This is huge. In both technical and political ways. And bringing all the details into live online event is twice as huge. I just watched the guy reporting the unsuccessful initial anchoring of the probe, and I felt so happy that I could see this. Incredible. By the way the lander software runs on Harris RTX2010 processors -- the US contribution.
Philae has landed
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Re: Philae has landed
#152Congratulations Europe. But why don't we hear people saying that the EU should focus on their poverty first and would be better off putting this money into getting the Greece, Spain, and Italy economies in order?
You won't believe how much attention the EU gives to poverty issues. This is why there are no many poor people in the EU.
Re: Philae has landed
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can you people be so dishonest with yourselves and everyone else? Look at the fallacious arguments you put forward: - Nations have a long history of funding exploratory ventures. (appeal to tradition - doing something for a long time does not make it right to keep doing it) - it creates jobs (unseen consequences - it destroys more needed jobs that would have been created or maintained had this money been used by…
(stolen money should not be spent in more or less important things, it should be returned to their rightful owner so they can choose what to do with what they've earned) Just to be clear.. Your issue is not that money from taxes is spent on scientific research and space exploration, but really that you have to pay taxes?
My issue is, whoever wants to accomplish something that takes a lot of money to make happen, should do like ARKYD and make a kickstarter or any other peaceful alternative, that allows for every individual to choose whether they'd like to participate.
My issue is that running to the government, just because it already has guns in place pointing to every individual's head in case they don't pay, and saying "we'll steal just 20 more cents but really it's nothing! it's so little! just let us have these 20 cents so we can do this for you, folks. for you!".
C'mon, if it's for our benefit, then convince us of it, lead by example, and ask for money peacefully without using the extortion machine of the government.
Re: Philae has landed
#154Coverage of this has been very confusing. The ESA live feed at most times show people in some kind of control room staring at screens. There is no apparent way to see any highlights, unless I want to try scrolling back and forth through the hour-long video stream. At any given time, various forum threads seem to have more information than the ESA site, which seems to communicate mostly through either lighthearted twe…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/science-environment-29985988
The Guardian live-blog is good as well. Less tweet-heavy than the BBC:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/across-the-universe/live/...
Re: Philae has landed
#155Congratulations Europe. But why don't we hear people saying that the EU should focus on their poverty first and would be better off putting this money into getting the Greece, Spain, and Italy economies in order?
As a EU guy paying taxes i prefer giving my money to space program rather than into those useless corrupted politician who "govern" us.
Re: Philae has landed
#156we just landed a friggin' robot into a friggin' commet mind blowing
It really is mind blowing. The degree of intergovernmental co-operatoin is incredible. The lander electronics has Hungarian know how, brought there by Hungarian scientists. Radiation-protected processors are American. The whole thing is supervised by Germany together with France. Absolutely fantastic.
Re: Philae has landed
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the risk of turning political, it's a great example of how our taxes are wasted. Playing with space toys shouldn't be funded with taxpayer money. I'm sure I'll get downvoted to hell for this, but why should my money be funding this? Sorry, but it has no benefit whatsoever. edit: Instead of downvoting a dissenting voice, why not argue your case - why should taxpayers fund space toys? edit2: Well, looks like I'm ban…
Good luck pushing that opinion amongst elites who are more likely to be the beneficiaries of space program spending than the victims of austerity. Space exploration for it's own sake is a self-perpetuating relic of the cold war.
How is space exploration categorically different from other kinds of scientific exploration?
Re: Philae has landed
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the risk of turning political, it's a great example of how our taxes are wasted. Playing with space toys shouldn't be funded with taxpayer money. I'm sure I'll get downvoted to hell for this, but why should my money be funding this? Sorry, but it has no benefit whatsoever. edit: Instead of downvoting a dissenting voice, why not argue your case - why should taxpayers fund space toys? edit2: Well, looks like I'm ban…
why should taxpayers fund space toys? They're scientific research, not 'toys'.
Because taxpayers are able to pay that much taxes today, because Newton and Leibnitz were playing toys like that some time ago.
Re: Philae has landed
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you really think that firstly, those technologies only exist because of NASA, and secondly that the cheapest way to innovate is to pick some arbitrary aim (Space exploration) and then spin off lots of innovation from it? You could do a better job just taking the money spent on space exploration, and opening some innovation/invention centers. edit: banned now, so I can't add any comments. It's really surprising jus…
Space exploration isn't all about side-effects. Humanity cannot survive on the Earth for eternity. Eventually we will have to move on to other habitable worlds. Doing so is an almost unimaginably difficult engineering task. This reason alone is sufficient to justify space exploration in my mind. On a shorter time scale, there are massive amounts of resources in space that, with better technology, we could theoretical…
Yeah, m8. With Musk to Mars!