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Frankenstyle posted:There really should be a penalty system for short shortsightedness on these things. Hell, even back on the Viking lander the test was all freaky. The cliff notes to that are that they'd decided "If the test for life gives result X it's a positive, and if it does Z it's a negative" and in the end it gave weird rear end results that didn't quite fit X or Z so the said "gently caress it, nevermind". And with all the poo poo they've chucked up there since they still haven't put much concerted effort into figuring out what the gently caress was going on back in 1976. I don't think you do get that, or how designing the things works in the first place. An instrument that can test for a huge variety of things to cover all the bases will not only be too bulky, but it just wouldn't get funded. There has to be a near guarantee on results (either positive or negative) for them to be approved, they won't let you put a space bee detector on because "maybe there will be some". First you'd have to observe some signature that at the very least suggests their existence, and then and only then can you start applying for funding to design your bee detector. As for "not putting much concerted effort into it", they gladly would if people would vote more for politicians that actually want to increase NASA's funding.
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Jun 27, 2017 16:56
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Frankenstyle posted:Yeh. That's why I pointed out the lack of direct follow up on a specific curiosity that reared it's head forty years ago. Valid projects get turned down all the time. I can't say for sure but I would be willing to bet it was applied for and other missions were given higher priority.
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Jun 27, 2017 17:03
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Decebal posted:Seems to me like "finding life" is only an afterthought at NASA or somewhere around 20% interest. Every time they launch something is to "test the rock composition that will tell us about the beginning of the Solar System" or " analyze the cloud structure on Saturn so we can send a cool picture of some gas" It's an incremental process. They are working toward those big picture questions, but even if you had unlimited funding it's not clear how you would just design an instrument that would definitively answer the question about whether there is life or not. You can't skip steps in science. You have to start from what we know - we know there is life on earth, we know our solar system is a certain way, so the logical next step is to search for similar systems. We are doing that and is one of the main goals of the Kepler mission, and the answer seems to be that yes, there are some similar systems to ours. Now the question is whether any of the planets have atmospheres that could hypothetically support life, and unfortunately for the public that requires "boring" spectroscopy. If we find a promising candidate from that then there are several possible further steps you'd have to take up to and including sending a probe to find out for sure. The point is you can't just jump to that last step and launch probes with life detecting capabilities in random directions. You'd never find anything. Space is really really huge, you have to be extremely specific about your targets. Exciting the public is one thing but we can't lie to you and promise things that just aren't realistic.
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Jun 30, 2017 18:01
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Also there have been ideas for missions to Europa for years. I don't think you realize how complicated it would be to send a probe capable of drilling through the ice and reaching the ocean, let alone detecting anything once you do that would be. Titan was easy compared to that kind of mission. If you ever experienced the bureaucracy involved with doing science while working for the government, you'd be a little more forgiving of how slow it is. Criticize the government, not the scientists. They want to find out all the cool stuff just as much as you do.
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Jun 30, 2017 18:12
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Honestly I don't know why we aren't spending our trillions of dollars on space weapons. No country could fight it once we had it in place and whatever space weapon we could build is surely better than the F35. If we control space we control the world.
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Jun 30, 2017 20:45
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