One of my favorite astronomy anecdotes is that Pluto was predicted based on the gravity perturbation of Uranus and Neptune but when Clyde Tombaugh found it, it wasn't where it was supposed to be and pretty soon was determined to not have enough mass to be the "Planet X" everyone was looking for. Then over the decades they recalculated the orbits of Neptune and Uranus with greater and greater precision until at some point in the '60s, Carl Sagan(?) observed that at the current rate of diminishment, Pluto would cease to exist some time in the late '80s. Of course, it's now impossible to find that quote because the whole world is all HURR DURR I LEARNED PLUTO HAZ PLANET SO WILL MY KIDZ without recognizing that the thing about science is it changes. I wonder if francopoli knows what I'm talking about.
That quote was from Cosmos, speaking about the discovery about the new-found moon circling the planet. I know it is out there, just need to work on my google-fu because sweet fucking retards of shit. You do a space search anymore and it is all churches and conspiracy tards and flat earth fuckery. These people must have tons of cash. Seeing that most of these guys are in their late 60's my guess is retired and nothing else to spend their SSI on. (sorry end of rant). The Neptune, perbutations? They cleaned the main telescope used during the data collection, this caused a change in the pointing of the equipment. This explains why nobody else outside of France were able to find the change in speed. It was not until Voyager 2 went by Neptune in 1989 that the exact mass of Neptune was worked out; with that data point all the math using Neptune to find "Planet X" went away.
Who? How much do you think Russia is dumping into this sector? How about business's AGW disinformation campaign? Does it even require active funding anymore? Can the snowball of stupidity be set rolling with only a few bucks? I think it can, but it does also feel to me like there's still a false/troll/bought component pushing forward on the perceived-as-grassroots "campain 4 stoopiditie" thread woven into the last couple of decades. I'm only correcting for the effects of living in my little bubble as best I can, mind you, but there does seem to be a disconnect from people on the streets vs. people on the internet. Folks I meet, elders included, are generally polite and trusting when they listen to me discuss anything technical that they're unfamiliar with. I'm hoping that the effects of the security accompanying anonymity on the internet (and two incomparably different age groups) aren't wholly accountable for this. If even half of these people on some of the internet forums and comments sections I've seen are real, we're fucked. No, really. If those are the actual ideas and thoughts of people on the other side of town or somewhere out in the countryside, we better make sure some serious legal penalties and mental treatments are an option (and do we have decent mental healthcare? nope). At least a few members of hubski don't go to (m)any of those realms of the internet, I think. I don't blame you. If this disconnect is real, that is to say, if the distrust of mainstream science truly is at the highest level in decades (and if the lower rungs of society are only going to get even angrier within the next few years), I think differences between the higher and lower tiers of education will not be sustainable in the near future, if they are right now. Then I arrive at a familiar question: "How do you fix a culture?". We can try, I guess. Cultural fitness selection will "fix" things, eventually, especially in this geopolitical climate, but the selection process doesn't give a shit about human life. Donald Trump might be a chemotherapy that some of our institutions end up benefiting from, in the long run, but I'm not sure that what's going on now isn't the new normal, or quickly on the way to becoming such. If this isn't a one-and-done type of political phenomenon, I might look at going global. But hell, Donny might save us all, somehow, in the long run. The "problem" may have compounded further under Hillary (or even Bernie). "Problem" being whichever one of the myriad things plaguing our society fails first. To me, student loan debt looks like it's first up to bat, but my view is obscured by all of the fake Monopoly money raining down from the upper deck. And all of this (frankly, bullshit) analysis is just as good as what's in the papers! Nobody seems to know hardly anything anymore, but that doesn't stop people from taking an absolutist stance, and I myself have been guilty of this inclination more than a few times. A calm, calculated approach doesn't sell. The sky is falling if we say it is, I guess. I agree with you though, francopoli, I think some very nasty disinformation designed to further U.S. anti-intellectualism isn't a conspiratorial notion, it's something we probably should've taken seriously before Putin figured out how to weaponize the internet. Speaking of which, I'll be looking for boots-on-the-ground, little-guy style reporting about the climate of French social media leading up to their election. This is a reminder to myself to post in that thread. Tell me what you see out there. My perspective is but one, and it's quite limited for the time being.You do a space search anymore and it is all churches and conspiracy tards and flat earth fuckery. These people must have tons of cash.
Ken Ham and Liberty University are both active in fighting godless science online. Add that in the shit show that is the baby boomer generation being retired, backwards, anti science, hell fucking anti reality, and flush with SSI cash and you really don't need foreign involvement to blame. Ads on Youtube, and promoted channels are not that expensive when you have a house paid off, free health care from the government and a retirement check. Editing to add. After I wrote the original comment I snooped around some of the flat earth and anti science stuff to see more about the people involved. Retirees and you people working with megachurches. And a few weird people here and here.
I've seen some people tactfully keep god in their lives while doing great science, and I'm trying to shy away from phrasing things in a militant tone. At least for now. The opposite comes more naturally anyway. I won't blame any one age bracket, either. My generation has plenty of dumbshits, trust me, and as we've beefed up standardized curriculum and increasingly formalized the classroom, critical thinking has suffered. No time for self-actualization. I'm not sure that those social media accounts have a one-to-one correspondence with American citizens. I'm also quite aware of how conspiratorial all of this must sound. Maybe my refusal to believe in the extent America's ignorance will come back to bite me.
The Big Bang Theory was proposed by the Vatican's Astronomer after looking through Einstein's equations. Darwin was a very devoutly religious man who had major a crisis of faith over evolution. Those are off the top of my head. Newton and Leibniz fought over calculus in part due to the religious differences between the two men. Ken Miller is a devout Catholic who gives pro-evolution speeches and presentations. We could sit here and name thousands of people in this camp. Religion is not the issue. Fanatic, regressive, nutballs are the problem. Ken Ham is a one-man atheist creation engine. Liberty University is using their narrow religious world view to fuck over the country. We could sit here and name thousands of people in this camp. Canada, Australia, UK, Ireland, Turkey, Germany and Russia are putting in a good fight against the American nutballs. I'd love to link a few but screw helping them rise in google searches.I've seen some people tactfully keep god in their lives while doing great science, and I'm trying to shy away from phrasing things in a militant tone. At least for now. The opposite comes more naturally anyway.
I'm not sure that those social media accounts have a one-to-one correspondence with American citizens.
I know space is incredibly empty and these new small planets and planetoids don't even register on the scale, so to speak, but it seems to me that every new discovery here makes the prospect of leaving the solar system more difficult. Am i just being defeatist about this?
The problem is not that you'll hit something. The problem is you never will. We use scientific notation to eliminate orders of magnitude and converse and operate knowledgeably about concepts that are beyond human scale in one direction or another. We do this because we are irrevocably tied to human scale whether we like it or not. It's hard to wrap your head around the forces and energy necessary to get out of the gravity well - but we burned up an office building worth of explosives to get three guys to the moon and back. And yeah - orbit is 90% of the way to anywhere in the universe but you have to get everything up there. And then you wait. It's easy to point out that Voyager 1 is past the heliopause but it's just as easy to point out that it took 25 years to make it 125 AU. IF Voyager were steaming to Proxima Centauri it'd get there around 4000 AD. And sure. lightsails, VASIMR rockets, Project Orion and on and on and on. But it took us eight or nine tries before we successfully got a rover on Mars so we're a long goddamn way from needing to worry about deep space objects. Personally? I rather like it here. And I know it's a long damn way to anywhere else. I don't particularly like the climate of Nevada let alone Mars and Mars is the best second-place contender we know of.
The human experience and spacetime: too much space, not enough time.
Depends on what you're trying to fly out of the solar system. A space probe? No problem, been there, done that, gonna do it again in a few years. A space ship? Again, not an issue because even the biggest ship we could build would still be tiny on the scale of the solar system. Now, if you've decided that you're taking Jupiter to go hang out in the TRAPPIST-1 system, you might have to brace for impact with a few little rocks on the way out. Of course, Jupiter can and has probably withstood worse.
Yeah I thought as much. Thanks for clearing that up
Leaving the solar system isn't difficult. One of the Voyager Probes has already left the solar system and Dala says the other one is pushing at the fringes as we speak but the situation is "confusing, so don't ask." The real challenge would be getting to anywhere else outside of our solar system and sheer distance is the challenge in every way. That said, in the lifespan of a single man we went from heavier than air flight to the moon landing. The history of travel, all the way back to prehistoric man, is chock full of people trekking inconceivably long distances with the technology they had at the time. Will you see a probe land on a planet outside our solar system in your lifetime? Probably not. Will it happen sooner than any of us expect? Probably.
Let's see you do it. ;-) It's 1300 miles from Midway to Hawaii. You can breathe the air the whole way. Yeah, I'm not too eager to point my dugout at the horizon and go but the fact of the matter is, the environment is substantially similar from the minute you get in the canoe until the minute you get out. Deep space? We don't even know if a Bussard ramjet will work out there because we have no idea what the interstellar hydrogen distribution is. I get the spirit of what you're saying but it's the equivalent of "the bumblebee flies anyway" which is only used by people who want to dismiss the expertise of people in fields they don't understand. Space is fuckin' far. Full stop. And I want to believe but as soon as you dip your toe into the physics of what's being suggested things start to get discouraging.Leaving the solar system isn't difficult
Thanks, that's what I figured. Exciting times we live in.
That's a terrible idea as most of the objects are not in the plane of the solar system. And they have orbits on the order of centuries, if not millennia. Here is a better idea. We take one of the pristine mirrors that the NSA/NRO gave NASA and use them for a wide field sensitive infrared survey telescope. We place that telescope at the L2 point between the sun and the earth (where the James Webb telescope will be) as it is in shadow, cold and the earth blocks the sun most of the time. This helps keep the telescope cold so your coolant lasts longer. Then, image the whole sky. your goal is to take an image of a part of the sky with a sensitive camera in the IR bands every 5-10 days. Everything that does not move? that is a galaxy or a star. Everything that moves? Get a visual scope on that object ans see if it is real or an artifact. This has a few advantages. One the telescope can be lofted on a Falcon Heavy. Two, we know that environment and can engineer for it. Three we can set the spacecraft up to be serviced as that is about the same delta-V as a lunar orbit insertion. Three we are looking exactly opposite the sun which is where these faint objects are brightest in the sky (note we are talking 10-100x dimmer than Pluto.) Why Infrared? These objects are small, dim, faint and hard to see. But they are warm relative to the background of space and all but the brightest galaxies and close gas clouds. Some of these objects are roughly as reflective as fresh asphalt (they reflect 5-9% of the sunlight that hits them) but the get 'warm' from the sun's energy and that makes them glow like a dull ember. Most of the rocks we find are not much bigger than mountains, most are under 50Km. Oh, cool video time. Want to watch what technology can do? Here is a video of all the asteroid discoveries from the 1970's onward. Note how the sweeps occur away from the sun. In 2010 an older infrared telescope was used to look at a 90° angle to the earth/sun line and fond thousands of rocks. Those are the big events and they stick out once you see them.
There are too many of these small bodies out there all exhibiting the same or nearly same weird behavior. With the new WFIRST and other infrared survey telescopes looking for asteroids, if there is something large out there that is causing the orbital scattering they will find it or have to go back to the math calculations.
THIS is the thing I keep pinned to the back of my brain: There are a number of objects out there that should have done one thing, and haven't, and show oddly similar patterns of behavior, and shouldn't. So the current 'best idea' is that there is a bigger something out there, that is dark and hard to see, and is causing these other - necessarily smaller - things to act in a similar manner. Due to my lack of expertise in astrophysics, until the behavior of these bodies can be explained by an alternate hypothesis (which this one doesn't seem to address), I think I'm going to stick with Planet X.
