (given that we'd have
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Nobody really cares if it is a single celled bug. If it can be clearly shown to be extra terrestrial it blows the doors on the origins of life wide open. We just need a wee bit of DNA to make one of the momentous discoveries of biology ever.
Of course, if it's 7 feet tall, blue and looks like Zoe Saldana then all the better.
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The thing is, I think it will be the kind of thing that is declared life by a committee of microbiologists, virologists, chemists and physicists on a split decision.
It will leave plenty of room for the usual cast of religious nutjobs to say it isn't life and it will be the kind of thing that will open the door for endless debate as to whether it really is life.
I think it would take an organism much more recognizable as life and/or intelligent to really be groundbreaking.
Hopefully (Score:1)
Pointless speculation (Score:1)
Viking Mars landers... (Score:1)
They'll discover that the 1976 Viking Mars lander transported life from Earth, and it survived.
Well... (Score:1)
NASA PR treated as fact (Score:2)
The 10 year horizon offers no step change in our space exploration to discover life.
We certainly won't visit the gas giant moons that seem promising within a decade, NASA can't send humans to Mars within a decade, SETI continues good but unrewarded work, we have no new physics to peer more closely at extrasolar planets and even if we did, NASA can't build *anything* new in less than a decade.
So you basically have to ask, "will today's tech with a slight upgrade do something basically different in the next d
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Now, now. Stop being such a downer.
While you're more correct than is comfortable, there is still quite a bit bits-on-the-ground stuff that NASA could do with with essentially current tech. We have ONE fully functional lander on Mars. ONE beat up mini rover and a bunch of orbital infrastructure. A dozen Curiosity class rovers would do wonders to improve our knowledge of Mars. Knowledge that we really should have before we drop meat popsicles on the planet.
Yes, NASA is pork. So is pretty much everything
And.... (Score:3)
And that will be the year of the Linux desktop...
And the year of the first human explorers on Mars...
It will be the year that we get a submersible robot into one of the ice covered ocean moons
I think we may even figure out how life started that year
And cure all cancers
plus Alzheimers
Prevent and reverse aging
We will finally get our damn flying cars
I can't wait!!!
Maybe I can take all this stuff in my time machine that will no doubt exist at that time and bring it back to myself now so that I don't have to wait!
Did anybody do the math? (Score:2)
Let us make a few assumptions first, and maybe throw in some facts as well.
1. What are the odds that there exist or has existed life beyond earth?
Well, even if the chance of a given solar system or any of its planets has life, we are talking about an infitesimal number of galaxies with their solar systems and planets So I'd say the odds are pretty good, almost so good that I would not bet a penny against it for a dollar.
2. What are the odds that evidence of such life or r
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Much of what you say depends very heavily on how common life is in the Universe, or more specifically, within a limited number of parsecs (dozens? hundreds?) from my iPhone here. Unless and until we get close to the hypothetical Big Rip, we can ignore the expansion of the Universe for this purpose.
Suppose an advanced civilization were able to send generation ships or hibernation ships at, say, 1% of the speed of light, it could colonize other systems, build up industry and technology, and head off to t
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I'm not an astronomer, but again, big numbers will play tricks with us.
A quick google search states:.
"As of October 2005, astronomers have been able to detect the presence of planets around only 28 G-type stars (including Sol) -- or around 5.5 percent -- of those 511 stars located within 100 light-years of Earth."
Lets double it to 50, to be on safe side.
I'm thinking that chance of life being created is very small even if the favorable conditions for it exist for millions of years.
I'm thinking maybe 1 in a
Re: You know it's just PR (Score:5, Insightful)
Much worse than space nutters are you miserable bean counters. Let's not do anything or go anywhere because "my God the expense!". Let's carry on with pointless resource ears to enrich the already insanely wealthy even further.
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Let's not do anything or go anywhere
Nobody says that. But the budget is only so big, so I would rather see it used on something that brings the most scientific bang for the buck.
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Okay, so first lets ditch the pointless wars in the Middle East - lots of bang, but the only bucks are the ones being funneled from my wallet to the military-industrial complex.
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For a 10-hour workweek to be productive enough to support a "leisure society with resources for all" will require significant advances in materials, economics, physics, engineering, and especially politics.
Putting a few folks on Mars is a far simpler goal, and the technology we develop along the way will help your preferred utopia, as well.
Re: You know it's just PR (Score:5, Interesting)
For a 10-hour workweek to be productive enough to support a "leisure society with resources for all" will require significant advances in materials, economics, physics, engineering, and especially politics.
I think politics is the largest impediment to a leisure society. We already have the productive capacity. Our needs could be met if people weren't constantly being convinced to buy stuff they don't need. But our economic system requires constant growth and profits. I have said before on this site that I think Capitalism is holding us back. And politics is the only way to change that.
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We really don't have the productive capacity for it. I've done the math before [slashdot.org].
The short version is that there are so many people in the world that we each get a very tiny amount of raw materials, and the mass production systems we have now really only support a small fraction of the population. To support a leisure society for everyone, we need to increase global production efficiency by a few hundred percent.
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Your post simply assumes that we should continue buying things we don't need and valuing a new car higher than leisure. If you want $60K/yr then yes you have to work long hours, everyone agrees on that. If you want $10K/yr then perhaps leisure is achievable.
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My post assumes that $60K income is a baseline for a leisure society. The exact numeric value is subject to inflation, arbitrary labor valuations, and many similar factors, but the economy scales uniformly.
We can redefine "leisure society" to require driving a cardboard car [wikipedia.org] and eating ramen twice a day, which would significantly lower the economic cost of the redefined leisure. However, if we set the bar at a current American middle-class lifestyle, silly desires and all, then $60K is reasonable.
Re: You know it's just PR (Score:5, Interesting)
Nonsense - the vast majority of current production goes to disposable novelties. To take cars as an example: if we instead built only a handful of different models, all of which relied on standardized, easily replaceable/repairable parts, and were designed for easy maintenance with a design life of several decades, we could radically reduce the number of cars produced with no loss in functionality, rather than selling enough new cars to replace every car in the country every 12 years. Reduce virtually all of them to sturdy golf carts instead and the savings would be even more dramatic. Would it require a cultural shift? Absolutely, but nothing substantial would be lost.
Something like 50-75% of global food production gets discarded in landfills thanks to cosmetic defects - lumpy potatoes, bread crusts from sandwich factories, spoilage at the store, etc - all a complete waste thanks to inefficiencies that aren't worth fixing because production so radically outstrips demand.
And don't even get me started on pretty much everything sold by Walmart and the like - designed to be as cheap as possible, despite the fact that doing so tends to raise the per-annum ownership costs dramatically.
In the US worker productivity has increased 3-5x over the last century - reducing work hours by 75% and the per-capita productivity will be roughly the same as it was a century ago, when it was obviously sufficient. Would it mean a reduction in material wealth? Possibly, but that's a whole separate conversation. All we *need* is food, water, and shelter from the elements, all of which can be provided at extremely low cost. Even most modern medical care is relatively inexpensive pretty much everywhere in the civilized world, at least so long as we stay away from end-of-life drastic measures. Everything else is cultural expectation, and many studies have shown it has minimal impact on happiness or quality of life.
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Google is your friend - "global food waste". Most of the statistics I'm seeing now are in the 30-50% range, so perhaps my original source was overstating the case.
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I agree with this. The capitalist system promotes competition and innovation but at the cost of efficiency and economy of R&D (double edge sword).
The next big obstacle is over population. Developed countries still have a positive population growth but it's significantly less than countries like India. I hate to say this but population growth control is key to the future on earth. Science continues to increase life expectancy as well as free up time to do what we want (automation + AI within 100 years wi
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Well, yes... The Soviet Union's advancements in rocketry and spaceflight let to some very nice technological advancements, which were primarily useful after some further social and political advancements in the region.
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The more leisure time technology gives us, the more we spend it on 'hobbies' in the broadest sense of the term. This started in Victorian times when the first wave of industrial wealth made it possible for the Downton Abbey class to fund voyages of exploration to every unexplored part of the planet, thereby initiating a golden age of observational science.
Today, ventures like SpaceX are part of the same process. If we did achieve a ten-hour workweek, space nutters would be waving at Luddites from the Oort C
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When the next "cometary visitor" from the Oort Cloud comes knocking
It's easier to survive a comet impact on earth than it is to survive the normal conditions on Mars or other solar system object.
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Sure there is - the most compelling reason of all time, which has caused humanity to spread even before we had language: "Because it's there."
There may not be any *economical* reason to do, but humans are not rational beings, asking us to behave as though we are is ridiculous. What *rational* reason is there for having children, falling in love, or hanging out with the guys for a few beers? Rationality has always been nothing but a tool useful for pursuing our irrational desires. And I for one rejoice in
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This is all about raising money. What else would she say? "We'll keep looking; hopefully we find something, but we have absolutely no idea whether we will. Also, looking is really expensive! Other than the usefulness of tech we develop, we're burning money."
And that's the problem. The minute she starts saying B.S. to raise funds she is no longer a scientist just a snakeoil salesman with some embossed pieces of paper and a briefcase.
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