What got me was the idea that what was going to happen had already happened. By the time JPL received information Perseverance was at atmosphere interface. It was in reality already either on the ground safely or scatter in a million pieces. That 12 minute delay was stressing me out.

You were stressed. I can imagine the groundcrew at JPL and NASA was a lot more stressed.

I'm in a marathon watching of Star Trek-TOS, TNG, Voy. DS9, disc. and the movies in this sequence. Have just watched TNG s2 ep.17.

One day in the future we will exploring the milky way with space craft which can travel with very high speed-Maybe not warp-but near warp

Markus

I know what you mean but until we develop quicker ways of communicating over great distances we are where we are at.

Where's Kirk or Spock when you need them?

That's the snag. Unless we do stumble across some fundamentally new physics that allows faster than light travel, moving from one end of the milky way to the other will take more than 100,000 years. If we do manage to move across the milky way at light speed, there are other problems like you arriving a few years older but your kids back home died of old age centuries or millennias ago.

I'm looking fwd to seeing the video it captured during landing. What an engineering feat.

Who needs Kirk and Spock when we have Northrop Grumman. Seems they're working on LASER communication systems as we speak.

Who knows, we may have subspace communication one day in the future.

Markus

It's still limited by the speed of light.

Btw, anyone else got their name to go to Mars with Perseverance? :salute:

https://i.ibb.co/Qnfvffj/Boarding-Pa...n-Mars2020.jpg

I missed out on this one. But I'm signed up for the July 2026 mission

WTF?
:o

You saying those were for sale and you didn't tell us?

Guess the best I can counter with is having my name on a Land Speed Record Breaker.
That stood for 16 years from 1990 to 2006!

Now beat this!!! I can walk on the exact same land where that record was set and have done so 3 times!
And I didn't need a Space Suit! :smug:

I get the feeling that science and space interested people only think on what we have now and what's in the pipeline/in development.

I try think 50-100-150 year a.s.o ahead.

I'm pretty sure we will have following within the next 50 years from now.

Phaser-Today we have Taser which will be developed into a phaser
Replicator(none food) Instead of ordering things from online store-we buy and then our replicator build it.
Laser-Well this is nothing new, but I'm convinced that in 50 years from now our military will have almost Star Trek like laser/phaser as main weapon.

Diseases - We may get rid of some and find antidote against others, while new will appear.
Flying cars-It's only a matter of time before this will be an ordinary sight.

Computer-If we within the next 50 years will have developed a quantum computer and if it will be each man's property I can't say.

And many other things

Markus

“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future!”

It is true that our understanding of nature has changed radically and suddenly at certain points in history. Newton was right until he wasn't, at least not all the time. Einstein's theories of relativity are being questioned, Copernicus was utterly wrong until we knew he was essentially right. The best theories we have today are, I'll borrow this one: "the best of bad ideas" meaning they are almost certainly not correct. They are just the best we have at the moment. It is entirely possible that our understanding of nature will be laughable at some point in the future. "Can you believe that? They actually believed in space-time!"

In fact, we have no reason to insist that an orange can not possibly spontaneously change into a ballerina. Noone has ever seen an orange change into any sort of dancer but there is nothing we know in science with certainty that strictly forbids it to happen. The best we can say is that it is so incredibly unlikely that looking into it is as close to a guaranteed waste of time as we can comprehend. Still, we can't outright dismiss the possibility... as a matter of principle of course.

Quantum mechanics and the theories of relativity are the most successful theories to date but we know for a fact they can not be entirely correct. The best of bad ideas. Noone knows what future physics is going to look like.

Flying cars have been a couple of decades into the future for about 100 years now. We dream, dreams drive us to discover new things. Dreams of space travel drove Tsiolkovsky to come up with the equations that allowed us to send this rover to Mars. Some dreams though, are old and still dreams.

Like this
https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/asse...xlarge-169.jpg

I like how they describe Perseverance as the 'cleanest' rover to go to Mars. Until then, it had never occurred to me previous missions were transporting microbes from Earth to the Red Planet.