O.T. .::THE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY THREAD::.

[throwbackewing33]

Climate Change has always happened on earth, sometimes even drastically. Most of the U.S. was covered in ice not that long ago. But there is no way that all the polluting we have done in less than 100 years hasnt affected the atmosphere in some sort of way. To what extent? I have know idea.

[j4remi]

http://www.fastcompany.com/1769468/scie ... e-in-space

[NBA Fan 1234]

So I'm taking an astronomy class so topics on planets have peaked my interest somewhat...

http://news.yahoo.com/planet-star-wars- ... 04397.html

Is the force with you? I wonder if there are midichlorinians also...because I've always felt I would be a good Jedi (until I deice that I want to be the strongest ever so I switch to the Sith...then when I become the strongest ever, due to mastering all aspects of the force, I will switch back to being good). Clearly, I have spent months thinking this through.

[HarthorneWingo]

http://climaterealityproject.org/

[ITGM]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ1VvvrAILo&feature=feedbul[/youtube]

[rsavaj]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ1VvvrAILo&feature=feedbul[/youtube]

Seems more suited for a pseudoscience thread.


EDIT: I guess it counts as philosophy...

[j4remi]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ1VvvrAILo&feature=feedbul[/youtube]

I'll be checking this out tom. for sure.

[ITGM]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlwyU0_M88o&feature=related[/youtube]

[TheBigBoss]

Time to bring this baby back!! A new planet called Kepler 22 has been discovered and appears to be nearly an exact twin of the planet earth. They said the planet's average temperature is believed to be around 70 degrees F. I think that there has to be life on that planet, I wonder what life forms are there.

A 'major milestone' in search for Earth's twin
NASA's Kepler telescope confirms first alien planet found in habitable zone

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has confirmed the discovery of its first alien world in its host star's habitable zone — that just-right range of distances that could allow liquid water to exist — and found more than 1,000 new exoplanet candidates, researchers announced Monday.

The new finds bring the Kepler space telescope's total haul to 2,326 potential planets in its first 16 months of operation. These discoveries, if confirmed, would quadruple the current tally of worlds known to exist beyond our solar system, which recently topped 700.

The potentially habitable alien world, a first for Kepler, orbits a star very much like our own sun. The discovery brings scientists one step closer to finding a planet like our own — one that could conceivably harbor life, scientists said.

"We're getting closer and closer to discovering the so-called 'Goldilocks planet,'" Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., said during a news conference on Monday.

Hunting down alien planets
The $600 million Kepler observatory launched in March 2009 to hunt for Earth-size alien planets in the habitable zone of their parent stars, where liquid water, and perhaps even life, might be able to exist.

Kepler detects alien planets using what's called the "transit method." It searches for tiny, telltale dips in a star's brightness caused when a planet transits — or crosses in front of — the star from Earth's perspective, blocking a fraction of the star's light

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45554617/ns ... t18GLLNkhI

[NyKnicks1714]

I think that there has to be life on that planet, I wonder what life forms are there.

How do you arrive at this conclusion? Just because a planet CAN harbor life, it doesn't mean that it actually has life. How can you just automatically say "there has to be life on that planet"?



This is off topic to the article, but people need to realize two things:

1. It is extremely likely that there is other life in the universe.
2. It is extremely unlikely that we have been visited before, or ever will be visited.

[j4remi]

I think that there has to be life on that planet, I wonder what life forms are there.

How do you arrive at this conclusion? Just because a planet CAN harbor life, it doesn't mean that it actually has life. How can you just automatically say "there has to be life on that planet"?



This is off topic to the article, but people need to realize two things:

1. It is extremely likely that there is other life in the universe.
2. It is extremely unlikely that we have been visited before, or ever will be visited.

We wouldn't want "visitors" anyways. I remember hearing that mathematically there MUST be life in the universe, not sure if that was BS though.

[Deeeez Knicks]

I thought Al Harrington was the biggest black hole.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/scien ... s-yet.html

Don’t get too close.

Astronomers are reporting that they have taken the measure of the biggest, baddest black holes yet found in the universe, abyssal yawns 10 times the size of our solar system into which billions of Suns have vanished like a guilty thought.

Such holes, they say, might be the gravitational cornerstones of galaxies and clues to the fates of violent quasars, the almost supernaturally powerful explosions in the hearts of young galaxies that dominated the early years of the universe.

One of these newly surveyed monsters, which weighs as much as 21 billion Suns, is in an egg-shaped swirl of stars known as NGC 4889, the brightest galaxy in a sprawling cloud of thousands of galaxies about 336 million light-years away in the Coma constellation.

The other black hole, a graveyard for the equivalent of 9.7 billion Suns, more or less, lurks in the center of NGC 3842, a galaxy that anchors another cluster known as Abell 1367, about 331 million light-years away in Leo.

“These are the most massive reliably measured black holes ever,” Nicholas J. McConnell, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an e-mail, referring to the new observations.

These results are more than just cool and record-setting. Observations with the Hubble Space Telescope over the years have shown that such monster black holes seem to inhabit the centers of all galaxies — the bigger the galaxy, the bigger the black hole. Researchers said the new work could shed light on the role these black holes play in the formation and evolution of galaxies.

The previous record-holder was in the galaxy M87, a member of the Virgo cluster some 54 million light-years from here, where a black hole weighed in at a mere 6.3 billion solar masses. The new black holes, however, were even larger than astronomers had predicted based on the earlier measurements, suggesting that there is something special about how the most massive galaxies are built.

“Measurements of these massive black holes will help us understand how their host galaxies were assembled, and how the holes achieved such monstrous mass,” Mr. McConnell said.

Mr. McConnell and his thesis adviser, Chung-Pei Ma, led a team of astronomers who used telescopes in Hawaii, Texas and outer space to weigh the black holes in the centers of galaxies by clocking the speeds of stars zooming around them; the faster the stars are going, the more gravity — and thus mass — is needed to keep the stars from flying away. They report their work in the journal Nature, which will be published online on Wednesday.

Martin Rees, a cosmologist at Cambridge University, called the new work “an incremental step,” noting that the study of these monsters has been a part of his life for a long time. “It’s good to learn about even bigger ones,” he said.

Black holes, regions of space where gravity is so intense that not even light can escape from it, are among the weirdest of the predictions of Albert Einstein’s curved-space theory of gravity, general relativity — so weird that Einstein himself did not believe it. He once wrote to a friend that there ought to be a law of nature forbidding such a thing.

But he was wrong. And some of his successors, like Dr. Rees and a colleague at Cambridge, Stephen Hawking, have spent their careers studying the implications for physics of objects that can wrap spacetime around themselves like a magician’s cloak and disappear.

Such is the fate, astronomers agree, of some massive stars once they run out of fuel and collapse upon themselves. Indeed the galaxy is littered with stellar-mass black holes detectable by the X-rays spit by doomed matter swirling around them like water in a drain. And there seem to be giant ones in the heart of every galaxy.

One question astronomers would like answered is how these black holes got so big, billions of times bigger than a typical dead star. Dr. Ma described it as a kind of nature-versus-nurture argument, explaining that black holes could grow by merging with other black holes as galaxies merge to get bigger — “nature” — or by swallowing gas around them — “nurture.”

“It’s a bit like asking: Are taller children produced by taller parents or by eating a lot of spinach?” Dr. Ma wrote in an e-mail. “For black holes we are not sure.”

Astronomers also think the supermassive black holes in galaxies could be the missing link between the early universe and today. In the early days of the universe, quasars, thought to be powered by giant black holes in cataclysmic feeding frenzies, were fountaining energy into space.

Where are those quasars now? The new work supports a growing suspicion that those formerly boisterous black holes are among us now, but, having stopped their boisterous growth, are sleeping.

Mr. McConnell said, “Our discovery of extremely massive black holes in the largest present-day galaxies suggests that these galaxies could be the ancient remains of voracious ancestors.”

Let’s try not to awaken them.

[NyKnicks1714]

I think that there has to be life on that planet, I wonder what life forms are there.

How do you arrive at this conclusion? Just because a planet CAN harbor life, it doesn't mean that it actually has life. How can you just automatically say "there has to be life on that planet"?



This is off topic to the article, but people need to realize two things:

1. It is extremely likely that there is other life in the universe.
2. It is extremely unlikely that we have been visited before, or ever will be visited.

We wouldn't want "visitors" anyways. I remember hearing that mathematically there MUST be life in the universe, not sure if that was BS though.

Well not "must", as in 100%. It's just so improbable that there isn't though.

We're pretty much dealing with fantasy here, but I think visitors would more likely be friendly than hostile. I'm not going to get into a discussion or a debate over that though, because it's just stupid.

[rsavaj]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlikCebQSlY[/youtube]

A little dated since science has found a lot of new stars, but it's a great vid.

[j4remi]

Well not "must", as in 100%. It's just so improbable that there isn't though.

We're pretty much dealing with fantasy here, but I think visitors would more likely be friendly than hostile. I'm not going to get into a discussion or a debate over that though, because it's just stupid.

Makes sense, there has to at least bacteria out there somewhere of some sort.

In terms of discussing friend or foe on hypothetical and unlikely visitors, definitely not a topic worth debating but I would say that Stephen Hawking had a pretty interesting article on it. Totally changed my view on the alien visitors thing since it made a lot of sense.

I can't find the article links, but have you guys seen the stuff about the largest body of water in the universe? The scale is beyond imagination, it's crazy.

[PeteW]

Great interview with the one and only Neil Degrasse Tyson

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXh9RQCvxmg&feature=spotlight[/youtube]

[j4remi]

http://news.yahoo.com/experts-stumped-a ... 48189.html

The shapes were found in a dig known as the City of David, a politically sensitive excavation conducted by Israeli government archaeologists and funded by a nationalist Jewish group under the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in east Jerusalem. The rooms were unearthed as part of the excavation of fortifications around the ancient city's only natural water source, the Gihon spring.

It is possible, the dig's archaeologists say, that when the markings were made at least 2,800 years ago the shapes might have accommodated some kind of wooden structure that stood inside them, or they might have served some other purpose on their own. They might have had a ritual function or one that was entirely mundane. Archaeologists faced by a curious artifact can usually at least venture a guess about its nature, but in this case no one, including outside experts consulted by Shukron and the dig's co-director, archaeologists with decades of experience between them, has any idea.

There appears to be at least one other ancient marking of the same type at the site. A century-old map of an expedition led by the British explorer Montague Parker, who searched for the lost treasures of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem between 1909 and 1911, includes the shape of a "V'' drawn in an underground channel not far away. Modern archaeologists haven't excavated that area yet.

[ITGM]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X96xI1gLdQ&feature=player_embedded#![/youtube]

[NYK StateOfMind]

What that article didn't mention about the planet that seems to be like earth, is that it's 600 lights years away from earth, meaning that it would take us around 22 millions years to ever land on/reach.

Thats my question, how can the Kepler see something that would take us over 20 millions years to reach?!?

But yeah, I honestly feel the universe could be never ending. Earth is just a tiny little speckle in the grand scheme of things. There are planets out there, that would take us not millions, or billions, but even trillions of years to get to. With all that said, I honestly believe there are life on other planets, planets that we'll never discover. Nor will they ever discover us. I also believe these planets have people like you and me, not aliens, but people; just like us on these far away earth like planets.

I've always wondered if they had sports teams, presidents, countrys, wars, storms, school, cars, air-ports, space programs, internet etc, etc. I bet they also wonder if aliens exist, or if life could live on other planets.

We're not alone in this universe, and I don't believe in funny looking aliens either, but I do believe in people like us living on other earth like planets, even if it's over 1 billion lights years away.

[TheBigBoss]

Well not "must", as in 100%. It's just so improbable that there isn't though.

We're pretty much dealing with fantasy here, but I think visitors would more likely be friendly than hostile. I'm not going to get into a discussion or a debate over that though, because it's just stupid.

Makes sense, there has to at least bacteria out there somewhere of some sort.

In terms of discussing friend or foe on hypothetical and unlikely visitors, definitely not a topic worth debating but I would say that Stephen Hawking had a pretty interesting article on it. Totally changed my view on the alien visitors thing since it made a lot of sense.

I can't find the article links, but have you guys seen the stuff about the largest body of water in the universe? The scale is beyond imagination, it's crazy.

Exactly what i was trying to say, I wasn't suggesting that there was definitely some humanoid type of species there, but at the bare minimum there has to atleast be bacteria there. Hell, for all we know there could be dinosaur like creatures running the planet, who knows?