On Wed, 12 Sep 2012, Keith Hudson wrote:
> At 15:39 12/09/2012, Arthur wrote: > > Subject: FW: How we got to Mars A MUST SEE > > http://www.youtube.com/embed/XRCIzZHpFtY?rel=0 > > I'm puzzled. This must have been the simulation of a previous proposal. This was for the Spirit/Opportunity landings in '03. If you strip off the "embed" in the link you get http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRCIzZHpFtY which gives you all the information. As with the link you give, it is a heavily CGI'ed post-production mixing live action with animation. > For > one of the recent Curiosity landing see: > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9hXqzkH7YA I happened to watch this one live - the youtube version is greatly compressed, of course. I was sitting down to check the news on the CBC website one night, and found a note saying the landing would be occurring shortly, and CBC had a direct feed from NASA. As it turned out, I had opened the CBC site about five minutes before the landing, improbably enough, and got to watch the whole thing. I took the time to check the NASA and JPL sites, and found they were overloaded, so I was doubly fortunate to find the CBC stream. The feed was in HD, and the euphoria in the JPL control room was fascinating to watch bubble up and explode in real time. The hugs and cheers and bubbly went on for about ten minutes, and then only tapered off a little. The feed went on for about 45 minutes, til the lander went round the horizon from the relaying orbiter. > > Brunel would be very proud of what engineers are achieving today. I'm greatly > looking forward to the results of rock analyses in a few weeks'/months' time. > Will there be any signs of DNA there? If so, will it have the same four > nucleobases as earth's lifeforms? If not, it will suggest that life arose > separately on Mars and Earth. It's all very fascinating. I will be surprised if evidence of anything like life is found on Mars. I am not convinced that it retained a hospitable atmosphere and climate for a long enough period, considering its low mass and lack of strong magnetic field. > > What's so extraordinary about life is that it can only grow and evolve > in a universe in which several sub-atomic parameters are set so > precisely and so narrowly that only one in a quintillion of slightly > different universes would qualify. Of course, those universes would not have anyone there to see them, so they rather self-deselect. If we're looking, we have to find ourselves somewhere we can exist. > Adverting to Natalia's mention of Bell's Theorem yesterday which > suggests a sub-atomic informational field below the level that we > think of as reality maybe there's a dialogue going on. Maybe the > universe is riddled with lifeforms. Yes, it would seem the numbers are strongly in favour of this. The Kepler probe currently has posted over 2300 planetary candidates, in an incredibly restrictive sample - the region a little off the centreline of the milky way is less than ten degrees on a side, so around 1/1300th of the sky. The stars considered are above 14th visual magnitude, so only within about 3000ly, say 3% of the length of the galaxy. And the detectable planets must be aligned with our point of view, which is a tiny fraction of possible orbital orientations. For big, close-orbitting planets, this can be maybe 1-2% of possible orientations, but for small planets far from the star, such as ourselves, the detectable orientations represent 0.1% or less. In fact, the system's sensitivity is such that planets such as our own are so small and far from their stars that they are on the rolloff slope of detectability, basically just getting into the noise. Nevertheless, so far, there appear to be around 50 that are within the habitable temperature range, and three or four that are less than twice our diameter, so not too gravitationally unpleasant. A very naive back-of-envelope calculation based on these numbers suggests that conservatively, those three or four therefore expand to around 50 million over the extent of just our galaxy, which of course is just one of *billions*. It would be very hard to imagine there not being inconceivable quantities of life out there. http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/kepler -Pete > > Keith > > > Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com > _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
