Bravo!! And ditto on those sentiments. May we all live in peace with goodwill toward one another. Heh, did anyone else find it cute how the Christmas tree/plastic holiday bush kept floating away?

I did too – & the toy Santa /Father Christams as well.

@20. QuietDesperation :

It is possible to have *too* large of a perspective.

Yep, you have to have some perspective on having the perspective too!

&

We survived whatever the Toba event was without a technological society. I’m partially in Lomborg’s camp on GW in that I think we can adapt and possibly even turn it to our advantage. We’re clever little monkeys, and just need to act like it a bit more. I think our tech will eventually get much cleaner anyway.

^ This!

Technology and science is our best hope for whatever we want to accomplish in the future. I veer between optimism and pessimism for our collective & individual futures looking around at the world but we certainly have the potential to achieve great and wonderful things.

Terrible and nasty things too but what we do is our choice and the directions we go are up to us to decide en masse. Hopefully we’ll do the right ones. This vast blue world, this speck of stellar building rubble dust, this complicated, messy, contradictory, weird old place full of complicated, messy, confusing, laughing and crying fellow human beings is well worth fighting – and better working – for.

Life generally~wise, as individuals all we can do is our best. There is more than enough pain and misery, gloom and doom, nastiness & woe in the world – I try not to add to it. There is also much love, knowledge, small acts of kindness and consideration, imagination, art and vision in the world. I try to add to those & contribute what I can towards what I see as good as best I can. I don’t always suceed, I’m human and fallible but that’s my philosophy in a nutshell – or rather blog comment.

The Earth is tough – it has survived multiple mass extinctions, bolide imapcts, supervolcanoes, ice ages, hothouse ages, perhaps supernova and gamma ray bursters irradiation & more besides. Its still here & recovers each time.

Humans too have endured some dreadful natural and unnatural disasters and problems, have developed some impressive technologies and made wonders the like of which we know from nowhere and nothing else. It will endure more and hopefully end well. The potential is there if we act wisely and intelligently.

Late to this party (thread) but this – & (#17) Autumn’s comment above – reminds me so much of this set of words by Carl Sagan :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNOM7WOGGUw

Merry holidays to all here wishing y’all peace, joy and goodwill to everyone whatever and whether you celebrate.

Special thanks to the Bad Astronomer for this superluminous blog which I’ve loved following all year and hope to for many decades to come. Have a great one!

Too true. Everything else hinges on that point right there.

Well, that’s actually what I was talking about. We survived whatever the Toba event was without a technological society. I’m partially in Lomborg’s camp on GW in that I think we can adapt and possibly even turn it to our advantage. We’re clever little monkeys, and just need to act like it a bit more. I think our tech will eventually get much cleaner anyway.

Re: Virgin Galactic – I agree. You’re getting a lot more bang for your buck if you manage to reach orbit. I don’t foresee “space tourism” of really taking off until the flights are orbital (or at least extremely long range suborbital, ie Europe to Australia).

They need a small “hotel” in orbit, even if the accommodations are very basic. The flight gets just high enough rendezvous with the hotel- either directly or maybe firing the passengers in a small module if the main craft can’t match velocities. Sort of how they are trying to launch satellites from airplanes.

There have been dozens of proposed cost effective ways to putting up a space station on the cheap (e.g. free of political pork concerns) over the years- from inflatable structures to an almost tinker-toy approach were a few basic modules are built on the ground and when lifted to orbit they just snap or screw together.

If the government still wants to remain relevant in space, some real money is needed into new launch systems that can get the cost per pound/kilogram down a by at least on order of magnitude. That should be the #1 priority now. That right there is the main hinderance.

@#20 Quiet Desperation: The earth itself is tough. It’s an iron-cored ball of rock several sextillion tons in mass.
The thin film of life on the surface, though, is pretty touchy

Re: Virgin Galactic – I agree. You’re getting a lot more bang for your buck if you manage to reach orbit. I don’t foresee “space tourism” of really taking off until the flights are orbital (or at least extremely long range suborbital, ie Europe to Australia).

Heh, did anyone else find it cute how the Christmas tree/plastic holiday bush kept floating away?

Anyway, I heartily agree with you that our petty squabbles mean nothing on the universal scale of things.

So? That’s nihilistic piffle. We have our lives to live. That fact that my life’s concerns do not affect some hydrogen atoms in M33 is irrelevant. It is possible to have *too* large of a perspective.

I’m reminded of how beautiful and fragile our planet is

It’s pretty, but I never understood the “fragile” part. The Earth has put up with a lot of abuse in its history. Not that we should clean up our act, but I feel things are a little more resilient than many think.

Christmas no longer holds any religious meaning for me;

Or for many people. It’s been pretty secularized for a long time. I get 2 weeks off from work, so I’m not complaining. Well, other than the fact that I live in So Cal and it has RAINED on most of my time off. It’s raining right now.

Some day I’d like to be rich enough to take a trip on Virgin Galactic.

I’m hardly rich, but I could probably scrape together enough if I wanted to put off my retirement for, oh, ten years. I think a quite a few of the older middle class people who lived within their means could.

But fly on that death trap? No thanks. Besides, it’s suborbital. I don’t ante up penny #1 until I can get into a stable orbit.

Only six minutes of weightlessness according to Wikipedia. I can get a ticket on one of the “vomit comet” flights for less than $5,000. That’s something I was thinking of doing in retirement.

http://www.gozerog.com/

I’ve recently been doing lots of soul searching into the faith of my upbringing, which I had left some time ago (Christianity). Anyway, I heartily agree with you that our petty squabbles mean nothing on the universal scale of things. But unfortunately, they do impact us still. We can’t transcend them, and may never. I have lost most of my rosy, UN’ll fix-it-all idealism in the issues of climate change and related areas, and the reality of peak oil plus the reality of a warming world, and the reality of widespread denial with no serious action taken have crashed many of my visions of the future. I once hoped for the colonization of Mars and space – i still hope that will happen, but if it does it will more likely than not be more for authoritarian values than those we hold and make real today.
The only real fix is technology. Even then that will not fix everything, as any powerful technology must stand up to geopolitical reality. Even the possibility of cheap fusion, such as focus fusion. All I can do is hope for the best.
Then again, this could just be a side effect of my English reading consisting of Oryx and Crake, 1984, The Crucible, and doing units on Genocide, Terrorism and the UN in Social. I think I need something more optimistic to read now, thankyu very much

Thanks for your words.
In fact, the somewhat “sad” part of that story is that your words may make you better Christian than many of those who claim to “believe”. I said “sad”, but on the other hand this also makes me quite happy!

Merry Christmas to you! And may all of us listen to your words; we should and can do a bit better in the upcoming year!

Christmas no longer holds any religious meaning for me; it is simply a time to exchange gifts and well wishes with family and friends, and a time of reflection on the year behind and the year ahead. I can think of no better sentiment for the season than this: may we all know peace in this season, however brief, and may we all do just a little better in the year to come. Happy holidays, and happy new year, to you, Phil, and to all my fellow readers. I know I’ll be back every day of the coming year, and I look forward to all the wonder and reason you have to offer.

Santa’s gonna take a nap(the cookies you kids left out for me were good but some of them had a funny taste,,,and they were green,,,)(guess that’s what I get for visiting California).

Ho,Ho,Ho!

Gary 7

Thankyou ISS and Merry Christmas to you! I know it’s still difficult up there for them, but for me the view and the weightless alone would be heaven. And I will see it one day, at least once. I just hope the prices for Virgin Galactic and the others come down significantly within the next decade.
Anyway, that’s a beautiful shot of home, but where was that from? My guess is the LRO. I hope they took at least SOME imagery during Monday night’s eclipse! I mean, the only moon-based lunar eclipse imagery I know of comes from Apollo 12 and a brief video from Kayuga. They should’ve at least taken one picture!

Sorry. Santa”s milk and cookie hangover is really got me by the ganglia.

(And a great shot of our misnamed homeworld!)

-

(It’s nice, when sometimes it’s just that simple! )

h__p://stallman.org/grav-mass.html