Author: m1k3y

ohstarstuff:

NO OTHER OBJECTS HAVE VENTURED THIS FAR FROM HOME

  • The primary mission of Voyager was the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn. After making a string of discoveries there — such as active volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io and intricacies of Saturn’s rings — the mission was extended. Voyager 2 went on to explore Uranus and Neptune, and is still the only spacecraft to have visited those outer planets. The adventurers’ current mission, the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM), will explore the outermost edge of the Sun’s domain. And beyond.
  • The Voyager 1 & 2 spacecrafts will be the third and fourth human spacecrafts to fly beyond all the planets in our solar system. Pioneers 10 and 11 preceded Voyager in outstripping the gravitational attraction of the Sun but on February 17, 1998, Voyager 1 passed Pioneer 10 to become the most distant human-made object in space.
  • As of June 8, 2014 Voyager 1 is 19 BILLION km away from Earth while Voyager 2 is 15.6 BILLION km away
  • Both Voyager spacecrafts carry a greeting to any form of life, should that be encountered. The message is carried by a phonograph record – a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds.
  • Voyager 1 is speeding along at about 57,600 kph (35,790 mph) — fast enough to travel from the Earth to the sun three and a half times in one year.
  • NASA’s Voyager 1 became humankind’s most distant spacecraft on Aug. 25, 2012 when scientists believe it entered interstellar space, or the space between stars. Much of interstellar space is actually inside our solar system. It will take about 300 years for Voyager 1 to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud and possibly about 30,000 years to fly beyond it.
  • Alpha Centauri is currently the closest star to our solar system. But, in 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will be closer to the star AC +79 3888 than to our own sun. AC +79 3888 is actually traveling faster toward Voyager 1 than the spacecraft is traveling toward it.
  • Barring any serious spacecraft subsystem failures, the Voyagers may survive until the early twenty-first century (~ 2025), when diminishing power and hydrazine levels will prevent further operation.

    WHERE ARE THE VOYAGERS RIGHT NOW?

    (Source: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/)

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fuckyeahdarkextropian: “Human facial structure evolved to tolerate punches to the head, according to new research that suggests our ancestors spent a lot of time fighting. Such ancestors likely included the australopiths, which lived 4 to 2 million years ago in Africa. “The australopiths were characterized by a suite of traits that may have improved fighting […]

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In short, while globalization is indeed undermining national political institutions and thus national identities and loyalties, what appears to be replacing the national is not the “global” political identity that “cosmopolitical” dreamers have long aspired to, but rather a return to localized identities rooted in clan, sect, ethnicity, corporation, and gang. In literary terms, this future has more in common with Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash than it does with Gene Rodenberry’s Federation utopia in Star Trek.

The ultimate losers in all of this, of course, are the middle classes—the people who “play by the rules” by going to school and getting traditional middle-class jobs whose chief virtue is stability. These sorts of people, who lack the ruthlessness to act as criminal insurgents or the resources to act as plutocratic insurgents, can only watch as institutions built over the course of the 20th century to ensure a high quality of life for a broad majority of citizens are progressively eroded. As the social bases of collective action crumble, individuals within the middle classes may increasingly face a choice: accept a progressive loss of social security and de facto social degradation, or join one of the two insurgencies.

The Twin Insurgency – http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2014/06/15/the-twin-insurgency/
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ENIGMA MAN: A Stone Age Mystery

With Enigma Man we follow the groundbreaking research of Aussie paleoanthropologist Darren Curnoe and his Chinese colleague, paleontologist Ji Xueping.

Their study of ancient human remains found in a remote cave in South-west China looks at the idea there may have been another species of human existing alongside our ancestors as recently as 11,000 – 14,000 years ago.

Dubbed the ‘‘Red Deer Cave people’’, these ancient people, or, more precisely, their remains – so similar, yet so physically different from us – are much, much younger than our Neanderthal relatives, posing some seriously interesting questions. Were they really another human species? And if so, what happened to them? Why did they die out? How did they live? And what were their interactions with our own early relatives?

These are indeed big questions, Curnoe  says, and that’s what makes the search for answers so fascinating.

“The documentary is about the process of deciding: do we have a new species or not?” Curnoe, who is Associate Professor of evolutionary biology in the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at UNSW, explains.

“The fossils just don’t fit with the dominant view in science at the moment about who was around 11,000 years ago or 14,000 years ago, how they relate to us, and how we think of ourselves as humans in relation to nature.

“We tend to think of ourselves as special. So it raises some pretty deep and challenging questions.

“There are views, which I subscribe to, and quite a lot of other people do too, that there are at least 30 different species that are in the fossil record that would be relatives of ours in some sense – some may be ancestors, some may be side-branches that went extinct.

“The classic example is the Neanderthals – everyone has heard of them, even if you don’t know much about them. What we are proposing is that instead of the Neanderthals being the last of the other human-like creatures [before it was] just us, we are in fact saying, well, no, this other group survived until much more recently.”

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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Herpes viruses have been infecting and co-diverging with their vertebrate hosts for hundreds of millions of years. The primate simplex viruses exemplify this pattern of virus-host co-divergence, at a minimum, as far back as the most recent common ancestor of New World monkeys, Old World monkeys, and apes.

Humans are the only primate species known to be infected with two distinct herpes simplex viruses: HSV-1 and HSV-2. Human herpes simplex viruses are ubiquitous, with over two-thirds of the human population infected by at least one virus.

Here, we investigated whether the additional human simplex virus is the result of ancient viral lineage duplication or cross-species transmission.

Evolutionary Origins of Human Herpes Simplex Viruses 1 and 2 – http://m.mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/06/04/molbev.msu185.abstract
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In its first stage, a small satellite about as large as a half-gallon of milk would orbit the moon. Using two highly accurate accelerometers, it could sense small changes in Europa’s gravitational field, eventually mapping the gravity of the entire surface. These detailed gravity maps could then suggest the location of watery oceans below the planet’s surface—or the openings to these oceans.

Once an ocean (or the entryway to one) was found, the probe would begin its second stage. The small satellite would release even smaller instruments over the interesting region. These “chipsats,” each no larger than a fingernail, could enter Europa’s thin atmosphere unharmed and float down to the surface.

“When there is an atmosphere, they flutter down like little pieces of paper, not like a rock,” said John West, leader of the advanced concepts team at Draper. He added that while they expect to lose some of the smaller “chipsats,” enough would be released that useful science could be performed.

Once deployed, the tiny chipsats would then send their measurements back to their orbiting mothership, which would in turn beam them back to Earth.

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