Bill Stone, the maverick cave explorer who invented robots and dive equipment that have allowed him to plumb Earth's deepest abysses, explains his efforts to build a robot to explore Jupiter's moon Europa. The plan is to send the machine to bore through miles of ice and swim through a liquid underworld that may harbor alien life. And if that's not enough, he's also planning to mine lunar ice by 2015.
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Europa is a moon of Jupiter, the smallest of the four Jovian moons discovered by Galileo in 1610. Juipter has 63 objects circling it that are called moons, though only eight of them are "regular" in their orbit and other characteristics. The rest are bits and pieces of clumped up matter that were…
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By Dr. Cynthia Phillips
Planetary geologist at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute
Jupiter's moon Europa could be the best place beyond the Earth to search for life. This small moon, about the size of Earth's Moon, is one of the Galilean moons first…
Discovery, by nature, has a ripple effect. When one thing is found to be plausible, testable, or true, a suite of potential other truths and plausibilities tend to follow suit. This is the nature of inductive reasoning, the foundation of the scientific method, and the reason why science–as a human…
Jeebus. Didn't he read "2010"?
Fark.com has green-lighted a link to this blog entry.
/Summon Bevets.
Wow, I've been farked. Is that good?
Hope you have alot of bandwidth.
Where do I sign up!!
Hope the robot doesn't kill the little buggers if it finds any.
man, i wouldn't want to be deep in a cave with him. he seems about two steps short of snapping, lot of barely-contained rage in him, yow.
Aren't Europa's oceans mostly sulfuric acid? If he is actually preparing to send a probe, it better be pretty tough.
I don't see rage. I see compassion and life! There are those who do it. And those who read about it. Those who read about it do so from the comfort of a warm room with the T.V. on. Those that do it.... face each day with a fire that is hard to contain. For that....we all reep the rewards.
As an engineering I think it is absolutely a doing goal with a realistic time line. I would absolutely sign up to be on the mining expedition to the moon. For that matter the cave thing looked pretty cool, too.