Comet

[hopalong]

This mission to the comet cost millions of dollars to tell how the universe started.  Does anyone really care and what use it that information to us.

[MargeB]

I care very much, I'm afraid to say. If that information is not of interest to us then we should all just commit suicide and forget the human endeavour. If we only seek the knowledge which we can show to be of use to us then we condemn ourselves to a very limited horizon. Imagine....the ability to know how life comes about.

Irony is, this is the kind of pursuit that ends up pushing science forward and helping humanity anyway...

[twiglet4frog]

i agree, i would rather spend money on something that pushes science onwards than use the money on speed cameras and id cards!!

one question tho? how much did all this cost cos it said on sky news website earlier it cost �300billion, which i find a little too high for my thinking, did someone slip and stick a b on the illion instead of a m? 

[MargeB]

Not sure, but no way this cost many many billions. The trajectory would be very difficult to achieve, as well as the telemetry, but nothing on a huge scale like hubble. I would guess about 6 B?

Strange, I've been quite down (life's a bit rocky at mo). But this gave me a deep down buzz, I was just so happy about it, and proud of my generation. Comet coming by? We'll just punt up a we capsule, fire it at it, and take some pictures. 10000mph? No problem. The physics involved is incredible. What next? Cars that don't rust?

[jno]

600,000 people paid to have their names put on a CD that was put on the spacecraft that was vaporised. So yes, people do care, even if I can't be quite sure what about. Looks like they just want to write their name in the stars.

[jno]

btw the BBC website says the cost was $333 million; I don't know if that was all at today's prices - it's been several years in the making.

[jake-the-peg]

This is very important science.

Comets are amoungst the oldest things in our solar systems they are a chemical snapshot of what things were like when our planets were being formed.

By hitting it and analysing the flash we can tell exactly what its made of and by association the likely constituancy of the earth when life first started.

How life got going from simple chemistry is still one of the great unknowns and this is a small step on the road to discovering this.

[Oneeyedvic]

"proud of a generation"

so proud that we can spend billions on finding out more about a comet - but still can't eradicate poverty / hunger / famine etc etc.

Seems we can find the money to explore the universe, fight wars but not to help other human beings.

 

Don't get me wrong, I am all for technology. The reason computers are so advanced is because of the space industry - however, I do wonder if that there should be other priorities.

[MargeB]

Nice point, I think that needs to be stated. I think that feeding people should be the priority. However (and this is by way of explanation rather than  excuse)..we are human beings...tribal warfare and selfish greed is part of the mix. I don't think we should accept this, but I think that as a result of this knowledge we should accept that despite our best efforts, the world will always be full of people who fail to get civilized. People are starving not because the west won't give, it's because Africa won't get with the program. The UK gave �220Billion over the last 20 years in aid to Africa. �220Billion was also the amount taken by corrupt Nigerian rulers from their very poor people over that time. So what should we do? Abandon our space research (fairly small in comparison?)

[jake-the-peg]

Why pick on space exploration at least that adds to the sum of human knowledge!

Sky gets half the cost of this mission in a year televising football in pubs and clubs!

And the UK spends six times this amount on ice cream in a year.

So don't compare research to famine relief there are a lot of  things to cut before we stop unmanned space exploration

[MargeB]

I think space exploration IS very important, but surely icecream has to be near the top of the list of 'keeps'. Fudge...mmm.

[BigDogsWang]

It's all to do with your interests. I'm happy to say that Astronomy is a subject which fascinates me. How anyone can not look upwards and question our existence baffles me.

And I'd rather the U.S. spend money on a subject in which millions of people have an interest, than $billions on a war nobody wants!

[twiglet4frog]

ever thought that now we know what 5 tonnes of TNT does to a comet, we now know how much might be needed and the physics involved to blow a complete comet to bits, just in case one was heading in a direct line through earth? they have more data after this of shooting a comet than they ever did last week

[stevie21]

I find loads of science really fascinating. Noble even. I'm sure though that in the real world where any whiff of politics is involved that there's never a real and practical choice between spending �100m on the UK's homeless and that same figure on Astronomy.
If there was, I'd opt for the former.
As interesting as I find it, I don't really see any huge benefit to my life in discovering, in any level of detail, exactly what the universe was like at 1second old.

Can anyone give us all some kind of practical benefit to knowing this (or whatever this project aims to discover)? A feeling of pride in pushing the bounds of scientific knowledge isn't quite justification enough for me.

Knowing it just for the same of knowing it is pants if there's no discernible benefit. Someone educate me about what the (possibly obvious) benefits are. Ta :-)

[Peter Pedant]

This is not really on the thread but jakey and bigdogzdodaah are geologists and I have been dying to ask......

isnt it true that the age of the comet was 4.5 bn years and there are some rocks on earth older? I have a figure of 15 in my mind. Anyway i thought it was a big thing that some rocks on earth are older than some estimates of the universe.....is this true and what's the solution to the paradox? thanks

 

PP

[jimtom]

If anyone needs an explanation as to the point of space exploration , I think the answer was given by a NASA scientist when asked the point of the Temple1/Deep Impact mission.
"The dinosaurs are extinct," he replied, "because they didn't have a space program."

[It is generally excepted now that the mass extinction which occurred at time disappearance of the dinosaurs was caused by the impact of a comet or large asteroid upon the Earth.]
By the time the next big one lands on us we might be able to stop it .

Jimbo

[stevie21]

jimtom, I think that history will show us exploring space for lots and lots of other reasons beyond practice at blowing comets up.
If we'd spent decades chucking missiles at comets and asteroids then fair enough but that's really obviously not the case. Here, we're apparently aiming to discover how the universe started.

[jake-the-peg]

The oldest known rocks are Acasta Gneisses in northwestern Canada near Great Slave Lake 4.03 Billion years plus or minus a few percent, these were dated radiometrically and hence it's pretty acurate.

Comets are *believed* to have been formed at the same time as the solar system but trying to date one is a lot trickier. The chemical composition that we've seen so far is very similar to that of star forming nebulae and comets as debris from planetary formation fits pretty well although a few years there was some contractictory evidence based on the Giotto findings.

These questions are exactly why we need this sort of mission