Astronauts and Jon Stewart

...because they are the best people, two unrelated articles:

Why Neoconservative Pundits Love The Daily Show

Scientist Tackles Ethical Questions of Space Travel

TV and space

both make me unreasonably happy.

Thus today was a good one for fucking around on the internet, because I got to dissect the brand-new Emmy nominations (BSG was once again criminally overlooked, although I'm really happy about the recognition Breaking Bad is getting) and check out lots of Apollo 11-related NYTimes content (today being the 40th anniversary of the launch): reader's photos and memories of what they were doing at the time, a cool page of NYTimes' original coverage, and, best of all, really amazing photos taken by the astronauts, many of which I'd never seen before.

Reshaping Earth.

Using images from NASA's Earth Observatory, Wired has created time-lapse views of regions of the world undergoing significant changes.

The disappearance of the Amazon rainforest:


The draining of the Aral Sea:


The urbanization of Dubai:

Strangely Badass III

This week: Scott Altman. Altman is a Navy test pilot and a NASA astronaut who was among the four pilots who flew the military jets in the Tom Cruise movie Top Gun. Oh, and he is the mission commander of what the Daily Mail is calling NASA's "most dangerous ever shuttle mission."

The mission, known as STS-125 and scheduled to launch tonight (May 11), is intended to repair the Hubble telescope in order to make it useful for another five years. There are, as there must be with such an introduction, a few catches.

1. No ISS-cape: Unfortunately, "Due to the inclination and other orbit parameters of Hubble, Atlantis would be unable to use the ISS [International Space Station] as a 'safe haven' in the event of structural or mechanical failure" ("STS-125"). NASA's solution? Have a backup shuttle and crew ready to launch in the event that something goes wrong, a step taken for the FIRST TIME EVER.

2. Russian roulette space-walks:"During five highly risky spacewalks, [the astronauts] will clamber aboard Hubble to repair and replace instruments contained inside, upgrading its capabilities and prolonging its life for another five years" (Daily Mail). Five times is a lot of times to risk your life 350 miles above the surface of Earth.

3. The little things: "[The astronauts] will face major hurdles, such as unscrewing dozens of minute screws while wearing gloves five layers thick and removing razor-sharp circuit boards capable of piercing the $10 million spacesuits that keep them alive in the vacuum of space" (Ibid).

4. The good guys: John Grunsfeld, another of the astronauts slated for the mission, seems to be the type of guy you do not want to spend eleven days around in a cramped environment. While others are reserved and saying, "The adrenalin is certainly pumping," or, "This is really going to be tough, the toughest servicing mission we have ever attempted," Grunsfeld has chosen to pump out metaphors of difficulty allowing people to fully understand how awesome he is. So far he has said the mission is like "performing brain surgery in space" and stated that he "[considers] this the climbing Mount Everest of spacewalking missions." (Ibid)

Somehow having a guy from Top Gun save the Hubble makes me think we are getting one step closer to a real-life Armageddon. I hope Altman can complete his job as well as Bruce and Ben completed theirs.

Shameless plug for my favorite entertainer

NASA is holding a contest to name their newest "orbiting laboratory." Stephen Colbert has launched on effort to have it named after him. His name currently leads the write-in votes, but he has to beat the number of votes for NASA-picked names to win. So go to here, click "suggest your own," and write in "Colbert."

Because an orbiting laboratory sounds awesome. And forcing Fox and other news networks to report that "Colbert is launching into space" would be even awesomer.

Searching for Extraterrestrial Life ("Where are They?")

I stumbled The Bloop on Wikipedia today. I innocently found my way over to SETI, which refers to the collective Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. The rest of my day was gone.

(Before you decide to make fun of me as you think about the fact that I blew my day on this - remember that you're helplessly intrigued by the space elevator)

Typically this wouldn't have happened - I can Wiki-chain or whatever you want to call it and then go on with my day. But I found that my view on the existence of Intelligent Extra-Terrestrial Life (I'll call it IETL or better yet IL) appears to be in quite the minority, at least as best as I could surmise from Wikipedia. I'll try to sum up my view thus:

There is almost certainly intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and it's probably not that uncommon. However, it is unlikely that there is life anywhere "close" to us - essentially a zero probability of being close enough to reach by either manned or unmanned space travel, and not much better odds that we are close enough to intelligent life to have any sort of one-way, let alone two-way, communication.

There's a whole Wikipedia page devoted to the topic of what's called the "Fermi paradox" - assuming IL exists, why haven't we found it? (Often, "Where are They?") Variations on my (I suppose, uninformed) opinion do exist on the page but are not very prominent, which surprised me. So I got interested in reading about this stuff (and bored at work) and ended up on all kinds of interesting pages, which I've listed below. (Some I have not yet read)

SETI
Fermi Paradox
Megastructure
Kardashev scale
Rare Earth Hypothesis
Interstellar Travel (Last one I've read)
Drake Equation
Bracewell probe
Light cone (I'm really interested in this one but haven't gotten there yet)

The article on interstellar travel seemed to imply that we might be able to reach Alpha Centauri within 50 years. The star is 4.3 light years away, or 25 trillion miles. This would require traveling 57 million miles/hr, or approximately 1,500 times the current record of 38,600 mph.

Talking again about IL, one article had an interesting take on life-favoring characteristics on earth. The moon, it claims, is the result of a Mars-sized object colliding with a young earth. This favorably increased our rotation speed, which minimizes intra-day temperature variation, and also put us at a favorable tilt on our axis (too much tilt results in too much inter-seasonal variation, but too little of such variation would slow evolution and thus delay the existence of IL)

That's all I've got for right now. Except that apparently one (very) unfortunate side effect of hypothermia is a literally-unstoppable urge to remove one's clothing.

God, space is awesome - UPDATED

I found this article really interesting, even though it's kind of not. I just really like descriptions of what it's like to be an astronaut, since my childhood dream will never be realized.

UPDATE: Also awesome! The below photo is the first of our planet framed by the surface of the Moon, taken in '66 and just recently digitized. Read about it here.