Good news on Kepler glitch.
by CJ | Apr 12, 2016 | Journal | 15 comments
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I wnt to know how it happened, how it came back to normal, and why emergency mode uses so much more fuel. They aren’t explaining things very well!
NASA definitely said Point Rest State (Kepler’s current state) has the momentum wheels stopped, so my guess is that Emergency Mode (EM) stops the momentum wheels, which could cause odd gyrations, and so the fuel usage is due to using thrusters to stabilize Kepler after stopping the wheels, possibly re-determining position by star sightings, and point the antenna at Earth.
NASA is still investigating what tripped EM.
I thought this was another Visitor issue at first!
Lol! We have had our share of them this round! But nay, this is the planet-hunter.
On this other thing, if you get to Proxima Centauri and find life, is it really there if you don’t have the antenna or transmitter power to send an intelligible message 4 light years back home? Or it it good enough that if they’re technologically sophisticated enough to learn that somebody came by, they’ll send an exploratory mission this way?
If there were life there, and they could pick up radio and TV signals, at least to know they were non-random signals in those bands, then they’d already know we’re here.
If probes find life there, it’s still there, whether the probes get a signal back to Earth or not. Troublesome points being, if there’s life smart enough to stop the signal and they stop it; and, if they’re also smart enough to decode anything, or at least see where the probes are pointing to send back the signal, then they have further proof where the probe’s home star system is. … But again, if they’re smart enough to do that, they’d likely already know we’re here.
The radio/TV wavefront from Earth would be what, around a century old, so around 100 light years or a bit less? So anyone within that sphere might know we’re here, if the signal’s still non-randomized by the time it reaches them.
Whether any alien life in that distance is advanced enough, or similar enough, to humans to figure it out is a question. (Er, a few questions.) Whether any such aliens are friendly enough neighbors is also a question; but so is whether humans would be good neighbors or hostile to other lifeforms. … All those usual questions put forth in SF.
Alien life might be so different, or at such a different developmental stage, that it would mean there wasn’t a rivalry. Or maybe they haven’t taken the technological or psychological paths humans have. Different goals, different outlook, different technologies, if any.
Could it be telling, that we haven’t (so far) found any definite signals from elsewhere? (Well, OK, maybe they use different signals. Does ET have a better cell phone plan for phoning home? Oh, probably! Heheh.)
So…could that mean there’s life within that 100 light year radius, but it’s so different, we don’t know it yet? Or — Is it so risky to become an intelligent, advanced species, to be able to send signals and get off the homeworld and out of the home star system, that we’re the only one who’s done it in the last hundred years or so? Given the risks we’ve seen in our own species’ recent history, maybe so. — Being aggressive isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. Surviving long enough to get out into interstellar space doesn’t guarantee a species is either peaceful or warline or predatory or not. All it says is, they somehow got past enough hurdles to get into interstellar space travel. — Which our species has not yet done, quite yet. We’re still trying too hard -not- to get out of Earth orbit. Too much nonsense going on, or we might’ve made it to Mars already. But then, the challenges are hard enough, an interplanetary phase might take longer than we think, for our own species or for others. Figuring out some workable interstellar travel seems, so far, pretty hard, not yet too feasible. But it might be doable.
The thing is, it looks like “exoplanets” are common. Planets in a Goldilocks habitable zone might not be too uncommon, though so far, it looks like those conditions can be pretty complicated, even so. But the upshot is, alien life might be more common than we thought. The real question then is, how common is it for alien lifeforms to reach some kind of intelligence comparable to ours? How common is it for aline intelligent lifeforms to make it into a form of civliization and make it into space travel beyond their own star system? … And how likely are they (and we) to be good enough neighbors, when we come into contact? Lots and lots of if statements. … And yeah, I don’t think I’m saying anything that sceince fiction fans or space scientists would think is new.
But as close as Alpha Centauri is, 4.3 some odd light years away, if there’s anything intelligent there, and they have any sensory methods to pick up radio and TV signals, then they’ve known we’re here for quite a while by now, probably. Assuming they’re at any stage where they’d notice. So my hunch is, they’re either keeping very, very quiet, or they don’t know, or there’s nobody home to listen. There might be life, it might be intelligent, but it might be too different. Or it’s not intelligent life. Or there’s no life there. I’d think a binary system would make the formation of life less likely, but that’s not definitive enough. We just don’t know enough about what might be out there, what other forms life might take besides what happened here on Earth.
For that matter, we know now there’s water on Mars, ice and occasionally liquid. So we still need to be looking for present-day life of some kind there, and fossil evidence. Apparently, Mars had oceans long ago, early on, and lost them. So there could be fossilized life there.
Europa — ought to be investigated, since it may have oceans below the outer ice.
If we turn up any life, either place, fossils or current, that would tell us a -huge- amount about how common life can be in the galaxy and in each star system. It would say a lot about what forms life might take besides Earth life.
There’s also the problem of, we need to understand our own species and get along better than we have so far. We need to understand if dolphins and whales are intelligent, but have a vastly different kind of intelligence than ours. What about octopi and squids? We’re still trying to figure out what we have here on Earth. — But it would help a great deal to know more, before we have a first contact with any aliens out there.
I would guess, with so many planets out there and enough in a habitable zone, there are all sorts of alien lifeforms out there. So the chances are, somewhere, there are aliens enough like us that we’d have the challenges, and opportunities, that contact could give. Even in the 100 light year radius. — So… are there alien intelligent lifeforms out there, nearby or far away? Are they proto-intelligent? Semi-intelligent? So different neither side would understand each other for a very long time? What’s out there? Who’s out there?
And yeah, there’s also the possibility that aliens could pick up our signals, or be able to learn a lot about Earth and its life remotely — and come looking. — Or, y’know, their starship might have engine trouble out here in the boondocks, and hmm, now they’ve been spotted by those aggressive, primitive locals. … Well, but right now, we don’t have anything much to send up to meet them, or help them, or counter them, do we?
Then again, maybe we should be more worried they’ll get loaded down with souvenirs: “I visited Earth, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt!”
But if they develop this craving for carbonated soda beverages….
Ah, commerce! But trading is a lot better than warring. Both sides get some benefit and nobody has to get hurt, if they do it right.
Then there are those weird alien mating rituals. Ours. Or theirs. Heh. You never know what will be popular back home, right? Purely for scientific interest, of course. LOL.
Hmm. If the aiens run things better than the local politicians and corporate big-wigs…. Well, you never know.
I s’pose we’ll see what happens, once any probes reach Alpha Centauri. But in 44 years, maybe we can get other probes there too.
So I finished Visitor. Very well done.
It occurs that some people might suggest that there are some inconsistencies with earlier books – one difficulty is that we learn things when Bren learns them. He most likely has been lied to – by just about everyone. Also, it appears that the Captains and others on the Phoenix have been playing games for just about forever.
Has the author also lies to we poor readers – perhaps, but it all makes for a very interesting read.
Full Marks for Visitor.
I have not yet started reading “Visitor”…I’ve got a bunch of stuff going on that distracts me from reading, some of it personal, some of it other stuff…. I’ve still not finished “Cloud’s Rider” from when I started it several months ago, and then there are other books in queue….
I’d like to say that once I get the personal issues resolved, I’ll have more time to sit and read. Part of my problem is that I don’t seem to have the motivation right now – no, I have not gone off my medications 😀
Good wishes for you, Joe.
One is reading Visitor now, out of much need for a rest from things personal. One is reading the book out of order; still back in the third book otherwise. And one has in mind to reread Tripoint and Visible Light, because it’s been too long since last one did.
One has encountered what one suspects are two typos in Chapter 4, in the scene between Bren-paidhi and the Lady Ilisidi, after the scene between nand’ Bren and nand’ Jase. There are two (or three) instances of ” Presidenta ” before the end of the scene and chapter. Possibly, this was in the conversion to ebook formats, which involves much fiddly business by someone entrusted with the conversion process. Such is the way of the gremlin Murphy. (One would not blame the frazzled soul doing the conversion. One understands how it can happen to the best of folk.)
One is greatly enjoying all the goings-on, human and atevi and potentially later kyo. — One got a very good laugh out of the aiji-dowager and the paidhi-aiji kidding each other.
One appreciates how every character, including the human kids and their parents, are people in their own right, with opinions of their own, and may not agree, but are given latitude to decide for themselves.
(One began the post, not realizing how using the indeterminate third person might be cramping to one’s wish to say “I, me, my, mine,” or to use human vernacular. Ah, well.)
Also, one is using up a flavor of tea from which one needs a break, but an appreciation of tea is always fine.)
The book is hitting all the right spots, and one thinks one’s long break from former reading habits might be getting closer to back to normal, at long last.
I see “Presidenta” again in Ch. 12, and now I think in each case, the usage is while someone is speaking Ragi. So perhaps I’ve missed a point of grammar there.
Looks like I’ll be able to start Visitor this weekend, even though returns aren’t due this year until April 18th! The woman I work with during tax season has declared tomorrow the end of our filing season. Can’t wait.
In the middle of Visitor, with contact imminent, while Bren is preparing his alien language toolkit.
This morning’s breakfast was leftover steak (extreme treat, these days) wrapped in a tortilla, and using up the sauce from the steak.
Tortillas. A flatbread as simple and old as anything in human culture or civilization. Old enough to be passed down since people first ground grain into flour, combined it with far simpler ingredients, made dough, shaped it or poured it, and put it on a hot rock, or later, bricks or a pan or griddle. Old enough it could reinvented, as long as anyone knew the concept. Old enough to go back to neolithic times, the birth of harvesting grain and grinding it, the Bronze Age — carreid forward by every little human group that learned how to make bread that way. So simple, it doesn’t need high technology. Still made in people’s homes by hand, or bought from the local paneria or the grocery store, as modern as you please. — And all the other kinds of bread-making and noodle-making, and so on. Deceptively primitive, but it carries with it a microcosm of knowledge about grain, flour, yeast (or not), sugar source for the yeast to work on, salt, an oil source, water, maybe eggs, and the idea of mixing it all into a dough, letting that rise any, making the tortillas or other bread, using a heat source to cook with, to create something so basic that we’d have proverbs about bread, too.
I was using leftovers, so the steak wasn’t strips for fajitas. That such things come from one native culture, were picked up by a colonizing / invading culture, then blended into a new culture (and food culture) and that was then picked up by a second, related colonial / invading group, so that now, after hundreds of years, all three have overlapped, blended into one another to some degree, and taken in the style as native or almost native — is one of the odd ways human culture works, how it changes over time, as groups combine and split and recombine and transform into something rather different than they were to start with.
And yet such a basic thing as tortillas remain essentially unchanged, with variants, because they’re such a simple, low-tech thing that there’s no need to change them. Humans will come up with variants anyway, just for the novelty, to try something else, the variety.
Heh, and then there’s the way we adopt and adapt foods, recipes, passing them from one culture to another, because humans like food and once something’s useful and tastes good, we tend to keep it and call it our own. — So foods from the New World became so commonplace that no one world-wide thinks of them anymore as “foreign” or new. (Everyone uses tomatoes, coffee, cocoa, corn (maize), and a host of other American plant foods.) We all think of those as “native” to several world cuisines. — And these days, with wider world trade and movement of people, we have “fusion” cuisines where native dishes are recombined into something almost the same…or fused together into something not quite like either source, but still…human, taken in by two or more groups. Humans blend cooking styles together, out of a love of the tastes, or out of necessity, and out of a need to bridge the gaps between us, or a love of another style of cooking, another culture’s ways.
Sometimes, we do this without even being aware of it. Sometimes, it’s a very conscious choice. The most successful blendings become their own traditional styles in themselves. — We don’t even think, usually, of how those cooking styles were combined in the first place, to produce a new style from another group of people who blended together. Native American Indian and Spanish to form Latino-American cooking. European and African sources at the root of American Southern cooking. Cajun and Creole cooking from French, American, African, and Spanish styles. Chinese-American. Italian-American. — Newer things now appearing as more gets, literally, mixed into the pot.
So…all that from tortillas and leftover steak this morning.
It occurs to me, if we keep on this way, with widespread travel and communications and trade, then more and more, we get a blend of food styles from multiple cultures into a shared “recipe box” or “cook’s toolkit” that becomes a common source, or an umbrella source. If there’s enough time for that to remain in place, eventually, I suppose we get a global human culture’s food style, that mixes all those old cultural roots together, fuses them into an overall human cooking style. People would still retain the old roots and traditional styles, because they like that too. But give it long enough, and everybody begins to think of that global style as “theirs,” belonging to everyone, indicative of humanity as a whole. … Well, maybe. (Humans, oddly enough, also like to keep their separate ways, even when they like sharing together. So you have two competing trends, but over time, you might still get that global human cuisine.) If world civilization lasts long enough and global trade, communications, and movement of people continues long enough, then you get that fusion, a world culture. I’d think you’d tend to get that too, if we can go interplanetary, which might take centures. So by the time people get out into space, you have a blend that’s been there a long, long time…alongside, still, our tendency for unique groupings.)
So…tortillas. Simple. And a fusion of things. Ancient and Modern simultaneously. An old native culture going back to the first springs of human civilizations, carried forward into modern times and world civilizations, because it’s such a simple thing, it remains mostly unchanged down through centuries, millennia.
Presidenta is indeed the Ragi form of president. Only two or three problems: Irene is first stated to be Irene Wilson and then all later occurrence of Irene or her mother is Williams. When I first read Irene Wilson I thought “Oh great, a relative of Wilson-paidhi.” . Now it appears just to be an oops. Found two or three other minor grammatical errors. Will post onto Jane’s blog when I get back to my kindle to find the exact places.
We were also told at one point, in ch. 1 of Destroyer, that Irene and Artur were siblings. Cajeiri was arguing that it wasn’t improper for them all to have a sleepover because Irene “wasn’t a girl, she was Artur’s sister,” but now she seems to have different parents. Or at least a different mother, if Mrs. Williams is her bio-mom and not an adoptive parent of some sort. Cajeiri might have been stretching the truth, however, in the interests of birthday party sleepovers…