The Heavens Themselves
Just another day in the cosmos. A rock landed on Russia.
Fortunately, the global elite are on the job preventing the next one. Buy your carbon credits now.
Watts Up With That thinks this is a Sign From Heaven — in a statistical sense at least.
The likelihood in this century of an asteroid impact with 700 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima A-bomb: 30%.
Anthony Watts writes: “While politicians, their activist friends, and pundits caterwaul over a few tenths of a degree change in the global temperature over the last 100 years, with some Ehrlich-like nutballs even claiming it will cause extinction of humanity, today might be a good day to recognize a real extinction level challenge humanity faces.”
Studying asteroids and finding ways to survive their impacts may make objective sense, but is there money in it? Can it be turned into a crisis that Rahm Emmanuel won’t let go to waste?
Or should we continue to rely on the same old shield humanity has employed all the eons it has existed? Pure dumb luck? In our ancestor’s defense they had no alternative. Until this point in history humanity had neither the capability to detect the incoming pieces of debris which struck the planet nor had the remotest chance of deflecting it.
Rocks have always hit the earth. That has been going on for billions of years. What’s changed is that something can potentially be done to stop or evade them. We might at all events relocate part of humanity somewhere else. That too was our ancestor’s defense: never to put one’s eggs all in one basket. These possibilities create for us a difficulty our ancestors did not have: increasing capability presents choices. And that means problems.
It would be nice to go back to the Garden. Early man must have thought that the skies were unchanging. They appeared within the short span of a observer’s attention to be serene and eternal. Only by degrees did humanity begin to understand that he lived beneath a canopy of fire.
It was not until the dawn of the Atomic Age that man realized how hot those fires burned. For a brief moment we understood its significance and why we could not return unto the garden. An early 1950s science fiction movie captured the attitude of those times:
North Pole, Ned Scott reporting. One of the world’s greatest battles was fought and won by the human race. A handful of American soldiers and civilians… …met the first invasion from another planet. A man by the name of Noah once saved our world with an ark of wood. Here, a few men performed a similar service with an arc of electricity. A flying saucer, which landed here, and its pilot have been destroyed. But not without casualties among our own meager forces. I’d like to bring to the microphone the men responsible for our success. But Capt. Hendry is attending to demands over and above the call of duty. Dr. Carrington, leader of the scientific expedition… …is recovering from wounds from the battle. – Good for you. And now, before giving you the details of the battle, I bring you a warning. Every one of you listening to my voice… …tell the world. Tell this to everybody wherever they are: Watch the skies everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies.
Hollywood drama perhaps, but perceptive all the same. However it was a brief moment of clarity that could not last. After that first heady glimpse of humanity’s connection with the cosmos in the aftermath of that other near-death experience, World War 2, the politicians of the world lowered their gaze because that’s where the money was.
Rahm Emmanuel may run for President, as may Hillary or Janet Napolitano. And they will busy grabbing everything that isn’t nailed down or waging war against “high powered magazines”. Their watchword is “who sent you?” The skies ain’t sent nobody we know.
It’s been forty years since man has walked on the moon. And Neil Armstrong, who passed away recently had these thoughts as he traversed the gulf between the worlds. “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small. ”
That is the perhaps opposite of what our current crop of leaders feel today. To them the heavens have become very, very small — shrunken almost to the size of the pea that Armstrong saw. There are no voters there. There mind is compassed by the vanities of society. There they live unmindful of the world outside.
When you’re out in smart society
And you suddenly get bad news,
You mustn’t show anxiety
And proceed to sing the blues. …Have you heard that poor dear Blanche
Got run down by an avalanche?Well, did you evah?
What a swell party this is!
Have you heard? It’s in the stars
Next July we collide with Mars.Well did you evah?
Well I never!What a swell party.
A swell party!
What an elegant, swell-egant party
This is!
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Sad but true, Wretchard. I dont really expect our current crop of leaders to do anything until after an asteroid erases a major city. Unfortunately.
The most noteworthy thing to me about the recent meteor event in Russia was how few reports made any references to Tunguska (1908). It would seem to have been a natural to bring that up, since it was a similar, but much larger, phenomenon in the same country (Russia). Almost no reports did any such thing. I interpret this as an example of the historical amnesia so many people, including news reporters and people in power, have.
Instead, we got ignorant speculation about whether this was related to the asteroid fly-by.
As to whether this “asteroid threat” business can become a crisis to be exploited? Absolutely. Here is another case of an “existential threat” to humanity that is actually much more real than climate change. It is a threat that can be met at releatively modest expense that doesn’t require an Apollo-sized committment. The expense and the technical challenges would still be significant, but not daunting. However, our “leaders” will find ways to make it hugely expensive and less effective, as they always do — and they will be certain to lose focus as to what the original intent of the effort(s) was.
Asteroids and meteorites
And magic from the sky
That cause the booms
To shake the rooms
That make the babies cry
But not to worry we know what
Is causing skies to storm
It’s CO2
By me and you
That’s causing Earth to warm
BATTLE STATIONS – ASTEROID!!!
FIRE LaWS!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqLkpcHavZE&feature=youtu.be&t=2m48s
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!!!
Now if we could get the Dumb-o-crats in Congress to increase military spending!!!!
U.S. NAVY – A GLOBAL FORCE FOR GOOD AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT!
The only long-term solution is to get a reasonable amount of humanity sustainably off-world. This would mimic our ancestor’s survival strategies of going over to the next valley. If they hadn’t done that, where would we be?
How long will that take, maybe a hundred or so years. Maybe two hundred. That’s the window of exposure. But once humanity is offworld the species is far less vulnerable to an existential threat like a giant asteroid.
In the near term we might put more money into surveys and find ways of detecting potential threats. Perhaps we have can develop the potential technology to deflect substantial incoming threats by nudging them by a little from a very long way out.
It is at any rate, a more worthwhile activity than banning styrofoam.
CNN anchors must be under orders to associate global warming with every scary natural event. That suggesting a meteorite could be the result of global warming is a very dumb thing to say can’t be lost on the viewing public.
In Post-Soviet Russia, SPACE EXPLORES YOU!
Isn’t it tonight that an asteroid passes between the GPS satellites and earth?
I got a chuckle that Jerry Pournelle dubbed today “Hot Fudge Friday” (although he should have called it Hot Fudge Fridae), which any reader of Lucifer’s Hammer will recognize. If you haven’t read it, why not? It’s something like 40 years old but it still holds up quite well, having re-read it a few years ago.
Wretchard, what you wrote is almost too depressing for me to dwell on. Here we are in the future that was dreamed about during the first 9/10 of the 20th century, and we’re curling up in our shells instead of striding out into the stars. Thank God for these multiple semi-private corporations developing what will hopefully be commodity space travel.
This also reminds me of an interesting theory about how humanity has a genetic bottleneck at about 70000 years ago, with an estimated total human population of only 10000 at that time. We might have dodged a bullet then; I hope we don’t tempt the fates by doing nothing when we have the most unique and precious gift of the ability to actually take control of our own destiny.
If the space aliens mutter a few comments about pro abortion and collectivism for all, the left and MSM would welcome them with open arms
“When beggars die there are no comets seen. The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”
– Julius Caesar, II, ii
5. wretchard
The only long-term solution is to get a reasonable amount of humanity sustainably off-world.
Agreed. However it needs to be stated what that means: very few humans will move off-world. In-space or off-world procreation will take care of the rest. The vast majority of people will remain on Earth. There will be no huge fleets of giant space arks lifting millions of people off of a “dying world.”
The nearer-term solutions you allude to have the added benefit of increasing our mastery of space, until we eventually graduate to being a “spacefaring civilization.” There are concepts in the works to land on potentially dangerous asteroids, and nudge them into safer paths. It doesn’t require blowing them to smithereens with nukes (a bad idea anyway). Increased mapping of the Solar System and near-Earth space will not only spot major asteroid/comet threats, but will also dramatically increase our understanding of our celestial neighborhood.
And yes, there could indeed be money in this, as there can be money in cleaning up man-made orbital debris. The gigantic fly in the ointment would be government interference. It is possible for governments to handle such projects rationally and with less-than-gargantuan budgets, but once bureaucrats, politicians and activists figure out the angles, they will find ways to turn these efforts into new empires and principalities of taxpayer-syphoning entities.
Doing something with a space program to reduce the asteroid threat? How does that advance our purpose in space to “reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations”?
10. shivermetimbers
If the space aliens mutter a few comments about pro abortion and collectivism for all, the left and MSM would welcome them with open arms
As long as those aliens find leftists tastier than the rest of us, it would be fine by me. We can help the proces by giving the aliens access to voter registration and welfare rolls, as well as government employment files and stimulus recipients. Also, all would-be “eliminationists” and other enviro-crackpots could go into the stew pots as well. We can then kill the aliens by sneezing on them.
Nature has a preliminary size of the bolide at 15 meters, 7000 tons and a kinetic energy of 188 KT if traveling at 15 km/sec. The size estimate is from the Nature article. The energy is from the Cosmic Tusk. Cheers -
http://www.nature.com/news/russian-meteor-largest-in-a-century-1.12438
Off-World? The moon, maybe. Maybe Mars. Much farther? Unlikely. Any group of people sent far away would forget the original mission after a few generations. The machines would break down before then.
One way to preserve the species but none of the civilization would be to seed the universe with the elemental amino acids. Maybe implant DNA into cockroaches in some type of self-sustaining vessels and aim them toward likely earth-like planets.
Wretchard #5
It is at any rate, a more worthwhile activity than banning styrofoam.
Now there’s a thought: just ask Mayor Bloomberg to ban meteors and other space junk from NYC. Anyone who can slow the rise of Big Gulps and stop the invasion of trans fats and sodium chloride should be able to post a Meteore Verboten! notice on subway walls and on every street just below the “No Parking” signs.
16. Black Bart
How about in “free space?” For one thing it would be easier to maintain 1-G, and “terraforming” would not be a daunting task. Granted, it would only work for people who don’t mind living in “giant coffee cans.” However, those coffee cans could be made quite large in time, and their volumes could have a habitable area the size of large, enclosed shopping malls, plus all the attendant sections necessary to sustain the habitats. There can be gardens, farms, and condo-size dwellings.
As to the “spraying space” with DNA or whatever, that is a facinating concept that has been talked about, or similar notions, for some time. The most intriguing one to me is the idea of sending out “embryo ships” with AI as the nursemaids, and perhaps android “parents.” Such ships ought to be preceded by the kind of more fundamental “life-seeding” you allude to.
Just finished reading a new book, published 2013, called: “Near-Earth Objects, finding them before they find us”, written by Donald Yeomans. The author is the head of NASA’s NEO Program office.
The book details where we are now, what has been done, and is written for the literate layman. We have done a lot, since 1998, we have gone from knowing about a few hundred NEOs to almost 10K. We have a lot more to do. We know where many of the rocks are, it is the ones we don’t know that scare me. We have a very hard time seeing stuff that orbits closer to the sun, so we need infrared platforms around the orbit of Venus,and the ability to do something about them.
The most dangerous objects will be comets coming in from the Oort cloud. We would have less than a year from when we would first see them at the orbit of Jupiter.
They can be big.
About using nukes. They would be the best bet, and only possible tool for most objects coming in with little warning.
One problem with trying to fine tune shifting an orbit far in the future is the three body problem. Gravity, with more than two bodies, cannot exactly be predicted. All orbits are approximations. Also you have influences of gas jets from objects, solar winds, variations in rotation all have seemingly tiny influences that over decades of orbits result in unknowable error margins. Plus, unless you have an object within radar range, you only know what direction it is, not exactly how far.
We need a setup where we have an orbiting platform fueled and ready to be loaded with a team and bomb(s) that can launch to intercept incoming, on a days notice. Three orbiting Saturn 5 upper stage ships would be good for redundancy. I know we don’t have them. We could.
I have been aware of the danger since reading the March 1966 Analog, with the science fact article called “Giant Meteor Impact by J.E. Enever. I still have the issue in my collection of science fiction. Just looked at it again. That was when I first discovered the dangers of one landing in the ocean, and killer tidal waves.
Faster, faster, we live in a shooting gallery. What scares me is a 20 mile wide comet coming from behind the sun, we would be toast. Burnt toast.
17. PA Cat
Bloomberg could raise revenue for NYC by being dunked repeatedly into a huge vat of Coca-Cola by people aiming for his head with softballs. Folks would pay $10, $20 for three throws each — more for even more throws. I bet he could raise hundreds of thousands in one afternoon at Coney Island.
It’s George Bush’s fault. Take off your shoes and let some government agents grope you, and we’ll all be fine.
What happens if a big’un hits the moon, knocking it a bit off?
“The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space – each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.” ~ Randall Munroe
Don Rodrigo #20
I bet he could raise hundreds of thousands in one afternoon at Coney Island.
Citi Field and Yankee Stadium would be even better venues– I’m sure both Mets and Yankees fans would pay to see a couple starting pitchers take aim at Bloomie with real baseballs.
The lyric Wretchard quoted at the end of his post is from the Cole Porter song “Well, did you evah?”.
The song first appeared in a forgettable 1939 Broadway production, but was recycled by Porter for the 1956 movie musical: “High Society”.
“High Society” was based on the Katherine Hepburn star vehicle “Philadelphia Story” (play 1939 movie 1940). The movie version of Philadelphia Story stared Hepburn, Carry Grant and Jimmy Stewart.
“High Society” featured songs by Cole Porter and a spectacular cast too. The Hepburn part was played by Grace Kelly, the romantic lead was Bing Crosby and the foil was Frank Sinatra. They also threw in Louis Armstrong and his band as themselves.
Highly Recommended to anyone who loves the great American Songbook or 1950′s Hollywood spectaculars.
OK, I will strap on the tinfoil hat and note that (a) despite lots of efforts, no-one noticed a big meteor headed our way from outer space, and (b) path was from east to west; to rephrase, trajectory was similar to a failed missile shot from Iran to Paris, or from North Korea to London. But it was a meteor — we know that because the Main Stream Media tells us so.
Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, Russian entrepreneurs are selling pieces of the meteorite on the Internet. Great to see unregulated free-market capitalism in action; it’s a shame we can only see it over there.
when we were young, at school, we were told that our ancesters, the Gauls, feared that the sky would fall on their heads
Don #2:
I heard on Fox News multiple references to the 1908 Tungeska blast, even saying that a theoretical impact by the rock that whizzed by today would have been similar in effect. However I later read that the rock today would have been only 2.4 megatons of TNT, and I think the 1908 blast was bigger than that, although nobody knows.
The impact in Russia today is interesting in that it points up something the software the company I work for also shows. The biggest problem is glass. You can be outside, and far enough away from the source of a shock wave as to be unaffected by debris and fire, but killed by the windows shattering and impaling you with glass. It depends on the type of glass and whether it has been covered with film and if the film has been anchored to the frame. I have run all over the Cape and KSC noting the type of windows used in buildings to support such analysis.
And while the nutjob on CNN tried to link the close pass to AGW, on the other hand, today Janice Dean in Fox News said NASA had a way to deflect such rocks. Well, NASA has come up with some ideas, but has nothing they can do right now. And I think we need to realize that if it’s really important NASA is not the right outfit. But then neither is the USAF, at least not any more. Today we have to choose between civilian bureaucrats who will build huge expensive self-licking ice cream cones designed to provide employment for all eternity and a military who will insist that complex systems have to be operated under the same ops concept as an M-16 rifle – i.e., by relatively uneducated enlisted people in large numbers. Neither approach will work for either space colonization or stopping errant space rocks.
By the way, I wonder if y’all realize the area affected, Chelybinsk, is in the Urals, and was built in WWI as Tank City, the place to build tanks out of range of German bombers and later became the premier Soviet nuclear facility. I had to look that stuff up while I was at the Pentagon to answer a stupid FOIA.
Presbypoet #19: I recall that meteor impact article in Analog and I have 4 books on the subject in my collection, “Rain of Ice and Iron,” “Collision Earth,” “Fire On Earth,” and ‘Impact.”
By the way, when they showed the hole in the ice in Russia when the meteor came down I thought at once of that scene in the 1950 version of “The Thing” where the men from the C-47 “Tropical Tilly” surround a similar hole in the ice. If you have not seen that film in a while, look it up. The dialog is the most realistic I have ever heard in a film. And the original story “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell is simply terrific.
Yes, we should certainly start building an asteroid intercept NOW.
Also, we should start hardening the electrical grid against the EMP we know is coming from attack or much worse the Sun, standardizing transformers and building a few dozen or hundred spares, along with some Faraday-caged warehouses full of other critical equipment that would go in the EMP and would be needed to keep things rolling for the year or two it would take for any kind of general recovery to even begin. Without the spares – add another twenty years and another hundred million deaths just in the US.
These are “shovel-ready” projects.
But then, so are about a million road and sidewalk potholes in Los Angeles and around the country, and they ain’t getting fixed neither.
wretchard@5: The only long-term solution is to get a reasonable amount of humanity sustainably off-world.
Newt, is that you? Just want to let you know that I supported your candidacy for this very reason. I can think of no greater purpose to which our rapidly decreasing resources could be applied.
If the question is dinner tonight or breakfast tomorrow, I’ll choose breakfast tomorrow.
We could start a project to have astronauts locate and destroy dangerous space objects, but there could be glitches. Besides those Space Alien Beachballs are sneaky.
If that event in Russia had happened 25 years ago both sides might have gone to Defcon 1. Dumb Luck helped.
Josh (#29) with that type of destruction there is a sunny side! Pregnancies will go up as the shortage of contraceptives become rare or none existent plus with no TV, Radio, etc. just plain nothing much of anything else after dark but a bed to crawl into…. You get the picture. Oh there will still be more functioning guns in America than any other location in the world so our enemies would still think twice about actual invasion (and a lot of pissed off bored men most being better shots than 90% of their army)… Wretchard the thought of leaving this planets protective magnetic field should be considered folly, no one’s going to Mars in any of the current living generations on this planet (considering the cost and material never will), one of several reasons we never stayed at the Moon or sent anything that breaths air past it. Reality is it’s a money pit rallying cry for the Science nerds and a banner to gather under for the Politicians. God didn’t create us to leave this place for another of his worlds, it’s here, hell or heaven. Complex Simplicity that proves of our origin and our destine.
Media should stage asteroid disasters, so public awareness will prompt needed action. Suggest new “Smoking Crater” website to educate citizens.
16. Black Bart “Any group of people sent far away would forget the original mission after a few generations. The machines would break down before then.”
Would or did? Because writers shouldn’t need to ‘borrow’ that much, unless they are trying to tell us something…
Marie Claude @ 27 – when we were young, at school, we were told that our ancesters, the Gauls, feared that the sky would fall on their heads
What we learned in an American school during the Space Race was
“Per aspera ad astra.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_aspera_ad_astra
The Protestant Work Ethic, I guess.
34. MachiasPrivateer
boff, what’s the weight of a protestant ethic in front of a alleatory meteor?
Besides you aren’t the only owner of the Space race, there’s also the Russian’s, the Chinese’s, the persians… the French LMAO
M. C. @ 27 – I suppose that’s why Asterix always wears his helmet, eh? Not only protection, but the wings must help him fly away from falling objects!
Folks, I have a story for you. I swear to The Most High it is true.
I am the sole witness of an impact event that happened in Arizona in 1987. I estimate the size of the Meteor to be about the size of a vw beetle or pt cruiser. Speed was about 200mph. It passed by me at a height of about 100 yds at a distance of about 150 yds. It impacted about 1000 yds from my position.
The time was about 10pm and I was exinguishing my campfire, preparing for bed. I heard the sound of what I thought was a fighter jet running in afterburner. I looked up to see a BIG rock which seemed to be coming directly at me! I honestly thought I was going to die and was transfixed seeing I had nowhere to hide. I saw my life pass before me and I felt peace as accepted my fate. I do not fear death.
I found the crater in 2004 just prior to Iraq Liberation.
In my search for the crater I found a primitive shrine dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe. While there I saw British Tornadoes and F16s practicing nap of earth (almost touched a wingtip). I knew we were going back into Iraq. I went to pray at the shrine for our Military when I began to feel very strange. It turned out my dead thyroid came back to life and I was going hypo because I was on Synthroid. It was also there I received the inspiration from The Mother of Jesus Christ to accept the call of Islam.
I have a problem. I think it is the same problem Joan of Arc had. It plagued her for years before she acted. I am still too confused to act, my OODA Loop is locked up! I talk to priests and shrinks to try to unlock it. It has been quite a ride. I am so focused on resolving this I have put my meteorite on hold, dropped the project.
This site has been an awesome guide and inspiration to me that I tell you this at this time.
I witness the fools in DC. The city ranked number 1 for infidelity for the second year in a row. I witness commenters on this site and others around us who are head and shoulders above those of the Political Class in DC. Why are they not our elected leaders?
I hope we can fix that in my lifetime. I pray America wises up!
@#37 Marzouq
What?
Either double up on the meds or cut ‘em in half.
Marzouq and MachiasPrivateer:
You aren’t supposed to drink the bong water.
Just sayin’.
@27 Marie Claude:
We got something similar as a folk tale featuring a panicky chicken.
But seriously – will this event inspire the Russians to put together a better system for tracking and safely disposing of dangerous meteroids?
#16 Black Bart
Actually, I would view that as being as much a feature as a bug. If the goal is to be sure that homo sapiens is not wiped out in one blow; then so long as libido and fecundity are operational wherever they land; it’s a win for whoever sent them. They will be genetically human, but they are not going to be culturally the same as we are in any case. They will have to adapt to what conditions they find, and what is necessary to survival will change the surviving culture.
As far as the meteorite(s) in Russia, I admit to having sent something politically incorrect to some friends, along with this short clip:
http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=missed+it+by+that+much&view=detail&mid=4DD425526895671114E34DD425526895671114E3&first=0&FORM=NVPFVR
Subotai Bahadur
16. Black Bart: “Any group of people sent far away would forget the original mission after a few generations.”
Seems to me I read science fiction story with that idea as its theme a very long time ago. I do not remember the author or the title.
1389AD
I always considered “Chicken Little” a political cautionary tale. Foxy Loxy was never one to let a good crises go to waste.
ws @ 42: Seems to me I read science fiction story with that idea as its theme a very long time ago. I do not remember the author or the title.
Wasn’t the original Battlestar Galactica a search for lost Earth? It’s a very common theme in scifi. If nothing else it’s always good for a quick joke to have characters speculate about human origins and misremember what little they know.
The nearer-term idea is that the colonies break free and/or make war against Earth, in many cases leaving Earth worse off than before, even if it is only fate fulfilled.
I’m afraid we still lack the technology to put a self-sufficient colony anywhere outside the Earth’s atmosphere. We might have the technology in fifty years or a hundred – as unlikely as that seems right now with most things moving backwards rather than forwards – but it will still be horrendously expensive, make the Apollo program look like a bottle rocket.
Unless, of course, we wake up tomorrow with cheap and easy nuclear fusion or something better, but I don’t see the faintest hope of that anywhere on the real world horizon.
Wanted to share a passage of Cosmos – Carl Sagan – about Tunguska
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irVof7adq4s
Enjoy!
“Our Ancestors the Gaul’s” I remember reading about that phrase being used in a class room in one of the schools in a French speaking and controlled country. The teacher was questioned about the use of that phrase considering that none of the students and even herself had no French descent. She replied, if I recall correctly, “It is not about the genetic reality but about the “idea” of being French.”
Ever since I was was a kid I’ve wished I’d actually seen the Tunguska Event. Now, finally, thanks to the internet, I have! One bucket-list item taken care of.
42 & 44 The idea of the space ship that slowly travels is actually a trope called the generation ship. Heinlein wrote of it in “Universe”, also called “Orphans of the Sky”, in 1941.
A major theme in many of these stories is that the ship’s occupants forget why and where they are going. The ship is the only “universe”, nothing else exists.
The distance to the stars is hard for us to imagine. Traveling at 1,860 miles per second, fast enough to travel from coast to coast in two seconds, it would take 420 years to travel to the closest stars. It only takes 7 miles a second to escape the earth. We have a way to go before we can build even “slow” ships that travel at “only” 1% of the speed of light.
18. Don Rodrigo
I agree about the coffee cans. That is one way to get our feet wet with off world living. Create bases on the Moon and Mars and then we should know enough to build the tin cans. Then we can begin wandering further afield and perhaps explore beyond the solar system. Kinda like the island hopping the ancient mariners did here.
Of course, the amino acids are already floating around out there, so perhaps some race has done that before. In anycase, the DNA seeding is a sign of failure. I don’t think the machine is much good without the programming. So without the civilization included with the package, what would be the point?
41. Subotai Bahadur
Feature or bug. Perhaps. I just seems to me that humanity has a hard enough time getting along on this spacious and resource rich planet. From what I have read, the nearest earth-like planet is light years away. That means that ships would have to hold a large number of people to have genetic diversity, the ships and systems will have to be repairable on the way, with either a huge store of spare parts and/or ability to get the raw material on the way and process it and the human population would have to stay educated. Again, on this resource rich planet we have, at least, lost accrued human knowledge once. If lost in space (heh) one such loss would be fatal.
Maybe some day an attempt to leave will be necessary. God may tell Noah to build an Ark.
46. toadold
““It is not about the genetic reality but about the “idea” of being French.”
do you know that the Africans in our colonies learnt that their ancestors had blue eyes and blond hair, and that they also feared the sky
Actually, a very serious and successful program to ensure our survival in case of all-out thermonuclear war, asteroid impact or megavolcano eruption was realized in Sweden by international team of scientists and engineers: they founded world seed bank of cultivars, not only of the staple food cereals but also of many additional edible plants, with dozens varieties of every crop available. It is situated in deep tunnel in mountain slope, it geologically stable formation of Baltic shield, the most enduring structure under hundred meters of solid rock. It has autonomous climate system and can even without human interference keep reasonable temperature for years. This “Noah Arc” of food plants will allow mankind to survive nuclear winter and resume agriculture as soon as conditions get normal.
Such shelters in mountain tunnels are now much more realistic and cheap option for survivalists communities needed to repopulate the Earth after world-wide catastrophe of any kind, compared to space, lunar or Martian colonies. Teams of scientists can permanently reside in such shelters doing research and maintenance of such collections, also being a reserve humane stock of high-IQ repopulators.
Marie Claude @ 35 – Besides you aren’t the only owner of the Space race, there’s also the Russian’s, the Chinese’s, the persians… the French LMAO
And which of those others have yet to walk across the finish line on the Sea of Tranquility?
Having seen the “Blue Planet” for the first time, our attention turned to exploring Earth, particularly the seas. Have you ever plucked part of a Soviet submarine off the floor of the Pacific in water 3 miles deep?
Didn’t think so.
@ 37 – Something like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUwBKorVs6A
Recommend to all the following site which describes a new company whose goal is to mine asteroids and to develop the ability to move asteroids when they get to close to earth. http://www.PlanetaryResources.com.
All this talk about Chicken Little!
Let’s go over the plan again. Just as the U S of A made friends with the children of Berlin by dropping chocolates during the Berlin Airlift (the “Chocolate Bombers”), we now intend to drop boneless chicken breasts to the starving children of the former French colonies (e.g. Mali) of Africa (via the “Chicken Bombers”).
Don’t worry folks, the “aliens” are friendly.
But the sky really is about to start raining chickens!!!
Fire up the grills! None of that boring bread and cheese, we’re going for coq au vin!
Or maybe we’ll really splurge and do Chicken McNuggets with “French Fries” as part of a “Happy Meal”!!!!
Note to MC and some of you others. “Living well is the best revenge.”
MP @ 55
While googling from your quote I came upon this:
http://zenpencils.com/comic/58-living-well-is-the-best-revenge/
thanks !!
SF
machias 53. A-6 was an awesome attack a/c, eclipsed A-7. Besides the tornadoes and F-16s, I have also seen a AC-130 fly nap of earth down a valley barely wider than it’s wingspan. That is another oldy but goody!
I saw these things along with the meteorite impact while on hunting trips.
The old P-3 Orion is now being replaced. That was another great old a/c.
Go Navy!
52 Sergey
“Mr. President, We must not allow a mine-shaft gap!” -Gen. Buck Turgidson
Humanity was a small hovel of individuals during the bottleneck and with the population thriving from Tierra del Fuego to Murmansk there will be outliers who will survive nearly anything that comes our way.
Interstellar travel will happen after space travel becomes like driving an RV or living in an arc. Until people become comfortable with living in space the idea of raising a family and multiple generations is untenable; which is to say we are a long way off from such travel. A moon colony is would acculturate and even that would not succeed if it could not successfully combine the elements into alloys and build self-sustaining structures. No government based on racism and Marxist trope would be capable of anything more than using violence to be king of the dung heap. They are in effect eating the seed corn for votes, borrowing money for “spreading the wealth”, and deconstructing infrastructure, in short, they represent anti-hope, that is why they so emphatically sell the lie.
“The best part of one’s life consists of his friendships.” – Abraham Lincoln (R-IL)
Heck, why not combine the Chocolate Bomber with the Chicken Bomber and add Reese’s Pieces to the Happy Meal?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmSlbH4bEY
SF @ 56 – Did you note the corporate logo in the last panel? Mickey D’s!!!
Hey, I worked on the high efficiency fryer and the pass-through-sandwich bin with McD’s advanced Engineering Group at HQ in Oak Brook, IL.
So we made lots of jobs for loser bullies, mopping the floors, flipping burgers, pressing the buttons on the electronic “cash registers”. Just the thing for Liberal Arts majors.
An ENGINEER wants to know HOW something works.
A SCIENTIST wants to know WHY something works.
An Ivy League LIBERAL ARTS MAJOR wants to know, “DO YOU WANT FRIES WITH THAT?”
Meanwhile, one of Russia’s politicians almost gets it right:
“Zhirinovsky, leader of the far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), said: ‘Those aren’t meteorites falling. It’s the Americans trying out a new weapon’.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky said what really happened was an act of provocation by the U.S.
He backed up his astonishing claim arguing that newly appointed U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had been trying to reach Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov all day, ‘to warn him that there would be such a provocation, and it might affect Russia’.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2279629/That-meteor-American-weapon-test-Russian-politicians-bizarre-theory-33-000mph-space-rock-crashes-earth.html
Hmmm. That would explain why the Russians originally claimed to have shot down the “meteor”, and then later back-tracked with statements about ‘Who? Us?’
Once our Political Class has taught us to distrust them, how can one ever know what to believe? If we can’t trust what the NYT says about anthropogenic global warming, why should we believe them about a meteor? How would we prove from publicly-available data (not media reports) that the event was not a failed Iranian missile en route to London?
“far-right Liberal Democratic Party ”
Something about that moniker makes me laugh. Maybe it is the juxtaposition of far-right and liberal and democratic party. It is amusing to see Russian’s fearful of the Americansky Leftists. Funny things happen in a pole shift.I used to root for the home team because they represented me. Now I root for the team that is the enemy of my enemy. Just imagine how many communists the Russians could kill if they put their mind to it and who would argue against it, China?
It is ironic that the Obamination sought to get the whole world to love the US and all he has managed is alienate 51% of its citizens,
marzouq @ 53 – C-130????
There are always copycats!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF-PZpaFVOc
GO NAVY, BEAT ARMY!
You can only get better by competing with the BEST!
And the U.S. ARMY IS THE #1 ARMY IN THE WORLD!
Even if they are just a teensy bit passé.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f25-FnGkiwo
MP @ 60
‘An Ivy League LIBERAL ARTS MAJOR wants to know, “DO YOU WANT FRIES WITH THAT?”
Nowadays what they want is poutine ! French fries are so McDo
OT but I believe our host is from Havard
By the way France is about to tax cigarette buts:
google translate:
‘”One cigarette can pollute alone, more than 500 liters of water or 1m3″ of snow he assures, noting that “there are potentially 70 billion cigarette butts thrown away each year in the wild in France” .’
http://www.midilibre.fr/2013/02/12/le-senateur-ecologiste-jean-vincent-place-propose-de-taxer-les-megots-de-cigarettes,643250.php
enjoy
SF
New York Times headline:
“Massive asteroid to destroy Earth tomorrow. Women and minorities to be hardest hit. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issues ‘disparate asteroid impact’ statement.”
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/435811/20130215/russia-meteor-putin.htm
”
Russia Calls for International Anti-Asteroid System after Meteor Terror [VIDEO]”
MachiasPrivateer,
of course we have, since Jules Verne related the trip
Black Bart@16 said:
“Any group of people sent far away would forget the original mission after a few generations.”
Walter Sobchak@42 replied:
“Seems to me I read science fiction story with that idea as its theme a very long time ago. I do not remember the author or the title.”
There was a short lived television series called “Star Lost” that was based upon that premise. “Star Lost” was ahead of its time as science fiction but had problems with low quality special effects.
Josh@44 said:
“I’m afraid we still lack the technology to put a self-sufficient colony anywhere outside the Earth’s atmosphere. We might have the technology in fifty years or a hundred – as unlikely as that seems right now with most things moving backwards rather than forwards – but it will still be horrendously expensive, make the Apollo program look like a bottle rocket. Unless, of course, we wake up tomorrow with cheap and easy nuclear fusion or something better, but I don’t see the faintest hope of that anywhere on the real world horizon.”
While I generally agree with Josh’s comment, the big problem with a self-sufficient space colony is not getting the people to Mars (we have that technology) but providing the colony with an energy source based upon in-situ resources. For example, a Martian colony would need to be near ore bodies of uranium or thorium in adequate concentration. Also the Martian colony would need to bring with it an industrial infrastructure for converting the ore body into useful energy. This energy limitation is ironic since the depletion of fossil fuels on Earth is a main driver behind why we need to build colonies in space. As Josh said, we need to solve the problem of nuclear fusion. Interstellar travel is probably not an option if nuclear fusion proves to be an intractable problem. This presents us with the ultimate irony of the Sun pumping out seemingly infinite energy from nuclear fusion but our being unable to extract energy through the same physical process due to limitations from the Laws of Physics. One could argue that the inability to use nuclear fusion as a beneficial technology due to the Laws of Physics is proof that god exists but has a nasty sense of humor.
By the way: Protecting ourselves from space rocks through building space colonies is a Good Idea.
61. Kinuachdrach
don’t buy into Daily Mail anti-russian propaganda, that would uses a anonym politician statment and make a generality out of it
@65 was in jest but close to the mark. Given our present state of affairs, I’d say any effort to establish far flung colonies in space in order to preserve our species would be limited not so much by the where and how, but by the who. Would the initial party be staffed with the kind of folks who carry forth the kind of cultural confidence that would be necessary to make it a going concern? Or would it be some sort of caring and sharing UN-type delegation that is doomed to fail because it seeks utopia? Of course this assumes that our leadership could even rouse itself from its current self agrandizing graft project to even consider such lofty thoughts. What set of instructions would they carry with them? In Navy speak what pubs would they take to operate with? The current lot hates the US Constitution, so that’s right out. (Even though it is one of the last and only documents that has ever widely advanced the human condition.) The Communist Manifesto and its evil spawn? The Bible? Koran? Torah? Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy? Stack of Playboys? Bottom line, I am certain we will find a place or places to diversify humanity’s reach, and we will figure out a way to get there. Who will determine who will go, who will actually go and are they prepared, like currently vilified Western explorers (Columbus, Pizarro, etc) to exhibit the kind of hard corps leadership necessary to make a human colony a successful endeavor? The answers to those questions will be the ones our post modern leaders cannot answer, because they are ideologically and fortitudinally unprepared to do so.
64. SF
the ecologists in France represent lesser than 2,5% of the voters, besides Mr Placé can ask for a law, it’s not him that decides of the rightfulness of his request, it still is the government’s choice (in the constitution statutes), which is sometimes a harm when it comes to EU decisions, they haven’t to pass through our parliament to be adopted, when they can be implemented by any of our governments. Unlike for Germany, where all the EU decisions have to pass through the Bundestag, and for the extreme cases through Karlsruhe Court
see what I mean:
http://contrelacour.over-blog.fr/article-transposition-des-directives-quand-le-parlement-delegue-sa-competence-legislative-aux-ministres-115012611.html
It’s a deny of democratic voices !
MC @ 66 – So how are things at the Center of the Earth??? Did you get Pat Boone’s autograph????
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF8Bf1d_crk
Did you bring back any rocks???
BlackBart@50: I just seems to me that humanity has a hard enough time getting along on this spacious and resource rich planet
That, to me, is the compelling reason to leave. How 15 billion folks could live on this planet without extreme oppression escapes me entirely; abortion, euthanasia, housing, transportation, food, energy and that ancient, overly restrictive constitution that unnecessarily inhibits the full expression of the common good.
you want a good laugh on the exercice of “Democracy” in the EU parliament?
I found a old report, and that’s a perl !
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xru408_dans-le-secret-du-grand-bazar-europeen_school#.USBZ_x2KvQM (video in french)
note what happened to Charles Pasqua !