Leaked photo reveals true reason for Philae comet landing mission

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I’d buy that for a dollar.

Maybe someone just wants one drink of water, just one, that fish have not pissed in ever.

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Earth-fish, anyway. No guarantees made about comet proto-fish piss content.

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Was the homeopathic industry a big promoter of this mission?

Big question is, is there any sign of life? If there is we could start drilling for oil, of course.

This is a serious issue. If we want to have civilisations away from Earth we will probably have to use cometary ice as a source of water, hydrogen and oxygen.

Depends. It may be easier to get water from the in situ deposits on the planetary surface. Some moons of the jovian planets are very ice-rich, and there is some on Mars and even Moon, albeit the places aren’t always comfortable. But there are rocks out there with no usable amount of water at all, and even mere stable orbital spots (orbits, Lagrange points - nobody says the thing HAS to be on a big rock) and the cometary source will be handy there.

Don’t put the cart in front of the horse.

First, we’d need to develop propulsion systems that don’t require us to spend centuries getting anywhere - which inherently means we also need to first develop energy sources sufficiently large to power such imaginary propulsion system, while also being logistically, economically, and environmentally feasible.

And if we’ve managed to do that, we’ve solved the earth’s energy, economy, and environmental problems, and are probably living in a utopia.

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No no. You don’t want comet as a drink. It makes your mouth turn green, tastes like Listerine, and makes you vomit.

No need to be upset.

We are now talking in the context of the backyard, aka the solar system. There are plenty of places where we could get to even with merely the contemporary technology, perhaps even just with 70’s/80’s tech, if the resources needed weren’t being pissed away on politicos’ pet wars.

Longer trips aren’t even on the drawing board yet. Let’s mine some asteroids first, build the space elevator, and perhaps make some itsy bitsy little fragments of a Dyson sphere for harvesting solar energy. Then we’ll see about doing more. You won’t want to build a generation-ship Earthside anyway because of the cost of getting the stuff from the gravity well.

The only problem is this mountain-sized watering hole is moving at 67,000 kph.

I know what really happened: Just as the lander was getting ready to harpoon this great white comet, the leviathan veered unexpectedly and broke off one of the lander’s legs. Now the probe will spend the rest of its operational life chasing said comet through space on a doomed quest for vengeance.

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