Science fact thread

[Davis Ashura]

sI never said that.
What I have said in the past is that our current priorities are here on Earth.
It's not our time to colonize Mars or any other planet, we should be building the foundations for saving our own planet... which btw, is the only planet we know of that can sustain human life...
This is the typical scare tactic NASA uses to get ever more money for ill conceived projects, which btw, usually don't do a darn thing for our long term chances at survival.

Why? Serious question. What difference will it make if the only habitable planet in a mechanistic universie dies?

 

[Steven L Jordan]

Steven, I was hoping you would respond to that WMAP link I speculated about a few replies back?

What part? About the fact that we've so far viewed only a small local part of our galaxy? Yes, it's possible there are signals out there that haven't reached us yet. On the other hand, with the distances involved, we have to accept that signals that far out may never reach us at all... they'll simply be too small to be heard through the background radiation.

And that's assuming anyone's broadcasting. I don't believe technology necessarily goes with intelligence. The most intelligent races out there may have absolutely no need or desire to broadcast anything, even if they suspect there might be someone out there to listen.

And given the relatively short amount of time that we have been technologically capable of sending out messages and listening for responses, and assuming other races may be at the same technological stage for a similarly limited time, I think it's highly likely that if a similar race to ours did the same thing, we would more likely miss them by millennia. The odds of us happening to catch their signal would be akin to trying to catch a bullet with your hand, not knowing when the bullet was fired or where it was aimed.

Or... was there another bit about the WMAP link you wanted a comment on?

Sorry... you were probably referring to the evidence of an expanding universe, supposedly corroborating the existence of dark energy. I'm afraid I can't comment on dark energy... although evidence suggests it might exist, we need more data actually proving it is there, and acting the way we think it does. Physics has already taught us that the makeup of the universe is a lot more intricate than we can imagine, and dark energy may just be a "convenient theory" at this point that doesn't actually hold up under serious scrutiny.

IOW... I don't know about dark energy. No one does, yet.

 

[Davis Ashura]

Physics has already taught us that the makeup of the universe is a lot more intricate than we can imagine, and dark energy may just be a "convenient theory" at this point that doesn't actually hold up under serious scrutiny.

IOW... I don't know about dark energy. No one does, yet.

I think certain data as currently interpreted and starting with the assumption of a Big Bang, tell us that the universe is more intricate than we can imagine. I have reservations about both the assumption and the interpretation.

 

[Sparrow]

Why? Serious question. What difference will it make if the only habitable planet in a mechanistic universie dies?

It would only be tragic for the moment, the last moment.

When humanity dies off concepts like tragedy die with it.
And the Universe will roll on without us. Life's a bitch.

 

[NeonKnight]

What part?

Or... was there another bit about the WMAP link you wanted a comment on?

Sorry... you were probably referring to the evidence of an expanding universe, supposedly corroborating the existence of dark energy. I'm afraid I can't comment on dark energy... although evidence suggests it might exist, we need more data actually proving it is there, and acting the way we think it does. Physics has already taught us that the makeup of the universe is a lot more intricate than we can imagine, and dark energy may just be a "convenient theory" at this point that doesn't actually hold up under serious scrutiny.

IOW... I don't know about dark energy. No one does, yet.

Actually it was all the links I added in post #130. We were discussing the binary-galaxy experiment. I just thought it was interesting to see what the WMAP spacecraft observed and also cracked wise, "Perhaps they fried their numbers so that their "pancake universe" would match the results of NASA's WMAP spacecraft?"

Since you mentioned it, what part of the universe's (Hubble's greatest discovery IMO) observed accelerating expansion does not hold up under serious scrutiny? Because to me, that is all "dark energy" really is.

5) WMAP's complete census of the universe finds that dark matter (not made up of atoms) make up 23.3% (to within 1.3%)
6)WMAP's accuracy and precision determined that dark energy makes up 72.1% of the universe (to within 1.5%), causing the expansion rate of the universe to speed up. - "Lingering doubts about the existence of dark energy and the composition of the universe dissolved when the WMAP satellite took the most detailed picture ever of the cosmic microwave background (CMB)."

http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Of course the more we find out, the more we find out how much we really don't know.

Still I think the evidence for both "Dark" forms, matter and energy, seem pretty strong, and it doesn't really matter if we completely understand all of it. They sure seem to find more evidence for it with every type of telescope they're using.

If they find that Higg's particle with the Super collider, that should pretty much seal the deal.

Pretty good recent article on dark matter...

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/dark-matter-map.html

A team led by Dan Coe at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys to chart the invisible matter in the massive galaxy cluster Abell 1689, located 2.2 billion light-years away. The cluster's gravity, the majority of which comes from dark matter, acts like a cosmic magnifying glass, bending and amplifying the light from distant galaxies behind it. This effect, called gravitational lensing, produces multiple, warped, and greatly magnified images of those galaxies, like the view in a funhouse mirror. By studying the distorted images, astronomers estimated the amount of dark matter within the cluster. If the cluster's gravity only came from the visible galaxies, the lensing distortions would be much weaker.

 

[Davis Ashura]

It would only be tragic for the moment, the last moment.

When humanity dies off concepts like tragedy die with it.
And the Universe will roll on without us. Life's a bitch.

Ultimately, if you share that philosophical viewpoint, it isn't even tragic. Whether, Humanity reaches for the stars and succeeds or sits at home and reverts back to cave dwelling, it's all the same pointlessness.
Sorry about the threadjack.
As for whether it's possible/plausible or even desirable to push for colonies...channeling Stone Cold Steve Austin: Hell Yeah! I have rational reasons, but I don't think Sparrow would see it that way. So be it. As to who would pay for it? Private developers can and should be the ones who fund this next age of Exploration. I am not impressed with NASA's record in the past forty years.

 

[NeonKnight]

Originally Posted by NeonKnight View Post
But the Earth is only around 5 billion years old. That's 10 billion years for life to evolve elsewhere. You probably realize our sun and everything in our solar system, were once part of first generation stars...

How many billion years before the first galaxy clusters formed?
Some scientists suspect that supernovae are necessary for life, at least creating some of the building blocks for life... sometimes called the Left Hand of God...
http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/3582/supernova’s-spin-on-life

... which means you would have to wait for first generation stars, the really large ones, to go supernova and seed parts of the universe with these exotic materials.

But that is exactly what I mean. 13.7 billion years for the universe. 5.5 billion for Earth.

Just take the 1 billion years just prior to Earth's formation. Given the vast size of just our own galaxy, 150,000 lightyears across, there were literally millions of candidate stars forming their own planet/moon type biospheres, throughout the galaxy, all from first generation stars, during just that one billion year period. There are literally eons of prime evolving time for life to get going anywhere you want to look in our galaxy.

Why would they do that?
Remember, the science fiction we've all read for so many years may have nothing to do with reality. Aliens that advanced would have nothing to fear from us, so why on earth would they go to such extravagant measures to destroy creatures that have barely learned to walk upright?

And why stray so far from what scientific observation tells us?

You've probably seen my reply to Steven L. Jordan by now, so the same reasoning applies. This is just plain speculation with the cosmic dice. It's fun, like I said. But the more we know, the more we realize what we don't know. No one could have even imagined something like Dark Matter a short 200 years ago.

The reality of whatever ET really is probably just as beyond us as Dark Matter was to Ben Franklin.

We have searched three decades for something, anything, and so far as we know we are alone.

Sparrow, come on. It's like you want to wish away post #148.

How can you look at that minute volume of space that SETI has investigated and come to that conclusion?

It's almost as if someone investigated a puddle, and decided that fish, sharks and whales could not possibly exist, since evidence of their existence did not appear in the puddle.

I'm not open to the idea of manned missions to the Moon, Mars, the Moons of Jupiter, or any place for that matter. Our priorities are here on Earth that is.

Yeah, we've been through this already. Not in the next 5 minutes. Eventually we have to go. We have to send humans until we have really high tech robotics that is. If we really want to solve our priorities here on Earth.

There's no finding out anything if what I suspect is true, we are alone in the galaxy and whatever other intelligent life may exist are simply too far away to worry about... or are intelligent in the way other creatures on Earth are.

Well the point is finding out one way or the other is the most profound question of them all. Either answer is staggeringly important.

You seem to believe the universe is awash in life?
Yet there is nothing, leastwise that we can observe, that would support such a belief.

Again, I refer you to my reply to Steven L. The odds are only increasing.

I tell you what Sparrow, you're so convinced that life only exists here on Earth. Can you link any articles to sources to support that? I haven't seen one reference to any scientist who thinks that these recent extremophile discoveries point to the logical possibility that this means that life is now only possible in one place, here on Earth. Nowhere else in the entire universe. Only here.

Just the opposite is the only conclusion to come to IMV.

 

[NeonKnight]

The problem with the idea of invading aliens is that, realistically, the times and distances involved in space travel make the idea completely impractical.

I almost forgot, I wanted to comment on this.

Not really, when you think about "The Singularity". Even if we never really get to the point where we "download ourselves" into some sort of Singularity-like existence, we will eventually get to producing sophisticated AI of our own. That's what we will likely send out on the first interstellar missions.

Light year distances will mean very little to self- replicating AI. Quantum level communication is certainly another possibility, with strong evidence in quantum physics pointing towards photons having instantaneous contact.

Hence my own speculation that ET has already developed machine AI. But there was a war, and the machines won. Their programming mutated and now they are on a search to prevent life from arising to eradicate their very existence...

 

[Steven L Jordan]

Since you mentioned it, what part of the universe's (Hubble's greatest discovery IMO) observed accelerating expansion does not hold up under serious scrutiny? Because to me, that is all "dark energy" really is.

Nothing about the actual expansion does not hold up... it's an observed phenomenon. It's the contribution of dark energy to the process that's still debatable, since dark energy itself has yet to be observed, directly measured or quantified.

Still I think the evidence for both "Dark" forms, matter and energy, seem pretty strong, and it doesn't really matter if we completely understand all of it. They sure seem to find more evidence for it with every type of telescope they're using.

True: We don't even have direct proof for many of the quantum effects that constitute our electronics systems... just circumstantial evidence that they do what we expect them to do.

Maybe dark energy doesn't need to be fully documented, as long as we can infer its results on the cosmos with reasonable accuracy. On the other hand, learning what is actually going on out there could provide much greater insight as to the workings of the universe, much like the insights were received when we realized that there was no "ether" in space.

 

[Steven L Jordan]

Hence my own speculation that ET has already developed machine AI. But there was a war, and the machines won. Their programming mutated and now they are on a search to prevent life from arising to eradicate their very existence...

Sounds like pretty dumb paranoid machines to me. They'd probably start warring with each other before they ever got here, and the only sign we'd ever see of them would be a strange cloud of pulverized carbon and silicon cruising past us...

Now, really smart machines would beat their organic creators to the Singularity, being made up of much faster and efficient intelligences. The machines would vanish in a puff of quarks, and the organics would be left with no technology to advance themselves, plunging them back into a primitive, planet-locked age.

If they chose to develop more machines, they would have to take steps to prevent the machines gaining any intelligence, lest they disappear in a puff of quarks someday like their predecessors. So we'll never meet the aliens, as they won't be able to build machines sophisticated enough to bridge space for fear the machines will leave them.

Oh: I almost forgot to give my real opinion on the idea of the Singularity...

Bunk.

Achieving the Singularity is like achieving light speed: The closer you get to it, the harder it is to take that last step that gets you there. We won't be achieving any Singularity, no matter how hard we want it.

 

[Sparrow]

Ultimately, if you share that philosophical viewpoint, it isn't even tragic. Whether, Humanity reaches for the stars and succeeds or sits at home and reverts back to cave dwelling, it's all the same pointlessness.

Whatever your philosophical leaning is it won't change reality.

 

[Fung Koo]

I am not impressed with NASA's record in the past forty years.

This is a sentiment I simply don't understand. I'm copying this post of mine from another thread where Sparrow and I got into the cost/benefit of NASA and his opinion that our focus aught to be on taking care of our planet here:

from: http://www.sffworld.com/forums/showpost.php?p=562658&postcount=33

NASA's budget is comparatively puny to all the other things that the US government spends money on. Like the defence and the military (~23%), social security (~20%), health care (~19%), the rest being disaster relief, public education, social programs... Taking that comparatively small amount of money away from NASA to be put to use so that "we begin to take better care of the only planet we know that can support human life" is ridiculous.

Here's why:

In fact, annually, NASA's funding is less than 1% of the US Federal Budget (about 0.8% on average).

Given that the Space Program is only half a century old, NASA's accomplishments are astounding:

• For less than 1% of your tax dollars, NASA has put a telescope in space, that has outlasted its design parameters, that has allowed us to see into the furthest reaches of space, giving us a wealth of information about how the cosmos functions. In turn, this has resulted in scientific pursuits on earth that have employed tens of thousands of people, creating particle colliders, environmental research stations, schools, a healthy fiction industry, just to name a handful.
  
• For less than 1% of your tax dollars, they flew to the moon and back -- not once, but six times. 12 humans walked on the surface of the moon for less than 1% of your tax dollars.
  
• NASA has been instrumental in the installation of the worldwide telecom and GPS system. A side effect of which has been the proof of Relativistic Time Dilation, shifting our understanding of physics from classical Newtonian thought to Quantum Mechanics.
  
• Two rovers have crawled on another planet, also outlasting their design parameters, for less than 1% of your tax dollars.

Now here's the kicker: 52% of all US Federal Funding on environmental research and policy comes directly from NASA's budget.

So, assuming that what you're proposing is that NASA's budget be redirected entirely to environmental efforts, the overall effect would be approximately a 0.4% change in US Federal spending on the environment.

0.4%.

Now, shall we compare the US's success rate in federal spending on the environment? Shall we go further, and examine the history of environmentalism, environmental policy, and environmental research throughout the world? From Juvenal through to Wordsworth, to the enviro-nuts of today, humanity has had approximately ZERO success in this endeavour.

If you want the environment to take precedence over space travel and research, there are many, many bigger fish to fry than NASA.

********

In the 52 year history of NASA, a total of approximately $425 billion has been spent on NASA. By comparison, the annual US Federal Military budget is about $690 billion.

Anyway, seeing that this is the science fact thread, those are some facts that really aught to be taken into consideration when assessing the worth/value/accomplishments of NASA.

Pursuing space and other-planetary habitation will necessarily require environmental research that will benefit the earth. Bang for our buck, funding space exploration is the best chance we have of saving the earth from ourselves.

No one could have even imagined something like Dark Matter a short 200 years ago.

Well......

The Dark Matter concept and its history suggest that it is a modern mutation of the luminiferous ether concept. Dark Matter/Energy arise from a discarded equation that Einstein postulated and then rejected, which was subsequently picked up and developed by scientists advancing a QM model based largely on Poincare's work.

Poincare, incidentally, had developed the luminiferous ether concept to a point that it operated more or less the same as Einstein's special relativity with the fundamental difference that it provide a universal constancy to "location." Dark Matter/Energy likewise performs much the same function for cosmological science, IMO. Einstein's true innovation with special relativity was to do away entirely with the notion of such a thing as "stationary," which correspondingly chucks out the notion of a proper location. Poincare was a relativist to be sure, but did not accept Einstein's work. It seems to me that the bulk of the science that argues for Dark Matter/Energy is rooted in Poincare's tradition of relativism, moreso than Einstein's.

 

[NeonKnight]

I think Banks may have also had some ideas in this area, "The Sentinels"?

I think I have my hostile AI wires crossed, "The Sentinels" were actually activated by Peter F. Hamilton in The Void series...

Oh: I almost forgot to give my real opinion on the idea of the Singularity...

Bunk.

Achieving the Singularity is like achieving light speed: The closer you get to it, the harder it is to take that last step that gets you there. We won't be achieving any Singularity, no matter how hard we want it.

You almost sound like Sparrow. Yeah, not in the next 5 minutes. Given some time, like maybe 500 years...5000 years...50,000 years, I would say Singularity status is achievable. If not by "humans" then certainly by whatever replaces us, whether that includes programmable DNA or perhaps even self-replicating AI.

And Steven L, you will be the first on the assimilation list...

 

[pox]

It would only be tragic for the moment, the last moment.

When humanity dies off concepts like tragedy die with it.
And the Universe will roll on without us. Life's a bitch.

ever the optimist.

 

[pox]

The matter side of things seems a lot simpler since they can observe the gravitational effects of emissive matter orbiting concentrations of it. I think that bit is pretty reasonable. Whether it's 'matter' or not is up for grabs perhaps, rather than uneven 'substrate' or whatever you might choose to call the gaps or rules at distance. Matter certainly looked a simple enough explanation last time I checked.

Dark energy looks more like a fudge. You do start to wonder about your ability to separate fudge/fact/and fiction after a body blow like the cosmological constant and eminent professors suddenly turning back to the 'ether'....

[EDIT] carried on reading a saw that above Fung Koo. The Dark energy stuff in synonymous to ether is it not? while dark matter is visibly clumping as does matter matter, and has measurable gravitational effects. We're really feeling the lack of proper scientists on here, myself included.

 

[NeonKnight]

Nice post Fung Koo! And welcome to the Science Fact thread, I'm glad you could join us. Most excellent stats you've added about NASA, some of these folks here could really use some of the basic facts about NASA.

Originally Posted by NeonKnight
No one could have even imagined something like Dark Matter a short 200 years ago.

Well......

The Dark Matter concept and its history suggest that it is a modern mutation of the luminiferous ether concept. Dark Matter/Energy arise from a discarded equation that Einstein postulated and then rejected, which was subsequently picked up and developed by scientists advancing a QM model based largely on Poincare's work.

Poincare, incidentally, had developed the luminiferous ether concept to a point that it operated more or less the same as Einstein's special relativity with the fundamental difference that it provide a universal constancy to "location." Dark Matter/Energy likewise performs much the same function for cosmological science, IMO. Einstein's true innovation with special relativity was to do away entirely with the notion of such a thing as "stationary," which correspondingly chucks out the notion of a proper location. Poincare was a relativist to be sure, but did not accept Einstein's work. It seems to me that the bulk of the science that argues for Dark Matter/Energy is rooted in Poincare's tradition of relativism, moreso than Einstein's.

Just a minor quibble here. If Poincare was a contemporary of Ben Franklin, then your analogy works much better. He lived from 1854-1912, so he doesn't quite make it.

I really think you may be discounting Hubble when it comes to Dark Energy. As I mentioned before, it was Hubble who discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe, which is now attributed to the mysterious force of "Dark Energy". Hubble's discovery was announced in 1925, so Poincare could not have known about it.

In fact, Hubble's other great discovery is that he profoundly changed our understanding of the universe by demonstrating the existence of galaxies other than our own, the Milky Way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Hubble

Poincare and his contemporaries all believed that the Milky Way was the universe.

I've often wondered how Hubble must have felt when he realized that the Milky Way was only one of many, many galaxies. That first night, perhaps he said to himself, "I know a big secret, and I'm not going to tell anyone else"....

 

[Davis Ashura]

I should have been more specific: I am unimpressed with NASA's manned spaceflight program over the last forty years. Aside from the moon landings, which toward the end became a farce (golfing on the moon?), what have we accomplished?
What advances in rocket design have we seen from NASA since the Apollo missions? For manned spaceflight, we got stuck with that mighty, ugly bird, the shuttle. Horrendous waste of time, money, and talent (especially talent).

 

[pox]

yeah, I think we pretty much all of us agreed it (NASA) needed a shake up at different places in this thread. Until someone comes up with the system to do that we're all just sitting on the sideline moaning about tax dollars really.

the science fact / politics peril vortex!

There's the side issue in the wings of "why should we bother anyway", which is a pretty standard defeatist attitude into which you can unfurl all the spurious extrapolations about the future one likes, it's still going to be no more or less valid than my mindless optimism.

Then we have the technical debate over what's possible, which seems to have forked into sci-fi (fair round here), and sci-ish. I'd argue that in the timescales over which leaving the planet permanently reap rewards we're all on very shakey ground there.

It's always seemed to me that sorting out the rationale for any next 'phase of expansion' first, then just getting on with it is the way forward. I agree manned space flight has (currently) had its day. If we need minerals then we should be designing and sending systems to get them...

 

[Davis Ashura]

Whatever your philosophical leaning is it won't change reality.

My point exactly! I was simply accepting your viewpoint and seeing where it takes us. To that end, it doesn't matter where we spend the money. It doesn't matter who spends the money. After all, as you and John Derbyshire would say, "We're doomed!"
So, when you say we have pressing matters on Earth and shouldn't lift our faces to the heavens until said problems are dealt with, I say twaddle. With a smiley, winking emoticon.

 

[pox]

Oh good you did read The Void! As I said, I have not read the finale. Without revealing any secrets of The Evolutionary Void, in your opinion, is there any similarity between the "singularity" and "Tipler's Omega Point"?
(My guess would be no, but I thought I'd ask anyway.)

Thanks NeonKnight, I'd completely stalled on that series then forgot. I'm most of the way through the second one and enjoying it a lot. This is exactly why I started on this forum. Excellent call.