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Fuck yeah, Science!

Here's something really worthy of a "FUCK YEAH SCIENCE!"

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36025706

The objective - interstellar travel. Stephen Hawking says it might happen within a generation!!! Who are you to say he's wrong?

I have vague memories of reading a scifi story about something like this. Story about an interplanetary race with capsules attached to huge sails to capture solar wind and move the capsule. Race course was like earth orbit beyond moon, out to Mars, around the planet and back to earth, whereupon the sails were dumped and the capsule re-entered. It could only be run every so often when the planet orbits aligned correctly.

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Found what I was looking for in Wikipedia.

"Sunjammer" is a science fiction short story by Arthur C. Clarke, originally published in 1963,
 
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Stabilized to the Milky Way Galaxy showing the rotation of the Earth...


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Did they make porn tapes to help finance the project? "Sex on Mars" would be a big hit.
 

There are subtle references to Intelligent Design throughout the article:

Life on a young Earth could imply that life is a routine development in the universe, and could be, as Nobel laureate Christian de Duve put it, a "cosmic imperative."

Cosmic imperative, and not random chance and billions of years?

No one knows how life began on Earth. Charles Darwin hypothesized that life emerged in a “warm little pond,” but other researchers imagine that it emerged around a deep-sea hydrothermal vent, or even came to Earth from space, perhaps after sparking into existence on Mars, or even in some other, distant planetary system.

I-am-not-saying.jpg
 
There are subtle references to Intelligent Design throughout the article:
Seriously? LOL. Those statements reflect the current state of the science. We simply don't know how life started. It's all theoretical.
 
Seriously? LOL. Those statements reflect the current state of the science. We simply don't know how life started. It's all theoretical.

I realize it is conjecture, but that is my point. Nature abhors a vacuum, and that includes the human mind. When the science stops, something has to fill the empty space left. In this case it is "cosmic imperative," whatever that is but it sounds like an outside force, and aliens. Just wanted to note that this need is part of human nature, and in this case the space fillers are intelligent.
 
I realize it is conjecture, but that is my point. Nature abhors a vacuum, and that includes the human mind. When the science stops, something has to fill the empty space left. In this case it is "cosmic imperative," whatever that is but it sounds like an outside force, and aliens. Just wanted to note that this need is part of human nature, and in this case the space fillers are intelligent.
Cosmic imperative is the notion that there is something fundamental that forced the creation of life as it has occurred here....and if life occurs elsewhere it will eventually have traits that resemble ours because the conserved mutations (over billions of years) have occurred for fundamental reasons.

http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1936/620
 
A scientist opining that life is the product of "Cosmic Imperative" isn't doing science anymore. He's doing philosophy, and he should be judged accordingly.
That's not true at all. Scientists can't explain why symmetry exists in nature, they rationalize it as some sort of essential property of the universe...a cosmic imperative. There is something in nature that seems to favor symmetry over non-symmetry. That belief was used by physicists including my avatar to build the theory of subatomic particles for example. Charles Jackels at Wake spent a lot of time trying to build a theory for why amino acids might all be one chirality in nature (except for intentionally flipped ones)...believing there was something fundamental in nature that favored one over the other.

That's one of the biggest issues as far as finding life elsewhere. In theory, amino acids generated from primordial goo would have random chirality. Why one occurs is a complete mystery. But if the same processes that occurred here are favored, then life should occur elsewhere similar to what exists here.
 
There's a big difference in claiming, based on mountains empirical data, that symmetry is a cosmic imperative and claiming that life, for which we have one example, is a cosmic imperative.
Maybe but it's still scientific theory either way. While we have "just one" example of a planet full of life, there is certainly more evidence that points to life occurring as a natural part of the cosmos. When the primary building blocks of life are found in space.....that suggests that the same process could occur elsewhere and is part of the cosmic imperative. That's the primary reason we are looking for life elsewhere.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7895-space-radiation-may-select-amino-acids-for-life
 
You're claiming cosmic imperative is scientific theory, and not just a hypothesis? Bold.
 
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