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well, I guess I finally found the time to respond to CC . . . what kind of critical thinking skills is that? Sounds to me like you just go with what is cool to believe; i think that should be the last time I talk to you.
Knowing what the future would hold does not necessarilly mean it will get here any faster; this is the leonardo da vinci lesson.
Getting a little off topic, I can't help thinking that if there are tons of E.T.'s out there, that not 'one' E.T. wouldn't want to contact us; what's the probability? That logic right there pretty much says either one of two possibilities; 1) there are not much more than one or two other E.T.'s out there right now, and/or 2) there was a first, and they rule with an iron fist . . . .
I'm still being lazy about looking up the extent of a gamma ray burst in the area of a galaxy, but I seem to remember at the end of "Rare Earth" they mentioned a gamma ray burst detected by satellites in 98 and saying if it was half as close(it was something like twenty thousand light years away; how amazinging large this galaxy is when you say twenty thousand light years . . . .), then we would have been fried.
I think it was the "Rare Earth" guys who have suggested that the earth's life does not have the full four billion years left that the Sun has before it really does go "Red Giant" phase; i forget, but I actually think they suggested there is only really five hundred million years left before Gaia starts struggling . . . well, if we are not off and out of here by then, then we've probably destroyed ourselves anyways!
The problem current martian life would have for the Gaia hypothesis is that if life took over the ecology of mars, why hasn't it kept the temperature good for life there? The answer as I do believe already pointed out is that the planet was to small to keep the gases in regardless of how hard life fought for itself on mars.
As for multi-cellular life on mars, I don't know. People say we don't know why multi-cellular life started on earth, and maybe in a rigorous sense, we can't say why, but I've read pretty good ideas on why multi-cellular life started here on earth.
When resources decline, life combines. Biologists have some interesting living examples of this where a colony of individual cells self-organizes into a single multi-cellular slug when the surrounding resources get to small. I do believe they call it a slime mold.
And so the question becomes why did multi-cellular life arise six hundred million years ago? The answer could quite possibly be that the earth went through a snowball earth phase, where the earth was almost completelly frozen over(the equator regions may have been a sludgeball earth according to recent analyses of the snowball earth idea).
This idea makes me think of what would have happened on mars when it went cold. Could it have already gone through a snowball mars period and created multi-cellular life? Or, could mars have gone cold gradually enough(because Gaia-mars would have done everything it could have to keep conditions right for life), that multicellular life could have formed(mostly in the sea just like here on earth)? Supposing the latter, i would think finding these multi-cellular mars beings would be stranger than the burgess shale and just as challenging; you'd have to have a permanently manned mars base of scientists who would have to look for the tiniest multi-cellular beings(burgess shale multi-cellular beings were mostly quite small; only one farelly big one).
In the end, there never was intelligent life on Mars, and any multi-cellular life is going to be hard to get to without a type two civilization.
If the E.T's on the other side of the galaxy were advanced enough to overcome that newtron star quake, then they should be quite noticable in their technological ability.
I suppose that brings back the arguement that they'd be so advanced that they would be undetectable; but, why would they choose to not use up the resources around them? I would think they would make that region a series of dyson spheres or something like such.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/climate-05t.html
Well, at our current rate, maybe we'll destroy ourselves after all!
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/stellar-05g.html
well, they'd have to have survived past the industrial age and become not only space faring civilizations, but probably pretty darned advanced technologically to have survived that explosion.
oops, should have expressed myself more explicitly(not sexually!).
Well, I'm not going to say I'm 'not' an environmentalist, but I'm certainly not an anti-tech or space colonization environmentalist.
"There is powerful logic which indicates that any Martian life has long been mixing with life here on Earth through the medium of almost constant impact transfer of crustal material between the two planets over the past 4.5 billion years. Whatever life exists on Mars, it would long ago have taken over Earth, if it were so inclined .. in fact, it may well have actually done so about 4 billion years ago! Or the reverse may have occurred.
The chances of a totally different type of life existing on Mars are vanishingly small. And the idea that any Martian life is poised to devour terrestrial life, in some kind of microbial 'War of the Worlds', is patent nonsense. If there were any chance of that happening, it would have happened long ago."
Nice arguement against the E.T. folks about life being different from us!
As for the point about environmentalist and such . . . ouch ??? :hm:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/m … 50216.html
they're just taking the possibility more seriously because of an analogy with earth's extreme bacteria.
I for one can barely care if there is bacteria on mars, but if it increases science and human colonization funding, I suppose I'd be excited.
i thougth the japanese have already successfually launched a solar sail for 'unfolding' demonstration purposes?!
In other words, why are they not sending probes all over the solar system right now?
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology … 50211.html
havn't seen anybody posting this one.
As for the technology; i wonder how much payload a hundred meter sail could send to mars, or how big a sail do we need to make say marsdirect work?
Well, I'd like to say that I've e-mailed Parks and some other supposedly high ranking science person who has chosen to be anti-space/colonization; to say the least, they reply with either in Parks case, "Well, then you go"(implying all the radiation dangers), and in this other guys case with no reply at all.
Some here may have seen my pre-drafts that I said I sent to our illustrious President Bush Jr; that's basically what I sent them; if you need me to, I'll try to re-say some of that.
You tell me what these guys motives are! They can only point out things that legit engineers and scientists have found all kinds of ways of overcoming, or just not reply at all!
P.S.
I have never e-mailed Bell, and this article is the first I've ever read of his; who is he? I guess he tells us who he is . . . .
well, that is certainly neat new stuff, but do you remember some recent advances where they got solar cells to produce electricity not just from the visible wavelengths, but from many if not all electromagnetic wavelengths?
It would be really cool if they combined that ability with the new organic solar cel ability . . . .
i don't know about newtron stars, but for black holes, if they rotate above a certain speed limit, they give off gravitational waves.
regardless of the space elevator concept, I'm wondering what the latest work on nanotubes will have on spacecraft construction . . . .
I would like to point out that I have not been in these forums for awhile now, and a quick look through doesn't reveal the thread title indicated by you; but, I'll take your word for it.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china_pr.html
Makes you wonder what other old ideas have been suppressed because of societal inertial factors.
China could actually become the world superpower because of this!
as I was going to say, i couldn't wait for them to team up with some x-prizers; but! the article mentions that they will be!
The only bummer is molecular manufacturing is coming and that will make for a global backlash towards science and technology including spaceflight because spaceflight would be viewed as a way out for science/techies to go unregulated; this will happen probably before private space interests actually get mankind off this admittedly beautifull rock.
Just imagine though! These bigalow inflatables with spike rocket engines getting scramjets to work to get the inflatable space stations up; then they'd be powered by the new solar energy collectors that take in all wavelength of solar energy, and they could even do the magnetic solar sailing, and mankind would finally be free of earth!
But, it will be all too late and for not . . . as Peter green said it, "Oh well . . . ."
you seem to not have read what I said at all; i now consider you bought by President bush jr.
Zubrins legacy may not be in achieving mars direct himself but in spreading the ideas; political and economic pressure will drive the rest.
i find it remarkable that nobody has replied to my comments about the damage of georgie boy period; i guess like Michael Moore, my points are too good.