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This is serious and far more important than a few towel heads in Afghanistan or a climate out of control, this will be the war of the millennium. The War on Galactic Cannibalism. The danger has now been recognised and our full resources must be mobilised to thwart the threat.:D

I'm definitely worried about those $800 hammers floating around. For a long time now we have been sending Mr Goodwrench up there with a hammer ,some gorilla glue ,and some duct tape. They have difficulties repairing the bath rooms on ISS . I think killer galaxies are beyond their pay grade.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

I'm definitely worried about those $800 hammers floating around. For a long time now we have been sending Mr Goodwrench up there with a hammer ,some gorilla glue ,and some duct tape. They have difficulties repairing the bath rooms on ISS. I think killer galaxies are beyond their pay grade.

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Yes Tom it's business as usual but how can you buy a hummer unless you can sell some $800 hammers which were probably made in China for $0.50. No, the ISS is about as high as our scientific thinking gets these days, it doesn't even extend to the moon. When I think about what they were predicting 50 years ago for a space station and what we have I feel very cheated. No vision.

As far as floating objects are concerned the ISS may need to be moved to avoid some space junk. You would think they could have at least captured it and recycled it:D

And all the while these are the same people who want us to deal with climate change, why? So they can sell some more hammers?

It really is sad. The only decent work being done by NASA is in robotic flights. Hubble has been a Godsend .Kepler is even better .The Rovers on Mars have served well past their warranty . The Mars Odyssey is doing some great mapping work. New Horizons' voyage sent back some great detailed images of Jupiter .

Perhaps the future is not manned missions but continuing robotic missions. They aren't as sexy ;but robotics have gotten us to the edge of the solar system and beyond.

Meanwhile manned space flight is bogged down in low earth orbit . Private enterprise will soon take over most of that... ISS will be sold off to a luxury Hotel chain(hopefully ).That is if the Ruskies don't dismantle it .
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8064060.stm
It has been a boondoggle .

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Originally Posted by tomder55

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It has been a boondoggle .

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Space has been a boondoggle! That is a wonderful point of view, so which martians benefited from this boondoggle? Has there been growth in martian tourism?

Space exploration hasn't got very far but it has given us a vast array of inventions and changed our society, it may even have shortened the Cold War. If the ISS was sold to a hotel chain it would be the first time it had shown a profit, I say sell it and use the money to build a better one. The one regret I have is that space exploration hasn't produced a better space vehicle, the shuttle is now old technology but we haven't developed anything better that we know of. In fact we are going to step back a generation

Putting words in my mouth again ? Clearly I was speaking of the ISS and not space exploration. As an FYI... my father worked for Grumman and was part of the LM project. Of course I have always been a strong supporter of space exploration .

But let's face the facts ;the ISS has been a joke that has stalled most other useful manned flight initiatives for a long time. It is so much of a joke that NASA held a contest to name a module and the name of comic Steve Colbert won(not clear if NASA will honor the contest results) .

The ISS has been in construction for a decade and only now has what could be considered a working operational lab(and the US has plans to bug out of the project by 2015).
Most of the time the crew has spent doing maintanance. There has yet to be any scientific research published in a peer reviewed journal.

Hubble by contrast has been a wealth of new discovery as has most of the robotic missions.

All the ISS accomplishes is giving humans a destination and keeping the Shuttle operational . That and perhaps proving that humans can remain in space long enough to go to Mars.

Well now Shuttle's days are numbered right at the time that ISS is beginning to do some work . There is no other cargo jet capable of ferrying supplies up there .

The Ruskies will keep their modules up there a little longer which means it will come plunging down into the Pacific at a later date then the rest of the ISS.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

putting words in my mouth again ?

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Hardly and perhaps you have more insight than I, it seems we understand that the space program is a great disappointment, what was once a destination is now simply a project. Has the administration realised that the whole thing is too big, too great an enterprise, and there is nothing to be gained. It will not solve the energy problem, it will not solve the health problem all it gives is hope and hope is futile, there are no worlds out there that we could populate within the next millennium, 2001 is an illusion long past, and who cares if the Russians, or the Japanese, or even the Indians go to the Moon, they will find it as sterile as the Americans. Mars holds no Martians and Venus no Venutians and we are alone in a sea of endless wonders

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we are alone in a sea of endless wonders

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Depends on the boundries of the sea you have in mind. Within our solar system I am sure you are right. However it would be arrogant to think we alone in the universe inhabit a wet and rocky planet . It is also illogical .

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Originally Posted by tomder55

Depends on the boundries of the sea you have in mind. Within our solar system I am sure you are right. However it would be arrogant to think we alone in the universe inhabit a wet and rocky planet . It is also illogical .

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Perhaps you know more about space than I, I only have the benefit of 50 years study, but the possibility is that a wet and rocky planet is a rarity. I don't know what conditions must be present for water to exist in abundance in the form it does here but a 100'C horizon is a fairly narrow window when you take the extremes of space into account. As far as we know it exists in one place in this system, but Earth exists in a narrow window, a habitable zone, if you like, and even the conditions here are barely habitable in certain locations. For much of it's geological existence Earth has been a hostile environment. Given what we do see out there, supernovas, colliding galaxies, meteors, chaos, vast distances I think it is quite illogical to suggest we will ever find other intelligent life, even if it exists or did exist

I never suggested we'd find them. I understand the rarity of the conditions of this planet.You may even be correct that inside our own galaxie we may be unique even though there are two and three hundred billion stars in the Milky Way . But there are also one hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe with billions of stars themselves .I base my speculations on probability... even given the narrow limits you place on habitable planets... which I don't necessarily subscribe to... Remember ;we are finding life even on this planet where we once thought habitation was impossible .

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Originally Posted by tomder55

I never suggested we'd find em. I understand the rarity of the conditions of this planet.You may even be correct that inside our own galaxie we may be unique even though there are two and three hundred billion stars in the Milky Way . But there are also one hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe with billions of stars themselves .I base my speculations on probability... even given the narrow limits you place on habitable planets ....which I don't necessarily subscribe to.....Remember ;we are finding life even on this planet where we once thought habitation was impossible .

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Tom, the possibility that life exists is strong, given that the building blocks are well dispersed, the possibility that it might be intelligent and anything like us, very improbable. In fact I think the improbability might almost be as large as the number of stars in the universe. Just the diversity of life here should tell us that. But the interstella and intergalactic distances surely preclude discovery and contact, so what is the point of searching if the only purpose is knowing. Surely we have bigger fish to fry and we need those keen minds focused on the immediate problem.


A thousand years ago we thought life possible on the moon, a hundred years ago we thought that life on Venus and Mars might be both possible and probable, that dream is shattered. Every advance in knowledge has demonstrated that the further we look the more improbable it becomes, in fact, a thousand years from now will there be life on earth?

Intelligent life is of course the horse of a different color . I too believe in human exceptionalism .

But there is no scientific basis for that faith.

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But the interstella and intergalactic distances surely preclude discovery and contact, so what is the point of searching if the only purpose is knowing. Surely we have bigger fish to fry and we need those keen minds focused on the immediate problem.

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Clearly ;but as you have already pointed out the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge sake has produced a wealth of transformative information useful for us here on our wet and rocky planet. Perhaps the answers to the earth's most perplexing problems will be found out there.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

Remember ;we are finding life even on this planet where we once thought habitation was impossible .

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Life is a very different proposition to intelligence. The building blocks of life are well dispersed in the universe, apparently, however both Venus and Mars have demonstrated that even this doesn't support viability outside of a certain range. We don't know what conditions are necessary to provide the beginning so this means we have yet to be able to narrow our search criteria, and in any event the need to examine billions of possibilities means we must narrow our search to the closest objects. The scale (billions x billions) of the available targets doesn't actually increase probability of existence. If we are one in a billion, that doesn't mean there are a billion similar worlds, just that the probability is infinately small. If we were to find life on a near object then it could be said that the probability might be large.