NASA astronauts to fly Orion spacecraft into deep space

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What a waste of tax payer dollars. They should be researching climate change, and improving relations with Muslim countries.
 
Dammit, every time I read one of these threads I want to go play Homeworld 2. Every. Time. I love space so much.
 
Snaku said:
What a waste of tax payer dollars. They should be researching climate change, and improving relations with Muslim countries.

I know right. How dare they fund different branches of science. I mean it's not like funding other departments like astrophysics ever gave us something useful to help us down here on the Earth.

It's not like a physicist who was an expert in atomic nuclei wondering how you would detect certain things in interstellar space brought about the understanding of nuclear magnetic resonance which is a key part in the development of the MRI machine.

Most of the greatest applications of science to improve the human condition don't come from the kind of research aimed at that. In the case of the MRI, it was biomedical engineers basing their patents and machine principles on physics, discovered by an astrophysicist.

N.B. The Physicist was observing viscosities in accretion disks (inferred from binary systems with high accretion rates).
 
Snaku said:
What a waste of tax payer dollars. They should be researching climate change, and improving relations with Muslim countries.
if it wasn't for space exploration we'd be even more clueless on climate change.
 
mrklaw said:
1) giant fucking planets just floating about? How come we've not seen evidence of them smashing into stuff yet?

Our view of much of the rest of our galaxy is blocked by.......the rest of the galaxy :(
 
MrDanger88 said:
I really hope I'm still alive when they put a man on Mars. Space fascinates me to no end.
How old are you? If you're in your 20s or 30s, I would say the chances are very good.
 
mrklaw said:
nah. why bother?

Outside of the solar system - by whatever definition you choose - there is fuck all of interest. If you can only just leave it, then the only reason to do so is to say you can. No practical benefit I can think of. The only reason to go any further than any of the planets is if you can get to the next system, and that isn't going to be possible without some random huge jump in technology and people willing to live their entire lives on a ship.
"Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive. And once you're out there in space for centuries and millennia, moving little worlds around and engineering planets, your species has been pried loose from its cradle. If they exist, many other civilizations will eventually venture far from home."

"The moon was where the tree of immortality grew in ancient Chinese myth. The tree of longevity if not of immortality, it seems, indeed grows on other worlds. If we were up there among the planets, if there were self-sufficient human communities on many worlds, our species would be insulated from catastrophe. The depletion of the ultraviolet-absorbing shield on one world would, if anything, be a warning to take special care of the shield on another. A cataclysmic impact on one world would likely leave all the others untouched. The more of us beyond the Earth, the greater the diversity of worlds we inhabit, the more varied the planetary engineering, the greater the range of societal standards and values—then the safer the human species will be."

-Carl Sagan

It's in our best interest to have a wider presence in space. I realize you're not disputing that in regards to our Solar System. But, our sun will eventually die. Even if it's not until a few billion years, there will be people willing to live lives on a ship if the human race is in danger from AI, depleted resources, or a catastrophe in this solar system.

Maybe the mission is to terraform a planet in a close solar system since Mars was successfully terraformed. Or to colonize an Earth like one.

To say there is fuck all of interest is completely and utterly wrong.
 
ThoseDeafMutes said:
Well we made it through the cold war unscathed, the next and greatest challenge will be to deal with the emergence of posthuman intelligences, particularly strong artificial intelligence. This is something we're going to have to deal with in our lifetimes, although we may be quite old before it happens depending on how Moore's law holds up.

Surviving this, at least someone will have the capability to travel to distant stars with regularity. Whether that's an A.I., a human dictator or a posthuman swarm intelligence is basically up in the air, but somebody will.

lol the next greatest challenge will be not blow ourselves up or permanently fucking up our nature shield against death rays from the sun before we make a strong AI.
 
Deku said:
It will be closer to Star Wars or the more recent actiony Treks.

Classic Trek is too idealistic to be realistic, even if you assume we have the tech.

Itll be Deep Space Nine.

And Im ok with that.
 
mrklaw said:
1) giant fucking planets just floating about? How come we've not seen evidence of them smashing into stuff yet?

I know that you probably can not grasp the true scale of this fact, but EMPTY SPACE BETWEEN THE STARS IS REAAAAALY BIG.

2) they'd still be so far away from the edge of the solar system that my point still stands. Probably quicker to get to proxima centauri than one of these planets.

If jupiter size planets can be ejected from their solar sistems, then smaller planets can be ejected far more easily.


http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/b...may-swarm-with-billions-of-wandering-planets/
...In fact, these free-floaters may outnumber "regular" planets by a factor of 1.5 or so. There are more of them than there are of us!

Mind you, the MOA survey is sensitive to planets with masses about that of Jupiter. They can’t see smaller planets, which should in fact be more common
....
 
LOL deep space my ass, my local bus service could drive to mars, Fucking lazy Nasa
 
Fenderputty said:
Being able to bend space and time is possible though right? At least I thought it was. I have no idea about the "hows", but I would imagine the energies invovled in something like that is beyond comprehension.
Bending space time is as SF as creating a warp engine :D
Fenderputty said:
Isn't a wormhole different than bending space time though?
Wormholes are 'bending space time'. Unless you found a new concept in which case, write a paper, publish it, get fame and money :D
Wray said:
I believe Einstein left open the possibility.
Stephen Hawking closed it :P
ThoseDeafMutes said:
That's the most deeply insulting thing anybody has said to me in weeks.
What, you think Ray Kurzweil is sane? You seriously think all the crap he says? AIs within our lifetime, eternal life as machines etc... Whatever, after all everybody is free to think whatever they want.
mrklaw said:
1) giant fucking planets just floating about? How come we've not seen evidence of them smashing into stuff yet?
We won't be able to observe them, unless they're near a light/heat source (a star). So we simply cannot observe them.
 
Alright so what other countries are stepping up to take humanity back to the moon or to mars? America was so determined back in the '60s to be the best and get this shit done, I'm very disappointed that Obama made those cuts and now we wont see anymore flights after the last shuttle launch for years and years.

I have to see humans land on mars and a moon base in my lifetime.
 
Aside from a lack of profitability I noted earlier, any sort of extensive human space exploration is hindered by the cost, safety, and time it takes to launch anything into LEO. Last I heard, it costs $5,000-$10,000 to launch one pound of anything into space, it can take years to schedule a launch (not surprising with how complicated a rocket launch is and how easily it can all go wrong), and safety is self explanatory. We need to find a way to get into LEO without rockets, or at least not be totally dependent on them.
 
Averon said:
Aside from a lack of profitability I noted earlier, any sort of extensive human space exploration is hindered by the cost, safety, and time it takes to launch anything into LEO. Last I heard, it costs $5,000-$10,000 to launch one pound of anything into space, it can take years to scheduled a launch (not surprising with how complicated a rocket launched and how easily it can all go wrong), and safety is self explanatory. We need to fight a way into LEO without rockets, or at least not be totally dependent on them.
What about a Mass Driver?
 
What, you think Ray Kurzweil is sane? You seriously think all the crap he says? AIs within our lifetime, eternal life as machines etc... Whatever, after all everybody is free to think whatever they want.[/quote[

First of all, work on your reading comprehension. You just compared me to Kurzweil, and then I said that was insulting. So why would you take that to mean I looked up to the man?

Secondly, his schedule is accelerated and he is overly optimistic, but strong A.I. in my lifetime (maybe you're 60 years old or something so you won't see it) is the opposite of crazy. Everything else falls into line once strong A.I. is in place, advanced nanotechnology, Theory of Everything, biological immortality etc.

Hard A.I. inevitably gives rise to increasingly intelligent agents, as outlined by I.J. Good:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion', and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.


That is to say, once Strong A.I. exists, everything that will ever be invented will be invented in a very short timescale (depending on how long recursive self improvement takes, this could be as short as days or weeks).

X-Frame said:
What about a Mass Driver?

Go hard or go home.

  • Laser ablative propulsion
  • Nuclear pulsed propulsion
  • Nuclear verne gun
  • Lofstrom Launch Loop
 
I'm sorry but you won't see a Strong A.I. during your lifetime. Maybe a lot later, but i just can't see it happen in the next 100 years. Unless, there's a breakthrough.

edit: i'm sorry, scratch that. We don't need a breakthrough, we need several, in different scinetific fields. For starters we don't even have a widely accepted definition for intelligence. Secondly, we don't understand how the brain works in its entirety. Nobody knows how intelligence is formed. Not knowing things like this, makes it pretty hard to copy the brain.

I want it to happen as much as you do. I just don't see it happen. Wouldn't mind if someone proves me wrong though :)
 
I'm not disagreeing with the need or desire to explore beyond the boundaries of the solar system. Just that I don't think it'll happen in the timescales being discussed here. Unless there is a huge leap in technology.
 
mrklaw said:
1) giant fucking planets just floating about? How come we've not seen evidence of them smashing into stuff yet?
Because it would be like 2 gnats "smashing" into each other in the grand canyon.
 
shuyin_ said:
I'm sorry but you won't see a Strong A.I. during your lifetime. Maybe a lot later, but i just can't see it happen in the next 100 years. Unless, there's a breakthrough.

edit: i'm sorry, scratch that. We don't need a breakthrough, we need several, in different scinetific fields. For starters we don't even have a widely accepted definition for intelligence. Secondly, we don't understand how the brain works in its entirety. Nobody knows how intelligence is formed. Not knowing things like this, makes it pretty hard to copy the brain.

I want it to happen as much as you do. I just don't see it happen. Wouldn't mind if someone proves me wrong though :)

No duh we need breakthroughs. If we didn't need breakthroughs we would be able to build them right now. Your objections amount to "we don't know how to do it yet", to which I can only state "who ever said we did?" I am well aware of the enormous challenges that face A.I. researchers, especially given that this is an area of great personal interest to me and it's one of the things I've structured my degree around (shame UTAS only offers one undergraduate course on A.I., I can't do any more now until postgrad. Doing some stuff with human intelligence next semester though!)

For reference, I am 20 years old. I have a good 50 years left in me at minimum barring accidents or brain cancer or some such (no family history, my grandparents are in their 80's / 90's right now, but you never know). Life extension also happens to be a field that has a bright future ahead of it, so my life could even be far longer than that. By the 2030's, supercomputers should be outperforming brains in raw calculations per second. Assuming moore's law doesn't hold out that long, we can shift this date to the 2040's. Assuming there is a magical block that prevents computers from ever matching human brains (there isn't, but for argument's sake), then the strong A.I. will just come in a different form - a synthetic brain made of the same stuff ours are, larger than our own, with general processors scattered around amongst the neurons for precision calculations.

The 20+ years it will take for hardware to catch up to the brain is time for neuroscience and computer science to catch up and develop the software side of things. This might take far less than the time it has, or it might take longer. Either way, I can't see this taking 50 years, not even close. Personally, my money is on 30ish years from now.
 
Deku said:
It is getting closer by 100 to 140 kilometres per second :P
So basically it will be here in 300000 * 3600 * 24 * 365 * 2.5 / 140 million seconds?

With a little bit of patience we don't even have to travel.
 
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