Interstellar Distances

[casagi...@optimum.net]

These are so great, as to preclude any chance of travel, even at
speeds approaching c , which is extremely unlikely in any case.

Distance = Speed x Time

Practical communications are also unlikely.

Yet we continue to hear nonsence about alien visits and deep space
messages.

[Whisper]

I think a few bogans were trying to find science fiction newsgroups and
accidentally stumbled into here.

[a425couple]

bo·gan1
/ˈbōɡ(ə)n/
nounDEROGATORY•INFORMAL
plural noun: bogans
an uncouth or unsophisticated person regarded as being of low social status.
"some bogans yelled at us from their cars"

So casagiannon and whisper think great thinkers like Frank Drake,
Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Neil deGrassie Tyson, and Arthur C. Clarke
are "unsophisticated".

It is them, that are the ones limited to their own lifetimes.
They lack the ability to work on projects that take longer
than their own lifetimes, or see that things may exist beyond
their limited sight.

[Mark Earnest]

The only thing keeping us from colonizing the universe is our backward early cave man scientists.

[R Kym Horsell]

This kinda of stuff can better be understood in terms of science denial.
We've seen this on the sci.env and alt.gl-warm groups for 20+ years.
Some hillbilly starts off claiming e.g. greenhouse theory is all wrong
and therefore the earth can't be warming.
(Of course on even numbered days the same nitwit claims climate change
happens all the time and is nothing new).
When it's pointed out the science on GHG is pretty solid and some of
the claims contradict this or that the nitwit then starts to
back-track and deny that various other long-established ideas are also
all wrong.
Eventually what I've elsewhere called the phenomenon of "creeping denialism"
ends up claiming basic numerical methods used to process weather data
must be wrong because they are tending to prove the earth is warming.

On this group it seems to be going along similar lines.
Ideas like inflation, curved spacetime, the big bang, a finite universe,
dark energy (tending to push things to fly apart faster than the speed of light)
etc all successively have to be denied and evetually it will get to
the point where 1+1 must not equal 2.

The typicaly hillbilly doesn't understand how much evidence backs
the proposition that GHG exist and they warm the planet.

One some of the sci groups the nitwits were pretty much pilloried out
of existence and only the nut-cases remain.

--
[A hillbilly claims the day-to-day variations of the temp of the sun's
surface explains global warming using phoney math; he calculates
1 mK of temp variation at the sun's surface causes ~1K at the earth:]

Will Janoschka 23 Apr 2012 12:48 -0500 wrote:
> That is 0.001 K not 0.001.
> The measurument is not part of the equation.
> (Delta Ts) / (Delta Te) = b/a x (Te^3)/(Ts^3)
> Your move dumb shit!!

[The hillbilly can't solve a(Ts+.001)^4 approx= b(Te+x)^4 for x].

Tsk. Hopelessly demented.
-- Bill Snyder, 23 Apr 2012 13:05:20 -0500

[The real algrebra:
The undisturbed system is aTs^4 = bTe^4
=> (a/b)^(1/4) = Te/Ts
=> x = (Te/Ts)(Ts+.001)-Te
= .001 Te/Ts
I.e. 1 mK over the Sun is ~.05 mK over the Earth].

[Whisper]

What's stopping us is our biology - zero chance humans could survive on
other planets even if we could get there. You don't seem to realize how
fragile our biology is. Did you even go to school?

[Mark Earnest]

> > The only thing keeping us from colonizing the universe is our backward early cave man scientists.
> What's stopping us is our biology - zero chance humans could survive on
> other planets even if we could get there. You don't seem to realize how
> fragile our biology is. Did you even go to school?

Scientists have found a ton of Earth like planets. And they keep finding them.

[R Kym Horsell]

I think the thrust of (whatever) argument you're replying to
is basically "too hard; don't try".
Sounds a tad gutless to me.

Luckily these kinds of people are not in charge of anything important.
At most they get hired by PR firms to harrange people on social media groups.
They are basically bottom dwellers.
Over on a.g-w it's got to the point the bottom dwellers had to reteat
to the safe "base camp" of talk.politics.guns where they continue to
snipe their meaningless memes.

Humans -- maybe not your majority humans -- are made of sterner stuff.
Fortunately.

Some people run into fires to save others they're not even
related to. They dive to the bottom of the sea just to see what is
there with their own eyes. They go walk on the moon or try to break
speed or altitude records that would have made their ancestors vomit blood.

Scientists, engineers, artists, sportspeople are all driven to do
things that overcome the supposed limitations of their biology.
As the masters say -- when it comes to flesh versus steel, pity the steel.

--
Lord Kelvin on why Mr Stephenson's trains will never ever work:
(1) The project will drain the King's treasury.
(2) The noise will scare the cows and sour their milk.
(3) At 37 mph air will be sucked out of the passengers' lungs.
(4) The vibration will injure passengers.
(5) The common people will be encouraged to come to London.

Within 2 years of these "objections" being raised the first
Liverpool to Manchester line opened. The Great Western Railway
ushered in an era of cheap transport but had other unexepected
"space program" spinoffs incl a standardised time system.
Before the railway each town in the UK typically had its own "standard
time" with not too many of the standards agreeing on when 12 o'clock
actually was.

[palsing]

I'm pretty sure that there may be millions of planets out there that would support human life... but there is a snowball's chance in hell that we could ever get there... but we would surely screw it up royally even if we did... so why bother? If we can't take care of this planet, what makes you think that we could take care of another one?

[Daniel65]

Oh!! I thought the only thing stopping us from colonising the Universe
was the distances involved ..... and the (supposed) fact that we'll
never get anywhere near the speed of light .... let alone faster than
that!! ;-P
--
Daniel

[Mark Earnest]

Scientists must secretly have hope for getting to those Earthlike planets or they would not keep looking for them.

Science gets thrown curve balls sometimes.