Comet watching

[teamsaint]

All good and fair points Ferney.
Actually, I think that the the human race can easily afford the £1.8 bn for this. It is a drop in the ocean looked at in some ways. But with financial resource, as we know with water resource, it isn't necessarily what is available in total, it is getting it to the right place at the right time.
This research and exploration may indeed yield great results,or at least tell us that there is less to know from a comet than we thought that there might be.But we know for sure that there are areas where resource is so badly needed. Clean water in The developing world., decent housing in the Brazilian slums......you know the list as well or better than I do.
The message that some people might rightly read into this is that the playthings of the rich northern hemisphere matter a great deal more than those simple and easily solvable issues.

None of which is to say that pushing the boundaries isn't important. maybe more support for pushing the boundaries in renewable energy would be more impressive , in truth. Is it not absurd that in an age of such extraordinary technology, we are still desperately looking at "solutions" like fracking?

[Ferretfancy]

Ah, now you're talking!

I'm with you there, Mary, and I'm pretty sure that Wolfgang Amadeus would have been impressed with Rosetta!

[Pabmusic]

was space exploration important to the development of , say, Quantum Physics? ( genuine question)...

Not really, since Niels Bohr, etc., did most of their work well before the age of space travel. However, their work was possibly important to the development of space travel (although Einstein was rather more immediately important - getting spacecraft home, for instance).

[kernelbogey]

I'm thrilled by the success - perhaps partial - of Rosetta. I had forgotten about it while it pootled for 10 years across the solar system.

I was eleven when the Russians launched Sputnik, and was able to listen to its beeps quite easily on our home radio. Isn't that a huge leap in technical competence in 58 years?

And the smartphone you hold in your hand has more computing power than any Apollo spacecraft: but its development may be ascribed largely to the space exploration programme.

[umslopogaas]

Very interesting discussion on the practical value of these huge projects. I think it is often the case that no practical outcome is being sought, but history shows that there often is one. A physicist friend of mine once told me that when the discoverers of the transistor (one of whom, I think, was Sir Neville Mott) were doing their experiments they had no idea of the application of the phenomena they were investigating, they just thought they were interesting per se. And on a sort-of related tangent, Sir Alexander Fleming only discovered penicillin because one of his experiments went wrong.

A point to ponder is that many very powerful and clever people are involved in authorising spending billions of pounds on space travel, and CERN and such like. I dont think they would allow all that money to be spent purely out of intellectual curiosity. Their thinking may be along the lines of "we dont know what will come of this research, but we are sufficiently confident that it is worthwhile to go ahead and spend the money."

[Mary Chambers]

I was eleven when the Russians launched Sputnik, and was able to listen to its beeps quite easily on our home radio. Isn't that a huge leap in technical competence in 58 years?

.

I was seventeen. What I remember best is that they sent a dog, Laika, into space, and of course the dog died. I wrote a poem about this at the time, a sort of protest poem. My elder brother, much more detached and scientifically minded than I am, was very scornful about it. I still have the poem, but I'm not going to post it on here!

[teamsaint]

J

Very interesting discussion on the practical value of these huge projects. I think it is often the case that no practical outcome is being sought, but history shows that there often is one. A physicist friend of mine once told me that when the discoverers of the transistor (one of whom, I think, was Sir Neville Mott) were doing their experiments they had no idea of the application of the phenomena they were investigating, they just thought they were interesting per se. And on a sort-of related tangent, Sir Alexander Fleming only discovered penicillin because one of his experiments went wrong.

A point to ponder is that many very powerful and clever people are involved in authorising spending billions of pounds on space travel, and CERN and such like. I dont think they would allow all that money to be spent purely out of intellectual curiosity. Their thinking may be along the lines of "we dont know what will come of this research, but we are sufficiently confident that it is worthwhile to go ahead and spend the money."

maybe part of the issue that Some people have is media related, rather than to do with the worth of any particular project.
As I mentioned, in the scheme of things £1.8 bn is a drop in the ocean. But the message that we receive through the media is that this is big, important, cutting edge, worthwhile and worthy, but that the everyday needs of of fellow humans in so much of the world aren't worth even £1.8 bn, or media time, or even discussing.

But, I suppose , on reflection, it is just part of a wider problem, that connects to the Arms industry, global finance, and the foreign policies of rich powerful nations.

Just as a comparison, I was talking to somebody recently who is involved with schools in Ghana, one of the more stable and affluent African nations. The kids on this particular school share one site between two schools, 3000 kids in each. One shift in the mornings, one in the afternoons. They don't have any chairs. And they are probably among the more fortunate.
I know that isn't the fault of scientists, but it does offer an interesting contrast to the resources available in various areas.

[umslopogaas]

I suspect that if the scientists involved said they thought it was immoral to spend all this money on such projects and they would prefer it to be spent on education in Africa, the money men would say we cant, the money is allocated for science and the government has other money that it gives to its overseas aid department for education in Africa.

There is also the point that these big science projects have non-negotiable costs, so if you are going to fund them, you have to completely fund them: half a large hadron collider, or a half-size version, isnt any use. Whereas aid is effectively elastic, half the aid budget would still be doing good work.

[Richard Tarleton]

I don't think any money spent on trying to understand the origins of the universe, and life on earth, is wasted.

Though I don't fully understand the water bit - it would take an awful lot of comets? Or just one big one? Or would one be enough to kick-start the process? The sort of thing Pabs can explain, I should think

[Lion-of-Vienna]

Though I don't fully understand the water bit - it would take an awful lot of comets? Or just one big one?

Richard, I think the answer is "an awful lot of comets". Comets don't often collide with Earth these days, although we did watch one collide with Jupiter about 20 years ago. However, 4 billion years ago we had a large bombardment of comets and asteroids in our area of the solar system. The effects on the Earth have been eroded away but we can still see the craters and impact basins produced on the Moon that have survived because the Moon has no atmosphere.

[Richard Tarleton]

Thank you! Ah yes I'd forgotten about Shoemaker-Levy.....

[kernelbogey]

I was seventeen. What I remember best is that they sent a dog, Laika, into space, and of course the dog died. I wrote a poem about this at the time, a sort of protest poem. My elder brother, much more detached and scientifically minded than I am, was very scornful about it. I still have the poem, but I'm not going to post it on here!

I, too, remember Laika the Space Dog! Of course the idea that they sent her[?] into space knowing full well that she would die seemed heartless to us at that age - though no more heartless, as I now know, than the treatment of dogs and all kinds of other animals all over the world, every day....

There have always been rumours that, between the Laika launch (and IIRC at least one other canine cosmonaut) and Gagarin's epochal flight, more than one Russian spaceman died in space in unannounced attempts. Allegedly their anguish was picked up by radio hams.

[johncorrigan]

Like me, some of you may find Prof Brian Cox a bit irritating but sometimes if I try hard I find interesting things behind his rather patronising presentation style. I had heard him talk about the ‘Drake Equation’ before and watched that episode of his recent series pretty intently. Frank Drake postulated this equation about how those searching for evidence of extraterrestials might estimate the number of sentient life forms that there might be in the Galaxy.

Essentially, as I understand it, it has to do with estimating the number of stars in the Galaxy, the frequency of those stars that might be of reasonable temperature, the frequency that have planets orbiting within a life supporting range, what proportion might have developed life, the proportion who develop life which might want to communicate...and finally the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space. You then get a number N which could be anything between 2 and 2 million depending on who's doing the maths.

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has spent billions since the early 60s and now has an array of listening devices trying to search for signs of life out there and has heard nothing (apart from one short blip, it would appear, according to the Cox programme).

Cox said this was not entirely surprising. He postulated that, given the final bit of the equation ‘the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space’, we might at this point in time in Galactic History be the only ‘sentient’ lifeform in the galaxy.

My understanding of what Prof. Cox then said (and I could well be misrepresenting him) was that he felt it was our responsibility, our duty, to continue to explore in space. Indeed he suggested that the Human Race should be sending genetic information into space in an attempt to colonise distant planets which might be suitable for sustaining life. Not sure I agree with the Prof, but I thought it was very interesting.

Given that the Human Race is now capable of landing a probe on a fast moving comet 300 million miles away this may just be an early stage of future colonisation.