So, significant amounts of water on the moon :)

[Neil]

Cooool!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8359744.stm

[deadpunk]

"You can break it down and have breathable air for crews. But also, if you have significant quantities of this stuff, you have the constituents of one of the most potent rocket fuels - oxygen and hydrogen."

Wow. Just...wow. The implications are hard to wrap your mind around :eek:

[krakenslayer]

I can't wait to see Patrick Moore eat his hat over this one. Don't get me wrong, I love the cantankerous old bugger, but he was dead wrong in his very vocal belief that there was no water up there.

[capncnut]

I can't wait to see Patrick Moore eat his hat over this one. Don't get me wrong, I love the cantankerous old bugger, but he was dead wrong in his very vocal belief that there was no water up there.
Oh, he'll be eating his hat good and proper but unfortunately I can't understand a bloody thing he's saying half the time. I dunno if it's because he's so old or because he's had one too many sherries but his slurring is getting worse with every episode.

[Danny]

Oh, he'll be eating his hat good and proper but unfortunately I can't understand a bloody thing he's saying half the time. I dunno if it's because he's so old or because he's had one too many sherries but his slurring is getting worse with every episode.

pretty sure its both, diamond had him on a sherry drip during his gamesmaster years

[Neil]

Wow. Just...wow. The implications are hard to wrap your mind around :eek:

Amazing to think that the crater they 'bombed' hadn't seen direct sunlight for over 2,000,000,000 years :eek:

[mista_mo]

This is fake, we've never been to the moon. They just blew a crater up in Brazil. Yep.

[Danny]

This is fake, we've never been to the moon. They just blew a crater up in Brazil. Yep.

thats a lie, theres no water in brazil.

[clanglee]

Interesting and all that, but isn't H2O a very common and easy chemical combination? I don't see why everyone is so surprised to find water in outer space, Hell, there are asteroids almost entirely made of the stuff. Neat find, but mostly a waste of money.

[Danny]

Interesting and all that, but isn't H2O a very common and easy chemical combination? I don't see why everyone is so surprised to find water in outer space, Hell, there are asteroids almost entirely made of the stuff. Neat find, but mostly a waste of money.

That was my thinking, but i think its more the simple "finding stuff that can support life off world" notion. Like a thumbs up to go ahead and explore further y'know?

[Neil]

Neat find, but mostly a waste of money.
It was a cheap project, so don't really see how it was a waste of money... Especially as given the right equipment, we can now obtain water and fuel from lunar soil...

[Danny]

Especially as given the right equipment, we can now obtain water and fuel from lunar soil...

Thats what makes me uneasy. Honestly i could see whatever we evolve into in a million years bieng some kind of swarm like a locust that just goes around to different planets, wiping them clean of all resources and moving on.

[krakenslayer]

Thats what makes me uneasy. Honestly i could see whatever we evolve into in a million years bieng some kind of swarm like a locust that just goes around to different planets, wiping them clean of all resources and moving on.

Hell, why not? There are probably things like that out there already.

[Danny]

Hell, why not? There are probably things like that out there already.

eh, i doubt it. i had this argument with a friend during a long car ride the other day. we both agreed that ufo's are bollocks, but he still thinks any possible life would be remotely like us because its made of the same stuff, i just pointed out that a rocks made out of the same stuff at the most basic level. There probably is life out there, but it is alien, evolved in a completely different environment, so the odds of something humanoid flying a machine is incredibly unlikely. I think science fiction and religious notions of higher power has us expecting this hyper evolved figures in gleaming space crafts when theres life out there that we might not even recognize as life. or vice versa, for all we know we might be a bigger fluke than we realize, music, language, machinery, for all we know the very things we take as stable facts of our existence might be totally alien in concept and simple reality to another life from from across the universe.
The odds of any other life is quite likely i think, the odds of it having to have needed to evolve beyond a basic animal to something using tools is much, much more unlikely. maybe there was and they died out, maybe were the first, who knows?

[krakenslayer]

eh, i doubt it. i had this argument with a friend during a long car ride the other day. we both agreed that ufo's are bollocks, but he still thinks any possible life would be remotely like us because its made of the same stuff, i just pointed out that a rocks made out of the same stuff at the most basic level. There probably is life out there, but it is alien, evolved in a completely different environment, so the odds of something humanoid flying a machine is incredibly unlikely. I think science fiction and religious notions of higher power has us expecting this hyper evolved figures in gleaming space crafts when theres life out there that we might not even recognize as life. or vice versa, for all we know we might be a bigger fluke than we realize, music, language, machinery, for all we know the very things we take as stable facts of our existence might be totally alien in concept and simple reality to another life from from across the universe.
The odds of any other life is quite likely i think, the odds of it having to have needed to evolve beyond a basic animal to something using tools is much, much more unlikely. maybe there was and they died out, maybe were the first, who knows?

I've done a lot reading into the philosophical, biological and scientific sides of "astrobiology" and, really, the range of serious logical arguments, problems and theories is far more complex than I ever imagine before.

I'd recommend having a look at this article, which is basically a very fascinating thought experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

I'm of the persuasion that, since the universe is mind-blowingly larger than we can comprehend, even if life is extremely rare then there should still be millions and millions of worlds on which life has evolved. Of this vast number, I'd expect that there are or have been at least a handful of space-faring races that are roughly analogous to our own (not because there is anything special about the bipedal form, but simply due to chance and statistics - if you let a million monkeys each play with a Rubick's cube for long enough, at least one will solve the puzzle by sheer accident). I'm not talking about alien babes with pointy ears, pink flying saucers and silver space bikinis, I just mean creatures with sentience, individual will and an understanding of science and mathematics.

That said, I have doubts that we will ever contact them, even if they are out there:

1) Because they're probably spread out too much - we're talking millions and millions of light years

2) Because they may have come and gone billions of years before we evolved

3) If they are still around, they may see no benefit in contacting belligerent, warlike young races who largely cannot tolerate different world-views even within their own species but continue to blast radio signals into space and advertise their presence to all and sundry

It's also worth noting that, in nature, when two species compete for one ecological niche or habitat, one is almost always exterminated. Biological life, by definition, fights for survival and resources. It would appear to be in the natural evolutionary order of things that two intelligent planetary species would very likely become hostile to one another. The logical upshot of this is that space-faring life with experience of inter-species contact should naturally be aggressive or otherwise highly successful colonisers, because non-aggressive species would not survive the initial competition for resources.

Also my initial point concerning resource-consuming hives of space-locusts does not necessarily imply intelligent life. Just because a species has the ability to travel through space does not necessarily make it intelligent, not by our conception of intelligent, anyway.

[Danny]

I'm of the persuasion that, since the universe is mind-blowingly larger than we can comprehend, even if life is extremely rare then there should still be millions and millions of worlds on which life has evolved. Of this vast number, I'd expect that there are or have been at least a handful of space-faring races that are roughly analogous to our own (not because there is anything special about the bipedal form, but simply due to chance and statistics - if you let a million monkeys each play with a Rubick's cube for long enough, at least one will solve the puzzle by sheer accident). I'm not talking about alien babes with pointy ears, pink flying saucers and silver space bikinis, I just mean creatures with sentience, individual will and an understanding of science and mathematics.

That's my whole point though, you using human notions and ideas as the basis. maths and science is just a variation of language we use to investigate the world around us. It's a human concept. Ant's work better together than people and they dont have a concept of math or science, because there not human, the concept of concepts is not even alien, its non existent to them because they arent us. They live a certain way and it works and they have no need to have minds that work like ours, or culture like ours, granted thats a wierd example off the top of my head, but the problem is people always think of aliens and use ourselves as the basis. just because we use internal combustion to power cars, electricity to power our homes ect. and people are so infused with this wealth of science fiction and fantasy that we assume another sentient race must exist that does what we do, but in a slightly wierd way. Honestly i think thats incredibly unlikely. We exist in one place. earth. we evolved here. created sounds to give meaning to things, to our emotions and we assume this is going to be in some way or another the norm for sentient life. But for something alien it might be as alien to them as something not even seeing in the same visual spectrum as us to perceive reality in the same way. If they even have evolved eyes.
I'm going really out there with this but my basic thoery i propose is this: there are billions of life forms on this planet, in exponentially varied forms. one ONE planet. lets say theres... i dunno, 27 other planets as abundant in life as earth. do they have the same atmosphere?, the same gravity? does it orbit a star? each of these is unique and the life will be so alien i would guess we would not recognize it as life as we know it jim. like a walking 9 legged behemoth that grows a forest on its back in some form of species mutulasim unheard of on Earth.
It's like you said about life fighting it out. thats life ON EARTH. imagine whats out there, the infinite possibilities. Earth has gone through a few extinction events imagine a world that didnt. that was constantly bombarded with what to us would be toxic radiation, but the life on the planet thrived on it. hell, theres a type of mold growing in the Chernobyl reactor if memory serves.
I could honestly ramble on for pages, the science fiction enthusiast and philosopher in me reacts in a pleasing way at this brand of juncture, but im fond of the jurassic park line "life will find a way", i just think we are to strict in what we brand life, because we only have one pitri dish to take samples from as it were.

[krakenslayer]

That's my whole point though, you using human notions and ideas as the basis. maths and science is just a variation of language we use to investigate the world around us. It's a human concept.

That's incorrect. The STUDY of maths and science is a human concept, yes, but electrons and prime numbers and angles and nuclear fission and velocity and temperature and whatnot all exist in the real, physical universe not just in the heads of scientists. Certainly the methods and outlook of another sentient space-faring race would be vastly different, but they'd be grappling with the same real-world phenomena.


Ant's work better together than people and they dont have a concept of math or science, because there not human, the concept of concepts is not even alien, its non existent to them because they arent us. They live a certain way and it works and they have no need to have minds that work like ours, or culture like ours, granted thats a wierd example off the top of my head, but the problem is people always think of aliens and use ourselves as the basis.

Well, this goes back to your original point where you actually used insects as an analogy to creatures spreading out through the universe like locusts and you picked me up on it when I said there were probably things already out there like that. This is a separate argument to what we're getting into now - I didn't necessarily imply that they would be "intelligent" in any way that we can imagine. I agree that, since insects appear to have a group "intelligence" that cannot be compared to human intelligence because it is so different, it's likely that (if there IS intelligent life out there) the vast majority of it is massively different in form and mind to our own.



I'm going really out there with this but my basic thoery i propose is this: there are billions of life forms on this planet, in exponentially varied forms. one ONE planet. lets say theres... i dunno, 27 other planets as abundant in life as earth. do they have the same atmosphere?, the same gravity? does it orbit a star? each of these is unique and the life will be so alien i would guess we would not recognize it as life as we know it jim. like a walking 9 legged behemoth that grows a forest on its back in some form of species mutulasim unheard of on Earth.

27? That's an infinitesimally small figure there. There are an estimated one hundred trillion billion (1 x 10^23) stars in the known universe. Even if only one in ten stars has a planetary system and we (very conservatively) estmate that each of these systems has an average of two planets then that's twenty billion trillion planets. If only one in a billion planets supports any form of life then that's still 200,000,000,000,000 (two hundred thousand billion) planets with life in total.

You can play with that equation, stick more conservative numbers in if you like, but I think, given the size of the universe, the number ought to come out a lot higher than 27.



just because we use internal combustion to power cars, electricity to power our homes ect. and people are so infused with this wealth of science fiction and fantasy that we assume another sentient race must exist that does what we do, but in a slightly wierd way. Honestly i think thats incredibly unlikely. We exist in one place. earth. we evolved here. created sounds to give meaning to things, to our emotions and we assume this is going to be in some way or another the norm for sentient life. But for something alien it might be as alien to them as something not even seeing in the same visual spectrum as us to perceive reality in the same way. If they even have evolved eyes.
I'm going really out there with this but my basic thoery i propose is this: there are billions of life forms on this planet, in exponentially varied forms. one ONE planet. lets say theres... i dunno, 27 other planets as abundant in life as earth. do they have the same atmosphere?, the same gravity? does it orbit a star? each of these is unique and the life will be so alien i would guess we would not recognize it as life as we know it jim. like a walking 9 legged behemoth that grows a forest on its back in some form of species mutulasim unheard of on Earth.

It's like you said about life fighting it out. thats life ON EARTH. imagine whats out there, the infinite possibilities. Earth has gone through a few extinction events imagine a world that didnt. that was constantly bombarded with what to us would be toxic radiation, but the life on the planet thrived on it. hell, theres a type of mold growing in the Chernobyl reactor if memory serves.
I could honestly ramble on for pages, the science fiction enthusiast and philosopher in me reacts in a pleasing way at this brand of juncture, but im fond of the jurassic park line "life will find a way", i just think we are to strict in what we brand life, because we only have one pitri dish to take samples from as it were.

Very intelligent points but I think you're getting way too bogged down in too many different arguments at once. First of all, I am in no way advocating the prevalence of human-like intelligence in the universe. I think that the possibilities ARE endless. I'm just saying that given the vastness of the universe, it would be incredibly surprising that, out there, among quadrillions of forms of life we cannot even fathom right now, there wasn't something with which we could theoretically make some kind of meaningful contact (for better or worse). I'm not saying it's likely we will make contact, and I am talking about similarity in the very loosest sense (i.e. something we could potentially communicate with in a meaningful way).

But, saying that, even on Earth convergent evolution has, by sheer chance, thrown up similar forms by different processes - for example, the wings of a bat, a bird and a flying insect all emerged from different structures at different times and by different paths all arriving independently at a very similar outcome. This is because these creatures, by evolution, have arrived independently at the best method for dealing with a given problem that exists in their environment. Obviously, creatures from a different environment would be different, and many of those from a similar one would also be unlike what we could have expected.

I think that people are very naive and anthropocentric in their imaginings of alien life - everything tends to mirror human or familiar animal life - but at the same time, I think it's equally naive, bearing in mind the vast size of the universe, to assume that there can't SOMEWHERE be things mentally similar (but probably physically incomparable) to ourselves, or even physically similar but mentally incomparable.

Like I said, I doubt we will be anywhere near contactable range of such life at any point in our existence and a species, but since the universe is almost infinite then it stands to reason that if something is physically possible, it almost certainly exists somewhere.

[Danny]

all good points, i guess i just think people should expect something that, like the space locust, would view space as the normal, not the outside of the eggshell, than being abducted and probed by the thundercats.


filthy gimp leopard bastards.

[Tricky]

Wouldnt fancy drinking that there moon water, would be like drinking the contents of a cement mixer! :p

[Neil]

I'd recommend having a look at this article, which is basically a very fascinating thought experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
Great read!

Personally my fears are:-
1) It's extremely common place for races gaining technology to cause global issues (climate change, toxic polution etc) that actually trips the whole species up and reverts them back to lower technologies, from which they would find it impossible to crawl back up again.
2) Space is just soooooo big it's impractical to communicate over anything more than a few light years, yet alone travel that far.

And my greatest fear is I will go to the grave with just as many questions about this area, as I have now - Are we alone :(

[Tricky]

And my greatest fear is I will go to the grave with just as many questions about this area, as I have now - Are we alone :(

But at least you'll go to the grave in the knowledge that you were far more enlightened than anyone from the generations that passed before you,including top scientists from previous generations who's theories have since been proved wrong! :)

[Neil]

But at least you'll go to the grave in the knowledge that you were far more enlightened than anyone from the generations that passed before you,including top scientists from previous generations who's theories have since been proved wrong! :)

But I'll also die knowing if I'd been born just a generation or two later:-
- I would live for multiples of times longer. (I'll die around 70 I suspect... By the end of the century life spans may be 2 or 3X that).
- I would most likely speak to an AI.
- I would most likely see men on Mars (I don't think it's going to happen before 2050).

[capncnut]

I would most likely see men on Mars (I don't think it's going to happen before 2050).
I dunno, mate. They really seem to think that they can pull it off in 2030's and there's a lot of work going into it to make that happen. It is wholly possible that you will be alive to see a manned Mars landing.

[blind2d]

I definitely believe in aliens, as you all may know. We haven't seen much of them yet, besides their craft and certain crop circles, but one day we will. One day, they will show themselves and we will become friends and practise sciences and maths together and everything will be beautiful.

[Neil]

I definitely believe in aliens, as you all may know. We haven't seen much of them yet, besides their craft and certain crop circles, but one day we will. One day, they will show themselves and we will become friends and practise sciences and maths together and everything will be beautiful.

...and even play 'Connect 4' togethor? Wow!

[clanglee]

Don't get me wrong, I am all for space exploration, and I get the reason for the test. Anything to get us out there is great. It just seems such an arbitrary thing to look for. . and why didn't they think of that with one of the manned Moon missions? Bah. . . I dunno.



As far as the alien thing goes, I have only this to say, "The only good bug, is a dead bug!!" :)

[krakenslayer]

I definitely believe in aliens, as you all may know. We haven't seen much of them yet, besides their craft and certain crop circles, but one day we will. One day, they will show themselves and we will become friends and practise sciences and maths together and everything will be beautiful.

Crop circles are almost all fake "crop art", with the rest (mostly "simple" ones) being the result of vortices and/or other atmospheric phenomena. Even most of the hardened believers agree on that now, unfortunately. :(

As for the rest, I'm an avid reader of Fortean Times, so I respect your belief. I wish I could believe it too, and did until fairly recently, but now it just seems that almost as soon as cases are reported they are given a very good explanation. Even old cases like Randlesham Forest, etc. are being pulled out of the archive and debunked, not by the government, but by genuine UFO investigators who "want to believe" just as much as the rest of us.

I dunno. Maybe, maybe, somewhere amongst all the millions of sightings there are a few genuinely extraterrestrial ones - maybe something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Von_Neumann_probes. But I think the truth behind it, if so, is far weirder and difficult to comprehend than we expect.

[mista_mo]

The prospect of meeting aliens like the Xenomorphs, Tyranids and Zerg make me think that we should concentrate efforts on building intergalactic super weapons.

Or just build Space Marines.

[Danny]

The prospect of meeting aliens like the Xenomorphs, Tyranids and Zerg make me think that we should concentrate efforts on building intergalactic super weapons.

Or just build Space Marines.

reminded me of this

http://hopethrone.ytmnd.com/


DISCLAIMER: this is a warhammer joke, i know certain people are jumping for joy for the go ahead, but no, not a politics topic, turn around and leave.

[blind2d]

Starship Troopers references are fun! Also MIB, which surprisingly has yet to surface... hmm... I. Love. Star. Wars.

[capncnut]

Slightly changing the subject but did any UK-er's see 'Mars Night' on BBC4 the other night? Fantastic viewing and the Sky At Night special had some excellent 70's footage. :)