Current astronomy scientific level

[ssj4goku1992]

      Hi guys,

  This is my first post here. I m a big science and more specifically astronomy fan so it s a pleasure to interact with like minded people. With the occasion of the first image of a black hole ever taken, and with reading the details surrounding it, one thought that has boggled my mind for some time became more and more aparent...

   How can our current astronomy scientific level seem to be at the same time so advanced and so primitive? On one hand we are literally able to take pictures of black holes in the center of other galaxies and explain them... In my mind a species who is at this level is extremely advanced in its technology and understanding of the universe itself...

   On the other hand, we are barely able to leave the planet. Our most outstanding achievement space wise to date is reaching our natural satellite. Going just to our neighbour,  the closest planet to us seems like a task above our current technological level. Actually it seems that there might be another planet in our solar system that we did not detect yet, planet 9.... So we don t even have the scientific and technological ability to know how many planets our solar system has. In my mind, all of these are characteristics of a species with a very incipient and crude scientific and technological level astronomy wise...

  So how can this dichotomy exist? How can a species be so primitive that it can barely reach the planet next to it and not even be able to tell how many neighbours does it have but at the same time being able to take pictures and understand things and phenomenons at millions and billions of light years away?

 Can somebody explain to me how can you be so advanced and so primitive in one scientific field at the same time?

Thanks and I am keenly waiting for the answers!

  

[Paul73]

Great isn’t it! I guess that the theory is relatively inexpensive and sexy. The hard yards turning the theory into reality are far more expensive and time consuming. So much so, that the majority of us loose interest before we get much beyond the end of our, metaphorical, front drive. Or, in the case of those holding the purse strings, past the next election.....

Paul

[saac]

There are easy things and there are more difficult things. Leaving the planet and exploring space is orders of magnitude more difficult than just looking at it  

Jim 

[The Admiral]

Well to my mind, our theoretical abilities are limited by our our mental abilities, which don't demand much by way of resources. Proving our theories does take resources, but in the grand scheme of things, not a lot, and are in any event dictated by what the laws of physics (and computing power) allow us to do. Leaving our planet, on the other hand, will ultimately be dictated by the physical limitations of our bodies, about which I don't think we can do much, even if the resources were to be available.

My twopence worth.

Ian

[Paul M]

Not are we only barely able to leave the planet, I would argue that we are less able now than we were 50 years ago.

Political will is a major driving force in human endeavour. If the momentum of Apollo had been maintained I think there may have been a manned base on Mars already. Paid for with the money not wasted on the Shuttle program. The technology required would have followed as a natural consequence.

To turn an old phrase upside down: The flesh is willing but the mind is weak!

[Star101]

Welcome to Stargazers.

As said above, $$$ Cost is one reason. At $90 million just to build the rocket. Before adding the people and satellites. Space is not cheap. 

Would one still say "primitive" when one "understands" the vastness of space. Realise Star Trek is fictional!

As said above, theorising and imaging is one thing. Actually getting out there is a totally different game. The speed of light is not fast enough and as the man (Einstein) himself said, matter cannot travel faster than light. 

Watching Sky at Night ( iPlayer ) on Wednesday, 10 April 8pm, they were talking of sending very small satellites to one of our nearest stars, less than 5 light years away. Sending the small items at 20% the speed of light, they will still take 20 years to get there and almost 5 years for their signal to get back to Earth, assuming that it gets there.

Check out this article. It may put things in perspective. https://www.sciencealert.com/simple-animations-by-a-nasa-scientist-prove-the-speed-of-light-is-torturously-slow

 

  

[Knight of Clear Skies]

13 hours ago, ssj4goku1992 said:

On the other hand, we are barely able to leave the planet. Our most outstanding achievement space wise to date is reaching our natural satellite. Going just to our neighbour,  the closest planet to us seems like a task above our current technological level.

We have the technology, it's a question of cost (the tyranny of the rocket equation is inescapable) and lack of a truly compelling reason to go back there. It's far more efficient to explore the universe by proxy, using probes, robots and telescopes. Inspiring as the Apollo missions were I see manned space exploration as something of a dead end, for the foreseeable future at least. Unless we can develop the technology to maintain truly self-sustaining environments any expedition is one problem away from failure. Before we can colonise space we first need the ability to colonise Antarctica. (Despite this there certainly are valid arguments for manned space exploration, but I couldn't really describe them as compelling.)

13 hours ago, ssj4goku1992 said:

Actually it seems that there might be another planet in our solar system that we did not detect yet, planet 9.... So we don t even have the scientific and technological ability to know how many planets our solar system has.

You aren't really comparing like-with-like here. Planet Nine, if it exists, is a very dim object. It does not produce its any (visible) light, it just reflects sunlight. The brightness of planets reduces in proportion to the fourth power of the distance, so very little light is reflected back to an observer on Earth. On the other hand, the core of M87 outshines all the stars of the Milky Way put together. It's a bright object and one that's easy for amateurs to take pictures of, there is a great deal of signal to play with.

Hope that's of some help, our intuitive feel for how difficult something should be doesn't always hold up when we do the math.

[andrew s]

Bottom line is it is expensive and risky to send people onto space for a low scientific return. Far better to send robotic missions. 

Landing on an asteroid and taking samples, visiting comets etc. seems rather accomplished to me.

Regards Andrew 

[saac]

3 hours ago, andrew s said:

Bottom line is it is expensive and risky to send people onto space for a low scientific return. Far better to send robotic missions. 

Landing on an asteroid and taking samples, visiting comets etc. seems rather accomplished to me.

Regards Andrew 

Agreed, I wonder if there is a tendency for the public at large to lose sight of just how hard an environment space represents re manned flight. Perhaps a generation brought up on slick CGI scifi movies and the swish marketing of Virgin Galactic, Ellon Musk and co prompts questions of "why are we not there yet".  I would argue that our exploration of space has been nothing short of heroic.  We have been reliant on  capital, intellect,  political leadership, public opinion, but above all, on the bravery of men and women who have taken extraordinary personal risk,  many paying with their lives. Kennedy was right when he spoke about "a nation's treasure".  Tom Wolf summed it up in his wonderful line from his book, The Right Stuff,  "What is it that makes a man sit on top of an enormous Roman Candle and wait for someone to light the fuse? Arrogance? Bravery? Courage? Or, simply that quality which we call 'the right stuff'? "  Test pilots like Yeager  and those who would go on to fly the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions were taking unprecedented risks (Gus Grissom, Edward White II, Roger Chaffee)  in an wholly unforgiving environment. It continued with the Shuttle missions and those two brave crews  (Christa McAuliffe  the first civilian in space - a teacher of all things). And while I'm sceptical that it will happen as soon as some would promote, if we ever do set foot on Mars, the same extraordinary personal risk will be accepted by those who dare go.  So all in all, I think we have exceeded our reach by some considerable margin and we continue to do so.  Here's the sucker punch, should we be doing it?  I watched First Man not that long ago and that got me switched on to the civil protests at the time of the Apollo missions which were  questioning the funding.  The protest poem by Gil Scott-Heron is as challenging and relevant now as it was when released in 1970.   Should our priorities and the treasure of nations be directed elsewhere; I wonder ?

 

Jim

[andrew s]

As @Knight of Clear Skies points out the rocket equation is a hard task master. If the Earth had been more massive chemical rockets could not escape its gravity.

Regards Andrew 

[andrew s]

@saac I am always amazed that the artificial gravity never seems to fail even when every other system has on a spaceship.  But, I agree the expectation of what is possible is based on the film industry rather than an understanding of science.

Regards Andrew 

[saac]

18 minutes ago, andrew s said:

As @Knight of Clear Skies points out the rocket equation is a hard task master. If the Earth had been more massive chemical rockets could not escape its gravity.

Regards Andrew 

Absolutely,  isn't that alone a curious close shave  - forever to be tied by and never to "have slipped the surly bonds of Earth" . Wow what a different outcome for us that would have been .

Re "artificial gravity" , add to that the "inertial dampeners"  - when do we want them , Now!   I'm a sucker for those movies but I do smile when the ships always meet facing the right way up or casually drop out of orbit- clever engineers they have.

Jim 

[Davey-T]

2 minutes ago, saac said:

 I'm a sucker for those movies but I do smile when the ships always meet facing the right way up or casually drop out of orbit- clever engineers they have.

Or if they want to catch up with somebody else in orbit they just accelerate a bit 

Dave

[JamesF]

1 hour ago, saac said:

Agreed, I wonder if there is a tendency for the public at large to lose sight of just how hard an environment space represents re manned flight.

I think you're probably quite right.  It is easy to fail to appreciate this.

I watched the Falcon Heavy mission last night and whilst I sat there somewhat gobsmacked at what was achieved (I can't quite decide which of landing the two boosters in unison back at the Space Centre or landing the central first stage on the deck of a ship in the Atlantic is more astonishing), in some ways they did make it look so easy.  Even more so perhaps because it was even possible to watch the satellite release from the video cameras on board the second stage.

When people see that sort of operation done so well, perhaps it's not so surprising that the vast majority of the public who have no comprehension of the engineering issues involved in even unmanned spaceflight fail to grasp just how fragile human life is and how hard it is to keep people alive outside a (relatively) tiny volume of space on our home planet.

Of course the thirty-odd minutes of live video of yesterday's mission isn't the whole story and that's what's missing.  There's the thousands of man-years of work that took place before yesterday just to enable that half-hour of work.  Perhaps if people had to experience all of that beforehand it might be a different story.

James

[Knight of Clear Skies]

7 hours ago, saac said:

Agreed, I wonder if there is a tendency for the public at large to lose sight of just how hard an environment space represents re manned flight.

That was something I liked about the film Gravity, despite its inaccuracies. It did a great job of conveying what a hostile and alien environment space is.

[noah4x4]

Having worked on a related project embracing desert survival and crop irrigation in extreme arid conditions, I can offer a different explanation........the need for water.

Human life cannot survive without it. It is true that water can be purified and recycled. Astronauts can even drink their own pee. But the payload of water necessary to sustain perhaps four humans on a visit to Mars is disproportionately significant for current technologies.

Simply regularly supplying the Earth orbit ISS is a significant challenge let alone sustaining life over perhaps six or more months on a single payload. Given the technologies that we were pioneering (hydrophilic membrane purification) the journey to Mars is now just about survivable. However, making pure H2O is a surprisingly dangerous process as it fast deteriorates into carbolic acid if not neutralised with salts. To sustain a colony on Mars then depends on finding an abundance of local (Martian) water that can be processed. The first ice crystals are now being analysed. If we find no bacteria, might that suggest man cannot ever survive there? Lassoing a passing asteroid to extract water might offer more hope.