for all the astro-nerds out there (Page 3 of 3)

There was a conference on monday for the 50th anniversary of SETI.

one of the main speakers has a new book coming out too which sounds interesting

edit - the american one at least has a description!

during the summer i met one of the people who designed the rovers that are on Mars currently. she also feeds controls to the robot and always the first thing she does when she gets up in the morning is check the status of her 'baby'. and she didn't even look like a nerd.

does the count include invasion planete?

dream job!!!

I heard about this... apparently according to this theory the dinosaurs were big cos the Earth was a lot smaller back then! I personally don't buy it although it was good food for thought...

this is pasted from wikipedia, but seems like a good summary of the points against the theory:

"Modern measurements have established very stringent upper bound limits for the expansion rate, which very much reduces the possibility of an expanding Earth. For example, paleomagnetic data has been used to calculate that the radius of the Earth 400 million years ago was 102 ± 2.8% of today's radius.[8] Furthermore, examinations of earth's moment of inertia suggest that no significant change of earth's radius in the last 620 million years could have taken place and therefore earth expansion is untenable.[9]

The primary objections to an expanding Earth have centered around the lack of an accepted process by which the Earth's radius could increase and on the inability to find an actual increase of earth's radius by modern measurements. This issue, along with the evidence for the process of subduction, caused the scientific community to dismiss the theory of an expanding Earth."

Meteorite that hit the earth 40 years ago has been analysed and found to contains tons of organic molecules

it's thought to be older than the sun, which is pretty mind blowing...