Space!

Anything made on the moon will probably cost millions on Earth for the first few years, due to the costs of transportation.

Wouldn't it be easier to terraform Venus? It's closer, it's in the "habital zone" of the solar system, it has it's own atmosphere. It's just really strawberry floating hot and poisonous. But surely it's easier to change an atmosphere than create one from scratch?

Space is amazing. Truly mind boggling. Sometimes I look up at the clear night sky (we have pretty good skies around here out in the sticks in Central Bedfordshire) and I'm just... well, actually a little bit scared by it all. I just always come back to that one Huge Question: What's it all for? It scares me that in my lifetime I'll never know why it's all there in all it's infinite size. It's life's great mystery and who knows if anyone, ever, will find out the reason for it all?

As a kid living in Devon I used to go and stay with a friend who lived out in the countryside and we'd go up into the forest behind the house late at night, climb a hill above the treeline and just lie back and stare at the night skies. So clear you could see the Milky Way, a beautiful ribbon of stars strung out across the heavens. We'd see shooting stars coming in fast, burning up fast. The wonder of it all.

Space is amazing.

Cal wrote:Space is amazing. Truly mind boggling. Sometimes I look up at the clear night sky (we have pretty good skies around here out in the sticks in Central Bedfordshire) and I'm just... well, actually a little bit scared by it all. I just always come back to that one Huge Question: What's it all for? It scares me that in my lifetime I'll never know why it's all there in all it's infinite size. It's life's great mystery and who knows if anyone, ever, will find out the reason for it all?

It's not for anything, it just is.

I'm a stupid Hobbit wrote:You know the "one way trip" idea of a Mars visit. I can envisage a time in the future where people, that have been so astounded by the achievement of colonising another planet, would attempt to retrieve the "one way trip" colonists because they believe it can be done. Mars is infectious, people love hearing news about it, especially to do with human visits. I think attention to Mars would balloon to the extent that any successful one-way-ticket colonists could realistically look to return to Earth after 20/30 years. Folk would salvage them just to prove that it could be done, which again would increase people's fascination with the red planet.

I love the idea, but unfortunately gravity on Mars is only 38% of the gravity on Earth. It's the changes to the human body which make a return to Earth less likely - the longer you spent living on Mars, the more likely a return to Earth would be a mission in death, or at least paralysis, your body and in particular your bone structure would struggle under the pressure. It does make me wonder how life will evolve when we do start putting people on other planets and seeing multiple generations born, would a human life still be human after several generations, or would the changes in environment result in rapid evolutionary changes?

Cal wrote:Space is amazing. Truly mind boggling. Sometimes I look up at the clear night sky (we have pretty good skies around here out in the sticks in Central Bedfordshire) and I'm just... well, actually a little bit scared by it all. I just always come back to that one Huge Question: What's it all for? It scares me that in my lifetime I'll never know why it's all there in all it's infinite size. It's life's great mystery and who knows if anyone, ever, will find out the reason for it all?

As a kid living in Devon I used to go and stay with a friend who lived out in the countryside and we'd go up into the forest behind the house late at night, climb a hill above the treeline and just lie back and stare at the night skies. So clear you could see the Milky Way, a beautiful ribbon of stars strung out across the heavens. We'd see shooting stars coming in fast, burning up fast. The wonder of it all.

Space is amazing.

I totally agree! There was a time, not that long ago, when we didn't know if there was life outside of the Milky Way galaxy. The decision was made to turn the Hubble telescope and focus it on one tiny section of the sky, about like the size of a finger nail, held up at arms length to the night sky. When that first image came back, we didn't see the first galaxy outside of our own, we saw twenty thousand of them. There is so much out there it's barely possible to comprehend, and the distances between them is even more mind boggling, which is one of the reasons I think I am so fascinated with space, there's constantly new things being discovered. We once thought that we were alone in the universe, and now we know that there are at least 100 billion galaxies out there. More galaxies than grains of sand on the whole of Earth. Are there other universes other than our own? It's possible that rather than there being a Big Bang, there could have been a near infinite number of them. Whatever the meaning of it all is, the voyage you have taken to be who you are today, is against virtually impossible odds. Your family tree & evolutionary history are just a tiny part of that puzzle, which I find inspiring.

The night sky is awe inspiring. It's cloudy in Norwich tonight, but Jupiter has been well placed from my window for a couple of weeks now and even though you can't see as much in the city as you can down the coast, watching this planet slowly move across the night sky is a fantastic sight.

Aayule1 wrote:Growing gooseberry fool on the moon is such a cool idea.

I want to eat moon food.

But everything would taste of cheese.

I love watching documentaries about space - Horizon and such - and occasionally use a few apps on my phone to check out the stars and information about them. Would be interested in any good sites for reference or documentaries if anyone has any?

It's such a beautiful and fascinating subject, and probably the one thing that makes me sad about having a finite lifespan is that I'll never get to see how far we get in terms of space discovery, travel, settlement, etc. This will sound really sad, but I play something like Mass Effect and it just fires all sorts of imagination about where we could end up - but if it happens, I'll never see it.

Lotus wrote:I love watching documentaries about space - Horizon and such - and occasionally use a few apps on my phone to check out the stars and information about them. Would be interested in any good sites for reference or documentaries if anyone has any?

My favourite App is Google Sky Map, but I also have NASA, Star Chart, Meteor Shower, SkEye, Mars Map, Google Earth, Find Comet Ison Free, GalaxyGuide, NASA Space Weather & Earth Now. I have an S4, so not sure which of those are available on other phones, but that should be a good start.

I'd also be keen to hear from anyone with any other links, I'll put together a list in the first post too as I intend to keep this topic going as there seems to be a few people interested. I watch documentaries on Youtube quite a lot so will add the best to here when I find them. But if you have not seen Wonders of the Universe and Wonders of the Solar System, this is where you should start, absolutely love Brian Cox's series.

Cal wrote:Space is amazing. Truly mind boggling. Sometimes I look up at the clear night sky (we have pretty good skies around here out in the sticks in Central Bedfordshire) and I'm just... well, actually a little bit scared by it all. I just always come back to that one Huge Question: What's it all for? It scares me that in my lifetime I'll never know why it's all there in all it's infinite size. It's life's great mystery and who knows if anyone, ever, will find out the reason for it all?

As a kid living in Devon I used to go and stay with a friend who lived out in the countryside and we'd go up into the forest behind the house late at night, climb a hill above the treeline and just lie back and stare at the night skies. So clear you could see the Milky Way, a beautiful ribbon of stars strung out across the heavens. We'd see shooting stars coming in fast, burning up fast. The wonder of it all.

Space is amazing.

Amen brother.

Used to get views like that on the Yorkshire dales, absolutely stunning.

Cal wrote:Space is amazing. Truly mind boggling. Sometimes I look up at the clear night sky (we have pretty good skies around here out in the sticks in Central Bedfordshire) and I'm just... well, actually a little bit scared by it all. I just always come back to that one Huge Question: What's it all for? It scares me that in my lifetime I'll never know why it's all there in all it's infinite size. It's life's great mystery and who knows if anyone, ever, will find out the reason for it all?

Does there need to be a reason?

Pontius Pilate wrote:Wouldn't it be easier to terraform Venus? It's closer, it's in the "habital zone" of the solar system, it has it's own atmosphere. It's just really strawberry floating hot and poisonous. But surely it's easier to change an atmosphere than create one from scratch?

Interesting idea, one other thing it's atmosphere is 90 times the pressure of earth.

Pontius Pilate wrote:Wouldn't it be easier to terraform Venus? It's closer, it's in the "habital zone" of the solar system, it has it's own atmosphere. It's just really strawberry floating hot and poisonous. But surely it's easier to change an atmosphere than create one from scratch?

Actually I think its generally thought to be the other way round, its easier to either add or let loose stuff into an atmosphere than it is to capture unwanted stuff in an existing one.

Pontius Pilate wrote:Growing plants on a planet is not a viable way to colonize a plant though. That would take, literally hundreds of thousands of years to create an atmosphere rich in oxygen...It's 19th century science being applied to a 22nd century problem.

We need to figure out how to substantially speed up that process.

It won't work on Mars either, because it leaks its atmosphere.

Xeno wrote:

Pontius Pilate wrote:Wouldn't it be easier to terraform Venus? It's closer, it's in the "habital zone" of the solar system, it has it's own atmosphere. It's just really strawberry floating hot and poisonous. But surely it's easier to change an atmosphere than create one from scratch?

Interesting idea, one other thing it's atmosphere is 90 times the pressure of earth.

If only there were some way to perform atmospheric trepanning to alleviate all that pressure.

Xeno wrote:

Pontius Pilate wrote:Wouldn't it be easier to terraform Venus? It's closer, it's in the "habital zone" of the solar system, it has it's own atmosphere. It's just really strawberry floating hot and poisonous. But surely it's easier to change an atmosphere than create one from scratch?

Interesting idea, one other thing it's atmosphere is 90 times the pressure of earth.

Titan excites me more than anything else in our solar system. It will be interesting to see how life has evolved there without the influence of land mammals.

Somebody Else's Presents wrote:

Cal wrote:Space is amazing. Truly mind boggling. Sometimes I look up at the clear night sky (we have pretty good skies around here out in the sticks in Central Bedfordshire) and I'm just... well, actually a little bit scared by it all. I just always come back to that one Huge Question: What's it all for? It scares me that in my lifetime I'll never know why it's all there in all it's infinite size. It's life's great mystery and who knows if anyone, ever, will find out the reason for it all?

Does there need to be a reason?

Space Jesus

SillySprout wrote:

Xeno wrote:

Pontius Pilate wrote:Wouldn't it be easier to terraform Venus? It's closer, it's in the "habital zone" of the solar system, it has it's own atmosphere. It's just really strawberry floating hot and poisonous. But surely it's easier to change an atmosphere than create one from scratch?

Interesting idea, one other thing it's atmosphere is 90 times the pressure of earth.

Titan excites me more than anything else in our solar system. It will be interesting to see how life has evolved there without the influence of land mammals.

If, you know, it has any life.

And what of Europa, and Enceladus? Are not both of those just as exciting as Titan?

Preezy wrote:

Somebody Else's Presents wrote:

Cal wrote:Space is amazing. Truly mind boggling. Sometimes I look up at the clear night sky (we have pretty good skies around here out in the sticks in Central Bedfordshire) and I'm just... well, actually a little bit scared by it all. I just always come back to that one Huge Question: What's it all for? It scares me that in my lifetime I'll never know why it's all there in all it's infinite size. It's life's great mystery and who knows if anyone, ever, will find out the reason for it all?

Does there need to be a reason?

Space Jesus

If the multi-verse theory is true, there is undoubtedly a space Jesus somewhere.

You can easily spot Jupiter in the Sky tonight, it's very high in an Easterly direction. It's brighter than any star in the sky and if you look closely enough, it appears bigger than the stars around it too. Space

Meaning originates within the mind, it is subjective, so it would reasonable to say that if there is a reason for the universe than it is within us. Only by comprehending and experiencing the universe does it have any meaning. Without anyone to observe and know the universe it may as well not exist at all, right? I suppose this applies to any other sapient beings out there in the universe too.

I think there are probably other universes in existence parallel to ours whose physical laws have not been conducive to life. They may as well not exist; unless we find some way to detect them. Our universe is special because we got the variables necessary to start off the whole chain of creating basic amino acids all the way though to complex organisms. Then again, since there could be an infinite number of universes, then there would be an infinite number that are conducive to one or more forms of life. So maybe we are not that special after all.

Meep wrote:Meaning originates within the mind, it is subjective, so it would reasonable to say that if there is a reason for the universe than it is within us. Only by comprehending and experiencing the universe does it have any meaning. Without anyone to observe and know the universe it may as well not exist at all, right? I suppose this applies to any other sapient beings out there in the universe too.

I think there are probably other universes in existence parallel to ours whose physical laws have not been conducive to life. They may as well not exist; unless we find some way to detect them. Our universe is special because we got the variables necessary to start off the whole chain of creating basic amino acids all the way though to complex organisms. Then again, since there could be an infinite number of universes, then there would be an infinite number that are conducive to one or more forms of life. So maybe we are not that special after all.

You took the words right out of my mouth.