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Post by Sigmaleph on Jul 21, 2009 17:06:03 GMT -5
The moon landing was the only good thing that came out of all that pointless Cold War dick waving. We should do it again. Do what again? Dick waving or the Cold War?
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Post by Tiger on Jul 21, 2009 17:09:41 GMT -5
2. Doesn't count because it's not what they consider life, IE it's microbial. And given that they choose to remain willfully ignorant of the processes behind the appearance and development of life, they probably would just laugh at that idea that a few microorganisms somehow mean that it's possible for "higher" life forms to appear elsewhere in the universe.
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Post by Admiral Lithp on Jul 22, 2009 6:03:20 GMT -5
Life on mars seems like a bit of a stretch, but who knows what conditions live can survive in, we know only of our own planet's brand of life. I say we need to send some probes to those potential life gold mines orbiting Saturn and Jupiter. And life has been found to be able to not only survive, but to thrive in some rather bizarre and extreme conditions here on earth; even more extreme than conditions on Mars or some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Life has been found in the ocean thriving in temperatures above 1000 degrees, in extremely frigid permafrost, and even inside solid rock. I think if we really started looking for life in earnest in other worlds, we will find it. In a similar vein of thought, I think we expect life to be too similar. You've heard the Fundie arguments. Dramatic overexaggerations of the Goldilocks Zone, expecting life to thrive only in areas with high water & oxygen, etc. Why, exactly, do we seem to expect alien life to develop the same way it did on Earth? Granted, it's not going to just poof out of nowhere, but I think we limit our minds too much as to what may be possible with extraterrestrial organisms.
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Post by Paradox on Jul 22, 2009 9:12:43 GMT -5
The moon landing was the only good thing that came out of all that pointless Cold War dick waving. We should do it again. Do what again? Dick waving or the Cold War? The moon landing.
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Post by Admiral Lithp on Jul 22, 2009 10:08:19 GMT -5
Do what again? Dick waving or the Cold War? The moon landing. We'll wave our dicks on the moon. It's brilliant. You don't even wanna KNOW where my mind wandered after THAT.
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Post by David D.G. on Jul 22, 2009 10:40:55 GMT -5
Interesting side note:
My girlfriend tutors foreign graduate students on their English. Yesterday, a Taiwanese student with a largely Chinese education was asking what all the hoopla was about the day before, having something to do with the moon. She told him that it was a celebration of us first landing people on the moon 40 years ago.
He was somewhere between uncomprehending (partly because of his language problems --- he seemed to think that the event had only just happened) and dumbfounded; he had never heard of such a thing, and had a very hard time believing that it was true.
Evidently, even after 40+ years, China's (and Taiwan's) educational system still does not mention anything about the successes of the U.S. space program --- and to compound the problem, most of the "information" he had received about the moon landing was nonsense from moon-landing-hoax conspiracy theorists, such that he thought that nobody took that story of "moon landings" seriously, any more than the radar tracking of Santa's Christmas Eve flights.
Evidently, the United States isn't the only major nation with educational deficiencies.
~David D.G.
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Post by Star Cluster on Jul 22, 2009 12:10:47 GMT -5
And life has been found to be able to not only survive, but to thrive in some rather bizarre and extreme conditions here on earth; even more extreme than conditions on Mars or some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Life has been found in the ocean thriving in temperatures above 1000 degrees, in extremely frigid permafrost, and even inside solid rock. I think if we really started looking for life in earnest in other worlds, we will find it. In a similar vein of thought, I think we expect life to be too similar. You've heard the Fundie arguments. Dramatic overexaggerations of the Goldilocks Zone, expecting life to thrive only in areas with high water & oxygen, etc. Why, exactly, do we seem to expect alien life to develop the same way it did on Earth? Granted, it's not going to just poof out of nowhere, but I think we limit our minds too much as to what may be possible with extraterrestrial organisms. Agreed. I have always wondered why nearly everyone thinks that life has to be life as we know it. As I mentioned, life here on earth is so very diverse that the conditions that some forms thrive in would be instantly deadly to other forms. And who's to say that all life needs water to survive? Could it not be possible that a life form could develop somewhere for which water would be deadly just by coming into contact with it? (This idea was explored in the movie Alien Nation in 1988.) I just think there are too many possibilities available for the existence of life to be pigeonholed into only the conditions we have on Earth.
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Post by Star Cluster on Jul 22, 2009 12:15:13 GMT -5
Interesting side note: My girlfriend tutors foreign graduate students on their English. Yesterday, a Taiwanese student with a largely Chinese education was asking what all the hoopla was about the day before, having something to do with the moon. She told him that it was a celebration of us first landing people on the moon 40 years ago. He was somewhere between uncomprehending (partly because of his language problems --- he seemed to think that the event had only just happened) and dumbfounded; he had never heard of such a thing, and had a very hard time believing that it was true. Evidently, even after 40+ years, China's (and Taiwan's) educational system still does not mention anything about the successes of the U.S. space program --- and to compound the problem, most of the "information" he had received about the moon landing was nonsense from moon-landing-hoax conspiracy theorists, such that he thought that nobody took that story of "moon landings" seriously, any more than the radar tracking of Santa's Christmas Eve flights. Evidently, the United States isn't the only major nation with educational deficiencies. ~David D.G. That's just sad. But then, one night I was watching Jay Leno when he was doing his "Jaywalking" segment and one of the questions was about the moon landing. One of the people looked at him and asked, "We've been to the moon?" Of course, they only featured the idiots in that bit. It is amazing just how clueless some people truly are.
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Post by Admiral Lithp on Jul 22, 2009 12:59:09 GMT -5
On the other hand, I don't really know how to respond to a lot of the hoax arguments. It's not really my area of expertise.
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doktor
Junior Member
So ronery...
Posts: 90
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Post by doktor on Jul 22, 2009 15:20:14 GMT -5
The moon landing was the only good thing that came out of all that pointless Cold War dick waving. We should do it again. The entire Space Race resulted in awesome advances in electronics, communications and materials science for developing said shuttles. We humans need a "campaign" to direct our efforts rather than sandbox or skirmish maps. I hope RTS fans understood me.
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Post by meshakhad on Jul 22, 2009 15:22:17 GMT -5
We need to go back. Two words: Farside Observatory (aka every astronomer's wet dream).
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Post by Star Cluster on Jul 22, 2009 16:39:18 GMT -5
We need to go back. Two words: Farside Observatory (aka every astronomer's wet dream). Absolutely. That would be beyond awesome and cool combined. No atmosphere to look through and no artificial light, no noise interference a great deal of the time, total darkness half the time. We could possibly make discoveries about the cosmos that the Hubble only hinted at.
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