i absolutely LOVE living in an age when this kind of stuff is being discovered. i hope to live long enough to witness first contact...~!

XxAxX said:

yeah we know so little. Hopefully we don't self destruct before we actually learn anything

NDRU said:

true. but, even in MY lifetime alone, we have gone from thinking that planet earth is a very rare place, to knowing for a fact that there asre literally hundreds of planets in the universe capable of sustaining life like ours.

put that in your pipe and smoke it

i absolutely LOVE living in an age when this kind of stuff is being discovered. i hope to live long enough to witness first contact...~!

i absolutely LOVE living in an age when this kind of stuff is being discovered. i hope to live long enough to witness first contact...~!

ZombieKitten said:

SO that's 2 spaceships we're looking 4 mmmh might build a sort of spaceship's 4 sale businees noooo joking i'l get SUED 2

Dave1992 said:

Check out Alexyss Tylor giving advice to gay men:




Tath just killed me dont know if i or or think i'l be

I would post it on zaza's thread, but I don't want him to kill me.

XxAxX said:

XxAxX, honey, you're username is IMPOSSIBLE for me to type in less than 60 seconds!!!


I totally agree with you. I wish I had been born 400 years from now though, just like Dave.


However, it's amazing how little we knew just when I myself was a kid.

Things we thought, or didn't know:

1) Dinosaurs dragged their tales / We now know that's a false.
2) We didn't didn't have any really valid or provable theories as to what killed the dinosaurs.
3) We had no clue that our milky way was a 'bar spiral' galaxy, so all the pictures of our galaxy growing up was that of a regular spiral galaxy. We also didn't realize that our galaxy may actually be as big or bigger than Andromeda. Thanks to infrared telescopes we can now peer through interstellar gas.
4) We didn't know the shape of our Universe (you'll have to google this one to understand why it's significant).
5) We thought you needed a good deal of heat to have weather patterns on a planet. Neptune has the highest winds in the solar system (1,000 MPH sometimes) and is very, very, veeeerrrrry cold. We were shocked by this discovery.
6) Though we always suspected planets existed around other stars, we never in a million years thought that even pulsars and neutron stars have planets circling them (very unlikely because stars go supernova before becoming one of those objects).
7) We didn't know Mars had traces of methane in it's atmosphere. The reason why this is significant is because Methane is destroyed by sunlight--and Mars has no magnetic field like earths to protect itself from harmful rays. Ergo, the methan that is found in pockets on the planet is being 'replenished', and there are only two sources of that---geological (volcanoes--of which Mars doesn't appear to have any), and Life (of which we haven't yet discovered on Mars).
8) Heck, we didn't even really know the devastating impact of comets until we were able to witness comet Shoemaker-Levy crashing into the Jovian atmosphere.
9) We didn't even know where the remains of the Titanic were.
10) Instantaneous information exchange between people in different continents like we have here on the org would have seemed fanciful.

The list just goes on and on. I grew up in a very ignorant time. !

30 years from now folks will be saying the same damned thing about today!


.
[Edited 4/14/10 10:39am]

I seem to remember when the first planet outside of the solar system was discovered amazing how far we have to go! There are still places on the Earth we haven't seen.

NDRU said:

We're probably a few years away from confirming that life exists on Mars as well.

This alone will change our official view of the Universe.

XxAxX said:

Humans actually KNOW next 2 nothing.

TheVoid said:

They almost confirmed it (or that it had existed) a few years back, too, with that meteor

NDRU said:

Ah yes, but there was no way to know if that wasn't the result of contamination.


In this case, Methane is a volatile gas that is immediately destroyed by solar rays (of which Mars's atmosphere gives very poor protection). So it has to be replenished on a continual basis. There are only 2 ways to do this, and the most common way is life. At this point, NASA can't rule life out, and is investigating this. At any rate, the plumes of methane are localized, and sending a probe to those specific areas would yield some interesting...and I believe definitive results.

TheVoid said:

Farts are so important!

I seem to remember when the first planetwas discovered

XxAxX said:

XxAxX, honey, you're username is IMPOSSIBLE for me to type in less than 60 seconds!!!


I totally agree with you. I wish I had been born 400 years from now though, just like Dave.


However, it's amazing how little we knew just when I myself was a kid.

Things we thought, or didn't know:

1) Dinosaurs dragged their tales / We now know that's a false.
2) We didn't didn't have any really valid or provable theories as to what killed the dinosaurs.
3) We had no clue that our milky way was a 'bar spiral' galaxy, so all the pictures of our galaxy growing up was that of a regular spiral galaxy. We also didn't realize that our galaxy may actually be as big or bigger than Andromeda. Thanks to infrared telescopes we can now peer through interstellar gas.
4) We didn't know the shape of our Universe (you'll have to google this one to understand why it's significant).
5) We thought you needed a good deal of heat to have weather patterns on a planet. Neptune has the highest winds in the solar system (1,000 MPH sometimes) and is very, very, veeeerrrrry cold. We were shocked by this discovery.
6) Though we always suspected planets existed around other stars, we never in a million years thought that even pulsars and neutron stars have planets circling them (very unlikely because stars go supernova before becoming one of those objects).
7) We didn't know Mars had traces of methane in it's atmosphere. The reason why this is significant is because Methane is destroyed by sunlight--and Mars has no magnetic field like earths to protect itself from harmful rays. Ergo, the methan that is found in pockets on the planet is being 'replenished', and there are only two sources of that---geological (volcanoes--of which Mars doesn't appear to have any), and Life (of which we haven't yet discovered on Mars).
8) Heck, we didn't even really know the devastating impact of comets until we were able to witness comet Shoemaker-Levy crashing into the Jovian atmosphere.
9) We didn't even know where the remains of the Titanic were.
10) Instantaneous information exchange between people in different continents like we have here on the org would have seemed fanciful.

The list just goes on and on. I grew up in a very ignorant time. !

30 years from now folks will be saying the same damned thing about today!


.
[Edited 4/14/10 10:39am]

NDRU said: