The incredible space thread

[Cam]

Remember that from Microsoft? But seriously, where do you want to go today...in space?

I was watching PBS (Canadian TV sucks) and they were talking about the Cassini mission to Saturn. I must say that it was awesome, and intrigued me to watch on and learn more about the "final frontier". Plausible space travel is something that I would like to see happen in my life time. More so effective interstellar space travel (don't know if that's the right term) in the form of hypserspace or "warp" to snag terms from sci-fi.

The vastness that is space boggles my mind when I think of it, and the amount of yet-to-be-learned information that is out there is enormous. Just think of the stuff we don't even know about, new medals, gasses, maybe even life or something that resembles life. What was also pretty cool was the predictions of the scientists and their accuracy about Titan and the makeup of it's gasses and surface.

So let's hear your thoughts about space and space travel. I would like to keep this semi serious, I know the regulars will be buy with their normal wit and dry-sometimes-wet-humor (this statement will probably invoke some of that). But I do want to hear what people think on a more serious platform.

-Cam

[indian airlines]

When you have a roommate/best-friend who's an Astrophysics major with a minor in philosophy, everyday conversations tend to go somewhat like this:

Me: "Hey, I saw Mike today, he was walking on college ave, I was in the car. I called out to him but he didn't hear me."

My Roommate : "Well yeah, your voice probably underwent Doppler degradation, compunded by wind and auditory interference. Now in a stellar vaccuous environment it would be possible to achieve 100% sound efficiency, but then again, to be able to live in space, we'd need various things - just today I was reading in Feynman's lectures that blah blah....."

Needless to say I've had my fair share of space-blabber. Based on some of that though, here's what I think. There's a whole lot of awesome stuff in space we know about, and about 99% more we don't know about. I'm sure everybody has though about where space ends, if it ends, when it ends, what's in it etc. The idea of space travel and life in space (both ours and others) is quite exciting - how feasible it is though I don't know.

There's one particular way I usually think about space. It's like this - everybody thinks that the planets are huge, nebulas are massive, galaxies are immense etc. However, break it down a bit - think of it like the human body. How do we know where we fit in. Is earth just another "molecule" in the grand scheme of things? Are people just part of that molecule? Are we protons, neutrons, quarks, strings? I think it's quite feasible that somewhere in the universe (I think I should define universe, because I've been in a great deal of arguments over this word. To me, the universe is everything. If something is, it is in the universe) there's a being who looks through his "microscope" and says - "Oh look, I've just isolated a strain of Galaxius Milkywaium." The planets, stars and everything else in the milkyway would just be part of this tiny thing.

On the other hand, it's quite possible that what we know today and what we percieve everything around us to be in terms of size and magnitude is correct, and there's nothing much bigger than a galaxy, or a cluster or other space objects.

I don't think too many (or even any) of these questions will ever be answered in our lifetime, but I still think they're worth thinking about - hey, atleast in some circles they make for good conversation ;-).

[scramjet]

This is why I am a SF addict.