BOSE? Bose-Einstein condensate

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/7/27/they-really-do-exist-nasas-ghostbusters/

In a team of professional ghost busters, Anita Sengupta would most certainly be the enthusiastic and multi-talented leader. She’s already taken on roles developing launch vehicles, the parachute that famously helped land the Mars rover Curiosity, and deep-space propulsion systems for missions to comets and asteroids.


Sengupta and other members of the entry, descent and landing team for NASA's Mars rover Curiosity discuss the nail-biting details of the August 2012 landing.

Most recently, she’s carved out a niche as the project manager for an atomic physics mission, called the Cold Atom Laboratory, or CAL.

Since the mission was proposed in 2012, Sengupta has been leading a team of engineers and atomic physicists in developing an instrument that can see the unseen. Their mission is to create an ultra-cold quantum gas called a Bose-Einstein condensate, which is a state of matter that forms only at just above absolute zero. At such low temperatures, matter takes on unique properties that seemingly defy the laws of thermodynamics.

Come on NASA,

The shuttle and now the Orion spacecraft have been and are designed by congressmen and women for make work projects in their states.

The shuttle, although a marvel of engineering, was a death trap due to putting the most venerable structures down the stack.

ISS is a fantastic endeavour, but its low earth orbit and NASA has been struggling with a new direction for decades. The moon... no wait... asteroids... no wait... Mars... hold on... the moon.

Just PICK ONE, at least DOUBLE the funding to NASA and make whatever new project a national initiative. The American space industry can do unbelievable things when the proper foresight is put is place backed by money. (hay, maybe take some out of the military complex?!).

We will see if the Moon remains a target for NASA, maybe that will change when your current "leader" is removed... I am mean voted out of his "office".

28 days in that tiny room with 3 other people yikes!


Oh and then you have to work under water where you can't see in between all of that.

That was seriously something.


I guess we'll definitely have candidates for Asteroid mining, since that will be quite a bit more luxurious in comparison.

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Uh, what? Nobody said that at all. It is neither a "classic example" nor an assumption. The trajectory has been tracked since it was discovered, which is hyperbolic around the sun, and the speed of the object is such that there is no way it could have accelerated to its current velocity due to the gravity of our sun alone, hence it has to be interstellar, picking up kinetic energy from another system outside of our own. The orbit is not improbable, it is unusual compared to trajectories of asteroids that exist within our own solar system. Sharpen your crayon there bud, and stop trying to impress people with your new thesaurus for hipsters (come on, "undergird"?? Really?)

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Interesting stuff, I don't agree with the 'bigger isn't necessarily better' conclusion he came to. Sauropods lasted a good 150 million years, and it took a massive worldwide external extinction event like an asteroid strike to take them out.

Humans have been around in some form for a fair bit less than 200,000 years. Stretching that to apes you can get to 10 million at a push. Even the early primates probably wouldn't have had their break if it weren't for that extinction event a mere 65 million years back.

Come back to me in 3 million generations and I'll ceded the point.

My concern is this : Imagine a global extinction event , lets say a repeat of the event that killed off the dinosaurs : a massive asteroid direct hit , instantly killing everything on roughly the same continent or general planetside , such an impact would punch a hole in the very tectonic plate it lands on and cause massive waves not just in water , but in the ground itself , waves of rock and earth surface taveling around the globe meeting on the far side of the impact and ricocheting back again . We are talking GLOBAL earthquakes off the scales, for YEARS after the impact as the tectonic plates are slowliy settling in, all this is followed by a thick cloud of ash from the impact, refueled by frequent vulcanic eruptions , this will block out most sunlight , so after the initial toasting , the few lucky survives of this pandemonium can look forward to hundreds of years of atomic winter. Sounds pretty fuckin bad.

But guess what : thats still better conditions for life than Mars. And Mars is goddamn paradise compared to the other planets around us. Anything outside our immediate neighbourhood ? Forget it , they are ATLEAST thousands of years travel away, making moving anything of note there unfeasable. We ARE a one planet species. Get used to it , take good care of this one , its all we got.

Aliens with the tech to get here from another solar system would mop us up.

We simply couldn't fight that.

Back in the '70s scientists came up with a space weapon they called THOR, which is essentially a crowbar-sized bit of metal that has guidance fins at the back. Drop that from outer space and the simple energy of it falling creates an immense amount of damage at ground level.

Aliens who could get here from another solar system could simply throw chunks of asteroid at our cities until we capitulated. No space laser is going to stop that. Especially when they'd have space lasers of their OWN to target our space lasers.

This whole thing is pure fantasy. The same kind of diseased minds who believe in God, Ghosts, and Donald Trump's fitness to be President.

Can't watch as it's blocked. Do they have huge asteroids within a few hundred feet of each other? Can't stand that crap.

I did not expect to sit through the whole 1/2 hour...but I found him intelligent and informative.
He's only the third person I've ever heard talk about the extinction event happening to dinosaurs BEFORE the asteroid hit.
Well worth the watch.

I always loved Centipede, partially because it's got one of the coolest cabinet designs, up there with Moon Patrol, Asteroids(and Deluxe), Galaxian, and Lunar Lander.

MASSIVE LONG POST WARNING: feel free to skip this

I usually like Vsauce a lot, but I disagree with just about every assumption and every conclusion he makes in this video.

Anthropogenic vs external extinction event -
I think the likelihood of an anthropogenic extinction event is low. Even in the cold war, at the apex of "mutually assured destruction" risk, IF that destruction was triggered I think it would have been extremely unlikely to make humans go extinct. The US and USSR might have nuked each other to near-extinction, but even with fairly mobile nuclear fallout / nuclear winter, etc. I think that enough humans would have remained in other areas to remain a viable population.

Even if ONE single person had access to every single nuclear weapon in existence, and they went nuts and tried to use them ALL with the goal of killing every single human being on the planet, I still bet there would be enough pockets of survivors in remote areas to prevent humans from going utterly extinct.

Sure, an anthropogenic event could be devastating -- catastrophic even -- to human life. But I think humanity could recover even from an event with an associated human death rate of 95% or more -- and I think the likelihood of anything like that is real slim.

So that leaves natural or external extinction events. The KT extinction (end of the dinosaurs) is the most recent major event, and it happened 65 million years ago. Homo sapiens have been around 150-200,000 years, and as a species we've been through some fairly extreme climatic changes. For example, humans survived the last ice age around 10-20,000 years ago -- so even without technology, tools, buildings, etc. we managed to survive a climate shift that extreme. Mammals survived the KT extinction, quite possible that we could have too -- especially if we were to face it with access to modern technology/tools/knowledge/etc.

So I think it would probably take something even more extreme than the asteroid responsible for KT to utterly wipe us out. Events like that are temporally rare enough that I don't think we need to lose any sleep over them. And again, it would take something massive to wipe out more than 95% of the human population. We're spread out, we live in pretty high numbers on basically every landmass on earth (perhaps minus Antarctica), we're adapted to many many different environments ... pretty hard to kill us off entirely.


"Humans are too smart to go extinct" @1:17 -
I think we're too dumb to go extinct. Or at least too lazy. The biggest threats we face are anthropogenic, but even the most driven and intentionally malevolent human or group of humans would have a hard time hunting down *everybody, everywhere*.


Doomsday argument -
I must admit that I don't really understand this one. The guess of how many total humans there will be, EVER, seems extremely arbitrary. But anyway, I tend to think it might fall apart if you try to use it to make the same assertions about, say, bacterial life instead of human life. Some specific species of bacteria have been around for way way longer than humans, and in numbers that dwarf human populations. So, the 100 billionth bacteria didn't end up needing to be worried about its "birth number", nor did the 100 trillionth.


Human extinction "soon" vs. "later" -
Most plausibly likely threats "soon" are anthropogenic. The further we push into "later", the more the balance swings towards external threats, I think. But we're talking about very small probabilities (in my opinion anyway) on either side of the scale. But I don't think that "human ingenuity will always stay one step ahead of any extinction event thrown at it" (@4:54). Increased human ingenuity is directly correlated with increased likelihood of anthropogenic extinction, so that's pretty much the opposite. For external extinction events, I think it is actually fairly hard to imagine some external scenario or event that could have wiped out humans 100, 20, 5, 2, or 1 thousand years ago that wouldn't wipe us out today even with our advances and ingenuity. And anything really bad enough to wipe us out is not going to wait for us to be ready for it...


Fermi paradox -
This is the most reasonable bit of the whole video, but it doesn't present the most common / best response. Other stars, galaxies, etc. are really far away. The Milky Way galaxy is 100,000+ light years across. The nearest other galaxy (Andromeda) is 2.2 million light years away. A living being (or descendents of living beings) coming to us either of those distances would have to survive as long as the entire history of human life, all while moving at near the speed of light, and have set out headed straight for us from the get-go all those millions and millions of years ago. So lack of other visitors is not surprising at all.

Evidence of other life would be far more likely to find, but even that would have to be in a form we could understand. Human radio signals heading out into space are less than 100 years old. Anything sentient and actively looking for us, even within the cosmically *tiny* radius of 100 light years, would have to have to evolved in such a way that they also use radio; otherwise the clearest evidence of US living here on Earth would be undetectable to them. Just because that's what we're looking for, doesn't mean that other intelligent beings would take the same approach.

Add all that up, and I don't think that the Fermi paradox is much cause for alarm. Maybe there are/have been LOTS of intelligent life forms out there, but they have been sending out beacons in formats we don't recognize, or they are simply too far away for those beacons to have reached us yet.


OK, I think I'm done. Clearly I found the video interesting, to post that long of a rambling response... But I was disappointed in it compared to usual Vsauce stuff. Still, upvote for the thoughts provoked and potential discussion, even though I disagree with most of the content and conclusions.

I've always wondered: What happens to all those laser blasts that miss the target and are pointed out toward open space?

Do they just continue on forever until they hit something (asteroid, planet, star, alien spaceship) or get sucked into a black hole?

(Pretty awesome gaming technology btw.)

If the conversations were like this the entire time they tried to sell things on these types of 24/7 channels, I just might watch them. For the comedy, and to get some of the best fracking video clips in the Universe to play and re-play...

I'd love it if they had to label a really complicated star system that has three stars (two that are satellites--and obviously if this star system existed it would fall apart really fast or if it achieved equilibrium then it still has, as I/you can imagine, amazingly low chances of staying in this semi-stable state; like our own system...which IS falling apart, but it's just doing it at a moderately slow pace); then add in planets revolving around the stars, moons around the planets...and it will become hard to decide what is a satellite or a planet in some instances (as it may count technically as both).

Throw in a large debris field (an asteroid belt, but with "chunks" the size of very large moons--like 1.5x the size of our own Moon) and an Oort Cloud, again with comets that are as big as small moons/satellites and they will literally have no idea how to label anything.

The sad part is that I bet a very large segment of our population would also have the same problems with this task.

Sometimes, it is bad that we have Google...because some people will rely on it too much (especially so if it's students--those going through K-12, or similar setups in whatever country you're reading this from; but, not college...though problems do exist there, but it gets FAR harder to "lie" your way to a degree, etc...). However, if you are older and you use the Internet to look up things you don't know and if you remember any of it--this is when the Internet (or "Google") becomes a great tool and boon for humanity.

Nothing is better than spreading knowledge and wisdom.