A vast number of accounts call for the world to end on December 21, 2012
Well here it is, late December, 2012, a date long awaited by doomsday theorists, a time when many believe our world will end. Others, more optimistic, tell us they anticipate the beginning of a great new era, a time of introspection, cleansing, and cosmic awareness.Still, the general feeling is that our world will end, specifically and exactly, on December 21, 2012. Dare we take these end of the world soothsayers lightly? In China and Russia, as well as in the United States, merchants are seeing sales of shelter supplies increase. In France, many devotees are planning a mountain-top convergence to await the aliens from space.…
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26 - Jet Gardner
I take that back Doc, This was posted yesterday, and bears a remarkablr resemblance to the image I posted in 2006
Click here
27 - Jet Gardner
Or this? image posted yesterday.
If I posted the wrong image 6 years ago a lot of people who posted within the last few days and copied mine are going to have red faces!
28 - Dr Dreadful
Sorry again, Jet. The local news station's caption notwithstanding, that's the main belt asteroid Ida, also the subject of a Galileo flyby in 1993.
Ida is interesting. See that little dot on the extreme right of the photo in your link? That's Dactyl, Ida's tiny moon. Before Galileo, it was generally assumed that asteroids' gravity was too weak for them to have moons. Now, over 200 are known to possess them.
29 - John Lake
Re # 20, Doc D.,
I am waxing outspoken today, so…. I do think the space program for the most part is a profit producing application for politicians and power groups. Having said that, I’m sure that students are benefiting from the program, but they are still prompted into pointless Quantum physics classes in a field they are unlikely to ever work. They might do better in biochemistry, or some area of health-care.
Weather prediction, navigation, communication are all important, as is a wide range of military areas. But spending billions to rove about mars is a pointless expense, and we already have sufficient telescopes pondering the universe. As to the forthcoming (ongoing?) scam of mining asteroids, proponents agree there will be little to gain for several decades.
Yes, Jet, I’m here, but I find myself with less time to work on my liberal blogging, and related tasks.
30 - Jet Gardner
LIBERAL?????
31 - Dr Dreadful
John, nobody said anything about Mars or asteroid mining. Those are just your straw men, although I could have a separate and spirited argument about them with you as well. Your suggestion was that the space program was something that could be entirely set aside in order to assist economic recovery. As I showed you, such a course of action would have precisely the opposite effect.
32 - John Lake
As I see it, mineral deposit detection has to refer to one of the two fields you claim were unmentioned.
I don't see your comments on the clandestine motivations of politicians, or on the urging of students to study the motion of sub-atomic particles, misnamed in some cases .... for example, the notorious "God particle." (A new can of worms,entirely)
33 - Dr Dreadful
As I see it, mineral deposit detection has to refer to one of the two fields you claim were unmentioned.
No, no, no. Satellites are used to detect mineral deposits here on Earth.
I don't see your comments on the clandestine motivations of politicians, or on the urging of students to study the motion of sub-atomic particles
Which again are wild cards you introduced and have nothing to do with the economics of the space program.
misnamed in some cases .... for example, the notorious "God particle." (A new can of worms,entirely)
Scientists refer to it as the Higgs boson while journalists are the ones who insist on perpetuating the "God particle" nickname. Again, can't see what this has to do with space.
34 - Dr Dreadful
And Jet - I'm afraid you and your readers are just going to have to be red-faced. You can blame news editors and bloggers who want a photo to go with their stories about how a giant rock is going to turn us all into space blancmange. Unfortunately, the best images we currently have of Apophis are pixellated blobs, which don't look too good on the nightly news. So they look around for something sexier (just for illustrative purposes, you understand), and it just so happens that Galileo's shots of Gaspra and Ida are some of the best close-up pictures of asteroids we have. Then the bloke in the newsroom who does the captions and knows bugger all about astronomy gets his wires crossed and thinks it actually is a photo of Apophis, and that's how the whole thing starts.
35 - John Lake
Satellites used to detect mineral deposits here on Earth. Imagine that!
My overriding point is that the space program (and particle accelerators) can be placed on the back burner, indefinitely, with no damage being done.
The tie in is that the bits and pieces sold by manufacturers for the space program are made by the same agents that sell for the accelerators. Both produce extreme profit, and are somewhat pointless.
The Swiss accelerator clearly supports that matter at the speed of light pulses and shifts between energy, matter. This is an important discovery to theorists, I don't dispute.
36 - Dr Dreadful
John, from a position of ignorance it simply isn't possible to determine whether a particular field of inquiry is pointless or not. That's why we do science.
I imagine there were a lot of people who thought Michael Faraday was wasting his time fiddling with electricity. And what about the Curies buggering about with poisonous metals? How pointless must that have seemed?
For my money, it takes an extravagantly Luddite sort of outlook to decide that exploring the fundamentals of how our universe is put together counts as a "somewhat pointless" exercise.
37 - John Lake
Done in good faith, I agree. Done for profit and with false declarations of intent, I don't agree.
38 - Igor
DD is right: no matter what it looks like or how it's justified, basic science research is the key to our futures and our very survival.
Scientists don't get rich on their projects. If they wanted to get rich they would become financial and banking operators, which requires less knowledge, learning and sacrifice.
39 - John Lake
Good news! : According to scientists, Apophis in 2036, now seen as being larger than previously believed, will be somewhat farther away, and not a threat.
‘“Certainly 2036 is ruled out," said Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near Earth Object Program. "It's why we track them so we can be assured that they won't get dangerously close." Yeomans said now the asteroid, named after an evil Egyptian mythical serpent, won't get closer than 19,400 miles. That's still the closest approach asteroid watchers have seen for a rock this large. And when astronomers got a closer look they noticed it was about 180 feet larger than they thought, but not a threat.’
40 - Dr Dreadful
As I reported on this thread yesterday...
Fox News, on the ball as usual. :-)