Space and Astronomy Megathread (MERGED)

[Venom'sDad]

What if that web is just a neurological connection for a higher being! It looks exactly like when you look at the electrical connections in the brain.

Imagine if we were just thoughts of some galactic being.

That's the God Complex

 

[NickNitro]

More like Inception lol

 

[Breogan]

New calculations suggest the Universe could collapse at any time

Crazy stuff

[YT]5U1-OmAICpU[/YT]

 

[NickNitro]

Dark Matter Mystery Could Be Solved in Next 10 Years

Dark matter — the mysterious stuff that is thought to make up most of the matter in the known universe — may reveal itself during the next decade, one prominent scientist predicts.

When the moment comes, it will result in "a pivotal paradigm shift in physics," Gianfranco Bertone, a physicist with the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, said in a talk on dark matter research at a Royal Society Frontiers of Astronomy conference in London in November.

The elusive substance may show itself as researchers set out to test "the existence of some of the most promising dark matter candidates, with a wide array of experiments, including the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and a new generation of astroparticle experiments underground and in space," Bertone said.

http://news.yahoo.com/dark-matter-mystery-could-solved-next-10-years-111846757.html

 

[RetrogradeOrbit]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25878042

Dream Chaser mini-shuttle given 2016 launch date...

 

[Bim]

Manned missions wont happen until 2017 though. The mini-shuttle reminded me of a bug lol

 

[NickNitro]

That dream chaser is awesome. Soo much smaller! I feel like we are very close to having individual launches into space

 

[:eek:]

Bold Prediction: Intelligent Alien Life Could Be Found by 2040

http://www.space.com/24622-intelligent-alien-life-detection-2040.html

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

Are These Pics of Water Flowing on Mars Right Now?

Scientists at JPL say that new analysis of pictures taken on Mars contains the "strongest indication" that there is water flowing on the red planet, right now.
Top Image: Darkening lines (known as RSL) moving down a slope as the temperature rises, possibly representing spring and summer salt water flows on Mars, NASA/JPL
Researchers have long theorized that Mars had at one point held flowing water, and probably even held frozen water still. But, the presence of darkening lines moving downwards along a slope as the temperatures rise in the warmer months, suggests that there could be water flowing even now — and also suggests a mechanism for how it might be able to do it.
So, how does water flow in the frigid Martian temperatures that are present, even in the summer months? Researchers think that there may be a naturally-occurring anti-freeze in the water, caused by the high-iron content, which they were able observe by layering mineral maps over the area where the flows seemed to be happening:

Image: seasonal flows map of Mars, overlaid with a mineral-mapping spectrometer, giving a clue to the ferric iron concentrations in the area. / Lujendra Ojba, NASA/JPL
These mineral maps suggest that not only do the darkening lines represent an actual flow of water, presumably with a diminished freezing point, but also that the water and ferric iron flowed together as part of a brine.
So how certain are researchers that what they're seeing is really water flowing? Not 100% certain yet — but they're pretty close. "We still don't have a smoking gun for existence of water in RSL,"Lujendra Ojha, a grad student at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the lead author of new studies in a statement. "Although we're not sure how this process would take place without water."

I really want to be the first guy to drink some Mars water

 

[Silvermoth]

I would love to stay in a hotel on mars

 

[NickNitro]

This would be amazing news.

 

[Bim]

I would love to stay in a hotel on mars

I'm more of a Saturn person myself

It would be very awesome indeed if it's proven to be water. It would certainly change the image i have of Mars.

 

[Silvermoth]

Oh no Bim you've set yourself up for a Uranus joke!

Look out! Who's going to take the shot?

 

[Venom'sDad]

Really....I mean, what person, in their right mind, want to stay in Ur anus? <shrugs shoulders>

 

[Bim]

Oh no Bim you've set yourself up for a Uranus joke!

Look out! Who's going to take the shot?

I said Saturn, SATURN! I'll be the mature one leaving any discussions regarding Ur anus out of this, i hope you'll do the same thing

 

[RetrogradeOrbit]

It's official Moon fans! Jade is dead...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26166296

EDIT
Just to add to this. I would love it if another device like Jade Rabbit was sent to the Moon. But this time it landed near one of the old Apollo landing sites. Then we could have new pictures and video of these historic areas.

 

[NickNitro]

I am a big fan of Moon, but I never liked their recent work.

 

[RetrogradeOrbit]

 

[RetrogradeOrbit]

Are These Pics of Water Flowing on Mars Right Now?

I really want to be the first guy to drink some Mars water

You'd probably be the last guy too...

 

[Breogan]

It's official Moon fans! Jade is dead...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26166296

EDIT
Just to add to this. I would love it if another device like Jade Rabbit was sent to the Moon. But this time it landed near one of the old Apollo landing sites. Then we could have new pictures and video of these historic areas.

"..Jade Rabbit; named after a mythical pet belonging to the goddess of the moon."

Not so surprising, the Mayan moon goddess also had a mythical pet rabbit.

Maybe in some hundred years they can send up the next one.

 

[NickNitro]

Silly Rabbit, space is for Aliens

 

[Venom'sDad]

It's official Moon fans! Jade is dead...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26166296

EDIT
Just to add to this. I would love it if another device like Jade Rabbit was sent to the Moon. But this time it landed near one of the old Apollo landing sites. Then we could have new pictures and video of these historic areas.

Yeah....where & how are they getting these full pictures of the vehicle on the moon?

 

[NickNitro]

Why It's So Hard to Find Alien LIfe

A big reason why the Fermi paradox has punch is the matter of time. Max Tegmark gets into this in his excellent new book Our Mathematical Universe (Knopf, 2014), where he runs through what many thinkers on the subject have noted: Our Sun is young enough that countless stars and the planets that orbit them must have offered homes for life long before we ever appeared. With at least a several billion year head start, wouldn't intelligent life have had time to spread, and shouldn't its existence be perfectly obvious by now?

If SETI is giving us no evidence of extraterrestrials, maybe it's because we're looking on too large a scale. What if, in other words, truly advanced intelligence, having long ago taken to non-biological form, finds ways to maximize technology on the level of the very small? Thus de Garis' interest in femtotech, a technology at the level of 10-15 meters. The idea is to use the properties of quarks and gluons to compute at this scale, where in terms of sheer processing power the improvement in performance is a factor of a trillion trillion over what we can extrapolate for nanotech.

I leave you to the two de Garis essays listed at the end of this article for the particulars on how this might be accomplished, including thoughts on moving beyond femtotech to 'attotech' and even what he calls 'zeptotech' (using possibly existing force particles that would mediate the grand unified force of the electroweak force and the color force; i.e., the strong nuclear force). It turns out that the vast improvement from nanotech to femtotech is based on factors like the density being a million cubed times greater, while the signaling speed between femto components would be a million times faster because such components are so much closer together, and so on.



http://gizmodo.com/why-its-so-hard-to-find-alien-life-1522825189

 

[Mr.M]

At that scale from which the article above mentions, essentially Planck scale, quantum physics breaks down. You are basically classifying the fabric that constitutes the cosmos itself. How on Earth do biological beings that we've evolved to become go on to essentially govern the very laws or the universe, or multiverse, even if we are talking about billions of years of evolution? If a civilization can compute at that level, we might as well call them the Gods that coded for the universe as we know of today.

This isn't what the Fermi Paradox is questioning in my opinion. The Fermi Paradox looks for life that works within the laws of the universe, which we haven't mastered by any stretch. But at that level of technological prowess, it wouldn't even be right to classify this intelligent "lifeform" as an alien entity. It is simply the "Creator" or "Law" that dicates everything at the most rudimentary levels of matter and energy, and that to me is a different question entirely.

 

[:eek:]

Major Discovery: 'Smoking Gun' for Universe's Incredible Big Bang Expansion Found

http://www.livescience.com/44136-universe-inflation-gravitational-waves-discovery.html