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Philae has landed

bbc.com

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Re: Philae has landed

#281

Post by acqq »

kbart wrote: post #267
throwit99 wrote: post #94

Earlier 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…

Wasted taxes? Are you serious? The outcome of this mission might be immense considering what possibilities are open if we manage to perfect such technologies. I'd say it's the greatest our race achievement after the Moon landing. Besides, the whole mission budget is only 1 billion euros (~1.2 billion dollars). If talking about wasting tax money, consider F-35 project which cost 1 trillion dollars and still counting,…

The unit cost of one single F-35 jet was in 2011 estimated to be around 300 million USD, that is, only three planes would pay for the whole (European, please note, financed by the tax of Europeans!) Rosetta mission.

The US plans to buy 2443 such aircraft (of course, financed by the tax of US citizens). Do they really need so many of them?

The military budget of the US was recently around 660 billion USD per year, that is, the US could finance some 600 Rosettas (each a multiple-decade project) every year with its military budget. Approximating the Rosetta life to 10 years, in these 10 years the US spent 6000 Rosettas for military. Or 18000 of F-35 fighter jets.

Re: Philae has landed

#282

Post by simonh »

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…

There are a lot of answers to this, but I think the central point of the post is not being addressed.

The job of democratic government is to take responsibility for the things that the people choose to delegate to it.

I am not a doctor, a scientist, a hydraulic engineer, a military officer, a policeman, a lawyer or a civil engineer to name just a few relevant specialisms. I don't have the time, expertise or inclination to get involved in choosing how government should address all of the services it provides. Therefore I am happy to participate in choosing political leaders who I and my fellow citizens delegate to make those decisions for me.

I do not think it is reasonable or would be beneficial for every single citizen to have to decide how every single penny of tax money should or should not be spent. I cannot believe that a system organized in that way could ever be made to function no matter what modern communications and decision making (voting) technology we used.

Finally, living in a society ruled by laws is a system of coercion. Our fellow citizens are coerced into not robbing each other, not murdering each other, not driving their cars the wrong way down one way streets, and yes not avoiding paying tax. If you don't like that, tough.

Re: Philae has landed

#283

Post by Cthulhu_ »

shitlord wrote: post #253

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?

If it turns out the asteroid is full of platinum or other rare / expensive minerals, unlike the moon which seemed barren rock, it'll be enormous and the start of the true space age IMO.

Re: Philae has landed

#284

Post by Cthulhu_ »

a-priori wrote: post #56
forgotpasswd3x wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The robot deployed harpoons to fasten itself to the 2.5-mile-wide ball of ice and dust.

I love how simple and low-tech this solution is. People have been using anchored ropes and cables of various kinds to fasten things together for millennia. People have been using harpoons at sea for whaling for centuries.

I now have a picture of the lander having one ivory leg and the asteroid called Moby Dick. Thanks, :p

Re: Philae has landed

#286

Post by apa-sl »

Awesome! Launched over 10 years ago (our "smartphones" back then had 1mpix cameras, youtube was not born yet, etc), travelled +6,5b km and nailed a target 3-4km wide...

Re: Philae has landed

#287

Post by gjm11 »

nathan_long wrote: post #206
bane wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, stunning stunning bit of science and engineering. Everybody involved in this should be beaming with joy. Once again the light of reason continues to chase away humanity's ancestral boogiemen.

> Once again the light of reason continues to chase away humanity's ancestral boogiemen. Boogiemen like the belief that humans are more than collections of atoms and random emergent behaviors? Because if those are your boogiemen, there's no particular reason to rejoice in reason, or anything else for that matter - it's all ashes in the end, and nobody will be left to care, whether we colonize Andromeda or blow oursel…

> there's no particular reason to rejoice [...] it's all ashes in the end

I hear this sort of thing quite often and I am never convinced that it makes any sense.

The underlying, unstated assumption seems to be: Whether we care about something now should depend on what will happen in the infinitely distant future.

But why?

What's supposed to be wrong with rejoicing now in the discoveries we're making now (and the ones in the past that have affected us, and the ones in the nearish future that our work may contribute to)?

Why should something millions of years in the future that I can't do anything about determine what I care about now?

(Of course maybe we can do something about it; maybe some amazing future discovery will allow us to extend the lifetime of the sun, or escape to another universe, or something. But for present purposes I'm granting the premise that we can't do anything about it, and that it inevitably is "all ashes in the end". If not, obviously the argument nathan_long is making gets even weaker.)

Re: Philae has landed

#288

Post by tripzilch »

foxylad wrote: post #248
throwit99 wrote: post #94

Earlier 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…

Once upon a time, long long ago, the most powerful dinosaurs got together to consider the proposal of a young pterodactyl. The pterodactyl had come up with the strange proposal that the other dinosaurs should bring her food while she concentrated on devising ways to fly higher. "Why should we all work harder so you can learn to fly higher?" roared a huge tyrannosaurus, and bit the pterodactyl's head clean off. So the…

You weren't there. This is not how it happened at all.

The strong and mighty individualist T-Rex was enslaved by the communist mammals. The once idealistic Pterodactyl was forced to evolve into a chicken, bereft of its flight, today kept in captivity by the trillions, bred by robots, for meat and eggs. Their feathers fill our pillows. How ironic that Mankind's dreams are birthed atop their crushed wings.

What gives us the right to land on this comet?

Weren't the dinosaurs there first?

What about our robots? Who fills their pillowcases?

Or, as Eddy Lizzard once wisely said,

"Do you have a flag?!!"

Re: Philae has landed

#289

Post by tripzilch »

valarauca1 wrote: post #43
k-mcgrady wrote: post #12

Amazing job! This might be a silly question but are their any ideas as to the actual real world benefits we could see from this? The director-general of the ESA said "This is a big step for human civilisation" so I presume there is some idea of what they expect to gain from this mission? Edit: Thanks for all the replies! I'm at work now but will take a look at them this evening.

The actual real world benefits of Space Flight are strange. For example the Apollo program didn't bring back DeathCrystals from the moon, that allowed us to crush the Soviets in a glorious patriot war (obviously sarcasm). Instead it gave us seemly random things, that we were looking for, but are beneficial nonetheless and some which may not come out right away. The Apollo Mission gave us ASICs, Cordless Tools, CAT sc…

> For example the Apollo program didn't bring back DeathCrystals from the moon, that allowed us to crush the Soviets in a glorious patriot war (obviously sarcasm).

Sarcasm aside, this is more due to Geneva Conventions rather than actual lack of Death Crystals on the moon.

Re: Philae has landed

#290

Post by [deleted] »

grey-area wrote: post #59
k-mcgrady wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I would definitely consider the second point a real world benefit but if we are going to spend over $1bn to learn about the solar system's history I take it we are hoping to discover something that actually has benefits to humanity (e.g. when the money could have had more immediate impacts treating disease or helping the poor etc.). Don't get me wrong I'm all for these kinds of missions I just thought that to…

If you want to talk about spending priorities, how about the folly of the Iraq war, trident, etc. those cost huge amounts more than this mission? Not everyone has the same priorities as you. Thank goodness at least some of our money is spent on things which might benefit humanity in the long term , like discovering how the solar system was formed or whether life was formed on earth or elsewhere.

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