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NASA: New Horizons Finds Blue Skies and Water Ice on Pluto

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A

aliengmr

Member
orioto said:
I've always heard life on earth is a 1 in a trillion chance etc.. cause lots of things had to happen etc... And the universe is soo big, and now we discover pretty close planets are not that different from earth, or at least less than we would have thought.. So what about the odds now ? If on the minuscule number of planet we can actually analyze, there are already a good amount of them with some kind of water.
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Well, there's very little debate over life existing on other worlds. It highly likely. Intelligent life is another matter entirely. The formation of the Moon, which itself is among many factors that have contributed to our existence, had so many smaller effects on Earth. The size of the Earth's core, the thickness of it crust, the rotation, and even the axis. Had it not happened in that precise way, Earth would have been very different. That's even before all the mass extinctions.

What it means is the chances of finding a habitable world similar to Earth is likely higher and the potential for life might be expanded to more planets. The debate is mostly centered around intelligent life. We got super lucky and its sadly pretty quiet.
 
G

Gordon Shumway

Banned
Rich! said:
People in Finland manage
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iboFbtv3IM5UfY.gif
 
T

titiklabingapat

Member
Re: water in space

It pretty much is. I believe we even detected water in outerspace as water ice. The question is whether or not liquid water is common.
 
D

Deleted member 80556

Unconfirmed Member
Indrid Cold1 said:
I would have said the opposite. Robots exploring relentlessly boring balls of ice and mud, and ageing rocket tech carrying cargo to low earth orbit and no further is not remotely exciting. We need MANNED space exploration. This is the exciting and inspirational aspect of it. The current policies of NASA et al towards manned space exploration are a joke.
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We simply are not mature enough as a species. It's quite clear when politicians say that such an investment is a luxury. Perhaps with whatever SpaceX will do, maybe we'll have a big jump in manned exploration.
 
N

Nocebo

Member
Indrid Cold1 said:
I would have said the opposite. Robots exploring relentlessly boring balls of ice and mud, and ageing rocket tech carrying cargo to low earth orbit and no further is not remotely exciting. We need MANNED space exploration. This is the exciting and inspirational aspect of it. The current policies of NASA et al towards manned space exploration are a joke.
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What are the current policies of NASA et al towards manned space exploration?
 
D

Dead Man

Member
Water everywhere gives me some hope for the medium term (next 5000 years or so) survival of at least part of the species.
 
I

IceCold

Member
Makes sense that water is pretty common in the solar system (and likely the universe) Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and oxygen is pretty common too (not to mention highly reactive).
 
RoadHazard

RoadHazard

Gold Member
Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good!

Really though, it's awesome how much new stuff we're finding out about our solar system these days.

Siphorus said:
We could totally adopt this as a second moon if we strap a few rockets to it to push it back. #adoptpluto
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I'll back this proposition. Let's go viral with this. Who starts the Twitter bomb? #adoptpluto
 
jufonuk

jufonuk

not tag worthy
Love to be there when we meet the plutonians , and they find out we don't classify their home as a planet.

And that kids is how the earth Pluto conflict started.
 
S

SkyOdin

Member
People need to accept that Pluto isn't going to be our ninth planet ever again. If we are going to count it as a planet, then we are going to have to count a heck of a lot of other objects out there as planets too. The dwarf planet classification is really useful since it describes a lot of objects in the solar system. Just remember that Pluto has a lot of company in its category, so it won't be feeling lonely.

Not that Pluto will ever be lonely with Charon staring at it 24/7.
 
C

Chariot

Member
Eh, give Idris Elba Pluto's former position as a planet. I know, you all think he is too young and not a planet, but neither was Pluto. I think he'll manage.
 
Y

YoYo Switch

Banned
We should airlift some greenhouse gas producing smoke stack factories, a couple a cars to Pluto and induce global warming, making it habitable in the future


What will one day destroy the human race shall save us in the end
 
B

besada

Banned
Nocebo said:
What are the current policies of NASA et al towards manned space exploration?
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There's a planned manned mission to Mars, as well as a manned mission to an Asteroid(NASA plans. Several other countries and some private businesses also have manned space plans and aspirations.) The issue isn't whether we're going to do manned missions, it's the ratio between manned and unmanned missions. I think an 80/20 split between unmanned and manned makes pretty good sense. We get more science bang for the buck from unmanned missions, but more attention and publicity from manned missions. And both are important to keep people interested in space, so we can keep paying for the science.
 
N

Nocebo

Member
besada said:
There's a planned manned mission to Mars, as well as a manned mission to an Asteroid(NASA plans. Several other countries and some private businesses also have manned space plans and aspirations.) The issue isn't whether we're going to do manned missions, it's the ratio between manned and unmanned missions. I think an 80/20 split between unmanned and manned makes pretty good sense. We get more science bang for the buck from unmanned missions, but more attention and publicity from manned missions. And both are important to keep people interested in space, so we can keep paying for the science.
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I agree. I think the person I replied to doesn't realize that there being few manned missions (Aside from the whole ISS) is not a case of any "policies" against such things. But more a case of cost, danger, technology, direction from the government etc. Robotic missions are far less expensive and far less risky.
 
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