[bojangles]

(11-01-2014 04:47 PM)Veloce Wrote:  

(11-01-2014 12:03 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  

A few years back a series of asteroids collided into Jupiter. If those same rocks hit the earth, every human would be dead right now. A comet just grazed Mars last week. It's only a matter of time before it happens here again and right now we have nothing in place to alter the trajectory of these things. I really don't know why world leaders don't talk about this more often. If I was an uber billionaire this would be the first thing on my agenda.

It's interesting you bring this up. I've brought up the shoemaker-levy impact in conversation a few times, and pretty much noone has any clue what I'm talking about. They don't realize how extremely rare of an event this was and how lucky we were to witness it in our lifetime (assuming they're 28+)

My dad is a fairly prominent astronomer and I remember looking at these spots on Jupiter from his telescope. He told me in the most casual tone possible, "See that biggest dark spot? That's 4 times the size of earth".

Pretty heavy shit for a 13 year old!

Anyway I see good points all across, but I'm leaning with Speak here. I really don't think that Virgin has any intention of colonizing Mars or some other project that would dramatically affect the course of humanity. They're giving rich people a chance to do something that's been done many, many times before.

SpaceX is another story.

Edit: Just to put things in perspective:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoem...0%93Levy_9

Quote:

Over the next 6 days, 21 distinct impacts were observed, with the largest coming on July 18 at 07:33 UTC when fragment G struck Jupiter. This impact created a giant dark spot over 12,000 km across, and was estimated to have released an energy equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons of TNT (600 times the world's nuclear arsenal).[17] Two impacts 12 hours apart on July 19 created impact marks of similar size to that caused by fragment G, and impacts continued until July 22, when fragment W struck the planet.[18]

I was really interested in the cosmos when that happened, it was brilliant but also terrifying. Thankfully Jupiter cleans up a lot of shit, didnt that inspire all the disaster movies that were space related at the time? Deep Impact, Armageddon etc