Curiosity

The Story of Mars

esiegel — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 12:59:43 +0000

The Story of Mars

"Mars once was wet and fertile. It's now bone dry. Something bad happened on Mars. I want to know what happened on Mars so that we may prevent it from happening here on Earth." -Neil deGrasse Tyson

Oh, it's true alright, something bad did once happen on Mars. And although there isn't any real danger of that happening to Earth, a little conversation I had earlier this week made me think that it's time to tell all of you a story about our red neighbor, and why it is the way it is today.

You see, when we think about Mars, we think about the smallish, red, desolate world that fascinates us today. We mostly think about the tremendous impact craters, the large mountains and the dry, rocky terrain.

Image credit: NASA / Viking Orbiter.

But Mars wasn't always this way, and we know it. There are clues to that, even today. Aerial views from orbiting spacecraft show us phenomena like dried up riverbeds with oxbow bends in them,

Image credit: ESA / Mars Express; yes, that's false color!

polar ice caps and occasionally atmospheric clouds,

Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA).

and recently, landers and rovers have found sedimentary structures in the terrain, silica-rich layers beneath the surface, and even hematite spheres, all evidence that water once flowed freely across the Martian surface.

Image credit: NASA / JPL / Cornell / Mars Opportunity Rover.

But no longer, and not for more than a billion years, to the best of our knowledge. In fact, liquid water is pretty much an impossibility on Mars today! You probably remember that like all substances, water exists in the solid, liquid or gaseous phases dependent on the pressure and temperature of its environment. While all three phases are common on Earth, only two of those phases -- the solid and gaseous ones -- are possible if the pressure is below a certain threshold, occurring at the triple point of water.

Image credit: Science Education Resource Center @ Carleton College, via http://serc.carleton.edu/.

Unfortunately, the average atmospheric pressure on Mars is just 0.6% of what it is on Earth, placing it below the triple point of water and making the liquid phase an impossibility at all locations, excepting the depths of the deepest Martian trenches.

But the overwhelming evidence for a watery past tells us it wasn't always this way. In fact, if we go back to the early Solar System, Mars and Earth likely weren't all that different.

Image credit: Don Dixon, via http://fineartamerica.com/.

We know that our home world -- in its infancy -- was different from Earth today in a number of important ways. The atmosphere was rich with hydrogen, as the most common gases were water, ammonia, methane and hydrogen gas, all excellent at trapping heat. Even though the Sun was only about 80% as luminous as it is today, Earth still had vast oceans and liquid water throughout its surface, bombardment by asteroids and comets was many orders of magnitude more common than it is today, and all the organics necessary for complex life -- the building blocks of everything in our biosphere today -- was in place.

And to the best of our knowledge, aside from being a bit smaller and farther from the Sun, so was Mars.

Image credit: Kevin M. Gill of flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinmgill/.

We know that life took hold on Earth relatively quickly, within the first few hundred million years. We also know that life was able to sustain itself on Earth; Mars, to the best of our knowledge, was not so lucky. At some point -- perhaps after the first billion or two years -- those similar conditions on Earth and Mars, those conditions that were so conducive to life, became very different. We're not certain what happened, but we have a leading (and compelling) hypothesis.

Image credit: NASA.

We don't think about it on a day-to-day basis, but the Sun is constantly spewing out a stream of ionized, high-energy particles in all directions. If all we had, instead of Earth, was a big rock covered in gas, that stream of particles -- the solar wind -- would strip that gas away in short order. But that doesn't happen! The main reason that the Earth still has an atmosphere that's as thick as it is is because we've got a powerful magnetic field generated in our planet's core. We typically think of the magnetic field as it is on the Earth's surface, deflecting compass needles and aiding in navigation, but the reality is that it extends far into space! As high-energy, ionized particles stream towards us, the magnetic field deflects them, and protects us mightily from the solar wind, keeping our atmosphere intact.

But the Solar System is 4.5 billion years old now, and Mars is much, much smaller than Earth.

Image credit: NASA/JPL; Galileo orbiter / Mars Global Surveyor Orbiter.

Planets radiate heat away according to their surface area, and with a radius of just 3,390 km (or just 53% of Earth's), Mars has just 28% of Earth's surface area. But it's much lower in mass; Earth is approximately ten times as massive as Mars! Due to its much smaller mass-to-surface-area ratio, Mars has cooled much, much more quickly than Earth, all the way down to its core. At some point, the dynamic magnetic field that Mars once had (and it had one; we've already seen the relic magnetic field imprinted in Martian rock) ceased to be, and when that happened, the atmosphere of Mars was no longer protected from the solar wind.

Image credit: Lundin et al., Science, Vol. 305. no. 5692, pp. 1933 - 1936, doi:10.1126/science.1101860, 2004.

On a world where a thick atmosphere and liquid water ruled for maybe a billion years or more, the death of Mars' magnetic field meant that these high-energy, ionized particles would begin colliding with the particles in Mars' upper atmosphere, giving many of them enough kinetic energy to escape from the gravitational pull of the red planet! In the span of just a few million years, Mars went from a world teeming with organics, liquid water and all the building blocks of life to the desolate, barren and mostly frozen world we see today.

Image credit: John Raoux / AP.

At least, that's the leading hypothesis. The big news from earlier this week is that the mission that's about to test that hypothesis, Mars MAVEN, was just successfully launched!

Image credit: Ken Kremer of Universe Today, via http://kenkremer.com/.

We've already got rovers on the ground, digging into the soil, returning photographs, performing analysis and exploring the terrain in unprecedented detail. But if we want to know the story of what happened to Mars' surface, that means learning what happened to Mars' atmosphere, and MAVEN is going to be the first spacecraft to attempt to figure that out by measuring what's happening to Mars' atmosphere right now.

Image credit: NASA / LASP.

When it reaches Mars in September of next year, MAVEN will enter an eccentric orbit around the red planet, spending most of its time a significant distance -- thousands of miles (kilometers) -- above the top of the Martian atmosphere, but once-per-orbit, dipping down into the upper atmosphere and taking data. By measuring the solar wind and the flux of atmospheric particles escaping from Mars today, it's going to give us the first hard data that will allow us to extrapolate how Mars lost its atmosphere in the first place!

Image credit: Mark Thiessen / National Geographic.

One of the great things is that Mars Curiosity has similar instruments on board to the ones on MAVEN, so while MAVEN determines the atmospheric composition, elemental isotope ratios and presence-and-formation of volatiles (such as methane) in the upper atmosphere, Curiosity can do the same thing all the way down at the bottom of Mars' atmosphere. With data combined from both missions, this incredible hypothesis will be scrutinized and possibly either validated or falsified by the forthcoming data!

Image credit: Brendan Alexander of Donegal Skies, via flickr.

So when you see this cold, dry, red planet hovering in the night skies, know that it not only wasn't always that way, but that we just might be on the cusp of finding out how it came to be this way! And that's a little bit of insight into the story of Mars!

esiegel Thu, 11/21/2013 - 07:59

Tags

Astronomy

environment

Physics

Solar System

In fact, Mars' atmospheric pressure (as you quote it directly below the lovely phase diagram) is *exactly* at the triple point of water. P(tp) is 0.611 kPa; Mars' atmosphere ranges from 0.4 to 0.9 kPa, with an average (as quoted in Wikipedia) of 0.636 kPa, or just barely above P(tp).

So it is just barely possible that some place on Mars could have a higher than average pressure, and a higher than average temperature (just above 0 C), to allow surface ice to melt to liquid instead of sublimating. But not over a large area, and not for a long time.

It is a great theory, and probably true. What I don't understand is if what has just been said about Mars is true, why does Venus have an atmosphere? The force of the solar wind Venus is subjected to is far stronger than the one hitting Mars, and Venus has no magnetic field to protect it either. Despite that, the atmosphere on Venus is thicker than the one on Earth.

@Denier

Good question. Wiki says the following regarding the atmosphere of Venus:

"The weak magnetosphere around Venus means the solar wind is interacting directly with the outer atmosphere of the planet. Here, ions of hydrogen and oxygen are being created by the dissociation of neutral molecules from ultraviolet radiation. The solar wind then supplies energy that gives some of these ions sufficient velocity to escape the planet's gravity field. This erosion process results in a steady loss of low-mass hydrogen, helium, and oxygen ions, while higher-mass molecules, such as carbon dioxide, are more likely to be retained. Atmospheric erosion by the solar wind probably led to the loss of most of the planet's water during the first billion years after it formed. The erosion has increased the ratio of higher-mass deuterium to lower-mass hydrogen in the upper atmosphere by 150 times compared to the ratio in the lower atmosphere."

Could it be that Mars, being lower in mass than Venus, could not even hold on to the higher mass molecules?

some images (the last two) seem to have a broken link?

Fixed, Tihomir?

Jens: "Could it be that Mars, being lower in mass than Venus, could not even hold on to the higher mass molecules?"

An interesting question. I'd certainly think it loses CO2 and other heavier molecules at a higher rate than Venus. There's still a preference for lighter particles, resulting in a concentrating effect just like on Venus. So I'd think that the measured molecule and isotope ratios measured by satellites and on the ground would start to constrain how much was their originally.

Which goes to Denier's point -- whatever geological circumstances caused Venus' atmosphere to become so thick in the first place is why it still has a thick atmosphere. The solar wind only strips particles so fast.

Speaking of rovers and measurements, I know that box full of wires and pcb in the penultimate picture: That's SAM! Sample Analysis at Mars combines a gas chromatograph, a mass spectrometer, and a laser spectrometer along with a bunch of sample processing machinery for concentrating gas fractions and such. It's a ridiculously sophisticated experiment engine in a box.

And it's really cool to find out it is being used on MAVEN, so the measurements from it and Curiosity will be as comparable as possible.

I'd heard of spin-offs of CheMin, Curiosity's other ridiculously sophisticated sample analyzer, as a portable X-ray diffraction unit for use on Earth. But not SAM. Neat! This will really shed light on the whole issue.

Ethan, thanks for providing the last two images, the web page has been repared. BTW, what is shown on the last image? Mars near Regulus, I presume?
And, since the credit of the image next to last goes to NGM, are they planning on writing an article on MAVEN, Mars, NASA, or other astronomical subject soon?

Another issue relevant to the atmosphere of Venus is it's ongoing vulcanism. It is continually renewing it's atmosphere, mostly with carbonates and sulfides, whereas Mars seems to have solidified all the way through. Ethan, do you know if this relates to nuclear decay in the planet's core? I've heard that a lot of Earth's heat comes from the decay of uranium.

"Planets radiate heat away according to their surface area, and with a radius of just 3,390 km (or just 53% of Earth’s), Mars has just 28% of Earth’s surface area. But it’s much lower in mass; Earth is approximately ten times as massive as Mars! Due to its much smaller mass-to-surface-area ratio, Mars has cooled much, much more quickly than Earth, all the way down to its core"

Ok, you do realize that you are supporting the science that was behind the theory that the earth was only about 5000 yr old do you not.

It is radioactive material that keeps the earth center molten, not residual heat.

@Ed Forbes #9: The square-cube law is valid, regardless of the source of internal heat. The question being addressed is how that heat dissipates away from the planet. The total heat content, *including* radioactive decay, is determined by the volume (i.e., the mass) because how much radionuclide is present is a function of the mass. How fast that heat radiates a way is determined by the surface area.

Second, Kelvin's calculation of Earth's age due only to heat of formation gave a value of 98 million years, *NOT* the 5000 year value the YECs pretend to claim.

Third, the contributions of radiogenic heat vs. residual heat of formation are approximately *EQUAL* at the present day. See the very nice introduction in the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget) for both a qualitative description and quantitative plots.

Mars lost its atmosphere, water and millions of human inhabitants in 189,960 BC.

Cause? The third inhabited Planet in our Solar System, Milona was destroyed in a war amongst its inhabitants. (A German scientist has shown the asteroid belt came from a single planet).

This 'explosion' knocked mars out of it's orbit and resulted in further catasrophe.

This information is from The Pleiadian Mission by Randolph Winters, that based on www.theyfly.com.

Before you scream fraud. hoax, note that the Swiss contactee Meier published data on our Solar System sometime years ahread of nasa's discoveries, that given him by et or from his personal observation from aboard et craft.

NASA, SETI, astronomers, Ufologists and Govts don't admit this. That is their loss. Millions of us know better, and use informatiom already given us by this race, with whom many share common ancestry. They are 12,500 years ahead of us on tech, medicine, knowledge of the Creational Laws etc.

Am I a nutter off my meds? Nah, just a retired Airl;ine Training Capt. with multip[le IFO sightings and an open mind.

Huh, huh, huh, huh. You said, "know." Huh, huh, huh, huh...

Mars lost it's ocean/atmosphere when it was captured by the more massive earth during an early flyby (passover) at near Roche Limit.
See:
http://www.creationism.org/patten/PattenMarsEarthWars/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7EAlTcZFwY
http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Collision-Immanuel-Velikovsky/dp/1906833117

Has my comment been censored? If so, WHY?

Michael Kelsey..please tell us EXACTLY what you find funny about data that didn't come from you?

I can guess: nothing.

However, what WAS funny is your protestations that you're not a nutter off their meds.

That was funny.

"Has my comment been censored? If so, WHY?"

Us Martians don't want the truth discovered.

Michael Kelsey..please tell us EXACTLY what you find funny about data that didn’t come from you?

I'm not Michael, so not nearly as diplomatic, but I'll take a shot here:
Because the ``data'' to which you refer is a load of crap presented by kooks?

Mars was hit with multiple electric discharges on half of the planet. This is why Mar’s northern hemisphere is vastly different from the southern hemisphere. Mars does have a magnetic field, mostly in the south and not the north.

Mars is scarred with the same markings which we see in various materials that have been hit with lightening or other powerful discharges. This is why the craters of Mars have an intact peak in the center. An asteroid impact does not leave a center point standing and untouched.

More info at: http://www.electricuniverse.info/Introduction
http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/

The Earth wasn't just accidentally "conducive" to life, it was MADE that way by YAHWEH for life as we know it. Yahweh created all that is in the entire Universe. Nothing "just happened" in the universe, it was planned by YAHWEH. Now, unlike some dim wit Bible thumpers, I do not say that the Earth is only 6K years old, and all that mess. Earth has been here for billions of years. Man was put here perhaps only 1 million years ago. Adamic man has been here a long time and was re-created after the last cataclysm that the Bible makes reference to in Genesis 1. Whatever hit the Earth was rather Titanic in scope and wiped out much of life on the Earth.

"The heavens declare the glory of Yahweh, the skies proclaim the work of His hands." Psalm 19:1

wally58,

So what's your evidence for any of your claims? If there had been a giant cataclysm referred to in the Bible, surely there would be physical evidence of such. When did such a cataclysm occur? What was the nature of that cataclysm? If you specify answers to those questions, then surely some of the people reading here could determine what consequences such a cataclysm would have and determine what effects should still be observable today. If we look for those effects and find them, then you have some evidence. If we look and don't find them, then your idea is falsified.

Of course, more likely, you are making a very non-specific claim of cataclysm PRECISELY so that it is impossible to determine the currently observable effects of this hypothetical event, thereby rendering any attempt to falsify your idea futile. That may lead to an inability to falsify your claim, but it certainly lends no credence to your claim either. Without such evidence, why should anyone believe your claims over the accepted scientific version of the history of the earth, which does give specific, testable predictions of what should be observed now?

BTW, wally, this is a SCIENCE blog. If you attempt to quote Bible verses or use other religious justifications for your claims, I (and likely most other readers) will ignore you.

You know, I read Thomas Turk's post and immediately thought satire. If I'm right, then I commend you on your wit. Upon reading further posts from Mr. Turk, I am inclined to belive otherwise. It's so hard to tell sometimes and my satire detector seems to be on the fritz lately.

It's likely that Mars is a former moon whose parent planet (a large, oceanic "planet V") no longer exists. Its remnants are what we call the asteroid belt. Voluminous evidence suggests that Mars was slammed at close range by a huge amount of debris. That debris storm wiped away Mars' atmosphere, embedded giant magnetic chunks in its surface, ripped giant valleys into the planet, and inundated Mars with massive floods. Roughly one half of Mars is caked with debris often miles thick (think the "pie in the face" effect). Mars' history is more violent than we dare imagine. For more on this theory, take a look at the dozens of lines of evidence as listed by the late former director director of the U.S. Naval Observatory and author of 100+ peer reviewed papers, Dr. Tom Van Flandern: http://www.metaresearch.org/solar%20system/eph/ephrevised/ephrevised.asp. In particular, scroll down to the list of evidence that Mars is a former moon. It is quite compelling.

Planetary mass isn't going to be able to explain either orbits of the belt objects, their composition, or the orbit and composition of Mars.

It's a less obscene hypothesis than Velikovski, but not by a huge amount, really.

"If there had been a giant cataclysm referred to in the Bible, surely there would be physical evidence of such"

Other writings would likewise have spotted them and placed them in a timeline and chronology that would be at least vaguely sympathetic to the bible story.

But I guess those are just myths, hence inaccurate, whilst the Bibble...

Gee, this article sure attracted a menagerie of kookiness, didn't it?

First there's the "Martian war" hypothesis, on the authority of aliens. Who, I might add, are kinda dicks since they're 12,000 years ahead of us (only 12000? what are the odds?) but will only give us access to data on the solar system (minus the whole 'humans living on Mars' thing) that's a couple years ahead of NASA.

Then there was an "Mars/Earth flyby" theory.

Then there's the Electric Universe kook, always delightfully ignorant of both how electromagnetism works, and how the thing they're claiming electricity replaces works. Yes, impacts can leave central peaks. No, the solar wind cannot be caused by an electric field because the solar wind is quasi-neutral.

Then lastly there's of course the religious theory. At least it's not a YEC!

It's pretty easy to pick a winner among them. Thomas Turk wins for originality, and sheer balls-to-the-wall unrepentant and self-aware nuttiness. I've never heard the Mars Flyby theory before, but it's not nearly crazy enough at first blush to beat Mr. Turk. Electric Universe is amusing in how easily people get suckered into buying books of nonsense disproven with a compass (or a probe measuring the solar wind, take your pick), but it's mostly boring old-hat kookery. And geeze, nothing beats "God did it" for a boring old story, even with the slight twist of not being the usual young earth crud.

Congratulations, Thomas Turk! You win... well, nothing, but still! You win!

Venus is the puzzler. It has no significant magnetic field, yet it is still volcanicly active, i.e. has a molten core. It is rapidly losing its atmosphere (only planet with a tail like a comet) so it must be getting new atmosphere via volcanics. So why no magnetic field?

One reason why Venus has a very weak magnetic field is that it cannot generate any dynamo effect because of it's very slow rotational speed.

"Venus is the puzzler. It has no significant magnetic field, yet it is still volcanicly active"

Vulcanism doesn't mean magnetic field.

For a magnetic field, you need:

1) Molten metal core
2) Rotation
3) Some permanent magentism in the metal

Vulcanism can result from a core that is hot enough to be molten so a lack of vulcanism can stop a magnetic field from regenerating and getting stronger. But it doesn't mean magnetic fields.

So the asteroid belt was the remains of a single body? I think that if you add up the masses of all the asteroids the total falls far short of a potentially life-supporting planet.... it probably would not even be large enough to have a molten core even in the very earliest stages of its'life' ... (just off to check Mr Turk's book...)

i went to go up therr

NASA Press Conference Will Announce Voyager Captured by Alien Craft!

gregladen — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 18:25:11 +0000

NASA Press Conference Will Announce Voyager Captured by Alien Craft!

I'm kidding, I'm kidding, NASA did not say that. But I do think people need to take it down a notch with this whole blaming NASA for doing their press conferences wrong. As far as I know, the Curiosity Martian Laboratory Robot recently approached a non nondescript pile of dirt, analyzed the bejesus out of it as a test of the fancy dancy instruments on board, and everything worked. The pile of dirt was not interesting but they did to that pile of dirt what would have required 3,000 feet of laboratory floor space full of expensive equipment and a dozen technicians working for two months back in the day. But they did it with a Robot. On Mars. In a few days. And everything worked.

If you don't think that is overwhelmingly exciting than you are either dead or have no idea how science works. That is incredibly amazing wonderful news.

So, when a NASA scientist became exuberant over the news that would be reported in the upcoming press conference and said he was really excited, science reporters and bloggers, jaded by the Mono Lake affair no doubt, assumed that only one thing could be that exciting: Martians. Nothing else. And then, when "rumors" went around suggesting that it was probably not Martians, it became time to crucify NASA again. That is not good science reporting, people. Don't think you're doing it right and NASA is doing it wrong.

I also think that the spoof site reporting that a blue plastic necklace had been found on the Angry Red Planet was pretty funny, and I think that NASA having that site killed was unnecessary. Those details are here.

Take it down a notch, people.

OK, there really will be a V-ger press conference and a Curiosity press conference in the near future.

OMG NASA IS HAVING MULTIPLE PRESS CONFERENCES IN A FEW DAYS WHAT IS GOING ON IN THE UNIVERZ????

Actually, NASA has press conference all the time. All the time. They've been doing this for years. The sudden concern that NASA is doing science by press conference, if it is a real concern, should have been brought up a long time ago. But really, there should not be a concern. The data that are collected on these various NASA Big Science Missions are studied by real live scientists who publish the results in peer reviewed journals. But they also have the press conferences.

Think about this for one minute. What if NASA had the rule that nothing they did would be reported to the press, but rather, only released via peer reviewed journals, often years after the actual mission activities were carried out, but they'd also let you stand a few miles away and watch launches. That's it. No press conferences keeping people updated on the various missions as they reach various milestones. What would the people who watch this science and report on it and blog about it do then? They'd whinge about the lack of transparency, the lack of information, they'd say things like "Sure, sure, peer reviewed papers are great, but with this kind of science, with the huge public funding, and given the importance of the public interest, and the various milestones and stuff ... well, they should have press conferences now and then, dammit!"

Yes, that is what would be said.

So, here, I will present the information on the upcoming press conferences, as provided by NASA, so you can see what it is all about.

11.29.2012
Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Update Set In San Francisco About Curiosity Mars Rover

PASADENA, Calif. -- The next news conference about the NASA Mars rover Curiosity will be held at 9 a.m. Monday, Dec. 3, in San Francisco at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).
Rumors and speculation that there are major new findings from the mission at this early stage are incorrect. The news conference will be an update about first use of the rover's full array of analytical instruments to investigate a drift of sandy soil. One class of substances Curiosity is checking for is organic compounds -- carbon-containing chemicals that can be ingredients for life. At this point in the mission, the instruments on the rover have not detected any definitive evidence of Martian organics.

The Mars Science Laboratory Project and its Curiosity rover are less than four months into a two-year prime mission to investigate whether conditions in Mars' Gale Crater may have been favorable for microbial life. Curiosity is exceeding all expectations for a new mission with all of the instruments and measurement systems performing well. This is spectacular for such a complex system, and one that is operated so far away on Mars by people here on planet Earth. The mission already has found an ancient riverbed on the Red Planet, and there is every expectation for remarkable discoveries still to come.

Audio and visuals from the briefing also will be streamed online at: http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl .

For more information about the mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mars and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl .

2012-377b

Veronica McGregor/Guy Webster 818-354-9452/ 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
veronica.c.mcgregor@jpl.nasa.gov/ guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

NASA to Host Dec. 3 Teleconference About Voyager Mission

November 29, 2012

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA will host a media teleconference at 11 a.m. PST (2 p.m. EST) on Monday, Dec. 3, to discuss the latest findings and travels of NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft.

Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, have been speeding through the outer reaches of our solar system and sending back unprecedented data about the bubble of charged particles around our sun. They were launched in 1977 and have traveled farther from Earth than any other spacecraft.

Audio and visuals of the event will be streamed live online at: http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2 .

For more information about the Voyager mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/voyager and http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov .

Jia-Rui C. Cook 818-354-0850
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
jccook@jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

2012-379b

_______________________________

Photograph of Alien Spacecraft by Flickr user Markusram

gregladen Fri, 11/30/2012 - 13:25

Tags

NASA TV is great. Hearing the questions asked by reporters can be very revealing.

Hearing the answers directly from the investigators is great. The detail of their explanations is often missing from articles based on them.

Can I ask why you are so smug?
"If you don’t think that is overwhelmingly exciting than you are either dead or have no idea how science works."

wow. You're pathetic

Jon, that is not smug. This is a blog post that starts out with a picture of a UFO. Think about it for a minute.

Then, after you've been thinking for a moment, I do have a question for you that you might try to answer if you've got anything left: Do you think it is not amazingly impressive that they ran this pile of dirt to the ground, as it were? Because if you don't .....

Yes, I find it impressive but not necessarily amazingly. I expect advancements in technology over thirty years. We have been sending rovers to Mar's since my dad was my age. However, just because I find it impressive I wouldn't, as a scientist, expect or fault anyone else who thought otherwise.

I read your blog regularly and seems lately you have had this very disdainful tone. It has made it hard to read. If you expect people to share in your joy you should try to educate rather than insult. The scientific community of the past ten years has become rather good at looking down its nose at people and you're adding to the problem.

"would have required 3,000 feet of laboratory floor space full of expensive equipment and a dozen technicians working for two months back in the day. But they did it with a Robot. On Mars. In a few days. And everything worked."

This makes very little sense. We can either perform these experiments on a machine the size of the rover or we cant. Explain to me why it is only possible on Mars. Are you saying if I drove Curiosity into my back yard and performed sample testing on some random patch of dirt, nothing would happen? i would need to find myself thousands of feet of lab space and teams of guys? No.

We made an advancement. Kick Ass. It's not the average persons fault that NASA over hypes things and most physicists are too self absorbed to explain it to people.

Jon, I'm not looking down my nose at anyone, but if I'm critiquing anyone (and I am) it is fellow scientist and science writers who have joined the "NASA is doing science by press conference" bandwagon.

My comparison with the laboratory setting and the modern rover is set in the context of change over time. Reread that section. You'lll see I'm comparing the present to some unspecified point in the past when you could not do what they are doing now.

Funny that the number of words of complaining from you is approaching the length of the blog post that you did not read very carefully! It's almost like you were looking down your nose at me or something.

NASA has not overhyped anything; read their press reports. Unless we think that every word that comes out of every NASA employee represents NASA, which would require that NASA control what their employees say very carefully. I would prefer not to have it that way. Finally, again, I"m not taking about the "average person." I'm talking about the scientists and science writers, a subset of whom, I think, are wrong on this.

@Jon

BOOM ROASTED, its a blog and an enjoyable one at that. I enjoy the snarky tone of it. Seriously, could you be any more of a whiny little girl? Go find something else to bitch about...

Slow and steady

stoat — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 08:50:07 +0000

Slow and steady

I remember old sci-fi stories, where the colony ship would take generations to turn up in a new system, they'd take a brief look from orbit, land, and get overwhelmed by monsters / bacteria / natives / whatever exciting thing the author had thought up. And the obvious question was always: well, why didn't they spend a bit longer checking everything was all right? And the answer of course was that would make the story too boring.

But the contrast with Curiosity is fun. BA reports that because they've seen one odd little thing, everything is on hold until they've figured it out.

stoat Wed, 10/10/2012 - 04:50

Tags

implausible connections

Curiosity

NASA

It's definitely a martian tadpole hoping for rain.

If you enhance the photo you can see the Ionian markings on the side. It's a small generation ship sent by the inhabitants of Io (who are themselves tiny) 3 billion years ago to settle on the planet.

They were wiped out by Martian frogs because they failed to take the time to properly check the planet out before landing.

Someone's going to be in trouble when they find it is something that dropped out of a fag packet ;)

To me, it wouldn't be boring. I'd be interested in the portrayal of the reaction back on Earth; I'd be interested in the dynamics of deciding what is the next most important step to take. But it would require a special writer to make it interesting to the less ardent sci-fi fans.

Eli has friends who drive Cassini, and one short answer is the speed of light. You don't get real time feedback, plus which AA doesn't go there.

Rocheworld (aka Flight of the Dragonfly) is a pretty good hard scifi book. They sent a robot first before the humans showed up but didn't get enough info beforehand to avoid trouble (of course).

If they find a bit of plastic on the ground exciting imagine what would happen if a person suddenly walked into view of curiosity's camera. and then promptly disappeared again, forever leaving the world with a unexplainable mystery.

Via Foursquare:
Curiousity has checked in often enough to become Mayor of Mars.

According to the Curiosity team it's most likely a bit of plastic, possibly from the descent stage.

https://twitter.com/MarsCuriosity/status/256494806430265344

After tnings had cooled down, NASA gave some of those who had come to witness Apollo XI lift off for the moon a grand tour of of the recently vacated launch pad.

To our amzement the scorched grass surrounding the pad was literally littered with flotsam- not just plastic insulation shreds, but screws, washers and bits of wire and the odd electronic fitting.

The attending press flack assured us that this all merely evidence NASA's wisdom in making all critical systems triply redundant.

He did his office fairly, for we departed in greater awe of the Right Stuff, having reached the epiphany that the first men in the moon rode there on a trail of not so spare parts all provided by the lowest bidder.

With All The Suffering in the World, Why Invest in Science?

esiegel — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 15:08:22 +0000

With All The Suffering in the World, Why Invest in Science?

"I am looking at the future with concern, but with good hope." -Albert Schweitzer

As you all know, the most ambitious interplanetary mission ever attempted -- Mars Science Laboratory -- successfully landed its Curiosity rover on Mars earlier this week. Last night, I had the opportunity to go on my local news and speak a bit about it, and as always, it was an absolute pleasure.

(Video credit: KGW / Ben Lacy / Carey Higgins / Steph Stricklen.)

Of course we got to talk about the rover itself and its science potential, and exactly how much more sophisticated it is than any of its martian predecessors. The sheer fact, alone, that it carries 72 kilograms-worth of science instruments (compared to a mere 5.5 kg for Spirit and Opportunity) should speak volumes. Indeed, the science that we'll get from Curiosity (it's already starting) may wind up teaching us more about Mars' geologic and atmospheric history than all other prior missions combined.

Image credit: NASA / JPL, of the scale of Spirit, Sojourner, and Curiosity.

But it was a question that I walked into the studio unprepared for that I really wanted to highlight for you today. When I mentioned the possibility of a future manned mission to Mars, this is what happened:

Steph: Well, ok, now that makes me have to ask you, because to send a manned mission to Mars, you're talking about tons of money. And NASA, continually, year-after-year, has to fight for every penny (and I think it lost another 2% of its budget, or something like that, just in the past year). Why is it so important that we invest precious dollars towards this, given some of the other financial difficulties this country's facing.

Me: You know, they asked this same question to NASA at the height of the Apollo program in 1970 (when NASA's budget, by the way, was eight times* what it is now, comparatively), and they said, 'Listen. There was a Count in Germany, a very benevolent Count, hundreds of years ago, who was really good to the impoverished people, and spread most of his wealth around, and helped fight disease, and all sorts of great things. But there was someone in the village who was working with magnifying glasses, and was able to see new things, at a smaller level, than anyone was able to see before. And when the Count heard about it, he thought it was wonderful and delightful, and invited him into the home to live with him and do his research. And people were irate, because this is money that he's spending on something that's just a lark, from their point of view. Well, of course it didn't happen in his lifetime, but people used that technology and that technique to eventually invent the microscope, which was the greatest boon to modern medicine, ever.'

I can't tell you right now what we're gonna get out of sending a manned mission to Mars. But we have got to have a long game, too. There is something worth investing in for more than the next six months, the next quarter, the next (even) few years. We have a long-term society to think about and grow, and that's what a manned mission to Mars is for, and that's why it's worth investing in.

Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Mars Pathfinder; the first Mars rover mission.

Now, admittedly, we have a long way to go and a lot of investing to do if we want to go from roving robots on Mars, which the photograph above comes from, to a human mission (or even a human colony) on the Red Planet, as is envisioned by Mars One, below.

Image credit: Mars-One.

But what about that story I told, about the German Count? Where did that come from? Believe it or not, back in early 1970, shortly after the first Apollo landing, a nun working in Zambia, Africa, Sister Mary Jucunda, wrote to NASA asking how they could justify spending billions on the Apollo program when children were starving to death. If one pictures these two images side-by-side, it hardly seems fair.

Images credit: NASA and WFP / Q. Sakamaki.

Ernst Stuhlinger, then the Associate Director of Science at NASA, responded by writing the following letter, reprinted in its entirety, below. (It's long, and it only contained one picture, but it's arguably even more relevant today than it was in 1970.)

Your letter was one of many which are reaching me every day, but it has touched me more deeply than all the others because it came so much from the depths of a searching mind and a compassionate heart. I will try to answer your question as best as I possibly can.

First, however, I would like to express my great admiration for you, and for all your many brave sisters, because you are dedicating your lives to the noblest cause of man: help for his fellowmen who are in need.

You asked in your letter how I could suggest the expenditures of billions of dollars for a voyage to Mars, at a time when many children on this earth are starving to death. I know that you do not expect an answer such as "Oh, I did not know that there are children dying from hunger, but from now on I will desist from any kind of space research until mankind has solved that problem!" In fact, I have known of famined children long before I knew that a voyage to the planet Mars is technically feasible. However, I believe, like many of my friends, that travelling to the Moon and eventually to Mars and to other planets is a venture which we should undertake now, and I even believe that this project, in the long run, will contribute more to the solution of these grave problems we are facing here on earth than many other potential projects of help which are debated and discussed year after year, and which are so extremely slow in yielding tangible results.

Before trying to describe in more detail how our space program is contributing to the solution of our earthly problems, I would like to relate briefly a supposedly true story, which may help support the argument. About 400 years ago, there lived a count in a small town in Germany. He was one of the benign counts, and he gave a large part of his income to the poor in his town. This was much appreciated, because poverty was abundant during medieval times, and there were epidemics of the plague which ravaged the country frequently. One day, the count met a strange man. He had a workbench and little laboratory in his house, and he labored hard during the daytime so that he could afford a few hours every evening to work in his laboratory. He ground small lenses from pieces of glass; he mounted the lenses in tubes, and he used these gadgets to look at very small objects. The count was particularly fascinated by the tiny creatures that could be observed with the strong magnification, and which he had never seen before. He invited the man to move with his laboratory to the castle, to become a member of the count's household, and to devote henceforth all his time to the development and perfection of his optical gadgets as a special employee of the count.

The townspeople, however, became angry when they realized that the count was wasting his money, as they thought, on a stunt without purpose. "We are suffering from this plague" they said, "while he is paying that man for a useless hobby!" But the count remained firm. "I give you as much as I can afford," he said, "but I will also support this man and his work, because I know that someday something will come out of it!"

Indeed, something very good came out of this work, and also out of similar work done by others at other places: the microscope. It is well known that the microscope has contributed more than any other invention to the progress of medicine, and that the elimination of the plague and many other contagious diseases from most parts of the world is largely a result of studies which the microscope made possible.

The count, by retaining some of his spending money for research and discovery, contributed far more to the relief of human suffering than he could have contributed by giving all he could possibly spare to his plague-ridden community.

The situation which we are facing today is similar in many respects. The President of the United States is spending about 200 billion dollars in his yearly budget. This money goes to health, education, welfare, urban renewal, highways, transportation, foreign aid, defense, conservation, science, agriculture and many installations inside and outside the country. About 1.6 percent of this national budget was allocated to space exploration this year. The space program includes Project Apollo, and many other smaller projects in space physics, space astronomy, space biology, planetary projects, earth resources projects, and space engineering. To make this expenditure for the space program possible, the average American taxpayer with 10,000 dollars income per year is paying about 30 tax dollars for space. The rest of his income, 9,970 dollars, remains for his subsistence, his recreation, his savings, his other taxes, and all his other expenditures. You will probably ask now: "Why don't you take 5 or 3 or 1 dollar out of the 30 space dollars which the average American taxpayer is paying, and send these dollars to the hungry children?" To answer this question, I have to explain briefly how the economy of this country works. The situation is very similar in other countries. The government consists of a number of departments (Interior, Justice, Health, Education and Welfare, Transportation, Defense, and others) and the bureaus (National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and others). All of them prepare their yearly budgets according to their assigned missions, and each of them must defend its budget against extremely severe screening by congressional committees, and against heavy pressure for economy from the Bureau of the Budget and the President. When the funds are finally appropriated by Congress, they can be spent only for the line items specified and approved in the budget.

The budget of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, naturally, can contain only items directly related to aeronautics and space. If this budget were not approved by Congress, the funds proposed for it would not be available for something else; they would simply not be levied from the taxpayer, unless one of the other budgets had obtained approval for a specific increase which would then absorb the funds not spent for space. You realize from this brief discourse that support for hungry children, or rather a support in addition to what the United States is already contributing to this very worthy cause in the form of foreign aid, can be obtained only if the appropriate department submits a budget line item for this purpose, and if this line item is then approved by Congress.

You may ask now whether I personally would be in favor of such a move by our government. My answer is an emphatic yes. Indeed, I would not mind at all if my annual taxes were increased by a number of dollars for the purpose of feeding hungry children, wherever they may live.

I know that all of my friends feel the same way. However, we could not bring such a program to life merely by desisting from making plans for voyages to Mars. On the contrary, I even believe that by working for the space program I can make some contribution to the relief and eventual solution of such grave problems as poverty and hunger on earth. Basic to the hunger problem are two functions: the production of food and the distribution of food. Food production by agriculture, cattle ranching, ocean fishing and other large-scale operations is efficient in some parts of the world, but drastically deficient in many others. For example, large areas of land could be utilized far better if efficient methods of watershed control, fertilizer use, weather forecasting, fertility assessment, plantation programming, field selection, planting habits, timing of cultivation, crop survey and harvest planning were applied.

The best tool for the improvement of all these functions, undoubtedly, is the artificial earth satellite. Circling the globe at a high altitude, it can screen wide areas of land within a short time; it can observe and measure a large variety of factors indicating the status and condition of crops, soil, droughts, rainfall, snow cover, etc., and it can radio this information to ground stations for appropriate use. It has been estimated that even a modest system of earth satellites equipped with earth resources, sensors, working within a program for worldwide agricultural improvements, will increase the yearly crops by an equivalent of many billions of dollars.

The distribution of the food to the needy is a completely different problem. The question is not so much one of shipping volume, it is one of international cooperation. The ruler of a small nation may feel very uneasy about the prospect of having large quantities of food shipped into his country by a large nation, simply because he fears that along with the food there may also be an import of influence and foreign power. Efficient relief from hunger, I am afraid, will not come before the boundaries between nations have become less divisive than they are today. I do not believe that space flight will accomplish this miracle over night. However, the space program is certainly among the most promising and powerful agents working in this direction.

Let me only remind you of the recent near-tragedy of Apollo 13. When the time of the crucial reentry of the astronauts approached, the Soviet Union discontinued all Russian radio transmissions in the frequency bands used by the Apollo Project in order to avoid any possible interference, and Russian ships stationed themselves in the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans in case an emergency rescue would become necessary. Had the astronaut capsule touched down near a Russian ship, the Russians would undoubtedly have expended as much care and effort in their rescue as if Russian cosmonauts had returned from a space trip. If Russian space travelers should ever be in a similar emergency situation, Americans would do the same without any doubt.

Higher food production through survey and assessment from orbit, and better food distribution through improved international relations, are only two examples of how profoundly the space program will impact life on earth. I would like to quote two other examples: stimulation of technological development, and generation of scientific knowledge.

The requirements for high precision and for extreme reliability which must be imposed upon the components of a moon-travelling spacecraft are entirely unprecedented in the history of engineering. The development of systems which meet these severe requirements has provided us a unique opportunity to find new material and methods, to invent better technical systems, to improve manufacturing procedures, to lengthen the lifetimes of instruments, and even to discover new laws of nature.

All this newly acquired technical knowledge is also available for application to earth-bound technologies. Every year, about a thousand technical innovations generated in the space program find their ways into our earthly technology where they lead to better kitchen appliances and farm equipment, better sewing machines and radios, better ships and airplanes, better weather forecasting and storm warning, better communications, better medical instruments, better utensils and tools for everyday life. Presumably, you will ask now why we must develop first a life support system for our moon-travelling astronauts, before we can build a remote-reading sensor system for heart patients.

The answer is simple: significant progress in the solutions of technical problems is frequently made not by a direct approach, but by first setting a goal of high challenge which offers a strong motivation for innovative work, which fires the imagination and spurs men to expend their best efforts, and which acts as a catalyst by including chains of other reactions.

Spaceflight without any doubt is playing exactly this role. The voyage to Mars will certainly not be a direct source of food for the hungry. However, it will lead to so many new technologies and capabilities that the spin-offs from this project alone will be worth many times the cost of its implementation.

Besides the need for new technologies, there is a continuing great need for new basic knowledge in the sciences if we wish to improve the conditions of human life on earth.

We need more knowledge in physics and chemistry, in biology and physiology, and very particularly in medicine to cope with all these problems which threaten man's life: hunger, disease, contamination of food and water, pollution of the environment.

We need more young men and women who choose science as a career and we need better support for those scientists who have the talent and the determination to engage in fruitful research work. Challenging research objectives must be available, and sufficient support for research projects must be provided. Again, the space program with its wonderful opportunities to engage in truly magnificent research studies of moons and planets, of physics and astronomy, of biology and medicine is an almost ideal catalyst which induces the reaction between the motivation for scientific work, opportunities to observe exciting phenomena of nature, and material support needed to carry out the research effort.

Among all the activities which are directed, controlled, and funded by the American government, the space program is certainly the most visible and probably the most debated activity, although it consumes only 1.6 percent of the total national budget, and 3 per mille [less than one-third of 1 percent] of the gross national product. As a stimulant and catalyst for the development of new technologies, and for research in the basic sciences, it is unparalleled by any other activity. In this respect, we may even say that the space program is taking over a function which for three or four thousand years has been the sad prerogative of wars.

How much human suffering can be avoided if nations, instead of competing with their bomb-dropping fleets of airplanes and rockets, compete with their moon-travelling space ships! This competition is full of promise for brilliant victories, but it leaves no room for the bitter fate of the vanquished, which breeds nothing but revenge and new wars.

Although our space program seems to lead us away from our earth and out toward the moon, the sun, the planets, and the stars, I believe that none of these celestial objects will find as much attention and study by space scientists as our earth. It will become a better earth, not only because of all the new technological and scientific knowledge which we will apply to the betterment of life, but also because we are developing a far deeper appreciation of our earth, of life, and of man.

Image credit: NASA / Apollo 8 crewmember Bill Anders.

The photograph which I enclose with this letter shows a view of our earth as seen from Apollo 8 when it orbited the moon at Christmas, 1968. Of all the many wonderful results of the space program so far, this picture may be the most important one. It opened our eyes to the fact that our earth is a beautiful and most precious island in an unlimited void, and that there is no other place for us to live but the thin surface layer of our planet, bordered by the bleak nothingness of space. Never before did so many people recognize how limited our earth really is, and how perilous it would be to tamper with its ecological balance. Ever since this picture was first published, voices have become louder and louder warning of the grave problems that confront man in our times: pollution, hunger, poverty, urban living, food production, water control, overpopulation. It is certainly not by accident that we begin to see the tremendous tasks waiting for us at a time when the young space age has provided us the first good look at our own planet.

Very fortunately though, the space age not only holds out a mirror in which we can see ourselves, it also provides us with the technologies, the challenge, the motivation, and even with the optimism to attack these tasks with confidence. What we learn in our space program, I believe, is fully supporting what Albert Schweitzer had in mind when he said: "I am looking at the future with concern, but with good hope."

My very best wishes will always be with you, and with your children.

Image credit: Walter Sanders / Time Life Pictures, of Stuhlinger with Von Braun.

The response from Sister Mary Jucunda?

Thank you - from now on, I firmly believe in the profound value of the space program.

I like to think that everyone in the world would share Stuhlinger's vision, and shares that same commitment to not just invest in the Earth's short-term future, but in our long term prosperity. Stuhlinger dreamed of a manned mission to Mars as early as 1958, and advocated for increased investment in science and exploration throughout his entire life. He passed away, at the age of 94, back in 2008, as one of the last surviving members of Operation Paperclip.

With all the suffering in the world, why invest in science? So that future generations never know, firsthand, of the sufferings that afflict us today.

* -- For what it's worth, I did get one detail wrong: NASA's budget today (as of 2011 data) is 0.52% of the national budget, which means that in 1970 it was just over three times larger than it is today; not eight times.

esiegel Tue, 08/07/2012 - 11:08

Tags

Mars Science Laboratory

Categories

Great post, as always, Ethan.

To the question "why not feed the hungry kids instead" I ask "why doesn't their government feed them?" Relief operations have great value in times of natural catastrophes such as drought, eathrquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, floods, and so on but when the primary problem is due to humans causing the catastrophe then aid alone will not do. There are many societal problems which the global population in general is not addressing adequately, and until we do develop some programs to deal with these problems effectively we will always have large numbers of people starving and dying and numerous refugees.

Ethan, you headed a post last year with AIR's "Talisman".

Reading this post, I had "New Star in the Sky" as the backing track in my mind's ear.

That was a nice letter to convince a simple soul, but science does good and it does bad, it is not like a religion where it is all good. Apollo has also given us long range nuclear missiles, chemistry has given us tons of pollution, it cuts in both ways, science is as often the cause as it is the cure, also in the case of povery. Going to Mars is only about the fun of exploration, basic curiosity.

Oh get lost you vapid troll.

Well Chell, you might think Science is not your thing, but clearly History isn't easier. Long range nuclear missiles have never deliberately killed anybody, but in a single good year violence inspired by religious belief has killed more people than science managed with the only two two atom bombs used against people. If the efforts humanity has expended down the millenia in grovelling before their gods had been used to help others, and the intellectual efforts devoted to trying to reconcile the early Iron Age morality of a Bible story with the concept of an all loving God had been devoted to actually try to understanding the workings of the world we live in, then Humanity might have progressed a bit more.

> "Oh get lost you vapid troll."

I just thought it was funny how Ethan used the same fairy-tail answer for the 'dumb-blond' female journalist, as the other guy used for that 'gold-digger' non. There is something about girls and how easy they can be brainwashed by starting a story with: "There was a Count ... "

You don't think, troll. You troll.

"You don’t think ..."

You are right.

Have fun!

This is an incredible article Mr. Siegel! Thank you for sharing the letter of Ernst Stuhlinger; I will be sharing that on my blog as well.

Good letter! Thanks for posting it in its entirety.

Chelle;

That was a nice letter to convince a simple soul, but science does good and it does bad, it is not like a religion where it is all good.

I'm so amazed someone would say this that I have to ask: do you really believe religion is all good, or were you just speaking rhetorically?

science is as often the cause as it is the cure, also in the case of povery.

If that were true - if it were causing as many problems as it solved - then the average lifespan would not have improved over time. The infant death rate would note be going down, kids would just be dying from different things.

Lifespans have increased and infant mortality has decreased. People may be dying from new problems, but its pretty uncontrovertible to say that they are dying in less (per capita) numbers than they were from the old problems.

The thing is that people always want an instant solution to whatever problem raised.
You can put any problem to them and they start to shout without even knowing anything.
However people don´t have have a broad view. They tend to see narrow mindedly.
But duh.
I´m going to wait for amazing things to come.
Whatever they might be.

Damn you Ethan that letter put a lump in my throat.

I was born a year after sputnik was launched. Like all boys in the 60's I wanted to be an astronaut, I watched Armstrong live from the Aussie bush, saw a bunch of Hippies abolish the draft and shut down a war, etc,etc. I also recall the last of the Chinese famines which occurred around the same time as the letter.

The picture of course is famous, it kicked off the modern green movement. Even as a child it had an impact way beyond a plastic globe in geography class. By the time I reached HS I had figured out I was an astronaut, unfortunately stuck on a ship that cannot change it's current trajectory without killing everyone on-board. Besides, Elton John made the job of astronaut sound a lot less appealing.

Troll food:
You have a point. I also recall the other technological race the super powers were running that was intimately tied to space flight in the form of ICBM's.

However your point is rendered moot by the fact that science has given my grandchildren double the life expectancy of my grandparents.

This argument is called a false dichotomy. A non argument. There is literally zero reasons we can't do both. That's it. That's the end of the discussion.

eric,

I was just making the comparison that people pray to God for good things to happen, in that sense God is all about good things that will happen. Here in this letter there is a similar presumption that Science will do nothing but good, that it is always about a noble cause, while in practice it is mostly an occupation that is driven by wanting to know, being the first, getting a patent and making money, doing good doesn't always comes in to the picture.

Yes medicine tries to look for cures, but nuclear science has given us the bomb, but nuclear research just keep on steaming forward with harder faster and bigger, and it's not just for the good of mankind but pure curiosity, there is an unstoppable drive, you could look at the benefits of a power plant and electricity, but around the corner there is always that immense destructive force. There's a darks side to science that we like to ignore, forget and prefer not to talk about especially in the field of high-energy particle collisions what is there still to discover, what energy release is there still to unveil, and what effects would such a new thing have?

And I agree that thanks to science our lifespan has increased and it has brought us a lot of luxury, and there is still a lot of great improvement going on. But the industry that comes along with the science, has put a lot of pressure on some regions in the world, where people strive for ownership over commodities, many wars have been fought. There's also a big part of the Rainforest that's being chopped to grow gene-manipulated soya, science has caused overfishing, drugs addictions, enormous pollution … Also look at satellites and the army that is spying upon us. I know that I sound like a paranoid troll, but some science is a cold ruthless business with no compassion for the little people.

I don't want stigmatise 'Science', I just wanted to point out that Ethan's fairy-tail is only one side of the coin, and if you want to educate people than I find that you have to tell them like it is.

So I'm all for flying to the Moon and to Mars and other exotic far away places, and there should be much more money to sponsor these endeavors, but that doesn't mean that all of science is divine and will heal the suffering in the word, in a way the the tittle of this blog-post is very hypocritical.

The mars rover cost two billion dollars while the Olympics this year cost over fifteen, not to mention all the money and equipment given by sponsors. The only thing that they really benefit is tourism in the hosting city. I think the world spends its money foolishly on many things and the space program is one of the least. Not many Olympics in Africa to say the least

Great post ethan, as always :) And the letter is a great addition.

While I can show empathy to the sister's letter, and also share the view of the NASA's director, the other side of the coin is that she should have sent it to Vatican also. Why not sell couple of the chandaliers or crosses and staffs inlaid with diamonds and other precious stones i.e.? Of course, this is a rhetorical question. We all know the answer.

If more reach people would follow the examples of Bill Gates and others and give more to humanitarian causes, the world would be a better place and nuns wouldn't have to write to nasa for funding.

I'm assuming the story about the count and the scientist is based in fact. What were their names?

Chelle:

"I just wanted to point out that Ethan’s fairy-tail is only one side of the coin, and if you want to educate people than I find that you have to tell them like it is."

Perhaps you think that this kind of statement makes you evenhanded and fair, but to me this communicates false equivalence and lack of understanding of what science is.

Science is not a result or a product, but a methodology. You say that science brought us thermonuclear weaponry, but it didn't. Claiming that "science" gave us the bomb is no different from claiming that language brought us the bomb. Language is just a means to communicate meaning, and science is just a means to discover facts. Science (when applied properly) weeds out spurious correlations, personal biases, and imagined phenomena. It separates out true causal relationships and real factual events from the background noise. This is ALL it does. Blaming science for the invention of thermonuclear weapons is no different from blaming language when someone cusses you out. Language didn't cuss you out and science didn't invent the bomb - in both cases it was human intent, operating through the tools that humans have created, that brought about the (allegedly) undesirable result.

"But the industry that comes along with the science, has put a lot of pressure on some regions in the world, where people strive for ownership over commodities, many wars have been fought."

The problems you cite here are sociopolitical ones that have zip to do with science. People were fighting wars over resources long before the scientific method was devised and long before the industrial revolution. Clear-cutting rainforest was happening long before any soy genes were manipulated. In fact, all of the issues that concern you so much are sociopolitical ones with antecedents far back in history. If we could go back in time and somehow wipe out the invention of the scientific method, about the only issue you name that would not still exist is the satellite peeping into your back yard. Instead it would be your neighbors.

Maybe you think of yourself as a science skeptic, but the essence of skepticism is a willingness to be proven wrong. You have not demonstrated any such willingness. Your distrust of scientific discoveries and the scientific process seems to be entirely knee-jerk and no amount of reasoning with you or presentation of evidence will ever change your mind. Please stop presenting yourself as a voice of rationality in the wilderness - you are not one.

" it is not like a religion where it is all good"

Gotta be a Poe.

"The problems you cite here are sociopolitical ones that have zip to do with science."

ok, so when we land on the Moon it is all about science, but building a long range nuclear missile has got 'zip to do with science'. Let's say building a machine that destroys our planet is a interesting scientific achievement, only pushing the button is a 'sociopolitica'l issue, what are you, the Joker?

@Ethan: Very nice post and letter. I just had this same argument put on me when i simply said, "You hear the mars landing was a success?"

@ skeith: You gave the exact argument I was preparing to give.

Chelle just likes to stir the pot. ( don't get so worked up WOW, your way too smart to play into his hand so easily.)

He just starts typing and never stops to reflect on what he has just said. Its simply a vomitious discharge of poorly constructed 'half-thoughts' and 'semi-ideas, spewing forth at a velocity so great it renders the use of logic impossible.

Chelle (If your objective is to troll, disregard the following statement, b/c your doing a great job if thats the case; If your not here simply to troll then continue reading), after you type your next mindless comment, pause before you click "submit comment", take a 15 min break from your computer, come back, re-read what you just wrote, and think about it for another 15 mins, then try writing it again with a little more care and a splash of reason. It will do wonders for you in your real life as well as the reception of your comments on this blog. Perhaps then you wont have to defend your 1st comment with 15 other ones. Inevitibly you end up digging yourself a pretty deep hole of stooh-pidity.

Poe: A person who writes a parody of a Fundamentalist that is mistaken for the real thing. Due to Poe's Law, it is almost impossible to tell if a person is a Poe unless they admit to it.

Example:
"The Bible is true because it's the inerrant word of God! I know because the Bible says so! Glory!"

"Is this guy serious? He's got to be a poe."

crd2,

"Chelle ... just starts typing and never stops to reflect ... "

Why should I reflect when it is all clearly in front of me, or are you the same type of person like 'DavidL' who comes up with an argument: "Long range nuclear missiles have never deliberately killed anybody ...", do you also need to see the axiom proven first e.g. the button being 'deliberately' pushed and blast enforcing the 'kill', so you can scientifically reflect on wtf just happened? I certainly don't, or am I the only crazy psychic here? Such type of arguments makes me wonder if it isn't just me, a normal person, who has jumped into a pool of trolls, that refuse to reflect upon what some parts of science have done in the past, and keeps on doing, building machines to create havoc. Look at Wernher von Braun a Nazi demon designing V-2 rockets to spread terror on London, and a few years later a bright scientist genius that helps to put the first man on the Moon. And it is you 'crd2' that tells me that I 'never stop to reflect', perhaps it is time for you to start stopping, and reflect here for a moment, to understand my logic.

Nope, that was knee-jerk again.

I wonder if this thread was designed to get chelle the antiscientist buffoon out of the undergrowth, so we can see all her spotted plumage.

Note: why 'him'? Women can be just as dumb, ignorant and ill bred as men.

The Poe is something on the listener side. It can't be deliberate, because that's trolling. It has to be someone who genuinely thought they were parodying some group or position, but someone (who is the one who has been poed) took it seriously.

To be a genuine poe, the OP has to say in a suprised voive something on the lines of "hey, I didn't mean it seriously, guys!". But if someone says "I just poed you", they're backtracking from their genuine position. For obvious reasons, this pretty much never happens on blogs, but can in real conversations face-to-face or long-term identifiable blogging.

@ KSWarzala

I tried searching the net but couldn't really find it.

The lenses have been known for hundreds of years before the time of the story. During the period of story (400 years ago).. so roughly 16th century, there have been many people who "played" with lenses.

As far as I know the first person (maybe not THE first, but amongst them) to propose using lenses to see small things was Rodger Bacon in 13th century, and yes he was also an alchemist ;) But in the 16th century there was (according to wiki) Dutch spectacle-makers Hans Janssen and his son Zacharias Janssen are often said to have invented the first compound microscope in 1590. But they were Dutch and not German. And shortly after them came of course Galileo and the Medici counts of Italy. I don't think that the NASA director mixed Italians and Germans, but maybe he did.

Maybe Ethan knows who the person in question was. But like I said, during that time both in Italy in western europe, people were experimenting with lenses and their practical applications. Really hard to say who was first. Galileo is sure the most famous one. After all there isn't much difference between a telescope and microscope, other than focal lenght.

"ok, so when we land on the Moon it is all about science, but building a long range nuclear missile has got ‘zip to do with science’."

Landing on the Moon utilized scientific methods (and could not have been done without them) but it was done for sociopolitical reasons. We landed on the Moon because we wanted to beat the Soviets (and everyone else) there, because we wanted to give the American people a boost of morale and pride, and because we discovered that the process of going to the Moon created a lot of excellent by-products which have made all of our lives better. Going to the Moon was, among other things, a proof of concept - yes, if necessary we can get off this planet and go somewhere else. But humans did not go to the Moon because "science" somehow forced us to do it. We did it because Kennedy made it an American goal, and then he was assassinated which turned his goal into a sort of secular crusade.

Clear-cutting rainforest doesn't even require scientific advances, and neither does war. Both have been engaged since time immemorial. Your insistence that science is to blame for these things demonstrates only your own bias and has nothing to do with "educating" people about the "other side." The other side is all in your head.

Science is value-neutral. Try to absorb that concept.

As above, it's a false dichotomy.

Indeed, starvation does not happen on this planet today because of an absolute lack of food or resources. It happens because of politics, trivially. Look at any country affected by famine and you'll see the same problem; instability, corruption and war consume all surplus production leaving nothing for when natural disaster strikes. If we canceled the entire science budget and diverted it into aid, it would be unlikely to change much; most likely much of it would end up in swiss bank accounts.

Meanwhile, military budgets exceed science budgets by orders of magnitude, of course.

I would even go further; it can be suggested that giving aid to countries whilst turning a blind eye to the politics that leads to the requirement for aid actually makes things worse. After all, if you absolve the ruling elite of a country from the requirement to feed their populations and provide basic amenities such as water and housing, you remove even the most basic check on their behavior. A European medieval baron may not have respected human rights very well, but did at least have to keep the peasants alive and productive or he had no income. Thanks in part to aid agencies, a third world warlord has no wider responsibilities at all. Of course, the fact the banking system also allows said warlord to avoid having to invest in his own country makes things worse.

Here endeth the rant..

> "Science is value-neutral. Try to absorb that concept."

Agh, cut the crap, here is an older post from Ethan on the same subject : http://startswithabang.com/?p=1574

The people (scientists) that work on scientific & military enterprises are both the same, doing their job and wanting to be first, and many don't give a rats ass about ethics or ending the 'Suffering in the World'. After Apollo they started to work on weapons such as Cruise Missiles and B-2 Stealth Bombers. These people do NOT care, not now, not yesterday, never, they only care about themselves and there own project and tribe.

'skeith', you are here only trying to BS your way out of it, being a coward about taking up moral responsibility, it is the same argument that "guns don't kill people, people kill people". Fine to all of you, but don't be hypocritical about it and end a topic with saying:

"With all the suffering in the world, why invest in science? So that future generations never know, firsthand, of the sufferings that afflict us today."

@Chelle

Yes, people are good and bad but SCIENCE is neutral! There is a difference between scientific progress, science as a discipline and people who use it. It's a tool, nothing more. How it's used is up to people. You choose to compare it with guns, how creative of you. Why not compare it with penicillin? If you abuse it, you will die, but use it properly and it will save millions of lives.

Chelle, can you name me a single thing that hasn't been abused by someone in our history?? You say belief in God?! HAHA! Don't make me laugh!!! More man have been slain "in the name of god" than V2 rockets ever did. I say there isn't a single thing we haven't abused in morally wrong way, in our history. So by your analogy, everything is bad.

It's not! There is a ton of good for a ton of evil. If you still can't accept that there are bad people in the world and blame science for it... ok, you're at that stage of comprehension. For every good we do, we do 10 bad things. It's how we are as a species. Like it or hate, u can't change it. Many more will die and many more attrocities will we commit during our evolution. It's a price we pay for not being more aware. But science as a discipline has been IMHO one of the greatest achievements we discovered. And the benefits to humanity far far outweigh the bad things it was used for.

My favorite excuse for the “neutrality” of “science” is the same as that for protecting one’s right to shoot other people. Scientific Method doesn’t kill people, people kill people. Method is applied by people and people are motivated by who knows what. See, that works with guns. Lenin taught us that machines are a beneficent neutrality. The railroad offers another lesson (see Thoreau on the “sleepers” in chapter 2 of Walden–paragraph 17 ), as does the automobile (see Tarkington, and Welles, depicting the alteration of life in The Magnificent Ambersons), as does the drone (that hovering, spying, moral neutrality of murderousness).

Now, “proof” or evidence or determinative causation does seem a valuable way to think about things so I’m not arguing that applying a particular method to your madness is wrong. I’m simply saying that madness applies the method. And I am determined always to focus on that madness as our reality and that method as our “beneficent” illusion.

http://btownerrant.com/2012/08/09/evolving-to-heavenly-host/

"Yes, people are good and bad but SCIENCE is neutral!"

Let me help you here with understanding what 'Neutral' means:
1. not helping or supporting either of two opposing sides, esp. countries at war
2. having no strongly marked or positive characteristics or features
3. an impartial and uninvolved country or person
--
Science is NOT neutral because it is the act of doing something that can have a negative or a positive consequence.
--
Let me bring up some more history, and add a quote from Robert Oppenheimer in regards to building the H-bomb:

"The program in 1951 was technically so sweet that you could not argue about that. The issues became purely the military, the political and the humane problems of what you were going to do about it once you had it."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Oppenheimer

He as a sensible scientist stayed 'Neutral' and didn't want to build it, because he knew the consequences.

The H-bomb was build anyhow by some other scientist who couldn't resist making it, he wanted to make a name for himself, continue the rat-race. Just like how we currently crank up the LHC and generate high-energy particle collisions with a frequency & density that is 10^9 higher than in nature, and 100 000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun. Are we doing this to solve all the Suffering in the world, nope; are we considering the consequences of what might happen when an energetic chain-reaction would be induced, nope; so why are we doing it, there is only one answer, it is the egoistic ambition of a few scientists along with the same curiosity that killed the cat.

"Science is NOT neutral because it is the act of doing something that can have a negative or a positive consequence."

STUPID.

You might as well whine that breathing is not neutral because it allows you to exist long enough to do bad things.

I think we know now where chelle gets her idiotic antiscience brain from.

Fundie religiosity.

> "I think we know now …"

Yes, you know.

Have fun!

@Chelle

Still you don't understand the difference between a field and and people.

sci·ence [sahy-uhns]
noun
1. a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws: the mathematical sciences.
2. systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation...

As such it's neither good or bad since it's knowledge. How one applies it is a totaly different matter. A not so subtle point you can't seem to grasp.

Yes, atomic bomb is BAD, it was never suppose to have been made in the first place. No one is saying otherwise!! To counter that you have computers, internet, medicine and other things which are a direct result of our study of atom and it's structure. Good and bad. Both. Why can't you understand that??

Want to live without all that.. fine, that's great. Who's stopping you? Throw away your comp., cell phones car and all else. Sell your house cause science made it, also the clothes, that too was cause of scientific progress, and go live in the nature with nothing but cave tools. Why don't you?

> "Science ... Good and bad. Both. Why can’t you understand that??"

Read my first comment in this thread (August 8, 12:16 am):
"... science does good and it does bad"

Well, I just cried a little bit ;( Awesome post, Ethan.

Don't misquote me Chelle!

Not science! People! people make good and bad things with the knowledge. But knowledge is neither good nor bad! Science doesn't do bad. People do!

Chelle:

"The people (scientists) that work on scientific & military enterprises are both the same, doing their job and wanting to be first, and many don’t give a rats ass about ethics or ending the ‘Suffering in the World’."

Upon what evidence do you base this assertion? I assume that you have some kind of study, some numbers, or at a minimum some personal experience with a large number of scientists which allows you to state this with a reasonable expectation of accuracy.

I await a link to the study upon which you are basing this, or if it is research original to you I will accept the data and methodology you used to reach this conclusion.

I ask for this because at the moment I have formed a hypothesis about you, namely that you have formulated your beliefs about scientists from watching movies and other forms of media. I base this hypothesis upon your apparent belief that every issue has two (and only two) sides and that both are always of equal value, your unsolicited reference to the Joker, and your persistence in slotting scientists into a small number of movie-friendly archetypes. However, I am willing to be proven wrong, so please present your sources to do so.

Chelle's view is not informed by anything other than her temper tantrum at science having no truck ill-thought flannel pretending to be science.

Maybe her "ground breaking" paper on a hurricane universe isn't getting anywhere. Must be those soulless bastards, the scientists...

> "Upon what evidence do you base this assertion?

You could have followed one link Ethan gave:

And von Braun's associates included:

Arthur Rudolph, chief operations director at Nordhausen, where 20,000 slave labourers died producing V-2 missiles. Led the team which built the Saturn V rocket. Described as "100 per cent Nazi, dangerous type".
Kurt Debus, rocket launch specialist, another SS officer. His report stated: "He should be interned as a menace to the security of the Allied Forces."
Hubertus Strughold, later called "the father of space medicine", designed Nasa's on-board life-support systems. Some of his subordinates conducted human "experiments" at Dachau and Auschwitz, where inmates were frozen and put into low-pressure chambers, often dying in the process.

All of these men were cleared to work for the US, their alleged crimes covered up and their backgrounds bleached by a military which saw winning the Cold War, and not upholding justice, as its first priority.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4443934.stm

Times may change but people hardly change, just switch on the news, many people only think about themselves and keeping their own job, you do it, I do it, we all do it ... competition.

Perhaps you could also ask Sinisa for a study about good and bad people.

I don't think it is so that people have the intention to do good or bad, its just that we all flow into projects/jobs that turn out to have some concequences that turn out to be possitive or negative for others, but because the possition provides an income to support our families we don't like to jeopardize the job and be to critical about the concequences and we prefer to just keep on going, go along with the herd.

btw if one of the herd wants to go into an other direction, he or she gets to be kicked (back) around by idiots like 'Wow' so we all continue following the path to 'success'. These people don't have a clue what they are doing, they just like to be in charge. A normal shepherd knows the way, but for science no one knows what dangers lie ahead of us.

I used to work with a "Chelle" - he made the same statements about scientists being lacking in ethics and having questionable motives.
He also believed in crystal healing, fairies, the Mayan calendar, etc, etc, etc.
I eventually figured out where he got his science-hatred from: Rudolf Steiner. Steiner schools actually teach children that science is bad and stuff you just make up is much better.

Chelle sounds like a Steiner victim.

Anyway, back to the starving children: personal responsibility. If people lack the resources or the industry and motivation to care properly for themselves, they are being absolutely reprehensible in inflicting their poverty on children.
What they need isn't food handouts, but contraception and good kick up the arse.
Children have been starving in Africa ever since I was old enough to read the newspaper. Nothing the charities have done in the time since then has changed that fact, so I don't see the point of donating to charities that have proven they are unable to solve the problem.
Yes, it's sad they are starving, but, no, it's not my responsibility, which means I don't want to see my tax dollars wasted.
Remember Sun Tzu: reinforce strength. Science is our strength. African famines are a lost cause.

Science is not a disembodied force or person [maybe chelle is used to thinking this way about life-- everything has a spirit--animism-- or something]. It is method. Just like carving can produce a bowl or a spear. It is up to the carver. The method called "science'can be USED to make a wide variety of things. These things can then be used to hurt or help. "chell"sems to have a reading comprehension problem or some type of bias to not be able to "get" what so many have explained so well that a five year-old could understand it. Too bad.

My apologies for the terrible editing above.

I like how Chelle tries to spin it like we just stumbled onto some plans for the LHC, had 0 knowledge of physics, built it & then flipped it on with absolutely no clue what would happen and just hoped for the best. That's not how science works, perhaps in the universe you live in, but not in this one. In fact, it seems as though you feel this is how all science is done. Maybe in the beginning it was like that when our knowledge base was extremely limited, but not these days.

IMHO, we know (or could figure it out if we wanted/had to) what we could do to help starving African nations, or any nation for that matter, its just no country is willing to bare the political & financial burden without some form of kick-back. Besides, once you go in and remove the regime that is the major contributor to the problem(s) there is no guarantee that another group wont step right in. Big investment and high risk for little or no gain. Not trying to sound harsh but this is how countries and their governments look at these situations. I don't necessarily agree with that view. Its not pretty, its just the world we live in.

"I like how Chelle tries to spin it like we just stumbled onto some plans for the LHC, had 0 knowledge of physics, built it & then flipped it on with absolutely no clue what would happen and just hoped for the best. "

How did you get that idea, it is the other way around, a slow process of always cranking up the energy. We are just like those frogs that comfortably stay in water that is continuously being heated until the point that the water starts to boil and they die. Try to put them straight in boiling water and they immediately jump out. This is our issue, scientists are in the comfort-zone, numbed out, while the frequency & density level is now a billion times higher than cosmic rays in nature, and nobody moves, except this froggy, and it won't let itself be soothed by them 'wise' old groggy froggies that are already long time in this boiling pot, and who laugh with a big smile all the warnings away.

I know my history, and I know that nuclear science can take it one step too far, causing immense suffering rather than solving it. We build everywhere around the world holocaust museums not to forget the brutality, but at the same time we also build nuclear missiles and temples, a strange situation where it is 'only the people' who can be vicious, not the 'science' we can produce, no sir, it is neutral; a gun is a gun, matches and sparks are what they are, and a scientifically ignited forest fire is what it is, neutral.

Buffoon, there are a lot more scienists working today than Braun's mates number.

'Most" you said.

Maybe you don't understand what the word most means.

PS, Vinny put a sock in it. You're clueless about poverty, just want to blame others so you can keep on doing what you like.

Julia,

> "Science is not a disembodied force ... "

Doing scientific tests on frogs isn't that an application of force?

> "Buffoon"

'That, of course, is the great secret of the successful fool - that he is no fool at all.'

Isaac Asimov

@skeith

".. namely that you have formulated your beliefs about scientists from watching movies and other forms of media..."

I think you may be right. The frog thing is straight out of Dante's Peak. Plot summary: the hero just "knows" the volcano is going to blow and wipe out the town, but his heartless boss wants scientific evidence first, and anyway, insists evacuating now will ruin a massive investment deal.

Chelle:

You name 3 people. There are millions of scientists. Three out of millions hardly justifies your label of "many." It definitely doesn't justify your sweeping statement that all scientists are "the same."

Josef Mengele was a medical doctor. By your reasoning, this means nobody should ever see a medical doctor because it is known that one of them was evil. I hope you take this lesson to heart and stay away from those scary doctors!

"many people only think about themselves and keeping their own job, you do it, I do it"

I'm willing to concede that you only think about yourself if that's what you wish to claim, but please refrain from speaking for me. I would not make the same claim.

"Perhaps you could also ask Sinisa for a study about good and bad people."

You're the one who made this claim, and you're the one who needs to back it up. If you can't back it up, then I will have to conclude that you have no evidence whatsoever and your statement was a total invention with no backing.

"I don’t think it is so that people have the intention to do good or bad, its just that we all flow into projects/jobs that turn out to have some concequences that turn out to be possitive or negative for others, but because the possition provides an income to support our families we don’t like to jeopardize the job and be to critical about the concequences and we prefer to just keep on going, go along with the herd."

Aside from being a run-on sentence, this is a very interesting statement about you. In the guise of "we," you tell me a great deal about yourself here.

So let me tell you something about myself: I am not like you. And I know a lot of people who are not like you. This next statement may be shocking to you, so be sure you're sitting down: some of them are scientists. In fact, none of the scientists in my acquaintance are like you.

You may feel like a herd animal, but I assure you that "we" are not like that, so don't assign your failings to everyone else.

However, I can now amend my hypothesis: not only do you gain your information about scientists by consuming the archetypes and stereotypes in popular media rather than by interacting with any actual scientists, you feel very trapped and insufficiently assertive and you assume that everyone is exactly the same as you.

Skeith,

I hope that your analyses at your work are better than your biased dissection of my words. I wrote:

"The people (scientists) that work on scientific & military enterprises are both the same, doing their job and wanting to be first, and many don’t give a rats ass about ethics or ending the ‘Suffering in the World’.”

A. This doesn't mean that all scientist are the same, but that the work they 'both' do is the same, be it developing a rocket to fly to the moon, or one to carry a nuclear bomb, making a biological weapon or a biological cure it is all scientific research and technology, the scientific method is what we both learned at school and it is 'the same'.

B. I said that many don't care about ending suffering, everyone has got enough problems of their own, so that doesn't necessarily includes you and your friends, but I presume that you and your friends do care about keeping your own job when push comes to shove.

C. In regards to references and examples for Ethics and how people behave, you might want to read this book by Michael J. Sandel: What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

btw if you would have read the link that I gave you, you would know that it weren't 3 but "700 others spirited out of Germany from under the noses of the US's allies". And once again I do not say that all of science is bad, I am here talking about some fields of science that produces hazardous machines, such as nuclear bombs and high-energy particle accelerators.

DavidL,

"The frog thing is straight out of Dante’s Peak."

Not really, it is a know scientific fact you can check it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svpsLZDgFK4

Chelle, the problem is that you, (someone who thinks religion is ALL good, and asks "Why should I reflect when it is all clearly in front of me?") think you are the one to define good and bad science. The German rocket scientists were bad people, but very good scientists. Their crime was not developing weapons, but their involvement with working tens of thousands of people to death in slave labour factories. Probably more people died making the V2s than were killed by using them.

And as for hazardous machines, motor cars kill around a million people a year, orders of magnitude more than all the worlds military put together. Do you drive?

DavidL,

Many of the people in car accidents got killed because someone drove too fast, and that is the same problem with the LHC, it has a frequency & density collision rate that is 1.000.000.000 higher than cosmic rays in nature, it is simply too intense, to be safe. I hope you can now understand what the issue is.

What? People are driving inside the LHC?

Not really, it is a know scientific fact you can check it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svpsLZDgFK4

Chelle, youtube videos are not a good source for scientific facts unless the expertise of the poster is known. Have you a scientific reference to confirm this fact? All I can find are comments that it is an urban myth based on a nineteenth century experiment that cannot be reproduced in the lab today.

PS did you find that video after you watched Dante's Peak?

Chelle, the issue seems to be that you , with apparently no scientific background at all, think know more about the reactions of fundamental particles than the thousands of scientists who have spent their careers studying them. Nothing in the world is "safe". Absolutely everything you do is at some small risk to yourself and others. Very few people have the knowledge to even make a guess at quantifying the risk involved with operating the LHC, and I doubt you are one of them.

You are right, and no I haven't seen Dante's Peak, I checked the wiki page and it says; "Al Gore used a version of the story in his presentations and the 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth to describe ignorance about global warming." I might have gotten it from there although I'm not sure, thanks for letting me know.

"Very few people have the knowledge to even make a guess at quantifying the risk involved with operating the LHC, and I doubt you are one of them."

You have the right to doubt me, as I have the right to doubt the 'experts'. The problem for me is that these collisions are judged as single events, while the whole frequency and density part is neglected. If these events would happen in a vacuum that is in fact empty than I would agree, but the vacuum is not empty, it is filled with Dark Matter, Dark Energy and the Higgs Ether and this turns empty space into something like a liquid. If you do a splash now and then you'll never shake up anything seriously, but if you increase it at a rate that is 10^9 times higher that you could imho start to disrupt the processes in neighboring atoms, I would have appreciated that this type of disturbance was included in the safety report but it isn't. Now can you blame me for putting up some big questions regarding safety, a combustion process can be witnessed on a daily basis even in the motor of your car, but nobody considers this even when we are using the most intense ignition system in the Universe.

Chelle...

" but the vacuum is not empty, it is filled with Dark Matter, Dark Energy and the Higgs Ether and this turns empty space into something like a liquid."

Please show how this is and how it affects LHC... oh great one! Not with some analogies but precise scientific and experimental data.

I think I finally know what's wrong with you... it even has a name:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_distortions

but don't worry.. it's treatable.

p.s.
and even a dash of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

"Dissonance is aroused when people are confronted with information that is inconsistent with their beliefs. If the dissonance is not reduced by changing one's belief, the dissonance can result in misperception or rejection or refutation of the information, seeking support from others who share the beliefs, and attempting to persuade others to restore consonance."

sounds a lot like you dude...

Sinisa,

Thanks for the advice, but I'm fine. I do have a very imaginative mind, but for this I'm just looking at the facts. I see lots of sparks flying around, so I compare it to how a fire works, and on an atomic level and it is pretty simple; a far above normal heat vibration shakes the chemical bondings loose, setting off a chain-reaction. So my original question was simply if the same thing isn't possible at a sub-atomic level, with an Aether as vibration carrier, that transmits the vibes created by the collisions into the hearth of atoms breaking up their composure. This idea isn't too far fetched, so for me it would be no more than logic that it was addressed in the safety report, but they only talk about Mini Black Holes and Strangelets, stuff that is actually weird, a combustion process is very much more down to earth. If you think that it is not possible, cool, than I will accept your position, but you can't deny that my proposition is technically a perfect sane one.

"you can’t deny that my proposition is technically a perfect sane one"

yes i can, and so do others here... it's not perfect, it's not sane and it's not technical (there are no sparks flying and there is no Eather carrying vibrations! It's all in your head!!!!). Like I said before... cognitive distortion with dissonance.

> "there are no sparks flying and there is no Eather carrying vibrations! It’s all in your head!!!!"

Ok, fair, now let's do some simple fact-checking:

A. 'there are no sparks flying' - Well a spark is described as a small bright object or point, now what are those detectors build for, and what are the jets that flash out of these collisions? It are all kinds of particles (*sparks*).

B. 'there is no Aether' - Well there is since the 4th of july definite certainty that there is a Higgs field, and proof also starts to pour in for Dark Matter & Energy what Ethan describes as a 'liquid' and what interacts gravity wise, it isn't numb. Now we could argue about the name Aether, but the proof that there is something filling up empty space is there.

C. 'It’s all in your head!!!!' - Well yes those facts and the mechanism are all in my head, but you don't seem to be able to put them in to yours (grasp the idea), how come, the proof is there. I guess you'll just need some time to digest it.

I'm just at the point where I have accepted that people will always go out of their way to increase the pain and suffering of other people so whether or not the money gets spent for exploration and science there will always be that sort of thing going on. For example, when Curiosity was doing its thing look how many people couldn't look past their limited lives and were lining up to buy chicken sandwiches because they wanted to make sure that everyone knew that they felt that people they don't know couldn't marry the person they want. The dung ball that killed those people in Wisconsin wasn't a lone outlier, he was part of a movement. On the other hand, the police officers who responded and exchanged fire with him were incredible in their dedication to the public welfare, that's a job that a lot of us would never take. There's nothing that we can do about that stuff, but we can try to make the world better in other ways. People have mentioned medical research.
As for Chelle, is there any way that there can be something implemented to deal with this sort of thing? It seems like blogs are really far behind what we had in Usenet. In the old days, I'd just plonk him/her into a killfile, or if there was a thread I'd just set it to ignore the thread. I don't want to read the replies either but I wouldn't killfile those posters. We seem to be going backward in technology in this regard.

"As for Chelle, is there any way that there can be something implemented to deal with this sort of thing?

If Ethan doesn't like me commenting here any longer, than he can ask me to stop doing so, and I will respect his decision, it is his place. If you personally have an issue with what I have to say than you can address me, or ignore me, it is that simple. It is kind of lame to come here waving that I should be put in a 'killfile', while all I have been doing is defending my opinion, as did all the rest who stood up for their opinion.

Chelle:

"A. This doesn’t mean that all scientist are the same, but that the work they ‘both’ do is the same, be it developing a rocket to fly to the moon, or one to carry a nuclear bomb, making a biological weapon or a biological cure it is all scientific research and technology, the scientific method is what we both learned at school and it is ‘the same’."

Despite your extremely poor self-expression here, I think I might actually understand what you mean. Are you telling me that you finally grasp that science is a value-neutral methodology and not a nebulous quasi-sapient force that coerces scientists into doing bad things?

Even if this is what you are trying to express here, you are once again laying the responsibility for war on the doorstep of science. I am interested in your evidence for this. Please provide me with documentation that war was invented by the Hellenist Greeks and by the Chinese, that it died out totally in Europe during the Middle Ages and only came back around the time of the Renaissance, and that early cultures knew no war until the scientific method was introduced to them. I'm sure this will make for a fascinating literature review and I eagerly await a list of your sources.

"B. I said that many don’t care about ending suffering, everyone has got enough problems of their own, so that doesn’t necessarily includes you and your friends, but I presume that you and your friends do care about keeping your own job when push comes to shove."

I would honestly appreciate it if you would not presume anything about me or my friends and family. You've already demonstrated that you are ready at any moment to project your own personality problems onto everyone else in your view, and I'd appreciate it if you would refrain from doing so in my direction.

I'm not going to address C because I'm not interested in researching your position. Defending your position is your job, not mine.

"it weren’t 3 but “700 others spirited out of Germany from under the noses of the US’s allies”."

I know that it was more than 3. However, even if you can name all 700, this still doesn't prove anything for you. Because I am at heart a nice person, I will explain exactly why your broad extrapolations about science and scientists - while I'm sure they seem plausible to you - are meaningless fabrications.

The behavior and attitude that you routinely ascribe to "scientists" (and sometimes erroneously to "science") can be reasonably categorized as antisocial personality disorder, which is also known as sociopathy. The incidence of sociopathy in the general population is roughly ~2%, and for any sufficiently large randomized population you can expect about 2% of the number to be sociopaths.

For your assertions about scientists to be plausible or meaningful in any fashion, you would need to demonstrate that the incidence of sociopathy in the sciences is greater than the incidence of sociopathy in the general population by a statistically significant amount.

At last known count there were over 2 million pure scientists in the US and over 1 million additional engineers. This means that you can isolate and name up to 40,000 sociopathic scientists and 20,000 sociopathic engineers and you have =still proven nothing=. The only thing you've accomplished by all that data collection is to demonstrate that scientists and engineers are actually human beings and not robots or aliens.

Honestly, if 700 is the best you have, then science is looking pretty good right now.

This, incidentally, is why we say that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data." This is exactly the kind of egg-on-face error that science is designed to help you avoid.

Chelle, the point is that everyone should be able to decide for themselves like we used to be able to do 15 years ago. I gave up on Pharyngula and Bad Astronomy years ago because someone would say something and way too many people would all start posting about how stupid that person was and why they hoped that it was a "Poe". It would have been nice to have been able to skip those threads, if they were able to be grouped in threads. It's not science and it's definitely not even close to interesting. Instead I just gave up on those blogs. I tried ignoring the comments for a while but sometimes there were people making valid points about the post in question, but most of the time it was the same drivel. It was easier to just drop those blogs. I'm hoping that it doesn't start here. It's also just amazing to me that the technology has gotten so far behind what it used to be. There aren't any blogs that arrange things into threads and allow you to do anything with the ones that you have no interest in so that you can see stuff that actually matters.

Mena,

Yes, that makes a lot of sense.

Technology-wise, I like the selection system of a dutch technology blog, everyone can vote, and the best comments actually turn into green, also threads are slightly seperated by using indents. So when you pass by you can quickly check out what is interesting, and follow up. It is a pretty sufficiant method for a blog with sometimes over 200 comments, you can check it out here:
http://tweakers.net/nieuws/83666/microsoft-gaat-windows-8-in-plaats-van…

skeith,

" you are once again laying the responsibility for war on the doorstep of science. I am interested in your evidence for this."

The invention of a new weapon thanks to science, gives you the tool and advantage to gain power over someone else. History is full of it, regarding this topic; having long range missiles gave the US the advantage, in response to the high precision of those rockets the USSR build the Tsar Bomb that was more brutal, we humans have always been in a race of bigger and better technology (science) to get the advantage, its evolution. Even in pseudo wars like sports, doping (science) has been used to gain power, and there you have your proof of how honest people are. One athlete starts doing it and win and next all the rest followed, people just want to win and keep up with the herd, fair play is in real life often an illusion, when money and power is involved, just like the LHC our ultimate weapon to gain knowledge; we simply avoid the safety aspect of frequency & density levels, cause we want to win. Wake up out of your idealistic dream world.

btw regarding our German Count don't you think he was interested in these optics simply to have a better view to see what his enemy was doing, not giving a rats ass about the stars in the sky, or to see some funny little germs, people who keep themselves busy with those things don't become a Count, it are those who engage in warfare.

I wonder if chelle somehow is leaning toward this thought pattern? http://www.psmag.com/politics/the-comforting-notion-of-an-all-powerful-… Or is chelle a fan of conspiracy theories? http://www.psmag.com/culture-society/belief-in-conspiracies-linked-to-m… Either way there is some type of distorted thinking going on that seems to have no cure in this context.

If you remember that the German count in the story above was the benefactor not the inventor attempting to see small things. Not everyone [every scientist] is out to hurt others, you know. This idea that everyone is out to hurt or manipulate others is a projection of Machiavellianism [mentioned in the articles above]. I would maybe do some introspection to see if you are not paranoid; thus skewing your perception of the nice explanations of what science is and is not that the scientists above have been attempting to make simple to you.

Mena, chelle isn' a Poe, she's our resident lunatic who now seems to have gone postal.

Chelle, I guess that your "revolutionary" new paper is in review, given you have so much more time to post here.

Right?

"Mena, chelle isn’ a Poe, she’s our resident lunatic who now seems to have gone postal."

Wow, don't you get it? Look at what you have been doing since I made my first post here, and you just keep on doing it; this is what he's addressing; it is not only about what I have to say, but perhaps even more your unstoppable urge to spew out gibberish about me. Try to keep your focus on ball (content), instead of whining about the player.

"someone would say something and way too many people would all start posting about how stupid that person was"

What you've been doing since your first post here has been whine and complain about how science is all wrong and now on this thread, about how all science is teh ebil.

Because you're our resident lunatic, as we found out a few months ago.

PS if Ethan has a problem with how I treat you, you lunatic, then he can say so. It's his blog, right?

Wow,

I don't mind you calling me a 'lunatic', it is normal, I'm just way ahead of you, they say the same thing about Usain Bolt, but it doesn't add any value to the debate do try to focus on the science (content). Good luck!

Chelle:

I like how you avoid acknowledgement of the numbers I gave you, as though they didn't exist. Those were back-of-the-envelope calculations, too, which were extra-favorable to you. A serious study about sociopathy in the sciences would additionally have to account for the fact that the numbers of scientists and engineers in the US has almost certainly gone up since the last numbers were tallied, the fact that sociopathy is not evenly distributed by gender but occurs 3x more often in males than in females, that the sciences are still much more heavily weighted toward men than women today, and the fact that you can deviate somewhat from the expected percentages in your sample before you start to reach statistical significance (size of sample is a big factor there). All of those factors raise the number of sociopaths that you could find in the sciences before you could claim that you were onto something. The 40K and 20K numbers are in fact very lowball, and yet even that extremely low bar has shut you up completely.

"The invention of a new weapon thanks to science, gives you the tool and advantage to gain power over someone else. etc. etc."

This may perhaps be a good time for me to point out to you that your reflexive insistence that the invention of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons was a bad thing betrays your total lack of understanding of international relations and the recent (250~ year) history of the world. If you think that the world would have been absolutely better off if those types of weapons had never been invented, you don't know your history at all and/or you haven't thought very deeply about the matter.

It is not an accident that we "enjoyed" either 3 or 4 world wars (depending on how you define a world war) prior to the invention of Teh Bomb (tm) and zero since then. It is not an accident that the most devastating and bloody regional wars during the 20th and early 21st centuries have taken place either between two or more non-nuclear states/nations, or between a nuclear state and a non-nuclear state.

Not only is science not to blame for war, and your attempts to do so remain puffery and not fact, your puffery reasons for trying to blame science for war are not even knowledgeable and well-reasoned once. They proceed from a position of complete ignorance and non-thought.

"I will have nothing to do with a bomb!"

- Lise Meitner

Go and read all the other quotes:
http://www.todayinsci.com/QuotationsCategories/A_Cat/AtomicBomb-Quotati…

And Chelle resorts to cribbing not only another person's thoughts, but also their words.

Do you have ANYTHING original in your head? Anything? Any thoughts original to you? Or are wafty platitudes, gut feelings absent facts, and arguments from ignorance all you got?

" I gave up on Pharyngula and Bad Astronomy years ago because someone would say something and way too many people would all start posting about how stupid that person was and why they hoped that it was a “Poe”."

Yep, that's happening here now thanks to Wow's childish name calling.
Wow, if you have answered the points you disagree with and the response is not to your liking, then you are just being a troll by writing messages containing name calling and nothing else.

Boo hoo, flint.

You don't know what the hell you're talking about.

Wow, chelle demanding that ANYONE ELSE has to stick to the science.

Hits a 100 out of 10 on the irony scale.

skeith,

You present a whole assertion about 'sociopaths' in science, you are missing the point. All those people that worked on nuclear weapons aren't sociopaths, THAT is the point, it are all just regular normal people caught in a race. Just like those German scientists; first they worked for the Nazi's, than for the Americans, they are all regular guys focused on creating something powerful, so they are first, so they are in charge, so they win the war, they participate. It's the same case for the LHC and high-energy particle collisions, the race is on, and it are the same type of very smart and sane people who are taking care of business, historic recurrence ... a mad man hasn't go the means (network) to make such things.

It is clear that Lise Meitner saw this through and didn't want to participate, she saw that it was all about scientists creating destruction and death. I thought that you would have understood and accepted it now by reading those quotes from other people who have far more scientific credibility than I do. I have been saying the exact same things here with my own original words, but I get to be told that I am no smarter than a five-year-old. What do you want me to do, if you and others are not listening to me, nor to the ones with all the credentials? Are you going to keep on saying that scientists are not to blame, while it was in fact them who came up with the idea, cause they were in competition with other scientists, so they chose to make it, and had it dropped on a bunch of innocent people, and they kept quit that the radiation caused leukemia.

Of course we didn't start the fire, but it have been the scientists who learned to control it, making TNT, and now up on to the level of a nuclear bomb, and what energy are you hoping to control with the largest ignition system in the Universe (LHC and beyond), perhaps setting of the biggest bonfire of them all?

btw Bon Scott had the biggest balls (content) ever, and guess what happened to him, yep, people die from overconfidence and pure stupidity, even the greatest ones.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIrOLNt7DU

Chelle:

"All those people that worked on nuclear weapons aren’t sociopaths, THAT is the point, it are all just regular normal people caught in a race."

I'm glad to see you admit that all your rants about science and scientists were just so many red herrings. Regular normal people doing regular normal people things are everywhere, even in the unthinking, knee-jerk corps where you live. Science has nothing to do with it either way.

Now we've finally drilled down to what your real issue is: you don't trust people, you don't trust the human intellect, and you don't think that people are in general morally good and professionally competent. Given what you've (somewhat inadvertently) stated about yourself - that you only care about you and that you are too cowardly to stand up for yourself - this is maybe understandable.

So I guess you're going to have to either take it on faith that not everyone is like you and has the same moral and personal failings that you do, or you'll just have to accept that you're going to live a life full of paranoid terror about the LHC. I have no stake in your decision so do whatever makes you happiest.

However, it would be best for all involved if you would stop trying to present your paranoid terror as "the other side" that "needs to be heard." It doesn't need to be heard because your "side" is fact-free, evidence-free, rationality-free and paranoid, and you have not yet provided me with any reason to discard my hypothesis that your "side" is heavily informed by movie pseudoscience. Nobody "needs" to hear that kind of nonsense.

Indeed, most of the worst acts are done by people believing that a sky fairy told them.

An example of religion "which is all good":

Genesis 38:7 And Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the LORD; and the LORD slew him.

"It doesn’t need to be heard because your “side” is fact-free"

Sure, there are no explosions to be seen in space.

Chelle:

"Sure, there are no explosions to be seen in space."

Your point with this is ...?

Wow,

I thought that trolls like you only existed in the movies :mrgreen:

"Your point with this is …?"

... that you can only see them in the movies.

Chelle:

One of the major problems with the Abrahamic religions and several others is the total reliance on authority. In these religions, X is true because God (allegedly) said so, and Y is true because a revered holy leader said so.

People who think in those terms have a big issue with science, because they think that science works the same way and they don't recognize the authority of notable scientists. Your attempt to duel with quotations and fall back on the credentials of others has this issue written all over it.

Science is not an authority-based system like religion. Scientists don't say that general relativity is good science because Einstein was a revered authority figure. They say it is good science because anyone with the right information and equipment can test it and verify for themselves that the theory works and provides consistent results.

"… that you can only see them in the movies."

I've seen psychotic breaks in movies, too. Are you having one now?

skeith,

I'm not a religious person, but where I live there are a lot of universities that carry the a christian name in their tittle, and they are top ranked among the world, and are not related to some of those honky dory religious creationist cults that you have in some places in the US. So it is no use to bring up religion into this debate, it is Wow who wants to push me into that group to create some polarization. Anyway, the point that I made regarding religion, is that for many people believing in god, is a believing in a deity that will bring them nothing but good things, I used the comparison because Ethan's letter gave the impression that Science is also 'only' about good things, ... the rest of the debate you know by now, so I hope we can put this 'religious' thing to rest.

And no, I'm not psychotic or dealing with some other mental distress, I'm pretty fine, thanks. Regarding my motivation you can jump back to my post at August 10, 11:13 am where I answered a roughly similar response from Sinisa, I try to stick to basic logic thinking.

btw I agree that "Science is not an authority-based system like religion", it is imho driven by ambition and curiosity.

I think Chelle's main agenda isn't science at all... it's religion. This is confirmed way back in her first post when she wrote:

"That was a nice letter to convince a simple soul, but science does good and it does bad, it is not like a religion where it is all good"

What???

I would claim almost the opposite... Religions have been, if anything, horribly bad. Bad for thought, bad for advancement, bad for humanity.

Aquanerd,

Go read 'mena's post at August 10, 6:55 pm, and my post just 8 minutes before you posted your first here in this thread.

Have fun!

Chelle:

"I try to stick to basic logic thinking."

No, I can't agree that you do. You stick to what your uninformed and ignorant emotions tell you (big bombs are bad, the LHC does things that you don't understand and therefore it is also bad, religion is always good). You try to rationalize it, but your rationalizations fail, and when I have shown you how they fail you skim that part and ignore it and pretend it never happened.

You may say that you're not religious, and maybe you aren't. But you certainly have that religious mindset, that the words of authority figures can support you and therefore you don't have to support yourself:

"I thought that you would have understood and accepted it now by reading those quotes from other people who have far more scientific credibility than I do."

Lise Meitner is not here and neither are any of the people listed on that quote page. Not even the Bible! Resorting to quotes from the Bible and from others is the act of those who rely on authority rather than facts. It is not the act of someone who thinks highly of "logic [sic] thinking."

Your fear and loathing of science doesn't make you brilliant or your ideas worthwhile, it just makes you someone who fears and loathes science.

"Boo hoo, flint.
You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about."
Yes I do, like you I'm screwing up this thread.
Let's see if I can get you to jump to this.
Hold on, you haven't call me a name yet. Reel slowly...slowly...wonder if I'm using the right bait

Well 'skeith' if I say that I'm not religious but you still feel the need to keep on painting it all over me, than it makes no sense to continue having a discussion with you. I can't even see what the issue would be if I was religious. btw the name of that site with all those quotes is: Today In Science History

There is little to no use in having a debate here, that is critical about some parts of science, you guys just can't take any heat, the comment section here looks like a bunch of irrational fanatics.

I accept defeat, not in the sense that you ran me over, but simply that I was too naive thinking that it was possible to have an honest debate here, its sad.

Anyway have fun entertaining each-other!

Chelle, you never wanted an honest debate.

Your screed has all been badly worded woomancering and pretending that somehow YOU know science when all the scientists have lied to you.

Now you're insisting religion is always good and science is bad.

You were a fundie idiot, pretending science.

Aquanerd, look at chelle's posts on other threads of Ethan's blogs.

Or don't, they're pretty dire.

But Chelle has after many many laborious attempts to get nonsense nonscience discussed or given credence has then turned to invective and insults.

And now being insulted back, is pretending to be butt-hurt over it.

Yep, their jumping, here’s one taking things out of context.
“I think Chelle’s main agenda isn’t science at all… it’s religion. This is confirmed way back in her first post when she wrote:
“That was a nice letter to convince a simple soul, but science does good and it does bad, it is not like a religion where it is all good”
What???”
Aquanerd go and look at chelle’s post August 8, 11:34 am
I took that first letter in the context chelle meant, didn’t need chelle’s message to eric to explain chelle’s meaning.
chelle August 8, 11:34 am
“eric,
I was just making the comparison that people pray to God for good things to happen, in that sense God is all about good things that will happen.”

“Aquanerd, look at chelle’s posts on other threads of Ethan’s blogs.”
And probably take them out of context as well.
Chelle’s right about one thing, Chelle and you jumpers have wrecked this site.
Fishing's over for me here too.

Fred, you merely state there that her "main point" had nothing to do with religion. You didn't actually explain what the neutralisation of "not like a religion where it is all good".

You see fundies pretend that science is a religion ALL THE TIME.

Reasons are varied, but the main ones are that

a) If science is a religion, science is being taught in schools, therefore religion is being taught in schoos, therefore the no state religion requires either removal of science or the inclusion of christianity teaching in school.

b) If science is a religion, then their religion is on equal footing therefore something. What is never really explained, but it's used as if it means that if science asks "what is the proof or evidence of God", then the religionistas can say "what si the proof or evidence there is no God", but that may just be because the religion aren't used to thinking, it being all done for them by someone else or a book.

Like I said earlier, you don't have a clue what you're talking about.

Indeed, you may be merely another sock for chelle, she's done it a couple of times before.

And freddie, aren't you taking chelle's and everyone else's comments out of context if you're refusing to read the other comments chelle's made on other threads on SWAB?

Naughty.

"you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.

Fred, he would rather you just said "Thank you" http://youtu.be/5j2F4VcBmeo

weren't you buggering off?

If you look at human thinking as a 'collective intelligence', and regard this discussion here as a reflection of that, than it is starting to look like this: http://youtu.be/DLvIFRNbqOs

One troll saying to the other to go away, ha ha

Anyway off I go :mrgreen:

you've said that before. didnt happen then either.

"you’ve said that before. didnt happen then either."

You didn't got the irony in regards to that clip, that the actual troll is still here even when I'm gone.

"There’s also a big part of the Rainforest that’s being chopped to grow gene-manipulated soya, science has caused overfishing, drugs addictions, enormous pollution … Also look at satellites and the army that is spying upon us. I know that I sound like a paranoid troll, but some science is a cold ruthless business with no compassion for the little people."

You are wrong. Science is indifferent, people are the cause.

i'm looking at the future but with wise concern..... to invest for a better tomorrow is my concern

This is why we must invest in ourselves!

esiegel — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 13:27:28 +0000

This is why we must invest in ourselves!

“We are much closer today to being able to send humans to Mars than we were to being able to send men to the moon in 1961, and we were there eight years later. Given the will, we could have humans on Mars within a decade.” -Robert Zubrin

This is what we can accomplish when we invest in something big.

Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Mars Science Laboratory.

I'm not talking about the Olympics, of course. I'm talking about investing in science, in exploration, in robotics, in engineering, in technology, and in humanity, and what can we accomplish?

Image credit: Mars Curiosity / NASA / JPL.

For just the seventh time in history, we've successfully landed a spacecraft on Mars. This time, however, is different.

This time, we landed the largest, heaviest, most advanced robotic science laboratory ever constructed. Or, I should say, we got it to land itself.

Image credit: NASA graphic.

After a journey of more than 350 million miles through space -- from Earth through interplanetary space, all the way to Mars -- Mars Science Laboratory had to hit an entry window towards Mars that was less than 15 square miles in size. By time it was set to arrive at Mars, the Red Planet was more than 150,000,000 kilometers away from Earth, meaning that it takes light (and all forms of communication) more than 15 minutes to travel from Mars Science Laboratory to Earth and back to the spacecraft again.

This time delay is so large that we couldn't simply send commands to this spacecraft and tell it what to do; we need to empower it to make intelligent decisions on its own! And this was especially challenging because of how ridiculously powerful and awesome this new science laboratory is.

Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / JPL's Mars Yard testing area.

Mars Science Laboratory, shown all the way at the right, not only dwarfs all other laboratories ever sent to Mars in terms of size (it weighs nearly a tonne and is the size of a small SUV), but also in terms of technological power. With 17 cameras on board, a specially designed martian weather station, and a sample analysis kit capable of detecting organics (among other things), this spacecraft has a total of 10 major science instruments.

Image credit: NASA / JPL.

And, as you can imagine, it didn't come cheap: all told, it cost $2.5 billion dollars to make this science laboratory, complete with the rover, launch, and landing systems. (For those of you wondering, Curiosity is the name of the rover, while Mars Science Laboratory is the name of the NASA mission.) This was how much it cost to do it right, which is the only way to do it if you want to land on Mars, considering the failure rate.

Because not only is it difficult to get there and land successfully under the best of circumstances, we've never landed anything on another world that was this combination of large, heavy, and fragile, which means that a whole new landing system needed to be designed. For $2.5 billion, you only get one shot at getting it right.

Image credit: NASA / JPL.

And the landing site in Gale Crater -- 96 km across in its entirety -- required an unprecedented precision. In order to land on Mars, Curiosity could be moving no faster than just a couple of miles-per-hour upon touchdown, which would make it the slowest, easiest landing ever performed on another world, and it needed to be performed with (by far) the heaviest device ever attempted to land on another world.

And there were plenty of worries. First off, the journey from the edge of Mars' atmosphere to touchdown on the surface took seven minutes, meaning that by time the device is a few thousand kilometers above the surface of Mars, it's on its own, as we can no longer send it a signal to correct its course. So it needs to be able to do literally everything on its own.

Image credit: NASA / JPL.

It needs to successfully hit the atmosphere at the correct angle so that the heat shield can absorb the intense energy of decelerating from 13,000 miles-per-hour down to about Mach 2. If even a small fraction of that heat made it through to the instruments, Curiosity would be ruined.

Then, the parachute needed to deploy properly, which means at the right time and speed to slow it down to a reasonable (about 180 miles-per-hour) by time it's ready to jettison its heat shield.

Image credit: NASA / JPL / University of Arizona, via Mars HiRISE.

This was a rousing success, and was even imaged (above) by the passing Mars HiRISE mission! This itself is very dangerous, because unlike the Moon, Mars has a significant atmosphere and rapid winds that can easily accelerate spacecraft to speeds over 100 km/hour; an impact at that speed would doubtlessly mean the demise of Curiosity.

In the past, we had used giant airbags to protect rovers from these speeds upon impact, a technology with an incredible track record of success that included Pathfinder, Spirit, and Opportunity.

Image credit: NASA / ILC Dover.

But the weight of the Curiosity rover meant that this method would be inadequate, and that a new, never-before-attempted landing technique would be required. As about 50% of all attempted Mars landings have failed, this was where the real terror kicked in. Because now, we need to go from falling at about 180 miles-per-hour not just vertically, but also with significant horizontal speed, and slow down to make a landing that's no harsher than dropping an egg from a height of about 6 inches (or 15 centimeters).

How was this to happen?

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

A brand new descent system, outfitted with eight retro-rockets, would bring the entire system to a virtual standstill just a few dozen feet above the martian surface, where it would then lower the rover down onto the ground ever-so-delicately.

This was the most critical stage, and meant the difference between two-to-six years of unprecedented science and a very public, $2.5 billion failure.

After maybe two minutes of total silence, the critical signal arrived.

Image credit: screenshot from NASA TV.

Curiosity had landed, successfully! Almost immediately, the rover set out to do its pre-programmed photography sequence, snapping images of where it landed. Unsurprisingly, the landing (and the retro-rockets) had kicked up a large amount of dust, but one spectacularly impressive picture stood out.

Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Mars Science Laboratory's front Hazcam.

More photos (including real-color images) are undoubtedly forthcoming, so sit tight (and follow along as the news comes out in real-time), but we know already that this landing means two outstanding things.

First, we made it! We are inside Gale Crater -- where we are almost certain a liquid lake once existed -- and ready to investigate the soil beneath our wheels, the atmosphere and weather above us, and the cosmic rays plunging all the way through the atmosphere. It looks like it's in fantastic shape to meet all six of its science goals, including learning about radiation levels that humans will be exposed to.

But second, it means that if we can land something this complex and heavy this delicately, we can do this.

Image credit: NASA.

We can send a manned mission to Mars. We've already learned about radiation during the 9-month journey to the red planet, and we've successfully developed and used the technology necessary to make a heavy, controlled landing on Mars.

All that we need to make this a reality is to invest in the people who can make it happen. We've got the know-how, we've got the experience, we've got the astronauts and we've got the plans; all we need is the decision that this is worth investing in and we can be on Mars within a decade. After all, we've come so far already.

Image credit: NASA / Mars Science Laboratory / Honeybee Robotics.

I can't wait to see what Curiosity learns, and I am so hopeful that this success means that exploring the Universe won't mean quibbling over budgetary table scraps anymore; there's a feast to be had if only we're willing to make the investment of planting the seeds. From last year to this, NASA's budget was just cut by another 2%, taking it down to about 18 billion dollars annually for everything: astronauts, launches, Earth-monitoring satellites, employees, contracts, telescopes and facilities, and all of NASA science.

But if we can achieve all of this with so little, imagine what we could do if we actually invested in science, in exploration, in robotics, in engineering, in technology, and in humanity.

Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona, Mars Exploration Rover (Spirit).

Here's looking forward to an amazing mission, sure to be full of unprecedented discoveries. I'm so excited about it that -- once again -- I'm headed out tonight onto my local news (KGW NewsChannel 8), talking about the amazing landing of Curiosity on Mars and what it means for all of us.

No matter where you are, make sure you tune in tonight at 7PM Pacific Time, and don't forget that this success isn't the goal of our explorations; it's only the beginning. I'll see you all then!

esiegel Mon, 08/06/2012 - 09:27

Tags

Mars Science Laboratory

Categories

One correction to your post: 2.5 billion dollars is not expensive; it is incredibly cheap. IIRC, it's less than the cost of a day at the London Olympics, and somewhere around the cost of five minutes of an American war overseas.

2.5 billion dollars is, on the federal level, pocket change.

This is a really important point. Compared to all the other things developed nations do, space exploration is a drop in the bucket.

This is incredible; it's always good to see a remote probe successfully arrive at its destination. Now the really exciting work can begin.

I noticed in the NASA TV feed people spoke of the wonderful power source they have, but everyone avoided calling it a "Radioisotope (aka Radionuclide) Thermal Generator". Why is RTG such a bad word these days? I wonder what the ageing characteristics of the RTG is like - how long can Curiosity last?

Now to find some martians and anal-probe them!!

Now if I could only get a RTG for my iphone.

$2.5 billion is pocket change for the USA maybe. Keep in mind the USA has one of the biggest debts in the world. The rest of the world is trying to focus on keeping the stupid countries like your own from going under...

@MadScientist:
I wondered the same thing. The half-life of Plutonium-238 is about 88 years, so even though the heat (and therefore the power) generated will taper off, Curiosity should be viable until humans can land and install fresh modules, however long that takes. They also used RTG power sources on the Viking and Voyager missions. Voyagers 1 and 2, launched 35 years ago, are both still sending back data from billions of kilometres away, even though instrument heaters have been shut down to conserve energy. At the Monday morning press conference, project manager Pete Theisinger said something very interesting (paraphrase): "There are no materials on board subject to depletion. We tested components to twice their projected lifespan. We did NOT test to destruction. No one should be surprised if Curiosity is still functioning at twice the projected mission length. And that's the first time I've talked about 'more than two years.' " My immediate thought: Theisinger was project manager for Spirit/ Opportunity, each projected to last 90 days. Opportunity is alive and well eight years on -- and counting. With budget cutbacks looming for any new projects, I think Theisinger built this rover to last indefinitely. Sharp move, Pete!

Nice work from NASA!

Money-wise, they should team up with the Saudis or those people from the Emirates they got lots of cash, and it's in their genes to live in the desert, it's nothing new to them. Anyway them Arabs are now wasting time and money on building skyscrapers, and trowing money at football players ... why not invest in a base on Mars, to proceed to Saturn and its moons. Think big, aim for the Stars, if you fail, you'll land on Mars.

The NASA video clip on NASA's own youtube channel has been taken down because a news corp has claimed copyright infringement of THEIR work by it. Under the DMCA.

REJOICE! The artists are saved!

Bah.

Can't wait to see what comes out from this mission.
Corgratulations to the team that did tha
Thanks!

Madscientist, an RTG is basically a radioactive pile that is hot and, since this is in space, barely shielded. They're good for a couple hundred watts, but you wouln't want one in your phone.

As to why it's bad, basically if your launch goes fubar on takeoff,you have a fair bit of cleaning up to do.

If you think this is only a worry to anti-nukes, then consider the hysteria about a "dirty bomb" from terrorists with the world governments.

This pile is pretty much the same thing if the rocket goes titsup.

What is the practical benefit of sending humans to Mars just to plant a flag and have a photo op?

It'd be better to take a long term approach and keep sending our robots to learn all there is to learn, then have them begin building habitats for future colonists.

Assuming society doesn't collapse climate change and peak oil before that...

What is the practical benefit of sending humans to Mars just to plant a flag and have a photo op?

It'd be better to take a long term approach and keep sending our robots to learn all there is to learn, then have them begin building habitats for future colonists.

Assuming society doesn't collapse from climate change and peak oil before that...

Double post. My comment must have double awesome.

"What is the practical benefit of sending humans to Mars just to plant a flag and have a photo op?"

I was thinking the same. I understand the big old motivation mantra about the moon landing, but the Mars is quite a different thing. While Ethan is right about that we are approaching the time when our technology is given for an crewed interplanetary mission, I don't see why not starting to use these capabilities to establish a proper presence in space by building large space stations, build space launch systems for cheaper, and start to colonize the Moon first (which could provide some materials for space stations and can also be a great place for launching shit, not to mention the science that could be done only couple of hours away from home).

The planetary bodies can wait until we have a better access to space. As a counter point though, if the MSL finds extractable water, carbon and nitrogen source on Mars, Mars would be a better choice perhaps, because despite the great distance, a colony could be independent of the Earth supply. Never the less, Mars is pretty much a one-way ride still. Years away from Earth, years in higher radiation levels, cramped living quarters, relying purely on technology, limited human presence is still a big limit.

What's the practical benefit of living?

Let me take the question a bit further: Assuming the purpose of a manned mars mission is exploration, what can a human do that a unmanned rover can not. The human will visit mars in a can (space suit), so much info that would be available on earth is not there. The rovers cameras can operate over a much wider band width than human eyes, and the human would likely have to have the same equipment. In particular since we are talking post 2030 for any manned mission, if Ray Kurzweil is at all correct the rover may be as smart as a human as well. Yes there might be a couple of days delay with a unmanned rover in discoveries but thats about it. It should be possible to build a virtual reality environment that provides someone on earth with at least as much as would be seen walking around on mars.

Adapt to an awkward situation. Can also carry instruments that can operate over a much wider bandwidth than the human eye.

Downsides: needs feeding, water, handling and a ticket home.

Proboem with a VR suit is that your reaction times go from around 0.22sec to around 15 minutes.

MadScientist: "Why is RTG such a bad word these days?"

Because everything with the magic word "nuclear" today is referred as evil stuff. That what happens if people are allowed to preach about stuff which they don't understand...

lyle, Gyula, etc.: I don't think there are any short-term benefits to sending humans. You're right, robots can do most everything a lot cheaper. But, if we ever want to move into space, we're going to have to make the very high up-front investment of establishing bases beyond LEO.

The first step of an off-earth base is big, expensive, dangerous, and not worth it on its own. Its the steps that come after which could make it worth it.

@ William and Gyula

"What is the practical benefit of sending humans to Mars just to plant a flag and have a photo op?"

Other than scientific benefits, for one, as far fetched as it might seem today, we are gonna run out of living space on earth sooner than you might think. Think of colonization and what economical prospects it provided several centuries ago here on earth (but without the bloodshed). We are becoming more numerable and earths resources are only getting smaller. Don't have to be a genius to figure out what will happen. It's an exponential function with a growth of 1% per year roughly nowdays. Take 7 billion and do the projection... it's scary.

"Because everything with the magic word “nuclear” today is referred as evil stuff."

Ah, I see. You don't know why people may be against nuclear power, therefore you make something up so that you can feel superior.

Got it.

@Chelle

"... and it’s in their genes to live in the desert, it’s nothing new to them. Anyway them Arabs are now wasting time and money..."

So in addition to being ignorant, you're also a racist. Wonderful....

Excellent science and engineering!

Not to diminish the Mars landing which was amazing!
And acknowledging that autolanding on Earth is easier than on Mars; because of runways, beacons, GPS satellites, etc. (not to mention Earth's atmosphere). But airliners have autolanded (e.g. in heavy fog ) for years. As well the most difficult parts of the space shuttle landing sequence required faster than human reflexes and were handled by computer (with a backup computer on standby to copilot should the primary autolanding computer fail). Once the most difficult part of landing a space shuttle was done by computer; control was given back to a human pilot.

Having a human pilot is more about politics and public relations than performance.
"Automatic landings are relatively easy to do. Since the return of the shuttle to earth is already highly automated, its range of automatic operation would simply be extended... In 1988, the Russians sent their Buran shuttle aloft on an unmanned mission; it made a faultless, fully automatic return... From the start, the American shuttles were envisioned and built for automatic return. That capability is used on all missions until astronauts take manual control minutes before touchdown. The brains behind the guidance system are the shuttle's on-board computers." New York Times

Once that google driverless car is available for a modest price; I'll switch to a computer chauffeur for my car.

Sinisa,

These people have a history of traveling for many day's through the desert to reach a well and move forward to sell their camels, do you never watch any David Attenborough documentaries? I could have suggested some other people like the Spaniards who sailed the oceans for weeks discovering new places, but they are as broke as can be, even the Americans are short on cash, so why not ask the people who are sitting on a lot of money ... There is nothing wrong with that, and there is no need to act like an overly politically correct individual, just to get at me.

I know their history Chelle, and even spent some time among them. And it's not about being overly politically correct since I couldn't care less for politics. But I know very well what claim's to "races being genetically predisposed to this and that" leads to...

And I will lash out at anyone who downgrades any race for whatever reason.

I bet you're hanging around here just to make sure that there is no 'downgrading' going one when those green martians show up on camera :mrgreen:

"These people have a history of traveling for many day’s through the desert to reach a well"

Not the arabs who live in the UK.

Therefore it cannot be from their race they get this trait.

Here's a thought. Maybe that trait is a result of living in a desert and that whiteys like you would trek many days through a desert to reach a well.

And none of that indicates in any way that "arabs" (whoever they are, because there's no "arabia" where all arabs live) are "wasting money".

none of that indicates in any way that “arabs” ... are “wasting money”.

Yes in football they are:

• Qatar & FC Barcelona : €171million
• Qatar & Paris Saint Germain : $122 million
• Emirates & Manchester City : £400million
• Emirates & AC Milan : £52 million
• Emirates & Arsenal : £100million
• Emirates & Real Madrid : €50 million
• Emirates & Hamburg SV : €8.5M

The numbers may slightly differ, but that's about a billion dollars going to 6 teams of guys that are just kicking against a ball. Ok, perhaps you might really like football, but I find this to be a waste.

oops 7 teams

"• Qatar & FC Barcelona : €171million"

So Arabs are Quatar.

"• Emirates & Manchester City : £400million"

Oh, hang on, Arabs are Emirates.

Oh, hang on, arabs aren't either.

I guess honkeys waste money too.

Swiss Bank Threatens to Sue NASDAQ Over Facebook IPO

Mark Zuckerberg's Big Facebook Mistake

Algorithmic Trading Glitch Costs Firm $440 Million

Right?

WASPS waste money.

Hooray JPL and NASA! Go Curiosity! I watched the live feed and listening to all the stages of the landing (thanks to Odyssey relaying telemetry from Curiosity) going off as planned and without a hitch and the cheers when the "We're safe on Mars!" was announced was simply epic.

Now while this is obviously promising for future landing of heavy objects (including people), I do NOT want an 8-year push to do it. I do not want Apollo on Mars -- bootprints and flag and let's bring a couple rocks back bye. I really want humans to visit Mars, but I want it to be after we've done extensive robotic exploration and preparation. There should be habitats and fuel for the return trip all ready and waiting for their arrival. The first human to set foot on Mars should be the beginning of a continuous human presence.

To frame the debate in terms of the opinions of legendary astronauts, I'm more Buzz Aldrin, less Neil Armstrong.

"Right?"

Yes, you are right.

Have fun!

Troll.

Actually the comments about humanity expanding are interesting. Some projects show that by 2200 the population may crash as children become more and more an economic liability. (Of course they are pure conjecture). Of course if the population keeps expanding it will likley collapse before we can do any serious colonization as Gia clears the earth of the Homo Sapiens infection she has.

If you really want to see what US scientists and engineers could do in space, just swap the current US military budget with NASA's for the next 20 years.

Sinisa: No one is saying we shouldn't go to space.

What were saying is that it has to be done in steps that are practical and have long term prospects. Humans are squishy products of a specific biosphere entering a place that is hostile to life. A manned trip to Mars should be done after we use our machines to make sure we've prepared the support we squishy bags of meat need.

Well long term human exploration is going to have to happen, so manned exploration has long term prospects.

Most naysayers really seem only to care about the money being spent, lots likely only because its government spending.

@William

well, you're previous question was "why send humans...". So don't know what you're saying now. Either you're for it or against it :)

It was WONDERFUL. America needed some good news for a change, and that wonderful rolling science lab was made in America too--though the first press conference was wonderful explaining how five countries worked together on this. If only this is what developed countries always did: work together in peace to develop great science. Why should people go there? We are born explorers. Someone is going to go. We should help them. We might need colonies out there someday.

Lately I've been thinking that humans are going to simply take a second seat to computers in the future. Once computers and robots are advanced enough, why even send humans into space? Won't AI be able to do the job much better once it can think many times faster than a human brain? I'm being serious here, I'm not trolling.

On Curiosity and its Shadows

cevans — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 22:19:43 +0000

On Curiosity and its Shadows

The NASA Mars rover Curiosity just landed on Mars. Those of us who tuned in vicariously via NASA's live coverage watched as a roomful of tense engineers exploded, and heard their disembodied voices whispering and booming through the control room. Holy shit. We did it. Their headsets fell askew, they glad-handed one another, criss-crossing the room, and then, immobilized by a sudden hush as the news spread: We've got thumbnails.

Thumbnails. We watched as a tiny image formed, transmuted across the void of space and into this room. It was black and white, an indistinguishable gesture of light in a blur of dark pixels. The engineers cheered and held one another as they gazed upon this small, inauspicious sight. One man sobbed at his desk. Then another image came down the line, this time more resolved. We began to see the grain of the dust, the pebbles, the outline of the rover itself, 352 million miles and 14 minutes of delay away, struck against the Martian soil.

And so, as with so many missions before it, the narrative of our rover's discovery began with an acknowledgement of its own shadow.

NASA's older Martian rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, were both avid amateur photographers of their own shadows as well. In fact, such images have been part and parcel of the visual language of space history since the Soviet Union developed and launched the Venera probes in the early 1960s; which, beginning with Venera 9, were the first landers to send back images of another planet. Those pictures too, taken before the cameras were undone by the very atmosphere they hoped to document, were of light and shadows cast on rocks.

Rocks that looked for all the world like our rocks, light like our light, and shadows like our shadows, only cast on an alien world.

William Gibson writes that the moment we began sensing and recording with technology, our extended communal nervous system, the "absolute limits of the experiential world" were "in a very real and literal way...profoundly and amazingly altered, extended, changed." We no longer relied on the limited capacities of our individual memories, nor did we quite fully trust the bounded senses of our apparatus; free to back ourselves up and reach ourselves further outward, we extended our reach. We also loosened the definition of "we," allowing our tools to become part of us in subtle ways. Now, closer and closer to the machine, we share a "largely invisible, all-ecompassing embrace."

This means: we can't go to Mars and see what it looks like for ourselves. Not yet, anyway. So instead we have sent this robot, this laboratory, this sentry of extended sense organs for the human race, ahead of us. I find it profoundly moving, not only because something inconceivable has been accomplished, but because we--that room full high-fiving tinkerers, and us plebeians too--can look at Curiosity's shadow and understand, without hesitation, that it's our own.

cevans Sun, 08/05/2012 - 18:19

Tags

The intersection of poetry and science Wonderful

The image that came down first, although apparently dull, very probably captured in the impact dust cloud of the skycrane. I'm sure there's another analogy in that.

What amazes me is that sunlight on Mars appears as bright--or nearly as bright--as sunlight on Earth, even though Mars is so much further from the Sun. I would have expected there to be less of a shadow, and that the atmosphere would be darker.

NASA rocks!

why not send one rover like curiosity to the moon and prove that the men of the apollo project got there?

Would'nt be prudent to land next rover at the equator of Mars, where the climate could be tropical like earth. Mre organisms could have survived there in ancient Mars !!

@MEL: Because NASA doesn't actually care what conspiracy theorists say, and their allegations don't deserve the dignity of a response. Sending another Curiosity-level rover to the Moon just to try to convince a few naysayers that they really did it would be a massive waste of time and money, especially since it won't convince them anyway. NASA scientists know what they did, and they're the ones who use this information. Rovers are for learning new things, not winning arguments.

I hope one day people can live on Mars!

To Mel - it's all about the money and getting funding. You wont get much funding going back to the moon (or there first the first time if we havent...according to some theorist). It's all about Mars now. NASA were scaling back missions before this last successful landing on Mars. They're flying high now and there's several new missions to Mars planned in the next few years only thanks to the success of this lander. If this would have failed then they'd probably go back to the moon as that's the only thing they'd be able to afford.

there's nothing like our planet.

First off, I love the fact you write about this topics claire.
2nd off I was lucky enough to be at NASA/JPL next to the control room when this happened and I'll tell you that the pure excitement, and reward for the engineers is like no other communal joyful moment I have witnessed. The whole week at work, we would randomly stop to watch "Space News" and get our daily scoop of curiosity. I just wanted to share that since you are so heavily interested in the matter.

I truly felt like I was in a pre-star trek era when she landed.

Over and Out
www.phillipschristopher.com

best ever achievement (yet) for human-kind...but l prefer to live in our plenet earth....tell me..where the hell is waikiki beach???ipanema rio???great wall etc.etc.etc???

Mars is Freeze Dried, a wee bit chilly .

Bswerdloff
subject Curiosity on Mars
In looking at my latest National Geographic Magazine--and
remembering that famous event at Roswell---I was
instantly wondering Who is cleaning the wheels on
Curiosity They sure did a good job.

Curiosity's wheels are specially designed to spell out JPL over and over in the dust in Morse code.

Curiosity

gregladen — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 08:57:46 +0000

Curiosity

The Mars Science Laboratory Mission has piles of cool equipment on board Curiosity Rover, which is closing in on Mars as we speak. The landing is expected to be next Sunday/Monday, 10:31 p.m. Aug. 5 PDT (1:31 a.m. Aug. 6 EDT, 05:31 Aug. 6 Universal Time) plus or minus a minute.. But not really, because the event is happening a it far away in spacetime; those are the times that the signals from Mars will arrive on the planet Earth, about 13.8 minutes after the event has happened. The mission is expected to last one Martian year, which is close to two Earth years. The weather at the landing site will be clear and ranging from 90 degrees below zero C to about freezing (-130F to 32F).

The location of the landing is ner the Martian equator, near the base of Mount Sharp inside the Gale crater.

The rover is about three meters long not ocuting it's arm, and just under three meters wide, and 2.1 meters high to its tallest point. The arm is about 2.1 meter long and the wheels are about a half a meter in diameter. It weights just under 4,000 kilos (over four tons). The vehicle is a hybrid of sorts, and will run on a nuclear thermoelectric generator with lithium ion batteries. Batteries are included.

The instruments Curiosity will carry include: a Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer, cameras, a robotic Martian-designed loupe, radiation detectors, environmental monitoring gear and a very fancy chemistry set.

NASA says this about the scientific investigations:

NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission will study whether the Gale Crater area of Mars has evidence of past and present habitable environments. These studies will be part of a broader examination of past and present processes in the Martian atmosphere and on its surface. The research will use 10 instrument-based science investigations. The mission’s rover, Curiosity, carries the instruments for these investigations and will support their use by providing overland mobility, sample-acquisition capabilities, power and communications. The primary mission will last one Mars year (98 weeks).

The payload includes mast-mounted instruments to survey the surroundings and assess potential sampling targets from a distance; instruments on Curiosity’s robotic arm for close-up inspections; laboratory instruments inside the rover for analysis of samples from rocks, soils and atmosphere; and instruments to monitor the environment around the rover. In addition to the science payload, engineering sensors on the heat shield will gather information about Mars’ atmosphere and the spacecraft’s performance during its descent through the atmosphere.

To make best use of the rover’s science capabilities, a diverse international team of scientists and engineers will make daily decisions about the rover’s activities for the following day. Even if all the rover’s technology performs flawlessly, some types of evidence the mission will seek about past environments may not have persisted in the rock record. While the possibility that life might have existed on Mars provokes great interest, a finding that conditions did not favor life would also pay off with valuable insight about differences and similarities between early Mars and early Earth.

The landing itself has been dubbed the "seven minutes of terror" because it is so complicated that even engineers will be terrified. Here is a graphic depicting the landing plan:

Here is a video about the mission:

gregladen Fri, 08/03/2012 - 04:57

Tags

Categories

Narrated by William Shatner, of course!

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for this one!

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/drc/ says:
Me: how much does rover curiosity weigh?
Dr C: Curiosity is the name of the Mars Science Laboratory rover. The Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, weighs 900 kilograms, or about 2,000 pounds.

43 years later, we're seven minutes away from a second giant leap forward.

esiegel — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 19:39:00 +0000

43 years later, we're seven minutes away from a second giant leap forward.

"The achievements of Apollo were so bold and our subsequent efforts so timid that the energy of those years seems like a youthful dream." -Buzz Aldrin

43 years ago today, humanity took our first steps on another world, venturing nearly 400,000 kilometers from home and walking on the surface of the Moon.

Image credit: NASA, Apollo 11, photo by Neil Armstrong.

Of course, what we found there was a world whose soil was very similar to our own, but devoid of any atmosphere, liquid, or signs of life, present or past. But out beyond the Moon, visible in the distance even when viewed from Earth, lies a world that's excited our imaginations for generations.

Image credit: Gary Ayton, 2003, using a 10" Newtonian telescope.

Despite its tiny appearance, Mars is much larger than the Moon in terms of actual size. It only appears smaller because it's up to 100 times farther away from us than the Moon is; if you were to put Mars and the Moon next to one another, the differences would leap right out at you.

Image credit: Paul Stansifer, 84user, NASA, Celestia, JPL/Caltech, under the Gnu Public License.

Unlike our dry, desolate, airless Moon, Mars has an atmosphere, polar icecaps, and plenty of hope that it once had a watery past. It made all the sense in the world, once we'd made it to the Moon, to set our sights on Mars.

While -- as you well know -- we've never sent a manned mission to Mars, it was exactly seven years later, on July 20th, 1976, that we landed our first spacecraft safely on the surface of Mars. Here's the first (black-and-white) picture of the Viking 1 Lander on the surface of the Red Planet, photographing its own footprint.

Image credit: NASA, Mars Viking 1 Lander.

One of the most ambitious things the Viking landers were equipped to do was to look for signs of life. One of the experiments, in particular, was really interesting. What they did was they scooped up some martian soil and placed it in a chamber filled with a liquid, nutrient broth.

The hope was that, if there were any martian microbes in the soil, they'd react with the nutrient broth, giving off organic gases that Viking would be able to detect.

Image credit: Elaine R. Ingham (USDA).

Both Viking landers (1 and 2) performed this test twice: once with freshly-scooped-up soil, and once with soil that had been "sterilized" by heating it to high temperatures.

If there were microbes in the soil, you know what you'd expect to find: microbes reacting with the broth, giving off organic gases (carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen-rich gases) in the fresh soil, and none in the sterilized soil.

And -- believe it or not -- that's exactly what both of them found.

Image credit: NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory, from Viking 2 on Mars.

So, does that mean there's microbial life on Mars, just waiting for a drop of nutrient-filled Earth water to begin organic reactions? Or does that mean the original Viking spacecrafts were contaminated with Earth-based bacteria, and only after the sterilizing heat were we truly examining martian soil?

The other two tests that Viking did for life/organics came up negative, and so at this point, we have to say we can't know for certain. But we'd love to find out, wouldn't we? Well, since the successes of Viking 1 and 2, we've tried many times to land on Mars.

Image credit: NASA / JPL / color composites by Emily Lakdawalla.

Although there have been many failures, including Mars 6 and 7, Mars Polar Lander, the Beagle 2, and Fobos-Grunt (which sought to land on the Martian moon Phobos), there have also been four more successes: Mars Pathfinder, Spirit, Opportunity, and most recently, the Phoenix lander.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ., by Opportunity.

And while we've done some amazing science on the Martian surface with these four landers, we've not only been unable to successfully test for present or past life, we haven't even sought to test for organics in the soil with the other landers.

But in just a couple of weeks, all of that is going to change, depending on how a very important seven minutes goes.

Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / JPL's Mars Yard testing area.

Mars Curiosity, the giant rover depicted on the right, is (arguably) the most advanced robot ever built. An entire science laboratory is on board this rover, which dwarfs Opportunity (whose clone is on the left) in size, speed, and scientific power. Because, among other instruments, know what Curiosity has on board? From wikipedia:

Sample analysis at Mars (SAM): The SAM instrument suite will analyze organics and gases from both atmospheric and solid samples. It is being developed by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the Laboratoire Inter-Universitaire des Systèmes Atmosphériques (LISA) of France's CNRS and Honeybee Robotics, along with many additional external partners. The SAM suite consists of three instruments:

The Quadrupole Mass Spectrometer (QMS) will detect gases sampled from the atmosphere or those released from solid samples by heating.

The Gas Chromatograph (GC) will be used to separate out individual gases from a complex mixture into molecular components. The resulting gas flow will be analyzed in the mass spectrometer with a mass range of 2-535 Daltons.

The Tunable Laser Spectrometer (TLS) will perform precision measurements of oxygen and carbon isotope ratios in carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄) in the atmosphere of Mars in order to distinguish between a geochemical and a biological origin.

The SAM also has three subsystems: the 'Chemical separation and processing laboratory', for enrichment and derivatization of the organic molecules of the sample; the sample manipulation system (SMS) for transporting powder delivered from the MSL drill to a SAM inlet and into one of 74 sample cups. The SMS then moves the sample to the SAM oven to release gases by heating to up to 1000 ^oC; and the pumps subsystem to purge the separators and analysers.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The key, of course, is whether the first-of-its-kind landing, on a world many millions of miles away, will succeed or not. Well, you don't have to wait much longer: on the night of Sunday, August 5th, Curiosity will enter the Martian atmosphere and descend, attempting to land safely and softly on the alien world below. Landings on Mars historically have about a 50% success rate, so everyone watching ought to have their hearts in their throats.

And what's going to happen? You don't have to rely on my explanation for it; NASA and JPL have put together a brilliant five minute video explaining exactly what this seven minutes of terror is all about!

My local planetarium will be broadcasting the landing live: will you be watching? In the meantime, for now, for the time leading up to August 5th, and for the days and weeks afterwards, I've built a spectacular trap on Mars for you, where all the news stories from around the world surrounding the red planet will be on display. (Got an iPad? I've got the brand-new #1 free news app for you to follow this story here!)

Image credit: The Mars trap via trapit, http://trap.it/.

It's no secret how much I've loved the Opportunity rover, and we've got a chance with Curiosity to absolutely blow away everything we know about the surface of our rubicund neighbor. I'm hoping for a successful landing, and I can't wait to see -- literally -- what Curiosity uncovers.

esiegel Fri, 07/20/2012 - 15:39

Tags

August 5? Well it's a LITTLE late, but you can still see it as an awesome birthday present!

Great post (as usual). I wasn't aware of the August 5 date, but now I am.

Let me use your comments section to ask a totally off-topic question: is there any way to communicate with the SB people to make suggestions about their new not-so-improved site? I've tried several times via the "contact us" link, and never gotten so much as an acknowledgment. If there's some way to do this, feel free to contact me directly, or post here in comments, as you wish. Thanks.

Why don't they include a microscope on any of the landers? Wouldn't it greatly simplify the search for life on Mars?

Great post. It's really impressive to see how difficult and complicate is to land a rover on Mars.
What I am curious about is, did they use the same landing technique for the previous rovers? If not, does anyone know what is the difference?
Cheers

@ Chris

That's a good question. I don't know for sure, but I don't think you can just point a microscope at some dirt and see microbes. The only time I've ever seen bacteria through a microscope have been either in carefully prepared slides or in a petri dish where they had been grown. Either way, separated from any opaque objects. I think if we had a way to automatically sort bacteria from soil to make slides then it would make sense.

At the very least, if a microscope was a feasible way of finding bacteria then I'm sure someone would have thought of it.

@ Filip:

This one I know! This is the landing on Mars to attempt the rocket-tether method. So add that onto everything else and you can see why 'seven minutes of terror' is an apt name to describe what it will be like for the folks at NASA/JPL.

Spirit and Opportunity were landed with the airbag method: housed inside a shell that was covered in airbags, they were simply dropped onto Mars. There was at least one before that, which served as proof of concet. Curiosity is unfortunately too heavy for that method.

Phoenix and others were landed with rockets on the landers themselves. It seems they expect to be able to get a lighter landing from this method, and they'll definitely end up with a lighter rover.

Though possibly a flatter one, too. I'm bitting my nails. I'm very excited about this. =D

* This is the first landing (sorry)

Very nice science and engineering.

"Curiosity is scheduled to land at approximately 10:31 p.m. PDT on Aug. 5 (1:31 a.m. EDT on Aug. 6)."

www.nasa.gov/mars has a countdown clock to landing on Mars.

And when you say your local planetarium will be broadcasting "live", of course that is "as live as possible", given the distance between Mars and Earth. Before we even hear that the spacecraft has touched the top of Mars' atmosphere, Curiosity will have reached the surface - one way or another.

@ Joffan:

That's what "live" means -- Every "live" presentation is limited by the speed of light, and most things you aren't witnessing yourself are transmitted slower than that.

Still, it's fun to think about the fact that the lander is so far away that the delay isn't just noticeable but downright nerve-wracking. :)

Great, if sad, quote from Buzz. But lunar soil was "very similar to our own"? Ummmm... no. Earth soil has organics and water, for starts. Lunar "soil" (regolith) is composed largely of shards of broken glasses and minerals that have been smashed and re-smashed, melted and re-melted from countless impact events. This process is part of why most plants and even bacteria can't grow in lunar regolith (unlike Earth soil): any nutrients are locked up in tough minerals... The list goes on, but lunar regolith is quite different than soil here on Earth.

Separately, before we get too wrapped up in space fanboy glee:

Let's remember that this $2.5 billion, over-budget thing is TWO YEARS LATE getting to Mars, the managers having missed the previous Mars launch window. (Recall that Alan Stern, of Pluto probe New Horizons fame, quit NASA after being overruled on cancelling this program to preserve other space missions that had remained on time and within budget.)

We already had a durable rover design (the MER - Spirit and Opportunity) and a proven delivery system. We could have duplicated them and explored more areas of the planet - and very probably met that launch window. But we had to go to the expensive Martian SUV with the precision rocket pack that will hopefully land successfully and let us more capably explore ... ONE site on the planet. It's a one-off design too expensive to fly again, with a nuclear power source using a plutonium isotope in rapidly-dwindling supply.

Enjoy the Mars pics. They'll likely be the last for a while, thanks in no small part to the juggernaut Opportunity, that has rolled over so many other opportunities.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/msl-costs/

Look at the two new reactors being built, greg.

How many billions over budget and how many years late?

And how late are you to this thread?

If we're going to use lateness to measure failure, epic fail there, greg.

Wow, just wow, Wow. I've written about this previously elsewhere (the industry paper Space News, for one).

The "epic fail", as you put it, will hopefully not be a new $2.5 billion crater on Mars. I feel confident Opportunity will set down okay, people will become enraptured over great pictures and data - and forget all about the cost this Super Rover cost us not just in dollars, or even other worthy space projects, but the future of a sustainable Mars program itself.

What is supposed to be imparted by "I’ve written about this previously elsewhere", Greg?

You've written it twice, so what? If you write it 100 times, it doesn't get any more (or less) right.

And sod a sustainable mars program. We haven't got a sustainable moon program.

And where has all this "oh, it's over budget" gone? It's disappeared because it was pointless. You're right to remove it, since it doesn't make a point, just whines.

Greg, you seem to be getting Opportunity and Curiosity confused. you talk about Opportunity as the proven design, but then talk about how you're confident it will set down and talking about how Opportunity has rolled over other opportunities. Which would be great wordplay if that was the name of the rover you were criticising. :P

Curiosity, if successful, will deliver a ton more science than more Opportunity-style rovers. Which themselves delivered far more science than another Sojourner rover, about which the same statement could be made: Why make Spirit and Opportunity when Sojourner was a proven design? Because we want to move forward.

If you want to finger a NASA project as a waste that is killing other good projects, try the SLS. Nothing but a pork barrel and vastly more expensive than the rovers.

"Wow" - You said my "epic fail" was that I was late to the thread, but I wrote about this shortly after they missed their original launch window deadline. So that's what. And I'm of course I'm completely right in both cases. :P

CB - Yeah, you got me. I realized my error a while after posting. These spacecraft names are starting to become interchangeable. After "Cosmonaut", "Astronaut" and "Taikonaut", a better name for this craft would be "Juggernaut".

I did mean we should have reused the Opportunity design. We could have duplicated it and improved it - maybe a smaller RTG and improved instruments - to explore a lot more interesting places.

The SUV upsizing has backed up the robotic Mars program against the wall. We'll never fly such an expensive thing again, it's hard to see us going back to more modest ground explorations, and the outrageous overruns and mismanagement on Curiousity and JWST mean not much else is going to be happening.

There's $2.5 billion riding on that one landing. And then ... we hopefully get the tons of data you mention on that one location on the planet. And then not much else for a long time.

Debating SLS is just another big rabbit hole. Human spaceflight doesn't have a place? Commercial launch providers will be the salvation of NASA? An open question is whether SLS will survive for very long to begin with.

And by "smaller RTG", I mean smaller than Juggernaut's, er, Curiousity's. Something for nighttime heat and a bit of additional power for survivability.

Greg, you need to go back to school and take remedial english.

I said, and I quote

And how late are you to THIS THREAD, greg?

You've just upped the epic, greg.

Fail hard 2: Fail harder.

Yes, we'll never fly another expensive mission because this one had cost overruns. Just like we never launched this mission after the last expensive mission with cost overruns. That makes a lot of sense.

We don't go for more modest missions because we have immodest goals. If modest replication of previous work was the goal we would have continued launching Pathfinder probes and never made Spirit and Opportunity. But because those two have become a sort of 'default' for Mars exploration, it doesn't occur to you to wonder if the same reasoning doesn't apply to them even when the question is asked.

If MSL is successful, it will become the 'default' and someone will ask the same question about the next rover that does even more. If it is unsuccessful, it will be another unsuccessful Mars mission that didn't stop future missions from being planned and executed.

You're making a lot of completely unwarranted assumptions to come to the conclusion that one way or another this is the last Mars mission.

JWST's overruns can be laid primarily at the feet of Congress for not giving them the money they needed when they needed it. Nevertheless, we will launch more telescopes in the future.

And on that note: The only question for which SLS is the answer is "How can I keep that sweet, sweet Shuttle Program pork funneling into my district?" The impact of the pork launcher on NASA science is ridiculously greater than the impact of an expensive rover.

They can also be lsid at pork barreling.

The efficient choice is removed so thsat the money will be spentin politically advantageous ways to enrich private companies in states with the senators ear.

When did Hans Zimmer start working for NASA?

"Or does that mean the original Viking spacecrafts were contaminated with Earth-based bacteria, and only after the sterilizing heat were we truly examining martian soil?"

IIRC, the contender for best explanation was that it was merely a new soil chemistry.

O2 is given off when you split H2O...

I Know What You Did Last Winter

esiegel — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 05:47:03 +0000

I Know What You Did Last Winter

"You better lose yourself in the music, the moment
You own it, you better never let it go
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow
This opportunity comes once in a lifetime yo" -Eminem

Here on Earth, a cold, frozen winter lasts three months, with the Sun's rays pointed a maximum of 23.5 extra degrees away from your part of the Earth from normal.

On Mars, however, winters are even more severe.

Image credit: Calvin J. Hamilton.

With a slightly more severe axial tilt than Earth, an extra 78 million kilometers separating it from the Sun than our planet, and the coldest season of the year lasting more than 150 days, winters on Mars are a cold, lonely and yet very unique experience.

Image credit: NASA / JPL, Mars Pathfinder, 1999.

With its thin, rarefied atmosphere, the red planet gives us a bluish view of the Sun close to the horizon, a striking demonstration of how alien a world Mars truly is to us. But exploring, even for a robot, is impossible during winter. Even our best-engineered rovers cannot gather enough sunlight to power themselves during the winter, and need to hibernate.

Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell, and yes, this is a synthetic image.

Even the Opportunity rover, my favorite mission to the red planet, needs to go into hibernation every martian winter. Now in its unprecedented 9th year of operation on Mars, Opportunity has come farther than any human spacecraft ever has on the surface of another planet. Since January 25, 2004, Opportunity has traveled more than 34 kilometers in distance, powered only by the distant Sun.

Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS.

And while we're currently less than a month away from Curiosity -- the next-generation in Mars roving -- touching down on our desert-like neighbor, Opportunity has just awakened from its fifth Martian winter, at the rim of the largest crater ever visited by a rover on any world.

Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / Arizona State Univ.

While I'm in "sleep mode," I'm completely useless. But for this incredible workhorse of a rover, it used this time to snap an 817-snapshot panorama, which has been stitched together into the largest, most impressive landscape of Mars I've ever seen.