If my harpoon can't penetrate a ball of ice, well, then life isn't worth living.After a 6.4 billion kilometer journey if what you finally got into squished 4 centimeters your harpoon probably wouldn't fire either.![]()
Bleah. Count me out. Manned spaceflight is a colossal waste of money. We could do 100x the science (and retain the jobs, industrial benefits, and tech spinoffs) if we gave up that sci-fi nonsense and focused exclusively on unmanned missions.It took a while, but we have reached the space program we should have had in 1977.
I'm glad the English, French, and Spaniards didn't feel that way 500 years ago.Bleah. Count me out. Manned spaceflight is a colossal waste of money. We could do 100x the science (and retain the jobs, industrial benefits, and tech spinoffs) if we gave up that sci-fi nonsense and focused exclusively on unmanned missions.
Bleah. Count me out. Manned spaceflight is a colossal waste of money. We could do 100x the science (and retain the jobs, industrial benefits, and tech spinoffs) if we gave up that sci-fi nonsense and focused exclusively on unmanned missions.
I'm glad the English, French, and Spaniards didn't feel that way 500 years ago.
The Martians won't like us either.The Injuns aint.
It's a stunning discovery: Electric eels don’t just “zap” their prey. They use their powers to remote-control them, too.....A new study published in the journal Science reveals the eels can “remote-control” their prey.
The electric eel is virtually blind, and they swim in murky waters. So they use their finely tuned electric senses to detect “echoes” from a pair of low-voltage pulses. Yes, like radar.....They then home in on their target, until they come within range.
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Experiments have shown that the eel has tuned its electric effect to trigger its prey’s nervous system. It hijacks the movement of every muscle in a fish’s body through mimicking the signals carried by its neural network.....This includes revealing the prey’s location (in the same way your arm would flex upward when touching a live wire) and smothering any reflex to run.
I'm glad the English, French, and Spaniards didn't feel that way 500 years ago.
Now THIS is a totally awesome discovery:
That article carried a link to the Science article: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6214/1231
Let's leave "manned" space flight to the entrepreneurs and super-rich for now and concentrate on more practical applications of space flight like how to beam solar power from orbiting satellites to earth or how to mine the asteroids.![]()
Like the Hudson's Bay Company and the British East India Corporation? Bully!People had already been sailing for millennia by then. The technology of oceanic navigation had already been worked out to a much greater degree.
Let's leave "manned" space flight to the entrepreneurs and super-rich for now and concentrate on more practical applications of space flight like how to beam solar power from orbiting satellites to earth or how to mine the asteroids.![]()
Like the Hudson's Bay Company and the British East India Corporation? Bully!
In Bangalore, nobody can hear you scream!
Sure it is - if "we the people" (more on that in a minute) give NASA an extra dollar, they can either spend it on a manned program or an unmanned one. Despite what Democrats tell us, you can't spend the same dollar twice. The same applies to the last dollar in NASA's budget, and the one before that, and every other dollar in their budget.1) It's not either/or.
People don't fund space exploration, Congress does. Find me one member who's ever been voted in or out for too strong or too weak support for manned or unmanned missions - that just does not happen.. This is truly an area where Congress can do what they want, consequence-free.2) The hype surrounding manned missions is the only thing that gets people to fund space exploration.
People drastically underestimate the amount of resources it would take to colonize another world. If we had those sort of resources available, we wouldn't need to leave. How crappy does Earth have to get so that *Mars* starts to look good? I mean, you don't see Billy Joel cruising for chicks at an Idaho county fair, right? We already have the belle of the ball - it ain't getting any better than this.3) The only imperative that matters is to get the chimpanzees off this rock before the gorillas blow it up.
Let's leave "manned" space flight to the entrepreneurs and super-rich for now and concentrate on more practical applications of space flight like how to beam solar power from orbiting satellites to earth or how to mine the asteroids.![]()
A major meteor shower will ignite the night sky over the weekend — providing one of the most spectacular shooting star displays of the year.
Dubbed the Geminids, the annual interstellar light show began Dec. 4 and is expected to hit its peak viewing time Saturday and Sunday night around 9 p.m EST, according to NASA.
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“You will be able to see 60 to 80 per hour with the naked eye with a wide expanse of sky in a rural area,” astronomer Bob Berman said in a press release. “Cities will only be able to see one or two per hour.”
Some of the best spots to see the Geminids will be across the Eastern Seaboard as a high pressure system moves across the region, Accuweather reports. The Midwest and southern Southwest will also see clear skies.