NASA's Curiosity rover finds organic matter on Mars

I guess you're right, but bills still kept dropping through letterboxes after those events were discovered, so I don't really understand where you're coming from. In other words, apart from a passing interest or not, what difference did the knowledge make?

 

It proved that religion was a fairy tale. It was the beginning of the age of reason. Religious dogma began to yield to logic and the understanding of cause and effect.

Our understanding of the cosmos made possible the age of information and communication satellites. What is the value in that? If you don't know, then turn off your computer, your TV, your media center, your cell phone, and live in a cave. Let me know how it goes in a few years.

 

All of that is the result of real science, not pretend science. But you make a good point about religion finally being acknowledged as bullshit - I predict that one day fake cosmo-science will be too. Wonder if that 'dust storm' on Mars has died down yet!

 

You asked a question. I answered it. Now you change the parameters.

That is the definition of bllsht.

 

I only changed them because you'd misunderstood what I was getting at. You might have noticed my question as to how anyone who has never been on Mars can possibly know that dust storms are regular meteorological events, and how long they last. You can give me your thoughts on that, if you like?

 

advances in technology are one of the benefits, often discoveries come from trying to find the answers to questions that may not of even been directly releated

 

It's hard to know what would come of us having an improved model of physics.

But, whatever that new model might be, it could bring us new insights for us on earth.

 

The nature of the travels of our satellites don't address the issues we were talking about. The granule size for space is suspected to be far smaller than we can detect with current technology. Dark matter can't be found that easily, because it interacts with other matter only by gravity. Remember that we have neutrinos, where trillions pass through our bodies daily, because they are just too small to hit anything and don't carry enough momentum to do damage if they did. The expansion of the universe is something detectable by measuring far distant galaxies and galaxy clusters. None of our satellites are going to travel outside our own galaxy unless something really surprising happens. It will be a few tens of thousands of years before they get as far away as the nearest star to the sun.

Expansion has to be detected by looking at distant galaxies. The distance to nearby galaxies can be shrinking due to the closing speed being greater than the expansion of space that is between them. On a larger scale (to truly distant galaxies), the total of the expansion of the intervening space can add up to something significant. It can even add up to being greater than the speed of light. Astronomers have identified objects so far away that if we were to travel at the speed of light, we would never get there. Ever.

Remember that the findings of astrophysicists include actual data and that they are held to the serious rigor of requirements for review, verification by duplication, by the extensive knowledge of physics and astronomy that has come before.

That's where those who reported a finding concerning neutrinos lost out. They had a cool idea with data to back them up. Still, physicists immediately found multiple reasons for rejecting their work. The "my own theory" idea just doesn't work.

 

I don't think many technological advances will result from speculating about dust storms and their duration on a distant planet which will never support human life.

 

Agreed!

I still don't have any understanding of what that is all about either.

 

Per the bolded comment above that would be logical given a single source of photons/energy. The further away from the source the cooler it would become.

However what we have is new sources of photons/energy being "born" in the form of new stars which is what is contributing to the heating and expansion. It will only be once there are no new stars and the existing ones burn out that the cooling and contraction would begin.

 

When someone tried to explain how the big bang worked, I said the same thing.

 

While we might never leave our own solar system that does not preclude the possibility that other life forms won't come and visit us.

It was only a quarter of a century ago that we discovered planets around other stars and now we are on the verge of establishing that life can exist on other planets.

Back in the 1980's electronic communication via the internet was crude and slow just like planes were crude and slow when they were first invented.

Our ability to physically great distances has improved tremendously from the original transcontinental flight taking 49 days to a flight today taking less than 6 hours without stopovers.

The internet is now such that we can have transcontinental conversations and even intercontinental conversations in real time even though we are separated by many thousands of miles.

Given the above and the time frame for those technological advances while we might never travel to other stars physically it is not beyond the realm of possibility that we might be in contact with intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe in the future.

 

Those conversations may take many thousands of years to carry out though due to the distances involved...

 

Denying the possibility of human interstellar travel is to deny the realities of human history.

 

...Yes, right now.

Consider quantum entanglement.

 

I can consider John Luc Picard, but that does not ''make it so''

 

Using CURRENT technology that is true.

However we are NOT still using clay tablets to have this conversation today as we would have had to have done thousands of years ago in the past.

The stark difference between clay tablets and the internet of today is an example as to how our ability to communicate has been transformed from physical to virtual.

Who can definitely stipulate that the means to communicate effectively and efficiently across interstellar spaces does not exist?

 

Hey, I'm not going to be the one to tell Einstein he is wrong about the speed of light.

 

I am not either!

Can you explain why mankind is constantly obsessed with setting ever faster speed records in various aspects of travel.

Can you explain why CPU chips are constantly refined and upgraded to be faster by orders of magnitude?

Light is but one small part of the spectrum of electromagnetism.



What is not commonly known is that darkness exceeds the speed of light and while darkness is the absence of information it is technically feasible to exploit the attributes of darkness to transmit information faster than the speed of light.



If your browser background is any color other than black then what you are reading as words on your screen is actually the absence of light AKA darkness. We only see the light around the darkness because we cannot see the darkness itself. It is from the shape of the darkness that we "see" the words themselves.

Another way to try and illustrate the concept of using darkness to transmit information is to think about the old fashioned signal lamps that ships used to transmit morse code. Now invert that so that the absence of light is used to represent a dot or a dash. In the video there is an illustration of intersecting light waves showing how the cancelled light waves, AKA darkness, travel faster than the speed of light. If a transmitter was made using that darkness principle and transmitting binary code it is theoretically possible to transmit information faster than the speed of light.

The possibility exists but the technology to make it functional is probably not yet available. Predictions of the future usually involve physical things like flying cars but the actual future tends towards refinements in technology that optimizes communication and the transfer of knowledge which is why something of this nature is not beyond the realms of probability IMO.

 

My understanding is that astrophysicists say there is about one star dying for every star created right now. Plus, the rate of star creation is decreasing, with no more than about 5% more stars being created throughout the future. That's worth checking, of course.

Given that expansion is currently accelerating, I've interpreted that to indicate the universe will continue to cool forever.

 

Yes, at least with communication we can hope for light speed - meaning that we could send a couple messages within the working lifetime of a human if it's to one of the very few nearby stars.

Today we are facing a fundamental limit of physics, not just technological problems.

 

yeah I like to be optimistic about space travel and alien contact but our relatively short lifespans, the enormous times and distances involved conflict with the very finite physical limits that we can not ever overcome.

 

It is possible that we may have reached the break even point for increasing the rate of expansion but there is still a great deal of matter in motion that equates to a lot of momentum. It could well be billions of years before expansion ends and contraction begins.