AND WE LOSE ANOTHER ONE OF THE GREATS
Maybe he didn't make it into space
himself, but he more than had a hand in our exploration of the solar system. I
am talking of course about planetary scientist Bruce C. Murray. He died Aug. 29
at the age of 81 after a long illness.
For those that don’t recognize the
name, you will recognize his talent and dedication to the exploration of space.
He was the director NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif,
from 1976 – 1982. And a lot of things happened during this time as well. Let’s
just list a quick few here as examples.
Viking
1 & 2 both landed on Mars.
Voyager
1 & 2 were launched
Founded
the Planetary Society with the late Carl Sagan
And the list goes on. He also fought
tirelessly to keep us moving forward on planetary expeditions during a time
when budgets were being shredded like illegal documents at the CIA, and the
future of exploration was looking grim indeed.
He is survived by his wife Suzanne
Moss, and also 5 children and grandchildren.
Goodbye our old friend. May the
spaceways remain clear for your sailing freedom to the stars where I am sure you
always wished to go yourself. We’ll all catch up with you out there eventually.
MORE EVIDENCE OF LIFE HERE
We are getting more evidence it
seems all the time that life here did begin out there; in this case our
neighbor mars.
According to Steven Benner of The
Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology in Florida, evidence is
mounting that life was brought to Earth by a meteorite that originated on mars.
Basically what this is saying here,
is that a form of oxidized molybdenum may have been crucial for life to start
here on Earth. This was likely to have been available on Mars surface, but not
here on Earth 3 billion years ago as we had very little oxygen but Mars did. So
basically though the building blocks of life are founded in organic compounds
they need a boost to get things started.
So with either Boron or molybdenum dropped into the mix, things get a jump
start and start happening.
The analysis of a Martian meteorite
shows that there was Boron on Mars, and it is thought that some form of molybdenum
was also there. Also, with Earth being covered by water at the time, it would
have been difficult for boron to form as it has been found now in only
extremely dry areas. There wouldn’t have been enough dry areas like this back
then for boron to have formed in high enough concentrations to jump start life
here.
Well, what can I say? This works for
me. So I guess we could say that we have those blasted Martians to blame for
all the problems here after all. And since we are those Martians, I still get
to complain about us. So this all works for me in every direction.
6 FUTURISTIC TECH IDEAS NASA IS FUNDING
Phase 2 of the NASA Innovative Advanced
Concepts program, which awards up to 500,000 for research and development, has
been granted to 6 ideas. And they are pretty good ones too.
Most are at least a decade away from
being of any possible use on a mission, but at least we are preparing for it
and doing the research to get us there. Seriously people, someone come up with
a cryo system or something that works or a serious life extension plan for us
will you.
Now, in order to make this simple
for us, (meaning me here), I am simply going to copy directly the 6 concepts
that have been chosen. Here they are along with the principle party responsible
for researching the concept.
Propellant-less
Spacecraft Formation-Flying and Maneuvering with Photonic Laser Thrusters
(Young Bae, Y.K. Bae Corporation, Tustin, Calif.)
SpiderFab:
Architecture for On-Orbit Construction of Kilometer-Scale Apertures (Robert
Hoyt, Tethers Unlimited, Inc., Bothell, Wash.)
A
Gravitational Wave Detector Based on an Atom Interferometer (Babak Saif, NASA
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.)
Super
Ball Bot: Structures for Planetary Landing and Exploration (Vytas SunSpiral,
NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.)
Nomadic
Exploration: Following Routes of Solar Sustenance and Temperate Climate (David
Wettergreen, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa.)
Sample
Return Systems for Extreme Environments: Phase II (Robert Winglee, University
of Washington, Seattle)
Now you see why I copied and pasted it.
When you look at these in the right
way, it seems that there are still people out there determined to get us off
this planet. It also seems that there are some pretty big things that could be
in the planning somewhere as well that we haven’t heard about yet also. I can
hope a anyway.
Also, at the end of paragraph 3,
there is a blue link there to a gallery of Future Visions of Human Spaceflight.
Well worth the look, believe me. Needless to say I went back and forth a couple
times with the pics and got sidetracked.
But here the link to the main article, and don’t forget to check out
that futuristic gallery.
Don’t panic, not that kind of
prophecies. This is just a list of 10 sci-fi predictions that now actually
exist. I will only give two of them here, number 10 and 9, and the rest are at
the link. Just something I came across here that I thought i would throw in
here for fun.
#10
The Atomic bomb.
The World Set Free, written by H.G.
Wells has numerous descriptions of atomic bombs. Yeah I guess that isn’t a big
thing, except that the book was published in 1914. Yep, basically 30 years
before the first atomic bomb test which took place in 1945, at 5:29:45 am, on
July 16th, at Alamogordo, New
Mexico. 18 years to the day before I was born.
#9The
Internet
"From the 'London Times' of
1904" by Mark Twain. He may not have written a lot of sci-fi, but then he
was Mark Twain and he was about as out there as a lot of us are a lot of times it seems. I like him anyway. I
think out of a lot of people from history, if I could choose only one to go
back and visit, it would probably be him. He would definitely up there on my
list at the top, that’s for sure.
The first link is to the list, and
the second link will be to that story.
Now, as I haven’t been able to keep
up this week on the sci-fi front, I do have two things to put up here. Both
short, but one may or may not be good news, depending how you look at it.
WOW TO BE FILMING IN JANUARY
Looks like they really are going to
try and do this after all. I was kind of hoping this would be forgotten and
removed as a very bad idea. From video game to big screen movie usually doesn’t
work out to well. And I did play wow for a while myself. It was fun back before
they turned the freaking thing on its head, and in my opinion, destroyed the
game.
Now I already know the responses out
there. There are basically two of them. Oh hell yeah, and Oh hell no. This time
I’m in the middle. I don’t know which way to go on this at all. So I simply won’t
say anything on that yet. There seems to be about a 50/50 split of the people I
know who have played, or are still playing. I will probably enjoy the movie
though to be honest as I simply got irritated at what the game became over
time. I was basically a soloer and helped out others here and there though when
I could. Even started a guild of nothing but soloers and it worked out pretty
good till we all got disgusted and went on to other things. But I doubt they
screw this up as bad as some others that have come out in the past. I won’t
mention any titles here, but bouncing plumbers come to mind.
TIME TO PASS GAS
And sorry, but that means exactly
what you thought it meant. Yep, from that end. It’s about a guy who discovers
that his stomach problems are being caused by a demon living in his intestines.
Yeah, I’m going to be seeing this one.
Basically, when he gets stressed out he does what a lot of people do,
bury it inside. Well, in his case, not a good idea. So basically, stress turns
into demon, which pops out of you know where to take revenge on that which is
stressing him out. Yeah, I really have to see this. (Seriously people, there
has to be something wrong with me). But this looks hilarious. Well they are
right about one thing. The tag line
says, bad sh*t happens. I will give two links to this as well. The first to the
Movie pilot page which doesn’t say alot, and the second to the IMDB page with
the trailer. You can see it on Itunes or VOD now, and it will be on the big
screen October 4th. I have only seen a part of the trailer, and
yeah, it’s another of my type of comedy horror things.
Well folks, hope you enjoyed the
rundown and I got a little info out here that you didn’t know yet. And I will
be seeing you all again next week. Hopefully with a little more time to keep up
with things this coming week also. One more breakdown by anyone’s vehicle that
I have to repair, and I really will be trying to steal a shuttle and get out of
here.
And one last thing for all the
Whovians out there. Saturday night will be the Dr Who "Doctors Revisited" special, and we are now up to Doctor #8, which is Paul Mcgann, and this is of
course the movie that was shown here back in 1996. This is on BBCA and is on
here at 8pm. Here meaning Ohio time.
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