I was thinking a chemical drill of sorts. A package of exothermic reactions to melt the way down. Then you’d actually need to drop an ultralong extending straw down (I admittedly don’t know how to solve this one, but my material science/mechanical engineering isn’t very strong) and slurp up a sample for onboard analysis. Otherwise you’d be limited to only those components you could fit into a transmitting sensor.
Perhaps a repurposed garden hose on a spool could work. I recently saw a pretty long one on sale on amazon and they sell extensions. As long as we’re making stuff up I feel like this should work nicely ;-)
Drilling slowly through ice with heat isn’t a very spectacular claim, at any rate. You’d need to keep the descending arm heated too I suppose, otherwise it’d all get stuck as it refroze behind the drilling area. But the sheer distance is the only potentially currently impossible hurdle, off the top of my head. Gravity is providing all the force you need, no motors should be needed. Use a radioactive, low output heat source. You’re not in a hurry or anything.
Wouldn’t be the first time and prolly won’t be the last time.
Jamestown.
Jamestowne is home to the ruins of the first permanent English settlement in North America.
104 settlers but only 38 survived
Despite writing describing cannibalism:
“Haveinge fedd upon our horses and other beastes as longe as they Lasted, we weare gladd to make shifte with vermin as doggs Catts, Ratts and myce…as to eate Bootes shoes or any other leather,” he wrote. “And now famin beginneinge to Looke gastely and pale in every face, thatt notheinge was Spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe those things which seame incredible, as to digge upp deade corpes outt of graves and to eate them. And some have Licked upp the Bloode which hathe fallen from their weake fellowes.”
Direct evidence of cannibalism at Jamestown, the oldest permanent English colony in the Americas was elusive until recently finding “bones in a trash pit, all cut and chopped up, it’s clear that this body was dismembered for consumption.”
This is freaking hilarious. I might buy this book just to read more of this:
“Imagine you’re stranded on the Red Planet with three crewmembers,” Seedhouse, a professor at Daytona Beach’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University wrote. “You have plenty of life-support consumables but only sufficient food to last one person until the rescue party arrives. What do you do?.. One day, while brewing coffee for breakfast, you realize there are three chunks of protein-packed meat living right next to you.”
… the biggest of the Mars explorers should sacrifice themselves first because they “both consume and provide the most food.” He went on to provide a “weirdly detailed look” at how to cut up one’s fellow humans if necessary.
“We don’t know where Seedhouse would fall in the buffet line because we couldn’t find his height and weight online,” the authors wrote, “and honestly we’re scared to ask.”
In “Survival and Sacrifice”… readers will also find… a photo of ten astronauts smiling in space alongside the caption: “In the wrong circumstances, a spacecraft is a platform full of hungry people surrounded by temptation. Is it wrong to waste such a neatly packaged meal?”
It is stated in the article that it is a “second generation planet.”. The primary star went red giant and destroyed all the previous Exoplanets. The one they observed has reformed from that debre.
It’s a preprint tough, so not yet peer reviews. So for now maybe to be taken with a grain of salt.
What’s the point of looking at the stars of we never reach for them? At some point the telescopes have to move into space, we can’t stay earthbound forever
Or we could regulate the reflectivity of satellites. No one is suggesting we shouldn’t have satellites. Why don’t we do satellites on purpose in a way that still allows us to also do effective astronomy?
“Shouldn’t have satellites” at all vs. “maybe let’s not approve this one corporation doing this completely unregulated activity.” If you really can’t tell the difference between those two things, I can’t help you.
“limited to how nonreflective they can get the satellites”
A hype-riding not-actually-a-scientist billionaire apartheid prince says it can’t be done, and no one that works for him wants to say otherwise because they don’t want to be fired.
Love how you also completely ignore the dozens of other companies designing and/or beginning deployment of massive satellite constellations just like Starlink. Some of them even multiple times larger than what Starlink is aiming for.
There very much are astronomers that have said they do not want ANY LEO satellite constellations.
They can’t make them non-reflective enough to not interrupt really deep observing. Also, that just shifts the problem around. If they are absorbing in the visible, they will likely have huge amounts of blackbody radiation in IR, sub/millimeter, and radio. You would need to make a satellite out of dark matter to not interrupt astronomy.
How about not putting a bunch of janky constantly-needing-replenishment laggy-internet satellites into orbit to begin with where the only real beneficiaries outside of bullshit “remote” excuses is the US military?
Throw enough glittering trash into orbit and your “can’t stay earthbound forever” platitudes become self-defeating because at some point nothing could be safely launched.
I already knew that; my point was that letting your euphorically under-regulated corporate saviors do whatever they please (which can and probably will include higher orbit satellite junk later on) under pretenses of pretentious “reach the stars” platitudes is interfering with actual contemporary scientific inquiry, right now.
The pollution of each launch is significant, and the benefit of the janky low orbit network is questionable (except to the US military), especially because it requires constant additional launches.
but have you considered that this under-regulated shlock allows for command and control in warzones across the world shitty internet service in “remote areas”
Just use fluffy euphoric speeches about destiny and reaching for the stars, prattle that could fit in a movie with a soundtrack composed by Hans Zimmer, and you can sell the “I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE” crowd almost anything, including actual contempt and dismissal for actual scientists (astronomers in this case). so-true
Man, I just went to a good seminar today on finding habitable exoplanets that emphasized that we currently need ground based telescopes, because it is still impractical to make 30+ meter telescopes in space and would be very expensive, even if could be done. But progress is just launching a bunch of bullshit into orbit to avoid real investment in infrastructure like fiber and other telecommunication lines.
But progress is just launching a bunch of bullshit into orbit to avoid real investment in infrastructure like fiber and other telecommunication lines.
With sufficient tweets/xeets/whatever about how “we can’t stay earthbound forever” and “we must spread the light of consciousness to the stars,” extremely credulous “I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE” bazinga brains will happily see actual science being trampled upon in favor of performative spectacle bullshit.
For those that know about trails and the ease of removing them from images through stacking as I thought, it isn’t about that, despite the cover image. It’s about momentary glints disrupting searches for momentary events. Not too much more to the article though, just raising awareness
Looking forward to at least half an hour on this from DR Becky. I’m very curious about the specifics of how they plan on detecting all this dark stuff.
Unfortunately this is a rather open ended question. We’re constantly discovering new things. The James Webb Space Telescope has only been fully functional for a short while but has already provided tons of new info.
Generally knowledge like this is similar to starting with a really low res photo that gets progressively more high res with each decade.
For example, the band of the Milky Way galaxy we can see in the sky was suggested to be made of stars itself in 5th Century BC by Democritus. In 964 AD, Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi recorded observations on the Andromeda Galaxy and Large Magellanic Cloud. 1610, Galileo confirms the Milky Way band is indeed made of stars. 1923, Edwin Hubble proves galaxies are “island” clusters of stars.
We’ve also had to rely on Newtonian Physics to describe things for a long time, but then it started being noticed that while consistent for practical things on earth, they couldn’t accurately predict things on the scale of the universe. Einstein’s general theory of relativity helped explain most of this, but still has some gaps.
Black holes were proven in the last century, but we got the first visual confirmation just a few years ago. Redshifting proving that galaxies are moving away from each other is also in the last century.
So at this point we have measurements on the general chemical make up of the universe, its size, its rate of expansion, the formation of galaxies, and how old it is starting from a specific event.
These measurements are ranges though, and those ranges get more narrow the better our instruments and the new info we get. It’s like guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar. Your first guesses can be way off because you have to eyeball, but then you’re allowed to measure the volume of the jar and the volume of a single jelly bean. You’ll be way closer than before. Then you’re allowed to measure the weight of that jelly bean and that jar. You’ll probably be a little closer. Then you’re given a variety of jelly beans to measure, so you get averages instead of basing everything on a jelly bean that might be an outlier.
So, in a binary way we don’t have the exact right answer for a lot of the universe, but each new discovery trends toward us being more correct than we were before.
It’s reflected light from the Sun as they orbit, not lights installed on them. Maybe they can use a non-reflective coating or something for new ones though
astronomy
Newest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.