I lose faith in humanity more and more each day.

It’s a fucking ROCK, people.  It’s a SPACE ROCK.  If these people want to stop impacting the environment, they’d do a lot better by sticking a cork up their asses and keeping their shit to themselves.

...or hugging a tree.  That makes more sense.

Hail Boppy goodness anyone? Ya know, Ever since that epic Homeworld I just view space rocks as resources.
Where the hell did I put that CD? ..for that matter ever since the original Warcraft I’ve viewed trees the same way. I think I needs one of them thar frivilous lawsuit thingies. I wonder if I can sue someone becase I’m offended by them taking offence? How about wasting air? What shit would that be?
I wonder if males that grew up to have shit lives can blame it all on a Moyal (sp?). Im sure its been tried. Wah I was traumatized. boo-hoo.

Homeworld is one of those games that’s been on and off my wish list forever because I can’t decide if I want to play it. I should probably put it back on seeing as it’s cheap.

I think this is great news, let the court proceedings begin! When these two are able to prove their beliefs using the scientific method, NASA should agree to immediately call off the mission and to award compensation.

I hate to join the bandwagon on this one, but I also have a personal stake in the life of that comet. I have already purchased land there near the comets tail. I got an outstanding deal; grabbing up a sizable piece of prime real estate for a song. I planned to build a small hut there and live out my days rereading all of my Terry Pratchett Discworld novels. This probe could easily go astray and wipe out my entire investment and there where would I be. You folks are so cruel sometimes. Sniff.

Gawd!
I work at an observatory and have a canned response for the quacks -

THEM: What do you do?

ME: I’m an astronomer.

THEM: Oh my God! Tell me about the aliens!

ME: Aliens? Oh, I see them all the time.

THEM: NO! What do you do?!

ME: I call the Border Patrol and they bring them back to Mexico.

That is a bonafide transcription of a recent conversation with a crystal hugging, gem-stone wearing, vortex seeking new-ager here in Tucson.

She had the last laugh though - She was angered by my joke and informed me that she was originally from Orion and was inhabiting the body of someone who had grown tired of the earth. It was a very nice body so I didn’t argue.

“Imagine leaving Moscow, then returning to find everything’s changed”

I’m pretty sure that happened to a couple of Russian cosmonauts in 1991.  I think there’s a movie about it somewhere.

It could be worse, MRK.  She could have asked you to tell her what her horoscope would be.

Ha! A conundrum! Where’s Sylvia Browne when you need her?!

It’s a fucking ROCK, people.  It’s a SPACE ROCK.
If these people want to stop impacting the environment, they’d do a lot better by sticking a cork up their asses…

I would prefer them “terminating” themselves… that would be most environmentally friendly option.

And comets aren’t solid rocks, I think “dirty snowball” is quite good comparison.

She had the last laugh though - She was angered by my joke and informed me that she was originally from Orion and was inhabiting the body of someone who had grown tired of the earth.

Doesn’t that make her as illegal immigrant who should be arrested… and taken to Gitmo for investigating possible terrorist connections?

Just looked that news link.
“impactor� carrying some 350 kilograms of a copper-based explosive
Looks like this reporter doesn’t know sh*t what she’s talking… there’s zero kilograms of explosives in that probe because there’s just no need for them, impactor’s kinetic energy can be easily equal to ten tons of HE. (except rocket fuel and possible small explosives which are used to detach impactor from main probe)
Actually it might be almost equal to lowest yield nukes. (depending on speed)

While I think that their reasoning & lawsuit are both inane, I gotta admit that I was somewhat miffed to hear of the project, myself.

I mean, that’s a pretty damned big act o’ vandalism, IMO. It ain’t NASA’s rock to destroy (I thought colonization was passe. Is the moon NASA’s to destroy if they can figure out a way to do so that won’t fuck us up tide-wise?)

The universe is speeding along nicely towards maximum entropy without help, thank you very much…

If the thinking behind it were merely on the level of your average adolescent with a fistful of firecrackers and an itch to cause random destruction then I’d very much agree with you, Maggie. However there is a point behind the experiment and it could provide some important knowledge in the event that we ever do have to live out the plot line from Armageddon and find a way to deflect an incoming comet threatening the planet.

You’re right: the creepiest thing about the whole affair is that a good number of people, both in Russia and the US, probably with real things to do, have to waste some of their valuable time over this deranged idiot’s delusions. Just glad I’m not one of them…

oh and btw: I just learned the mission has beeen completed succesfully by now. Cheers for science!

Yup. You’re right. Destroying og disturbing an intergalactic garbage collector doesn’t mean a thing. Well maybe some other planet in some another galaxy will have to pay for our disturbance some

day, but that won’t influence life on earth. For sure. We’re not influenced by anything going on out there. Universal laws do not apply to us. Besides that, we’re alone in space, the only

intelligent life form amongst hundreds of billion of galaxies. Lucky us. Universe is there OUR playground, certainly. Lets blow up the moon next, just for the kicks of it, and see what happens.

I’d like to have the North Star relocated, where do I give up my VISA details? Can you guys see how brain dead you are? No? Didn’t think so… even NASA are unable to get it.

Cheers for science!

Agreed.

Mediator, if NASA were crashing this probe simply for “the heck of it” then you might have a point, but they aren’t and the impact itself is probably not going to be enough to alternate the comet’s course by any significant amount. There’s a lot of space in space so the likelihood that we’re putting some other civilization at risk with this experiment is pretty small.

Les, do we know what “a significant amount” would be? I wish you were right, and in this particular case you might very well be so too. My point is, NASA had no idea what the outcome would be. They didn’t know the exact point of impact, and neither did they know the density of the comet. Is it firm? Soft? Mostly ice? How can one estimate anything without those important parameters? Sounds to me those folks at NASA are playing a nice round of russian roulette ("russian snooker” might be a better term here). The jubilation post impact (yes! we really hit it!) did not convince me of the contrary.

Changing the course of an object by as little as 1cm per mile of motion, would result in a 500 mile deviation over a distance from the point of impact to Earth (approx 80 million miles) (of simplificity ignoring universal powers of attraction). Imagine the outcome over a year? A hundred years? Mankind should not be messing with stuff they do not comprehend. But NASA doesn’t give a donkey’s arse shitting in some distant backyard, as long as they get a reason to celebrate their narrow minded brains from it.

What would be their next “achievement”? Same basic plan, probe against comet, just equipped with nukes this time?

I think there is a good reason to be a bit sceptic here!

By the way all, according to some scientists and NASA, comets are the building blocks of life. And the hard fact of the matter is that if the theory is true, NASA may have just exterminated an impending planet, solar system, or star. Our entire solar system, according to many scientists was created by a comet. Lets face it, haven’t we,” the human race “ destroyed enough life on our own planet, much less one that hasn’t even been created yet?

firstly the comet wasn’t destroyed, the impact merely blew out a large crater so that the debris could be studied by the probe’s mothership. i’d also like to argue the fact that by changing the comet’s path we could have sent it towards an M type planet where life may not have evolved and thus helped to create a new species. that argument is just as relevent as the one put forward by mediator.

the jubilation from those at NASA after the impact was more than likely due to the fact that they actually hit the comet. do you know how hard the calculations would be to send something as small as a washing machine 83 million miles through the vastness of space and hit something a few kilometres across? that they actually managed to do it is incredible.

ok so its risky firing something at 23.000km/hr at something else of unknown composition, but thats why they decided to do it 83 million miles away, in an area of space we can be fairly sure is uninhabited since we’ve scanned the planets in this solar system for life and found no evidence. the comet also orbits our star, and since we know its velocity and the periodicity of its orbit we can be certain that it doesn’t even reach another star in this galaxy, nevermind traversing the 200 million light years plus to another galaxy so theres no chance of us destroying any innocent bystanders in the crossfire there.

i say well done to NASA for not ballsing up the experiment and hopefully the data yielded will provide us with answers to questions we have about how our universe evolved and what it was like during the early stage of this evolution, as well as giving us the oppurtunity to discover the composition of a comet so that if, by some magnificent irony, we have disturbed the cosmic balance and sent a comet on a direct collision course with earth we will know how to handle it.

one more thing, ‘scientists’ would have never said that our solar system was created by a comet, nor can comets create stars or planets. the popular theory of the day is that these bodies are created as clouds of gas condense under the influence of their own gravity. as they condense their density increases, further increasing the gravitational pull and acceleration of the condensing matter. this causes the cloud to spin and generate heat and this is how stars are thought to form. planets are created from the leftovers of this process as they coalesce into rings of dust and rocks like the asteroid belt between mars and jupiter. these coverge to form rocky cores like the planets of the inner solar system. there is no proof that comets play any part in this process other than being created from the remaining debris which was on too obtuse an orbit to join the formation of a planet. in truth we’re not sure how comets are formed, and hopefully this experiment will provide us with the information we need to answer that question.

the jubilation from those at NASA after the impact was more than likely due to the fact that they actually hit the comet

My point, exactly. It wasn’t even a question of “where”. A “somewhere” would be good enough. They don’t know what they’re messing with, nor the outcome! It may seem like it’s the technical challenge of an experiment that drives them, mainly. The glory. Being blind to the further consequences. They should have waited until they were up to the task, or concluded with a “hands off”. Based on knowledge, and not a combination of assumptions and black holes. We ARE rookies in space, and should act accordingly!

I must admit that I was unaware of Tempel-1’s short orbital period, thanks for the update… only 5,5 years… but that doesn’t change much - except for the fact that we’re messing directly in “our own” back yard, and not some distant, ignorant neighbour’s.

if, by some magnificent irony, we have disturbed the cosmic balance and sent a comet on a direct collision course with earth we will know how to handle it

Good point! BUT I believe science should mateure substantially until performing those live experiments. Besides that, we can only tell what Tempel-1 consists of, and its very surface only. Some day we should be able to scan on object in space, without interfering it.

Talking about ironi… in a world where “shit” and a bare tit is damned, but comet snooker seems to be okay :o)

Digression… science has already established the weight of a human soul to be 21 grams, but what I am looking forward to, is the day when science attempts to explain how, when and from where our souls are incarnated. The achievement of THAT would be seansational, and a task worthy of glory.

Comets, like every other thing in space IS impacted with particles in a range of sizes daily.  If you look at the photos taken just before the impact at http://www.nasa.gov/deepimpact you will see the surface of the comet is scarred with IMPACT CRATERS!  It HAS been struck before, probably with other rocks bigger than the probe.  DUH!