It’s been exhilarating how far we’ve come in new space discoveries the past few years: landing on comets, interstellar space satellites (Voyager), full detail of Pluto which was such a fucking enigma my whole life, lots of very cool things. My last wish isn’t colonizing another world. It’s simply finding something organic that’s not on this planet. It doesnt have to be alive, even for the last half billion years. But SOMETHING that was alive, right down to bacteria. Something that shows that life wasn’t simply stuck on this one very wet rock that we can only live on a small part of.
Sun stuff https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/preparing-for-discovery-with-nasas-parker-solar-probe
I know a ton of the news is about SpaceX when they do stuff, but Virgin Galactic is sneaking in there a bit lately. Very cool:
Good for Branson. That has been a LONG time in the making. They used to keep one of the failed “commercial” space rockets stored at a baseball diamond up by Fanshawe Park. It looked it was straight out of The Quatermass Xperiment. I would NOT be going on a day-glo V2 rocket into space, thanks.
China on the moon. https://www.space.com/42883-china-first-landing-moon-far-side.html Honestly, I didn't realize that China had previously landed equipment on the moon.
Such a bizarre shape for a heavenly body. On the other hand, Halley’s Comet bears a similar shape when it doesn’t have its ice/dust tail.
We just now finished watching the episode of NOVA about how this was discovered and the effort that went into doing the fly by. Truly amazing. When it was over I said to my wife rhat it seems like just when you start to wonder what NASA is doing with all that time and money, they come out with stuff like this. And they've been hitting it out of the park the last few years. I'd like to see us go back to the moon, if only to see live broadcasts in higher definition.
Another wonderful thing about this new era of space travel is that high-tech high-def puts every citizen where the action is. When we DO land on surfaces of new moons/worlds, we’ll get to watch and see what it truly looks like and SOUNDS like. Europa is the one I’m most excited about. It’s an ocean moon jacketed with ice and a thin oxygen atmosphere. Who knows what’s under that surface, but if extraterrestrials exist in this solar system, that’s the one other place they could live.
Anything down to microscopic things such as bacteria and single-cell organisms. Plants, perhaps. Something that simply is alive, or was alive; and that’s not of this planet. Or something new that we can’t imagine because we have no concept of it. And does it contain the same sort of structure and compounds as things on earth?
The most interesting discovery in that regard is the arsenic-based life that was found in California a few years ago.
It should have been a way bigger deal than it was. For me, someone that has zero education in science, its the most compelling argument for aliens.
I live by the popular philosophy of “There’s no way we’re alone with that much out there”. If I had to guess there’s probably at least fifty thousand planets out there with Earth-like sustainment. We’ll just never see them or hear from them in our lifetime unless new theories/laws are discovered.
Heh. According to the estimates they made off Kepler data, its closer to 40 Billion in the Milky Way alone.
And there’s at least 150 billion galaxies. Some 200,000 times the size of the Milky Way. If all humans truly knew (or accepted) how insignificant Earth was.... everyone gets laid. There is no As Above, So Below. Just a big, mostly empty...thing. And the only ones who could be watching us is ourselves. But to those who think things are going to eventually get all Hitchhiker’s Guide in their lifetime..... well, to get a hockey puck up to light speed we’d have to suck the entire Earth’s energy dry for a week. And it would hit the next closest star in five years. We are staying here.