Just a place to throw links about cool science related topics :)
I’ll start with an awesome image from Hubble taken recently of a small part of the universe (including the farthest galaxy we know), it’s a bbc link:
Anyone who can look at that photo and state that there are no other intelligences in the universe is an idiot.
Sheezus that’s awesome :)
I love deep field pictures so much. It’s galaxies all the way down.
Does that mean anyone who can look at that photo and state the opposite is an idiot as well?
There are no other intelligences in the universe. Checkmate.
CHECKMATE THEISTS
Depends on whether you mean contemporaneous to ourselves or not.
13.7 billion years is a long time. Long enough that a lot of shit could go down.
I wonder why none of the big monotheistic religions let us know that we might find such vast copies of our own physical situation in the stars (planets around suns), but that we can ignore them as only on this planet did ‘God’ do his special magic? Surely an omnipotent being would secure their credentials as such in this manner?
And that pic is just from a tiny little segment of the nights sky, that is what blows me away with it the most! “It’s all full of stars”.
Even if conditions for planets forming that can support life are extraordinarily rare - which they probably are - the sheer size of the universe (there are more stars than grains of sand on Earth) means there are probably still millions of planets with life.
The thing I always have problems wrapping my brain around is that since matter can neither be created nor destroyed, all of this comes from the singularity before the big bang. All of it. That just freaks me out.
I don’t think the religions exclude aliens for the most part.
On the seventh day, God rested.
On the eighth day, God started suing the gods of all the other worlds for copyright infringement.
God is very angry at our insistence on trying to uncover prior art.
This pic of the space shuttle landing in Los Angeles is awesome and science-y:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120926.html
@Jason, thank god, God is not american/other hyper-capitalist type ;)
@Clay, that would make you pause and look up!
Well i think this is where ‘God’/‘gods’ really has the trump card, and we have just interpreted it poorly. Our tiny speck of dust of a planet (and ourselves) is not the big deal in this universe other than the fact it is ‘life’ in a mostly lifeless void. Once we get over ourselves, then ‘Gods’ wisdom can truely lead us, and the clues are in all the texts, the commonalities. The divisive stuff is the ‘human error’ part (which is what leads to all the wars/destruction, ‘anti-life’ and ‘evil’).
Or it is all pure science all the way. Either is fine in my book. Now onto some other quite amazing opportunities for us finely tuned monkeys:
‘Viewpoint: When will we send humans to Mars?’:
I have nothing of value to add other than this a cool thread.
Conglomerate. On Mars
The Curiosity Rover found rounded pebbles and conglomerate, a rock composed of a bunch of different sizes of rock, in Gale Crater. Unambiguous evidence of fast-flowing running water on Mars.
Will it ever get the water back though? I understand you can do lots of things to melt all the ice and permafrost ground to get liquid water again (when i say this, i mean theoreticaly speaking), but would the current Martian atmosphere sustain liquid water in any decent quantity again?
Honest question here, but doesn’t Mars have sufficient gravity to prevent water from leaving the atmosphere? I always assumed that it was either subsurface, tied up in solids, or both.
I think Mars lacks a dipole magnetic field, which means establishing a notable atmosphere is problematic; therefore, maybe water evaporates or sublimates away from the planet?
It is not a matter of phase/state change it would have to be a matter of gravity afaik. Helium escapes the Earth’s atmosphere due to a lack of gravitational force, correct?