I AM GRANDO posted:

Yeah I don’t know, it kind of seems like a sloppy troll, turning criticism of ufo beliefs back on an empirical endeavor deemed reasonable by people who dismiss ufo beliefs as lacking in evidence. Who knows for sure?

DrSunshine posted:

The Article posted:

More than a week after accidentally cutting off communications with the Voyager 2 probe, NASA officials heard a hopeful signal that may allow them to reestablish contact with the interstellar traveler months ahead of schedule.

With the "heartbeat" confirmed, NASA will next try and send a command back to Voyager 2 to coax the probe into angling its antenna back toward Earth. Typically, it takes about 18.5 hours for a command to reach Voyager 2, and another 18.5 hours for Earth to receive a transmission back from the probe, according to Scientific American, so we may know its fate in the next two days.

If the forced realignment fails, Voyager 2 is expected to reset its antenna to the Earth-facing position on Oct. 15, in one of a planned series of auto-resets that occur throughout the year.

DrSunshine posted:

That's too bad. I feel like I'm a little sad whenever any country loses a probe. On the small silver lining, we do tend to lose them more often than not. I think I recall a statistic somewhere that lander missions have the lowest success rates?

Rappaport posted:

Apparently I just can't deal with Google anymore , so I pose my question to the thread: What is the projected life-time of Nixon's signature on the Moon? Presumably the solar wind will erode it at some time-scale, but how long is that?

space.com posted:

From past studies of moon rocks collected by astronauts during the Apollo missions, researchers have learned that the rocks erode at a rate of about 0.04 inches every 1 million years.

dr_rat posted:

I like when space test don't kill adorable pets!

Also that sounds like it could be really useful. I remember looking up the bandwidth we have available communicating with Mars and telescopes space ways and stuff, and yeah it's really not all that much, which for some stuff can be really limiting. Like for the James Webb Telescope, it seems like the speed it can send information is actually a bit of a limiting factor in how much it can be utilized.

Rappaport posted:

Another Moon mission launched today:

The tiny rovers sound adorable, but do we really need bitcoin in space?

Rappaport posted:

I understand that we live in the Bad Timeline since Marty and Doc didn't assassinate Ronald when he was a GE propaganda man, but it's the principle of the thing. As much as I'd rather sub-Lunar space not be turned into an eternal robotic battle-ground à la Lem's dystopias, I'd also prefer some random billionaire doesn't fund a space program with the caveat they carve Hitler's face on the Moon as a sideproject or what have you.

Of course the cynical response to the realist view is to say you shipped the buttcoin coin up there, but really didn't. What are the coiners going to do, go up there to check?

DrSunshine posted:

I think one of the benefits of human space exploration comes from subjective information, actually. A robot can send back telemetry, data, samples, and so on, but what does it feel like to stand on the surface of Mars? To watch the sun rise from 180 million kilometers? To see the sunlight reflect off the wispy dry ice clouds? A future Mars mission should have an artist, writer, or poet onboard, honestly.

That said, what I meant was the Alpha Centauri probe shouldn't be expected to be a one human lifespan kind of deal. I didn't mean "Generation Ship", hah.

DrSunshine posted:

Alright folks, new goon project: let's build an Alpha Centauri rocket with a stack of used HDDs.

ashpanash posted:

It's hard to express how wrong the conspiracy-filled are about scientists. The assumption that we ignore things because of dogma couldn't be further from the truth. There's little that would excite a scientist more than evidence of contact with aliens.

I grant that we are a fickle bunch. Our requirements for what qualifies as "good evidence" have high standards. But give us that evidence? Far from being embarrassed at being wrong, we'd be celebrating how right you are. We know we're wrong to some extent, that's literally the point of science, correcting what's wrong about our knowledge. Give us some new insight and we'll give you a prize. Overthrow our best theory with one with better evidence and we'll celebrate you for as long as we exist. We'll name elements and units of measurement after you. People will debate which ideas of yours were correct and which were wrong for ages. Scientists aren't your enemies; prove your claim and scientists will be your bitches.

No one wants to be shown how wrong they are more than scientists. But on the other hand, no one is dicked around with about these ideas more than scientists. It gets pretty tiresome when a community keeps announcing that they have evidence, convincing evidence, and it'll blow your mind, just wait until you see it...and then never delivers. This dance isn't new. Thinking you've got the truth and believing you've got the truth isn't the same thing as demonstrating that you've got the truth. But once again, I can't stress this enough: there's nothing we'd like more then for you to be right and for egg to be on our faces.

Precambrian Video Games posted:

Whoa, I'm absolutely not interested in being proven wrong when it:s clearly Professor Wernstrom who's out to lunch.

Wernstrom posted:

Who cares? I have tenure.

mediaphage posted:

eh if such a thing actually existed, any civilization would already be aware of at least some degree of life on this planet and likely check it out