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Philae has landed

bbc.com

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Re: Philae has landed

#251

Post by AYBABTME »

innguest wrote: post #135
kartikkumar wrote: post #53

Absolutely stunning feat of engineering. My bosses are on the drill team for Philae and were amongst the nervy faces being beamed all over the world. Great example of what European nations can do when politics don't get in the way. ExoMars [1] and Bepi-Colombo [2] are perfect examples of the inverse. Look forward to the first pictures from the surface. I'm at the Division on Planetary Sciences (DPS) meeting [3] in Tu…

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…

Space exploration is your best bet at fleeing to a world where nobody would be able to tax you, where you'd live like a true free man on the land.

Re: Philae has landed

#252

Post by rybosome »

tedks wrote: post #123
rybosome wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nations have a long history of funding exploratory ventures. It is generally understood that the process is useful for a variety of reasons: it creates jobs, there is a small chance that something practical could be discovered, and most importantly it satisfies a basic human need to know more. With this mission in particular, we may be able to answer some very fundamental questions about the arrival of organic compou…

Hijacking the top comment in this subthread to make a meta-complaint: The comment-parents viewpoint is perfectly valid, but has been censored because of disagreement within the broader HN community. For all the talk about "free speech" that HN does when the topic is, say, not objectifying women, or making racial minorities feel included in tech, it certainly seems to perform an about-face when confronted with... obje…

Sorry for the double response: my previous comment still stands, but I wanted to add this as well.

The treatment of women and exclusion of minorities in this field is incredibly distressing. The thought of how many brilliant minds we could be turning away (not to mention the basic empathy I feel for their suffering) makes me sick. I look forward to a more enlightened age when these people will be welcomed with the basic respect and dignity they deserve.

...but, apathy towards education and scientific progress is also incredibly distressing - that a smaller absolute number of people are affected does not make the issue less important. Climate change denial and lack of enthusiasm for clean energy are complicated phenomena, but are (in my opinion) partially influenced by a culture that devalues science and education (in addition to outright manipulation by insidious parties). If you want proof of how dangerous this is, look at Mario Zervigon[0], a campaign-finance director for a pro-solar candidate - his house and cars were firebombed last week. This (admittedly unusually extreme) resistance to the idea that we should be taking care of our environment is mind-fuckingly insane. The library of Alexandria is still very much in peril, so to speak.

So...us freaking out about this doesn't mean we do not care about the exclusion of minorities. It's ok to be worried about multiple things; there are more than enough causes to go around. We live in a sick, sad world[1].

[0]: http://fusion.net/story/26335/car-bomb-house-explosion-rock-...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W4Loj8k2Dk

Re: Philae has landed

#253

Post by shitlord »

Awesome! Think of all the nice desktop backgrounds I'm going to have.

I am wondering what this will mean for humanity. Do you guys think the insights we gain from Philae will be as impactful as the ones from other space missions?

Re: Philae has landed

#254

Post by johndevor »

kartikkumar wrote: post #140
return0 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to give a hint about what kind of results those are?

Sure. You can look up the abstracts for the Rosetta sessions at DPS to get a better sense of the work that has been done and is being conducted [1]-[3]. Some of the highlights presented at DPS, based on the talks that I attended, include: * Further image analysis has shown that Comet 67P likely has very low strength, perhaps in areas even just powders held together by van der Waals forces * The Microwave Instrument f…

Could you speak more on the "everyday impact" about this landing? I'm trying to understand why this was worth the billion euros. It's seriously cool but that's all anybody seems to be saying. How does this really affect us?

Re: Philae has landed

#255

Post by johndevor »

rmc wrote: post #164
innguest wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the criterion importance? How about, governments shouldn't require protection money from its citizens? The way it used to be before 1913.

There were taxes before 1913

Not really though. Microscopic compared to today.

Re: Philae has landed

#256

Post by johndevor »

antimagic wrote: post #122
throwit99 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Health, welfare, lowering taxes, employment.... y'know, things that enrich real peoples lives. Space toys and exploration are fun for those working on them, but will this event transform civilisation? Nope. Did the moon landing really transform civilisation? Nope.

You're kidding right - this would have lowered my taxes by about 20 cents a year, or 3E50 total. Careful not to spend it all at once. So much for lowering taxes. Simply put, Rosetta's budget was about 70m Euros per year over 20 years. That's like funding maybe two schools, or one hospital ward, spread over the whole EU. None of these enrich humanity as much as Rosetta is. As for employment, well, the project is creat…

>That's like funding maybe two schools, or one hospital ward, spread over the whole EU. None of these enrich humanity as much as Rosetta is.

Really? You're basically saying you'd prefer a robot on a comet over thousands of healthy and educated peers. Who are you to decide this?

Re: Philae has landed

#257

Post by testing3212 »

frapandolf wrote: post #129
throwit99 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So effectively, you want to subsidise scientists working on some arbitrary aim (Space exploration), in the hope they'll invent cool stuff you can spin off... I don't think you need to subsidise science like this. Did we really get "propelled" into new age of technology half a century ago? Did the moon landing really change anything here on earth? Technology would have advanced just fine without it.

How toxic an existence do you have to lead to put your own petty greed over one of the few great frontiers of human scientific progress?

Cultural progress too!

I'm an American, and I'm fascinated by space exploration. These kind of endeavors bring people together and make us look at the Earth as one entity that we all need to live on. It brings people together by strengthening trust through a common goal and achievement.

Now, as far as the "hur-dur my tax monies..." argument. I wonder if he has heard of the asteroid mining company in the US. Planetary resources speculats that a single 30 meter diameter asteroid could have over $50 billion[1] worth in platinum. Developing technology like ESA has done obviously helps advance a companies that can bring these resources back to Earth. So, I feel like he has to be trolling unless he really just hasn't had ANY interest in space exploration from the start. But, if he is going to out-right dismiss the program, he needs to have done some searching to at least form an opinion for why it is bad. Very untactful.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/24/us-space-asteroid-...

Re: Philae has landed

#258

Post by pbhjpbhj »

TomGullen wrote: post #214
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #198

ITT downvoting to invisibility because you disagree with someone honestly held and cogently expressed opinions. Silencing diverse opinions is quite possibly the worst facet of HN.

Libertarian world philosophy is totally bunk (if that's what you were referring to). I down vote most of that because it's generally ridiculous.

Just that opinions off the norm seem to be too readily moved to opacity -> 0. The idea that government shouldn't freely use taxation to fund projects that apparently only return a mild satiation of curiosity is a valid opinion, for example, and was apparently expressed honestly, without malice.

I'm not settled on where I stand with that (I tend towards cooperative and communist ideals) but I certainly don't stand on the side of "those expressing these views need to be censured" (nor censored as it happens); which is what appears to be happening.

It's possibly that I'm being over-sensitive towards the failings of the HN UI as much as anything.

Re: Philae has landed

#259

Post by ngoldbaum »

johndevor wrote: post #254
kartikkumar wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. You can look up the abstracts for the Rosetta sessions at DPS to get a better sense of the work that has been done and is being conducted [1]-[3]. Some of the highlights presented at DPS, based on the talks that I attended, include: * Further image analysis has shown that Comet 67P likely has very low strength, perhaps in areas even just powders held together by van der Waals forces * The Microwave Instrument f…

Could you speak more on the "everyday impact" about this landing? I'm trying to understand why this was worth the billion euros. It's seriously cool but that's all anybody seems to be saying. How does this really affect us?

Let's say a comet is going to impact Earth in a few decades. One proposal among many [0] to divert a comet is to aim a laser at it for a few years, long enough for the outgassing from the laser spot to push the comet onto an orbit that misses the Earth.

If you were designing a mission like that, wouldn't you want to have first-hand knowledge about the comet's surface?

This is also a baby step. We now feel more confident about landing equipment on irregularly shaped, rapidly spinning objects with negligible gravitational fields. Conservative estimates about the aggregate value of all of the rare heavy metals available inside a near-earth asteroid go into the trillions of dollars.

[0] http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~jmelosh/HazardsDeflect.pdf

Re: Philae has landed

#260

Post by mathattack »

kartikkumar wrote: post #53

Absolutely stunning feat of engineering. My bosses are on the drill team for Philae and were amongst the nervy faces being beamed all over the world. Great example of what European nations can do when politics don't get in the way. ExoMars [1] and Bepi-Colombo [2] are perfect examples of the inverse. Look forward to the first pictures from the surface. I'm at the Division on Planetary Sciences (DPS) meeting [3] in Tu…

I have to say this is Science Awesomeness at it's best, and I'm bothered by the lack of media coverage. Perhaps if all of us posted and retweeted we could get some motion on this?
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