Apollo 17 Soil Matches Ancient Earth's Ocean Ridges In Water Content 78
StartsWithABang writes: They say that one of the most exciting phrases to hear in science is not "eureka!" but "that's funny," and the Apollo 17 astronauts, just over 43 years ago, certainly got such a moment when they discovered orange soil just beneath the grey regiolith. What turned out to be volcanic glass with tin inclusions had another surprise: olivine deposits that showed signs that they contained significant amounts of water inclusions when they were baked, at about ~1200 parts-per-million. This matches the water levels in Earth's upper mantle along ocean ridges, providing further evidence for the giant impact hypothesis and a common origin for the Earth and Moon.
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The break ins were due to a political party and reelection campaign and had nothing to do with official government intelligence agencies.
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Nixon's accomplishments while in office are over looked because of the Watergate scandal. He oversaw the creation of the EPA, opened diplomatic relations with China, enforced desegregation of Southern schools, withdrew US military forces out of Vietnam and signed the Paris Peace accords, and initiated détente with the Soviet Union in the wake of his diplomacy with China which lead to the SALT I and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. As far as Presidents go he got more accomplished in his truncat
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Democrats today ignore Nixon because he was Republican. Republicans today ignore Nixon because he was too liberal and made compromises.
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I don't think it really matters what political party Nixon was in. The democrats and republicans back in the 50's, 60's, and 70's and even further back in time did not always share the same views that the modern day parties do. In some instances the roles of the major political parties were completely opposite of what the parties support today. And no matter how fucked up our politicians and their radical supporters are today it doesn't even come close to the madness that took place in the 1920's. The gove
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Alcohol: the most abused drug in the US today... the one that has the most social impact and consequences of all drugs. And it's legal. Meanwhile, other, less impactive drugs, are either illegal or next to it.
The US is a truly fucked up country when it comes to chemical addictions and social norms.
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"Meanwhile, other, less impactive drugs, are either illegal or next to it."
If you check your history, you'll find that the first of those drugs to be made illegal was one that was generally believed to only be used by immigrant farm workers and the unstated primary reason for the ban was to keep newly minted "G-men" in jobs.
In other words. Narco-gangs created the need for the FBI and the FBI needed the narco gangs to continue existing in order to justify staying in operation.
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Alcohol, in one form or another, has been a part of human civilization going back to the glory days of the Roman empire and even going back as far as Egypt 5000 years ago. Trying to legislate it's demise is idiotic. My point was that religious hardliners were able to push such a law on society at large. Today's religious hardliners do not come close to wielding that type of influence today. They have been trying to overturn abortion law since 1972 and while there have been restrictions put into place they s
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Equating the history of alcohol with the history of slavery is a straw man argument. People abuse everything. Alcohol, legal and illegal drugs, food, caffeine, tobacco, and even sugar. Should all these things also be legislated away to make sure no one is harmed? Just how far are you willing to go in building the nanny state? Get back to me when you can count to 10 with your shoes on. .
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You want to talk about straw man? And you offer sugar, food, and caffeine? I specifically used slavery BECAUSE it was so far and away more heinous, and it proved my point perfectly!
BTW: "A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument which was not advanced by that opponent." Your argument was that since alcohol has been around since ancient times, we wouldn't be able to legislate i
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You're forgetting the primary reason for ignoring Nixon: He was corrupt and provably so.
Whatever else he achieved, his political corruption(*) cost the USA (and the world) 40 years of viable nuclear research when he shut down Oak Ridge's MSR program. We (the developed world) could be more-or-less off carbon and giving a real helping hand kickstarting developing countries' economies (not to mention not needing to prop up nasty dictatorships/kingdoms around the world to ensure continued access to cheap but po
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He oversaw the creation of the EPA, opened diplomatic relations with China, enforced desegregation of Southern schools, withdrew US military forces out of Vietnam and signed the Paris Peace accords, and initiated détente with the Soviet Union in the wake of his diplomacy with China which lead to the SALT I and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Isn't it funny how much politics has shifted so far right that even the Dems in 2015 are further right than Nixon era Republicans?
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It's the cheesiest!
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Yes, but Kraft's is better when you need comfort food to eat in a dark corner along with a pint of Ben and Jerry's and a fifth of scotch while watching Titanic.
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Yes, of course they were on earth. The aliens who stole the moon from the earth had to come to the earth to get the material for the moon!
Right (Score:4, Funny)
Yep, the Nevada desert. Thanks Stanley!
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And that leads me to the question: why does life have to resemble life as we know it, here on earth? When people come up with these odds, they presume that life must depend on water. What if life need not depend on water? Life - what IS life?
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Life - what IS life?
Life is a monosyllabic morpheme consisting of a fronting diphthong followed by a labio-dental voiceless fricative.
Seriously, you're right. Yes, there could be plenty of life out. The reason we look for life, as we know it, is that it's impossible to find life as we don't know it because we don't know what we're looking for.
So it's quite possible that our kind of life is rare but other kinds are not. But since we don't know how to find that, it's sort of a moot point.
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Water is one of the simplest, most abundant things in the universe. Maybe life could use something else, but why would it when there's water everywhere? Even in our own solar system there's tons of moons and dwarf planets with water (including in liquid form internally), and even Mars with its extreme environment and lack of air has some occasional running water on the surface. Water does not seem to be the limiting factor for life.
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Water is the "unviversal solvent". It dissolves and mixes with just about anything; salts, acids, alkalines, ions. Some things don't mix like oils and fats, but that makes them useful as well. It also has a strong heat carrying capacity making it useful as a cooling fluid and it isn't combustible which is another advantage.
Chemically, it's formed from hydrogen and oxygen, both of which are found in stars. (also Nitrogen and Carbon through the CNO sequence of atomic transmutation).
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It's not as bad as you think.
Anything in an old galaxy has probably already been baked by at least one nearby star going bang. Anything from a first-generation galaxy isn't going to have much in the way of heavy elements.
Most galaxies are probably old, first generation galaxies. Galaxy formation started very soon after the universe cooled enough, quite likely nucleating on dark matter clumps. If by "going bang" you just mean supernova, then a neighboring system has to be within a parsec or two to be b
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Doom, gloom, and lack of vision. Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen organic molecules aren't the only way to reverse entropy (aka life). We're close to demonstrating an alternative with silicon, lithium and conductive metals, and there are others - maybe not in this galaxy, but more than likely, yes, somewhere within just a few light years is something living, far stranger than ocean vent communities or other extremophiles that incubated on the same planet as us.
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Life does not reverse overall entropy. Just locally, by using energy from an outside source whose entropy is increasing (think sun vs. plants).
True enough, but the whole tendency toward increasing complexity thing is a lot harder to explain...
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"Anything from a first-generation galaxy isn't going to have much in the way of heavy elements"
Given that a number of stars in our own galaxy have been shown to be over 10 billion years old, what's to say a first generation galaxy hasn't matured into something like ours over time?
Fossil records show that life showed up on earth more-or-less as soon as the surface was cool enough and solid enough to hold it - it showed up almost immediately after the Theia event (which would have reset everything on the plan
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If (proto)life or traces of it is found on any other planet in our system that will blow the "rare" factor away
Not at all. There's been over 100 meteors from Mars found on earth. There's no reason life couldn't start on planet, then contaminate others even if life didn't start there.
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This is the basis of panspermia theory.
Even 50 years ago it was known that if you take the ingredients of primeval earth (as in the gas makeup of the early orange planet) and subject them to electrical discharges (lightning), you'll end up with a hodge-podge of organic compounds. This was done in gas jars over a short period.
When you expand that over an entire planet and thousands/millions of years it shouldn't be surprising that some of those organics will assemble into more complex forms - it's clear that
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Giant moon? What did they do with our mon-sized moon?
Pardon Me, but... (Score:1)
Who is the "they" who said this? It is the most ignorant thing I've heard today! It is the difference, to paraphrase Twain, between a lightning bug and a lightning bolt. "That's funny" is a significant observation; Eureka! is a celebration, a dance, to an personal intellectual achievement. One cannot sit still in such moments, one shouts, screams, runs in circles, speaks in tongues, laughs uncontroll
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Exactly. Pardon me...again.
Over and out.
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It is either
over: you expect the talk to continiou with an answer of partner
or out: the talk is terminated
'Over and out' happens only in bad movies.
And remember to release the push to talk button, or in most cases you wont hear/receive any answer.
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The difference is that "Eureka!" marks the completion of an answer, which, while significant, is not as exciting (to a scientist) as *beginning* a journey of discovery. "That's funny" means something that we thought we know maybe isn't so, and therefore it is the start of a quest for more knowledge. To a scientist, that is when the excitement happens.
Having said that, this seems to be tying up loose ends more than asking new questions, so I'm not sure how many scientists are saying "that's funny" to this
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Issac Asimov. And he knew how to spell Eureka.
So he spelled it ""? ;-)
Hmmm ... Yet again, /. messes up anything not in the English alphabet. Funny things is that the editing panel shows my reply correctly, with the (classical) Greek spelling of the word between the quotes. But the Preview just shows two adjacent quotes, with the Greek characters omitted.
Sure would be nice if we could discuss "foreign" words, especially in spelling and etymology messages, and have them show up spelled correctly. ;-)
I think I'll post this with the original Greek
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So he spelled it ""? ;-)
Hmmm ... Yet again, /. messes up anything not in the English alphabet. Funny things is that the editing panel shows my reply correctly, with the (classical) Greek spelling of the word between the quotes. But the Preview just shows two adjacent quotes, with the Greek characters omitted.
Sure would be nice if we could discuss "foreign" words, especially in spelling and etymology messages, and have them show up spelled correctly. ;-)
I think I'll post this with the original Greek word there, and see what appears in the edit panel after it's been through the posting process ....
Nope, while correct Greek survives the Preview process into further editing, it does seem to disappear entirely when you post it.
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> They say that one of the most exciting phrases to hear in science is not "eureka!" but "that's funny."
Who is the "they" who said this?
Isaac Asimov
Pro-Human Hype (Score:4, Insightful)
This seems to be presenting an argument for more scientists (instead of just astronauts) and/or on-site human exploration instead of remote-controlled robots.
However, the argument for both is weak. A regular astronaut and remote rover could spot orange soil also.
In fact, a rover could have more "color" filters instead of be limited to the 3 ranges (cones) that human eyes have. There can be odd spectral variations that human eyes just can't detect, including the infra-red and ultraviolet range.
And for the same money, bots can cover far more territory and linger in an interesting spot, if needed.
Fuck Forbes (Score:3)
You foist another Forbes link upon us to tell us about a discovery that's 43 years old?
Sheesh.
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And hide it behind a link that doesn't work without Ad Block turned off...
Not News I'll look at...
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Link works with Addblock+ just fine, me thinks you never even tried to click on the link.
Or maybe he doesn't use Adblock+.
regiolith? (Score:2)
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Cooled off in 6000 years (Score:2)
It is astounding how quickly it cooled off when it separated from the earth 6,000 years ago
Bring it back! (Score:1)
Well, we all know Ethan Siegel isn't a geologist - (Score:2)
I didn't actually know that "NASA/Arizona State University," had an online, high resolution "Digital Petrographic Slide Collection" ; not surprising. I'll dig into that more. Nice pictures. The fascinating corrosion textures on the surface of the glass grains really raise a lot of questions. Which Ethan doesn't notice. (OK - I'm biased - I was repairing a petro