3 QUSTIONS

[crazthebum]

im not as advanced as you guys so help a dude out,lol<br /><br />1- space crafts, on its way to plants an other stuff, how does it know exactly where to go an stuff. and do they time it to come back.<br /><br />2- how can earth be the only living planet in this univrse, if the universe has been around for over 13 billion years then and people on earth have been living well over 1000 years, then how come no one (ufo, aliens) have come to earth by now. an if they did, wouldnt people notice. im sure some living things in th univrse have the technology leading to my 3rd question<br /><br />3- im sure this been posted. gravity an speed. with earths speed it would be impossible to go to far but differnt parts of universe have diffrent speed. now they said it would be 250 days to mars, has it been figured where speed changes in out solar system area. if so cant they figure out how to go a place where they can speed up (probaly cant cause thy would die at such a fast speed im gueesing)<br /><br />basiclly noob questions <br />edit: lol how can people tell what part is post an sig.

 

[weeman]

<font color="yellow"> space crafts, on its way to plants an other stuff, how does it know exactly where to go an stuff. and do they time it to come back. </font><br /><br />I'm assuming you're talking about unmanned spacecraft? Spacecraft on their way to other planets use onboard computers and thrusters to calibrate themselves so that they make it safely to their destination. The control team on the ground here on Earth may also launch the spacecraft at a specific time so that the spacecraft will have the shortest path possible to its destination.<br /><br /><font color="yellow"> how can earth be the only living planet in this univrse, if the universe has been around for over 13 billion years then and people on earth have been living well over 1000 years, then how come no one (ufo, aliens) have come to earth by now. an if they did, wouldnt people notice. im sure some living things in th univrse have the technology leading to my 3rd question </font><br /><br />I would say that Earth ISN'T the only living planet in the universe. Personally, I think that anyone who has ever told me that Earth is unique because it harbors so much life is out of their damn mind! The universe is much too vast and there are WAY too many stars to say that Earth is alone.<br /><br />"There are about as many stars in the observable universe as there are grains of dry sand on all the beaches on Earth." This is a statement that was in my Astronomy textbook from my class that I took last year. The way I see it, they are basically just trying to say that the amount of stars in the Universe is basically an uncountable number! We already have proof that other planetary systems exist just within this small region of this one galaxy. <br /><br />It's possible that ET's have been here and we just didn't know it. It is also possible that ET's visited Earth far before there were any humans on it. Possibly they came when dinosaurs still roamed the planet <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" /><b></b> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><strong><font color="#ff0000">Techies: We do it in the dark. </font></strong></p><p><font color="#0000ff"><strong>"Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.</strong><strong>" -Albert Einstein </strong></font></p> </div>

 

[lampblack]

As far as knowing how to send spacecraft from Point A to Point B: imagine a quarterback throwing a perfectly timed and on-target pass to a running back about 50 yards down the field.<br /><br />If the quarterback throws the ball to where the running back is located when the ball is released, the ball will end up falling far behind the running back (who will have moved on). Instead, the QB "leads" the running back, timing the throw so that it arrives at where he expects the running back to have moved during the time that the ball is in the air.<br /><br />In other words: think of an interplanetary probe from earth to, say, Mars as the mother of all hail-Marys. The pass is thrown with a high degree of confidence -- and it's almost always exactly on target. (The exception being the occasional confusion of English and metric units, which has led in at least one case to an otherwise fine spacecraft crashing and burning as it arrived at Mars.) <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <font color="#0000ff"><strong>Just tell the truth and let the chips fall...</strong></font> </div>

 

[3488]

Mars Climate Orbiter, the first dedicated Mars Weather Satellite.<br /><br />It was a beautifully built & capable spacecraft, that was on an important mission to<br />observe the Martian atmosphere, circulation, humidity, radiation (although a rebuild of that <br />instrument went on Mars Odyssey), & how different surface features interacted with<br />the atmosphere.<br /> <br />What a waste, due to a pathetic school boy mistake, getting the sums wrong. <img src="/images/icons/mad.gif" /><br /><br />MCO should have reached Periapsis at a height of 150 kilometres / 93 miles during orbital insertion.<br />Instead due to the mucking up of metric / imperial, MCO approached Mars to a <br />suicidal 60 kilometres / 36 miles.<br /><br />Did not stand a chance.<br /><br />-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br />This image is the first view of Mars taken by the Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) Mars Color Imager<br /> (MARCI). It was acquired on 7 September 1999 at about 16:30 UTC(9:30 AM PDT), when<br /> the spacecraft was approximately 4.5 million kilometers (2.8 million miles) from the planet. <br />This full-scale medium angle camera view is the highest resolution possible at this <br />distance from Mars. <br />At this point in its orbit around the sun, MCO is moving slower than, and being overtaken by, <br />Mars (the morning side of the planet is visible in this picture). <br />The center longitude is around 240° W.<br /><br />The Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft will reach Mars on September 23, 1999. <br />The Mars orbit insertion (MOI) will be immediately followed by a period of aerobraking<br />(into November 1999). The orbiter will then function as a relay and communication satellite <br />for data from the Mars Polar Lander through <br />February 2000 before beginning its Mars-year-long mapping mission.<br /><br />When the next MARCI image will be acquired is presently uncertain. <br />The original mission plan calls for op <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#000080">"I suddenly noticed an anomaly to the left of Io, just off the rim of that world. It was extremely large with respect to the overall size of Io and crescent shaped. It seemed unbelievable that something that big had not been visible before".</font> <em><strong><font color="#000000">Linda Morabito </font></strong><font color="#800000">on discovering that the Jupiter moon Io was volcanically active. Friday 9th March 1979.</font></em></p><p><font size="1" color="#000080">http://www.launchphotography.com/</font><br /><br /><font size="1" color="#000080">http://anthmartian.googlepages.com/thisislandearth</font></p><p><font size="1" color="#000080">http://web.me.com/meridianijournal</font></p> </div>

 

[fingle]

CRAZTHEBUM Said:<br /><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>2- how can earth be the only living planet in this univrse, if the universe has been around for over 13 billion years then and people on earth have been living well over 1000 years, then how come no one (ufo, aliens) have come to earth by now. an if they did, wouldnt people notice. im sure some living things in th univrse have the technology<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote><br /><br />Regarding your statement: people on earth have been living well over 1000 years.<br /><br /> While that is true, 1000 years is a gross underestimate.<br /><br /><br />As weeman has said and I will bet many of us here believe, Earth ISN't the only living planet in the universe. However the Universe is very very large. Even with millions of years to play with a civilization will only be able to reach a statistically insignificant part of the whole universe. Instead many people are content to worry about a much smaller bit, like say our home galaxy. Put in this smaller context your question is quite valid, why haven't any alien civilizations come to visit. This is famously known as Fermi's Paradox, and you can find articles and discussions about this on space.com's web site. Here are a few links to help you get started.<br /><br />Our Galaxy Should Be Teeming With Civilizations, But Where Are They?<br /><br />Fermi's Paradox II: What's Blocking Galactic Civilization? Or Are We Just Blind To It?<br /><br />Rare Earth Debate Part 5: Elusive ET<br /><br />Personally I am of the opinion that technological civilizations with the ability, the willingness, the stamina, and the good luck to reach us are extremely rare. Maybe only one per galaxy if even that many.<br /><br /><br />t <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[crazthebum]

cool, thanks guys<br />anvel- lol thats my sig an why would i be john madden? but thanks for the info.<br /><br />weeman- thats cool, i wonder if they contol the spacecraft from the space station as well. also yeah ET could of visted that time. i wonder what ever happened 65 million years ago that ETcould have been killed on earth. <br /><br />lampblack- thanks for the info, the second way you said it was better.lol<br /><br />3488- so that failed to reach mars.<br /><br />fingle- ok i meant well over 10000 years, thanks for the artcles on space.com

 

[vandivx]

<font color="yellow">Personally I am of the opinion that technological civilizations with the ability, the willingness, the stamina, and the good luck to reach us are extremely rare. Maybe only one per galaxy if even that many.</font><br /><br />my personal view is that other civilizations out there are many but due to vast cosmos the nearest ones are too far away for them to get here and also that technical advances are not limitless in regard to how fast it might ever be possible to travel which means that contacts will only happen between very few civilizations out there (fortunate enough to happen to exist relatively near each other) and will be inherently always very rare occurence<br /><br />I see it as naive when pple simply extrapolate our advances of the last couple hundred years and think it will always proceed that way<br />I know it looks like sceptic view but it is my most realistic estimate as little tainted by emotions and wishes as I am capable of <br /><br />vanDivX <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[MannyPim]

I am not sure sure about other civilizations.<br />I am perfectly willing to accept that life is ubiquitous in the Universe and that there are many planets where life exists.<br /><br />I am not so certain about intelligent, self aware beings.<br />It seems to me that intelligence depends on such a long chain of completely random events that if it exists elsewhere in the Universe it must be very very rare.<br /><br />Which is to say that there could be millions or possibly billions of sentient beings spread throguhout the universe. But since we have hundreds of billions of galaxies, that woould mean perhaps one intelligent race evolves in one out of 100 galaxies. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <font size="2" color="#0000ff"><em>The only way to know what is possible is to attempt the impossible.</em></font> </div>

 

[vintersorg]

In order for an alien civilization to reach us it would have to be extremely developed. Assuming just our own galaxy, it had to be able to travel between stars, which, if you think of our current technological state, is pretty much like hard. Even if there are several intelligent beings in our galaxy, I doubt many have reached our current technology, let alone being able to travel to another star (and imagine if they were "many stars" away, the closest star to us is only 4LY away, but a civilization may be anywhere, even 50000LY away).<br />But of course, we don't know how many intelligent life beings are out there, there could be one in every 100 stars, or one in every 100 galaxies, so, really, reaching another intelligent being might take a long, long time, or may never happen at all, even though it's possible millions of them exist.

 

[vandivx]

<font color="yellow">It seems to me that intelligence depends on such a long chain of completely random events that if it exists elsewhere in the Universe it must be very very rare.<br /></font><br />not sure what sort of randomness you have in mind, I am willing to admit that kind of randomness like that Earth for example came to be and that it came to be this distance from the Sun that it did and so on but once you get such basics together, life is inevitable and maybe even intelligent life is inevitable, nobody knows and it could be either way but we find life in all places here and it is extremely resilient <br /><br />I think that every star has chance to have life on one of its planets given that it happened here, I'd give chances like throwing a dice, maybe not one with six faces but say 24 faces one of which means life and the rest some conditions like we have on Venus and Mars... <br /><br />who knows if Mars or even Venus could have at one time life starting out there and then things went wrong there or that one day in future it will be there because the conditions in the solar system might change (without our doing anything)<br /><br />problem is we don't have anything to go by, it would be different if we found life on Mars, even microbial and it would be determined that it developed there independently of the life on Earth, that would boost our expectations of life elsewhere immesurably<br /><br />I can imagine that there is civilization like ours around Alpha Centauri and that it might be even more advanced than we are but still the interstellar distances prove forbiding for them, I can just see ourselves in the year 2500 having well explored our solar system but still be unable to make the trip to that star nearby, it will be because physics while developped beyond our imagination might still be obeying the basic priniciples of special relativity even if that theory would have been reworked several time over and advanced<br /><br />vanDivX <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[vintersorg]

While I don't know about the probability of life, I doubt it is indeed random. After all, evolution states that species ADAPT, it's not just some random occurrence that makes us what we are, and while on other planets and envoirements it may be (is) very different, I'm not sure if life would develop there just "by chance" or "randomly". It needs several factors, yes, but it's not like throwing a dice.

 

[vandivx]

I quite agree, that's why I said that I don't know what randomness he had in mind<br /><br />when you come to elements reacting together to make something organic, the randomness stops there, it may be random that they come together at first but I think even that is inevitable in the larger picture<br /><br />and then evolution from the most primitive organisms is not random at all <br /><br />intelligent life may be rare but then again who knows if later on dogs or whatever animals might join humans and soon in some hundreds of thousands years who knows if all animals will not be joining ranks of intelligence and then maybe we original intelligent beings might become superintelligent superhumans...<br /><br />our time window is way too short and narrow to tell much at this point, maybe again this is it and animals will always remain animals and then one could say that intelligent life is rare even if life as such might not be<br /><br />I believe neaderthals were also intelligent beings which would make second instance of intelligent life rising (not sure if that was completely separate line from humans but likely not since they were roughly like us descended from apes) but I am no expert on that, it is thought they became extinct or perhaps they mixed with us humans and merged or its a puzzle to this day what happened with them<br /><br />in the light of this I can well imagine a planet around Alpha Centauri with life on it as long or longer that we know it existed here on Earth and with dinosaurs roaming still today about there in lush countryside and completely ignoring our SETI signals while emitting at maximum farts in our direction LOL (I understand we will soon have detectors in operation to detect just that) and it might go on like that without the rise of intelligent beings out there<br /><br />vanDivX <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[qso1]

vanDivX:<br />while emitting at maximum farts in our direction LOL (I understand we will soon have detectors in operation to detect just that)<br /><br />Me:<br />Flatulant Animal Rectal Transmissions or FARTs LOL.<br /><br />Seriously, with spectral analysis, methane would be one of the chemical signatures detected from extrasolar planet spectrographs and this should be possible once we are able to image extrasolar planets. However, pinpointing the source of the methane and concluding it to be a farting animal would be another matter. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><strong>My borrowed quote for the time being:</strong></p><p><em>There are three kinds of people in life. Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen...and those who do not know what happened.</em></p> </div>

 

[vandivx]

<font color="yellow">Flatulant Animal Rectal Transmissions or FARTs</font><br /><img src="/images/icons/laugh.gif" /><br />you know you should have it patented and also seek some job in the line of figuring acronyms<br /><br />and from my noding acquitance with extrasolar planets exploration/detection, that's what I had in mind - detecting the methane I mean<br /><br />vanDivX <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>