Discussion
k-off spaceships in Iain M Banks' books must have been influenced by Chris Foss's paintings.
eldar said:
Presumably some of the ice from it's position has ablated off and with increased sunlight it's enough to get more power. Nice to see a possible being realised. This with Ceres and Pluto, going to be a good summer for planetary folk .. cool.
I can imagine a whole bunch of engineers around Europe waking up today and punching the air!
Fingers crossed that they can grab some more data off it, and perhaps even get enough power to get a sub-surface sample analysed. -35 deg C sounds almost warm, bog standard industrial temperature range components are already specified from -40 to +100 deg C, with military stuff considerably beyond that. Of course that doesn't take into consideration the periods of intense cold and darkness that it must have experienced, but heck, it is aliiiiiive!
Fingers crossed that they can grab some more data off it, and perhaps even get enough power to get a sub-surface sample analysed. -35 deg C sounds almost warm, bog standard industrial temperature range components are already specified from -40 to +100 deg C, with military stuff considerably beyond that. Of course that doesn't take into consideration the periods of intense cold and darkness that it must have experienced, but heck, it is aliiiiiive!
I'm really hoping that they manage to get the drill up and running. I'd love them to find that the comet is rock and dust with no ice, a giant whiskey stone in fact. That would really get the scientists to start looking for some new answers and stop making odd theories up about comets starting life on earth.
Eric Mc said:
Why would you want that particular theory to be scotched? It's still a valid one - and might very well remain valid as examining one comet out of millions is not going to answer all the questions we have about comets.
Mainly because every time a comfortable consensus is blown out of the water lots and lots of exciting new science happens. Secondly, I prefer the idea that life arose on earth without any help from the sky. I saw a great interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson where he pulls apart the "we're special" argument really well, pointing out that carbon and hydrogen (the basis of life on earth) are so abundant in the universe that the life is not so much unusual as inevitable.XM5ER said:
Eric Mc said:
Why would you want that particular theory to be scotched? It's still a valid one - and might very well remain valid as examining one comet out of millions is not going to answer all the questions we have about comets.
Mainly because every time a comfortable consensus is blown out of the water lots and lots of exciting new science happens. Secondly, I prefer the idea that life arose on earth without any help from the sky. I saw a great interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson where he pulls apart the "we're special" argument really well, pointing out that carbon and hydrogen (the basis of life on earth) are so abundant in the universe that the life is not so much unusual as inevitable.So, I would say that there can be no other way for the materials that form life to arrive on a planet - because that is how planets form in the first place.
jammy_basturd said:
Might be a bit of a naive question, but does anybody know if the tweets from Philae and Rosetta are directly from the systems themselves, or just some dude at NASA?
Bear in mind Twitter wasn't really around when the rocket carrying Philae and Rosetta was launched. Amazing to think how much things have changed, and even more amazing to see how much they've done with technology from the pre-smartphone era!ash73 said:
Why?
Because then it is far more likely that it arose elsewhere as well. And in fact may exist elsewhere in our own solar system. Eric does make a fair point about solar system formation and accretion though, "comet seeding" may just be a communication error. Having listened to to the absolute and total scientific illiteracy of a R4 morning presenter who was interviewing a scientist about this yesterday, I can see why they have to dumb down science communications to the point of meaninglessness.
Eric Mc said:
I prefer not to "prefer" any one theory - because that's all they are - a theory. I would say that there is absolutely NO consensus that the building blocks of life were delivered to earth by comets as such - although you have to say that ALL of the material that formed earth was delivered to the earth during the accretion process which formed the planet. An awful lot of the material and objects that accreted to form the earth (and the other planets) would have been very comet like in their make up.
In the science you are probably right about there being no consensus about life's origins, it is probably down to poor reporting and trying to appeal to a broad (and scientifically ignorant) audience.The consensus I was referring to was the dirty snowball one. The Comet Lovejoy event in 2011 (was it really that long ago already) should have caused a lot of reexamination of that theory but after a few "mystified scientists" stories, the dirty snowball theory is as strong as ever. If there is no (or very little) ice discovered by Philae, what then?
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