Recent content by zclayton

Its frozen for the same reasons the Arctic and Antarctic are frozen on Earth. Its cold there. Since Mars is farther away from the sun than Earth is, it is colder there than it is here, a "balmy" summer day at the Mars equator is still below freezing. So No, ice doesn't melt. If the ice has...

Watching a night time shuttle launch when I was in Grad school - from my front yard in St Petersburg. This was pre-Challenger. A glorious climbing torch of light.

There are three questions here. 1. If we find life, will we recognize it is life? 2. If it is sentient, will we recognize it as sentient? the human race does not score well on this question. I.e, What is sentience? How long did we insist that "slaves" were not human, but were trainable...

Water is in-compressible. It will expand and contract with heat or cold. NO, tides are caused by the gravity of the sun or moon reducing the effect of earths gravity under themand on the opposite side. a study of orbital maechanics is needed to understand why this happens on the opposite...

Their mission is ongoing. the two spacecraft are still sending data back for analysis.

Gravity has no distance limit. any body in the universe exerts a force on any other body. Most are just too distant to have an observable effect. so the earth appears to orbit the sun, but so do the other bound objects in the solar system, such as the moon and Jupiter. it is not just one...

If you don't want to talk about the orbital mechanics then you don't really want to talk about origins. Those are determned by orbital mechanics. Everything you said with that is just flute music.

A car is a thing that takes us somewhere. A starship is an idea that takes our mind to places unknown. It is sad if someone cares more about their car than their mind.

It is not a Zero. a singularity is where the math breaks down and is undefined. What they are referencing is the measument of size of the event horizon, which is the size of the orbit of light around the black hole. Closer than that radius, the light will spiral "in" to the singularity as it...

I think this has been covered in several SciFi books/stories. It never goes well. And we will probably not have either option available for100s of years as a "best case" scenario. Best case in quotes because what will have to change to drive that solution?

The Time is a property of nature Vs Time is an illusion issue is the difference between Physics and Philosophy. In the modern context, they are not talking about the same set of answers. In the property of nature context time will end when it no longer separates events into discreet...

I -think- the "Property of Nature" quote is from Stephen Hawking. Which leads to the observation that the big bang status had no time, and that time ended that status.

"The Ship That Sang" for the individual ship. Sisu, from Heinlein's "Citizen of the Galaxy" for story. "Just Read the Instructions" for general badass name.

That "empty"space can range from near absolute zero to several million degrees Kelven. And that is not from direct radiation. but just the implicit energy of the gas in the "emptyness" .

New Year. Not a new Decade, I expect better from Space.com. The first year was 1 CE. 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10, a decade of 10 years. Unless you can show which "Decade" only has 9 years in it, the next Decade starts on 2021. I would have thought you would remember from the 1999-2000-2001 fiasco...