NASA is going to Europa

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/20/nasa-is-going-to-europa.html

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For half a second I read Europa as Europe and thought that NASA had really lowered it’s sights with regards to space exploration…

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Any time I hear news about Europa, I can’t help but get this song stuck in my head:

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NASA is going to Europa

All these other Planets are for you, except Europa. Arthur C. Clarke couldn’t make it any clearer…

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My daughter is learning how to read, and she’s just learning about contractions, which she learned was when you “squish two words together.” The other day she got all frustrated trying to ask us to put on a particular TV show she couldn’t remember the name of. She kept saying “squish Zootopia and Barbie together!” We were at a loss, until she found it on Netflix, a Barbie show called: “Dreamtopia.” We were relieved and kinda impressed by her lateral thinking.

Anyway, I am beyond titillated by this Europa news, if I can manage to avoid thinking about the hungry space colonizers lining up to exploit space. Oh, and Newt Gingrich specifically can suck it

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my thought was they were heading for where they could get some funding…

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That too! Although, I’ve long thought that the best way forward with a space program that will actually get people in space needs to be a collective program…

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Time to plug a really cool but obscure film in the “found footage” style, Europa Report. One of those great films that mines the prospect that space is a pretty hostile environment in of itself even without rogue robots and facehugging aliens.


See also
http://1000misspenthours.com/reviews/reviewse-g/europareport.htm

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This is really exciting stuff! Europa is one of the more likely candidates for harboring favorable conditions for life; it’s just rather harder to get to than Mars.

I have hopes that we live to see underwater photos of weird alien fishy things.

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I’m half expecting the GOP to try and get the project scrapped, because Europa = socialism.

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Meanwhile, in the Marianas Trench…

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mmm weird alien looking deep sea predator

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Would not be surprised, actually. Budget cuts is the most likely actions, though. The republicans have often paid lip service to supporting NASA, while always cutting their budget. That’s why we never went back to the moon…

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As a kid, I had a single volume encyclopedia (on reflection, more of a pedia, I guess) which I loved to read. However, I couldn’t read it in bed because it contained a picture of an angler fish, and I was always scared of handling the book after dark.

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Given how human missions usually go, he forgot to add “Crash no probes into it, drop nothing on the surface, leave no space junk debris in orbit, etc.”

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Yeah, way to tempt fate, NASA…

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well as long as no black obelisks appear we should be OK…

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Yeah, but Jupiter’s big red spot is shrinking…

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You will note that they are, in fact, not attempting a landing…

(In the books series the monoliths seemed OK with them having satellites in orbit to study the planet and it’s inhabitants .)

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