Voyager 1 and 2 still alive!!!! 38,000 mph!

[68PK21 440.6bbl]

I laugh at all this moon crap going on, yea there's water up there frozen at like what absolute zero... ummm how you gonna dig it up and defrost it? Then there's plenty of Titanium ore to build these gigantic space colony structures to house the 'Gateway' to the Universe.
Ummmm who's going to tow the big azz foundry up there to process the ore? I know nothing about how to make Titanium but I'll bet it ain't easy.
Magic Wand maybe?

Then the best image brain fart was the building of housing on Mars with a gigantic 3D Printer!
How you going to build that printer? Unbelievable!

 

[Mike66Chryslers]

These tiny little spacecraft could, in the endless vastness and cosmic timelessness of interstellar space, be the only evidence we ever existed.

On the other hand, could be as likely they will never been found by anybody.

One is going to be found by an alien intelligence which builds a huge ship for it to help it find it's way home. The other is going to be blown up by Klingons as target practice.

 

[Mike66Chryslers]

I laugh at all this moon crap going on, yea there's water up there frozen at like what absolute zero... ummm how you gonna dig it up and defrost it? Then there's plenty of Titanium ore to build these gigantic space colony structures to house the 'Gateway' to the Universe.
Ummmm who's going to tow the big azz foundry up there to process the ore? I know nothing about how to make Titanium but I'll bet it ain't easy.
Magic Wand maybe?

Then the best image brain fart was the building of housing on Mars with a gigantic 3D Printer!
How you going to build that printer? Unbelievable!

Finding a source of water is key to building self-sustaining colonies in space. Defrosting it should not pose a significant problem.

We need water not just to drink, but to grow crops and to separate it into hydrogen and oxygen to provide fuel and breathable air. If Earth is the only source of water, that will significantly hinder humans' ability to explore space, except remotely via robots as we have been doing.

 

[amazinblue82]

One is going to be found by an alien intelligence which builds a huge ship for it to help it find it's way home. The other is going to be blown up by Klingons as target practice.

trekkies unite!

 

[amazinblue82]

full disclosure .. yes, call me crazy but not in public

I am invested in a company that wants to do this. It will not even remotely pay off in my lifetime, and perhaps not my children either.

My great-grandkids could be multi-billionaires in their 30's (so 60 years from now, or 2080+).

Its all about the Helium 3 .. perhaps even by that time some other technology will make it all very easy to do .

Anyway, to me this is plausible.. i bet a trivial amount compared to what it could be worth in 6 decades. Long after I am dust.

 

[Turboomni]

WOW!

 

[amazinblue82]

Mercury transiting the Sun .. a little over a dozen times a century can we see this from Earth. Monday morning November 11, 2019 .. then again November 2032.

source: Transit of Mercury - Wikipedia

A transit of Mercury across the Sun takes place when the planet Mercury passes directly (transits) between the Sun and a superior planet, becoming visible against (and hence obscuring a small portion of) the solar disk. During a transit, Mercury appears as a tiny black dot moving across the disk of the Sun.

Transits of Mercury with respect to Earth are much more frequent than transits of Venus, with about 13 or 14 per century, in part because Mercury is closer to the Sun and orbits it more rapidly.

Transits of Mercury occur in May or November. The last four transits occurred on November 15, 1999; May 7, 2003; November 8, 2006; and May 9, 2016. The next will occur next Monday on November 11, 2019, and then on November 13, 2032. A typical transit lasts several hours.

On June 3, 2014, the Mars rover Curiosity observed the planet Mercury transiting the Sun, marking the first time a planetary transit has been observed from a celestial body besides Earth. ​

 

[Turboomni]

Being so close to the sun how fast is it moving compared to the earth or other planets? I guess it has relatively little mass compared to other planets so maybe not so fast?? Thanks for posting.

 

[amazinblue82]

Being so close to the sun how fast is it moving compared to the earth or other planets? I guess it has relatively little mass compared to other planets so maybe not so fast?? Thanks for posting.

good question .. i am sure closeness to a bigger object means it will orbit the bigger object faster.

faster surely because orbit is shorter and because gravity is stronger the closer its gets. so mercury faster (orbital velocity and orbital duration to travel the distrance) than earth, than Jupiter etc.

but i dont think the planet's mass (unless its somehow more massive than its sun) matters that much. one of Kepler's planetary motion laws (dont recall them well enough though) proves this.

hmm .. worth a lookup whene i get home.

WAIT .. found something from NASA. eyballin' this chart I"d say mass doesnt matter that much if at all

 

[Turboomni]

Latest update.

 

[amazinblue82]

those darn Voyagers still astound and amaze.

last week, we found another Earth-sized exoplanet in the habitable zone of its star. The more I study this science, its fascinating how they do this detective work.

alas, so far though thousands of exoplanets have been found, less than 20 are earthsize and warm enough for liquid water (if any is there) on the surface, NONE of the 20 could have life like ours.'

NASA planet hunter finds Earth-size habitable-zone world



Anyway, as Voyagers plow on, we'll keep searching the galaxy for ET's signals. simple math says something/somebody's out there

 

[cbarge]

Nerds....
I must admit i did check out the links on their activity.
Geeks rejoice!!

 

[amazinblue82]

 

[Turboomni]

Neet video Amazinblue . I wonder how many planets we miss just because from our vantage point the planets do not cross between us and the star?

 

[Turboomni]

Anyway, as Voyagers plow on, we'll keep searching the galaxy for ET's signals. simple math says something/somebody's out there

Or was or will be and we have just missed the possibility by 1 million to Billions of years. A mear wink of an eye in the whole scheme of things.

 

[amazinblue82]

Neet video Amazinblue . I wonder how many planets we miss just because from our vantage point the planets do not cross between us and the star?

Or was or will be and we have just missed the possibility by 1 million to Billions of years. A mear wink of an eye in the whole scheme of things.

Both are possible.

to see a planet pass in front of its sun, we kinda need the most perpendicular line of sight vs. it star.

as to timing, i imagine a race of beings advanced enough to understand EM spectrum but not have "warp drive", and whose planet got hit by a big *** space rock and pulverized eons ago. we'd never know they were even there at all.

 

[70bigblockdodge]

Many years ago in a Galaxy far away.....

 

[amazinblue82]

art imitating the real thing.

we have NO idea whats going on in the billions of galaxies we can see .. but cannot remotely spot a planet. kinda like trying to read a newspaper, on the bottom of the Pacific, from Mars -- impossible.

heck, though this map is dated (2015), we only see few thousand of the billions of planets in THIS galaxy alone.

That little reddish cone is the line of sight, in one direction, we that have along one spiral arm, for seeing transits past another star.

gravitational lensing techniques, going to the right in the graphic, has shown a few planets going toward the galactic center. Some of them in the space between the spiral arms .. NONE habitable by a species like us.

Milky Way Map Shows the Tiny Fraction of Nearby Planets We've Discovered So Far

 

[Turboomni]

I would think if there was a way to detect life or hear from them in some way by the time the light or radio waves got to us they could have become extinct for a very long time. And I guess the same for us as our radio waves are still travelling away from us but only for a bit more than 100 years.

 

[amazinblue82]

I would think if there was a way to detect life or hear from them in some way by the time the light or radio waves got to us they could have become extinct for a very long time. And I guess the same for us as our radio waves are still travelling away from us but only for a bit more than 100 years.

yeah thats right.

so, as you point out, if you draw a 100 light-year diameter "bubble" around our solar system, then somebody in that area may just be learning about our existence "today".

Assuming technology equivalent to ours, they radio back they heard us ...we find that out 100 years from now.

assuming we are still here...