You are all missing the point of space exploration, it's some of us want to be able to get away from the rest of you, permanently.

When you burn up a carbohydron, you're oxidizing it. So... Do you know what it is?

Anyway, I guess you have greenhouse gases all figured out, and thousands of climatologists don't know what they're talking about and are part of a libtard conspiracy. I don't know how I didnt see it before

Also, what is your point about "civilian control"? Industry is under *human* control - our governments regulate them and our societies instantiate them.

@Randomizer
Would you want to be one of those volunteers NASA keeps threatening to send on a one way mission to Mars? Terrifying, but what a way to go, your name would be remembered for the rest of human history!

Honestly, I cannot understand a climate denialist at this point. We are facing down the ***end of our civilization*** and you decide that economic stability is the most important thing? The fuck?

@twiddlestix yes, I would go on a one way mission into space - particulaly with colonization as a goal. If we had our shit together on earth we should be able to save ourselves without leaving, but since we're such a miserable excuse for an intelligent species I would be in favor of space colonization in order to buy us more time to hopefully evolve out of our barbarism

And, in my opinion, if you are in favor of something, you must favor it in deed as well as in word; so I would volunteer for such a mission

ice caps melt... costal cities flood... people flock inland... and the only place unaffected..

The space station! so we're back to space

I would colonize mars with thucy

Its a bit too scary for me! Ill stay at home at try to sort this mess out ;)

Also I just cant help myself:

Fluorinated Industrial Gases are the main problem, and 97% of those are industrially produced, and out of civilian control.

"You're not just embarrassing yourself, you're embarrassing the species"
-If facts are embarrassing, then yes, i suppose i am. dumbass

Apparently 3% of fluorinated industrial gases aren't produced by industry. I would love to know who produced them then.

Facts aren't embarrassing but made up ones certainly are!

twiddlestix - didn't read the article because work won't let me, but I assume you're first post wa talking about an asteroid hitting earth?

Conceivably, all they'd have to do is load up a spaceship and - given enough advance notice - just smash it into the asteroid. Putting it off by a couple micrometers per second would make it miss Earth by a large margin if you hit it a few years ahead of time. Over a shorter timeframe, a nuke would probably do.

I think it must be pointed out that there is a lot of room between "climate denialist" and "we're going to turn the planet into Venus and end the species and almost all other life."

If there was no space exploration (and WAR!!!), more than half the shit we consider standard conveniences in life --- including cell phones --- probably wouldn't exist.

THAT is why we do mad science shit.

@ goldie

Hitting an asteroid a few years ahead of time is a good few generations beyond our abilities in terms of technology. If we're lucky we see asteroids after they've passed us. If we're exceptionally lucky we see them before they get close to us. Mostly though we never even notice their existence.

http://www.kiwisbybeat.com/minus/minus37.jpg

to turn the planet into Venus and end the species and almost all other life."

If we do nothing, that is exactly what will happen. That fate, at least, we can still avoid if we act within the next (very) few years, most likely. But the ice sheet in Antarctica, that is gone. The east coast and Bangladesh and lots of island countries and on and on will have to be evacuated. That's a fact, sadly. It's not a happy future

And anyone who thinks we won't go into a prolonged dark age at the very least as a result of the uprooting of billions of people... I don't know what to say to you.

Theoretically we could mitigate the upheaval by starting evacuations now, but... Lol. Everyone knows we won't

"Conceivably, all they'd have to do is load up a spaceship and - given enough advance notice - just smash it into the asteroid. Putting it off by a couple micrometers per second would make it miss Earth by a large margin if you hit it a few years ahead of time."

Actually, i believe current plans invove NOT crashing your space craft into the rock, just sitting beside it, perhaps in it's micro-gravity field; the gravitaional attraction between the space craft and asteroid will sligthly deviate the course. And boom, you're golden - for the same reasons and with the same conditions that goldfinger mentioned.

Now the commercial entities would like to take a rock which is oing to come close anyway, and nudge it ever so sligthly so they trap it in an earth orbit; thus allowing a decent harvesting operation to begin...

Probably a high earth orbit to avoid skimming the atmosphere and losing altitude before you're done harvesting...

Anyhow.

@Octavious - this may indeed be the biggest challenge. But did you see the several billion dollar space telescope which is in the planning stages - a next generation after the James Webb Space telescope (which is due to replace Hubble)

I'm not expert, but i imagine it will be much better at detecting everything, they are discussing using it to do spectroscopy on exo-planets, to see if they harbour life...

(Mental note *if i ignore the conversation about climate change i can see whether it goes and finds it's own thread*)

^nah

Besides, climate change seriously is probably the biggest reason we pursue spaceflight

Thucy, lets instead applaud climate change for spurring us to find ways to make Mars' atmosphere habitable. We're probably only a couple hundred or so years away from actually being able to terraform a planet, which is exciting to me. Mostly trolling you, but serious on the second sentence.

@Octavious - you're right. But we do track them once they pass us and plot out their locations for the future. And as ora said, the technology and effort being spent there is improving.

Did I imagine it, or was there once a time when exoplanet referred to planets that escaped their orbit and wandered the void rather than planets around foreign stars?

Spectroscopy to search for life? No doubt it will find organic compounds, and then we'll have a lot of confusion as people realise that an astrophysics definition of organic ain't much like a normal person's definition. Many dollars later we will have strong signs of the potential for life and in reality be no better off than we are now :p.

Still, I have a few friends in the industry whose mortgage depends on this sort of thing, so lets do it!

@goldfinger
Yeah thats what I was talking about, but like Octavious said, that is way beyond us. Remember landing that tiny lander on a comet that people were going crazy about. That plan was decades in development and the lander itself was orbiting around for years to get into the right position.
@orathaic
Also pretty sure your micro-gravity idea wont work. The mass of a single space ship is negligible compared to the earth, and maybe also to the asteroid. I doubt it would do anything at all.
The new telescope sounds fun, what do you mean by do spectroscopy though? We can already do that by analysing light which has been reflected off the planet, or when the planet passes in front of it's star.

Thucy,

"If we do nothing, [turning the earth into Venus] is exactly what will happen."

Your level of certainty is enviable, but let's not pretend it has anything to do with evidence.

Here is the best evidence I could find for your hysterical claims:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/31/runaway-greenhouse-planets-earth-venus-like-planet_n_3681874.html

Nonscientists often read articles like this and think it's safe to replace all the "could"s and "maybes" with things like... well... "that's exactly what will happen." It is not. This paper was studying possibilities, not certainties. Moreover, like most science of its type, it is a computer model, with loads of simplifying assumptions. It's valuable for adding to our understanding of how different parameters affect behavior, which over a very long time can help us understand how real planets like ours behave. But these models are sensitive and very often wrong, and it is simply not responsible to take their results and turn them into ironclad guarantees on which to base policy actions.

Moreover, even if it were an ironclad guarantee, this paper only even claims that this scenario is "theoretically possible" -- not that it's something that "we can avoid if we act within the next (very) few years, most likely." In other words, it is something we would probably have to try to accomplish. Moreover, this is something that, even if it did occur (unlikely) would not occur for a billion and a half years, according to the study.

So where do you get off making these absurd and baseless assertions that conveniently tie some horrible near-term outcome (turning the planet to Venus for sure) to the nonperformance of your preferred policy goals, without a shred of evidence?

(Note that I don't, of course, mean to imply that all nonscientists are as sloppy in their use of evidence as some are; some of them are adept at understanding the role and nature of scientific studies as evidence).

@Octavious Exoplanet? Who can forget the march of the Okies and Amalfi's rigging of a planet to destroy the Vegan orbital fort! (James Blish 'Earthman Come Home')

@twiddles: re: spectroscopy, i'm not sure. Just something i read today...

You're right about what we're doing now, i guess this would just give much netter resolution, and possibly allow for new techniques which can't even be attempted at present (also it will operate in a different wave lenght from the James Webb...)

As for the gravitational pull, first you only need a small delta v now to cause a big course change in a year or two. Second, you could land on the rock, try to secure your spacecraft and fire you thrusters (well probably fire up an ion drive...) but this is easier because it skips that landing/attaching step, and you can also ignore the angular motion of the rock itself if you don't attach) So it is feasible, but still requires some serious lead time... You really want to know it is going to come on a close approach in ten years and then a collision in twenty/ thirty years, so you can launch a probe to join it on the close approach...

Other plans include detonating a nuclear warhead in the path of a rock, and altering it's course by the friction with the explosion's debris, which varies in it's concentration... Again small effect which is only useful long enough in advance.

@twiddles: here is the article about 'super-Hubble'

@Venus-like,

Interesting article Smeck, i was going to complain, we might be able to get temperatures like Venus and even pressures, but Venus also has horrible chemistry, and i don't know if we could produce enough sulphuric acid... But then i read the article.

I don't know why we couldn't intentionally trigger a run-away warming similar to Venus, but i guess not being close enough to the sun has its advantages here - at least messes up that parameter significantly.

Still weather patterns getting fucked up will mess with food production, and we already grow food in just about every arable spot of land on earth. Sure vertical gardens are now becoming a thing, but they also require energy - and we are also left with water, we need fresh water to grow anything, and if weather patterns change, that will give us droughts and flooding... We will he rather badly fucked; unless we have a serious amount of water desalination and that again requires energy, vast amounts of energy... (if we had no other source of freshwater, how many TerraWatt hours would we need to desalination enough water to irrigate enough food to feed 7-8 billion humans - even assuming we're not growing food for meat animals ? And what do we currently produce?)