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Space: The Final Frontier

Mengy

Mengy

wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
A27 Tawpgun said:
Why would physics stop you? Physics would be the weapon.

Fly a rocket to an asteroid. Push it along and aim it at a city from orbit.
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o_O

Um, yeah, that would be one hell of a rocket...

Honestly, if you had the technology to do something like that, you wouldn't need the asteroid.
 
E

Elfforkusu

Member
A27 Tawpgun said:
I think you could use a rocket no different than the Saturn. A modification to maybe land it head first. No gravity does wonders.
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Asteroids (even the small ones) are freaking heavy, and the Saturn V (being the most powerful machine ever built by man, mind you) was designed to barely get a small pod out of earth's gravity well. All its fuel was burned up just getting the astronauts into space.

There's not a rocket that exists now, in material form or even on a drawing board, that can do a "point and shoot" style redirection of an asteroid.

Dropping an asteroid on earth by way of propulsion guidance might be plausible with the so called Interplanetary Transport Network, but there you're setting something in motion decades in advance, and hitting a city at all (much less the one you were targeting) is going to be entirely left to not-very-good chance.
 
T

ThoseDeafMutes

Member
A27 Tawpgun said:
Serious question.

I know we can't have nukes or other weapons in space...

But legally, is there anything stopping anyone from using asteroids as weapons?
Click to expand...


Outer Space Treaty of 1967, article IV:

The moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manoeuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden.
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Asteroids are considered to be "celestial bodies", and using them as weapons would certainly violate the "for peaceful purposes" clause. Lawyers might be able to make a case for classifying militarized asteroids as WMDs, which would violate additional clauses in the same treaty, although this might be slightly tricky because peaceful asteroid mining equipment can pull double duty and steer asteroids into Earth in a military capacity.
 
wolfmat

wolfmat

Confirmed Asshole
Dr. Feel Good said:
Maybe a little off topic, but hypothetically if a nation blew up the moon what would happen to Earth? Would that kill off humanity?
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Well, there is no nation that can blow up the moon. At all. But if such a thing happened, the tides would change, at the very least, which would alter the global climate significantly. And a significant amount of debris would fall on Earth if you assume a blowup in all directions, which would register as crazy amounts of fallout, with the associated consequences. Lots of radioactivity, lots of dust, lots of impact shock waves, shit like that. I'd say it's pretty likely we'd all be dead.
 
E

Escape Goat

Member
There was an episode about the moon and what would happen if it were to disappear. I totally forget everything they said now. Maybe I'll watch that before bed tonight. Its on Netflix.
 
O

orientalNoodle

Banned
wolfmat said:
Well, there is no nation that can blow up the moon. At all. But if such a thing happened, the tides would change, at the very least, which would alter the global climate significantly. And a significant amount of debris would fall on Earth if you assume a blowup in all directions, which would register as crazy amounts of fallout, with the associated consequences. Lots of radioactivity, lots of dust, lots of impact shock waves, shit like that. I'd say it's pretty likely we'd all be dead.
Click to expand...

Naw Earth will just get a nice ring around it like big bro Saturn.
 
S

Snakeyes

Member
A27 Tawpgun said:
Serious question.

I know we can't have nukes or other weapons in space...

But legally, is there anything stopping anyone from using asteroids as weapons?
Click to expand...

Yeah, just like others have said. But dropping an asteroid would probably be catastrophic for the attacking nation as well.
 
S

Scrow

Still Tagged Accordingly
The moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manoeuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden.
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i don't understand why they don't make treaties like this apply to Earth too....
 
T

ThoseDeafMutes

Member
Scrow said:
i don't understand why they don't make treaties like this apply to Earth too....
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Nobody would agree to them, and if they did, nobody would choose to be bound by them whenever it wasn't convenient. The fact that space-warfare is so expensive (even by military standards) and the technology to undertake it isn't here yet are the only reasons that anybody even signed these treaties to begin with.

Regardless, even here on Earth right now, nobody starts "unjustified" wars of aggression or conquest anymore. They try to paint just about everything as a defense of peace, stability, freedom or sovereignty, even when it's clearly just a flimsy pretext.
 
A

AAequal

Banned
Serious Blow to Dark Matter Theories?
The most accurate study so far of the motions of stars in the Milky Way has found no evidence for dark matter in a large volume around the Sun. According to widely accepted theories, the solar neighbourhood was expected to be filled with dark matter, a mysterious invisible substance that can only be detected indirectly by the gravitational force it exerts. But a new study by a team of astronomers in Chile has found that these theories just do not fit the observational facts. This may mean that attempts to directly detect dark matter particles on Earth are unlikely to be successful.

A team using the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory, along with other telescopes, has mapped the motions of more than 400 stars up to 13 000 light-years from the Sun. From this new data they have calculated the mass of material in the vicinity of the Sun, in a volume four times larger than ever considered before.

“The amount of mass that we derive matches very well with what we see — stars, dust and gas — in the region around the Sun,” says team leader Christian Moni Bidin (Departamento de Astronomía, Universidad de Concepción, Chile). “But this leaves no room for the extra material — dark matter — that we were expecting. Our calculations show that it should have shown up very clearly in our measurements. But it was just not there!”

Dark matter is a mysterious substance that cannot be seen, but shows itself by its gravitational attraction for the material around it. This extra ingredient in the cosmos was originally suggested to explain why the outer parts of galaxies, including our own Milky Way, rotated so quickly, but dark matter now also forms an essential component of theories of how galaxies formed and evolved.

Today it is widely accepted that this dark component constitutes about the 80% of the mass in the Universe [1], despite the fact that it has resisted all attempts to clarify its nature, which remains obscure. All attempts so far to detect dark matter in laboratories on Earth have failed.

By very carefully measuring the motions of many stars, particularly those away from the plane of the Milky Way, the team could work backwards to deduce how much matter is present [2]. The motions are a result of the mutual gravitational attraction of all the material, whether normal matter such as stars, or dark matter.

Astronomers’ existing models of how galaxies form and rotate suggest that the Milky Way is surrounded by a halo of dark matter. They are not able to precisely predict what shape this halo takes, but they do expect to find significant amounts in the region around the Sun. But only very unlikely shapes for the dark matter halo — such as a highly elongated form — can explain the lack of dark matter uncovered in the new study [3].

The new results also mean that attempts to detect dark matter on Earth by trying to spot the rare interactions between dark matter particles and “normal” matter are unlikely to be successful.

“Despite the new results, the Milky Way certainly rotates much faster than the visible matter alone can account for. So, if dark matter is not present where we expected it, a new solution for the missing mass problem must be found. Our results contradict the currently accepted models. The mystery of dark matter has just become even more mysterious. Future surveys, such as the ESA Gaia mission, will be crucial to move beyond this point.” concludes Christian Moni Bidin.
Notes

[1] According to current theories dark matter is estimated to constitute 83% of the matter in the Universe with the remaining 17% in the form of normal matter. A much larger amount of dark energy also seems present in the Universe, but is not expected to affect the motions of the stars within the Milky Way.

[2] The observations were made using the FEROS spectrograph on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope, the Coralie instrument on the Swiss 1.2-metre Leonhard Euler Telescope, the MIKE instrument on the Magellan II Telescope and the Echelle Spectrograph on the Irene du Pont Telescope. The first two telescopes are located at ESO’s La Silla Observatory and the latter two telescopes are located at the Las Campanas Observatory, both in Chile. A total of more than 400 red giant stars at widely differing heights above the plane of the galaxy in the direction towards the south galactic pole were included in this work.

[3] Theories predict that the average amount of dark matter in the Sun’s part of the galaxy should be in the range 0.4-1.0 kilograms of dark matter in a volume the size of the Earth. The new measurements find 0.00±0.07 kilograms of dark matter in a volume the size of the Earth.
More information

This research was presented in a paper, “Kinematical and chemical vertical structure of the Galactic thick disk II. A lack of dark matter in the solar neighborhood”, by Moni-Bidin et al. to appear in The Astrophysical Journal.
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http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1217/
 
E

Escape Goat

Member
RSP said:
Do you know which show it was?
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Its The Universe from the history channel. its season 4 or 3 I believe. They talk about all the crazy shit that would happen if the moon blinked out of existence.

The Day the Moon Was Gone

Premiere Date: 08/25/2009

Without the moon, Earth would be a very different and desolate place today--four hours of sunlight with pitch-black nights, steady 100-mph winds spawning giant hurricanes that last for months, and virtually no complex life forms, much less humans. Safe to say, we probably owe our very existence to the moon. But what if it suddenly disappeared? Solar gravity redirects ocean water that floods coastal spots around the globe. Sea currents shift, resulting in freakish weather patterns. Eventually, earth's axis begins fluctuating wildly and climate change grows more extreme. The poles are tropical jungles and parts of the equator become frigid wastelands. Human evolution starts churning in unpredictable ways or ends completely. Without the moon, the Earth is a very different place.
TVPG
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http://www.history.com/shows/the-universe/episodes/season-4#slide-11
 
W

WeAreStarStuff

Member
A

AAequal

Banned
How the Hubble Space Telescope's stunning colour images are created - video
Since its launch in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has captured half a million images – in black and white. Zoltan Levay of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, reveals how his team creates the spectacular colour pictures we know. He also explains how the finished images are interpreted to unlock the secrets of vast galactic clouds of dust and gas, and tell the story of the birth and death of stars
Click to expand...

Awesome! Short but awesome.
 
K

Kyaw

Member
orientalNoodle said:
If the earth is no longer rotates on it's axis, would the tide causes by the moon still work?

Debating this with my friend. I am saying no.
Click to expand...

Need more information. The earth has stopped rotating but is the moon orbiting around the earth?

If both are stationary, then you'll get a permanent sea rise on the side facing the moon.

Doesn't matter whether Earth is orbiting the sun or not.
 
O

orientalNoodle

Banned
Kyaw said:
Need more information. The earth has stopped rotating but is the moon orbiting around the earth?

If both are stationary, then you'll get a permanent sea rise on the side facing the moon.

Doesn't matter whether Earth is orbiting the sun or not.
Click to expand...

The earth still rotates around the sun and the moon still rotates around the earth. It is just that the earth is no longer rotate on it's axis.
 
E

endre

Member
I don't see why not. The tide is caused (in a great part) by the moons gravitational pull, and the moon is changing its position relative to Earth.
 
B

Brolic Gaoler

formerly Alienshogun
Nasa picture
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1009/venusmoon_pascual_big.jpg

venusmoon_pascual_big.jpg
Click to expand...
 
G

Gregorn

Member
Oh my god, fuel depot in space.

Working on that station is going to be my job, I'll get to listen to all the stories from the space travellers. It'll basically be Mos Eisley.
 
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