Russian astrologist suing NASA

After all the fun we had on the astrology thread I figured I'd share this:

Russian Astrologist Plans to Crash NASA’s Independence Day.


*sigh*

The NASA site for the mission: Deep Impact.

I kinda doubt she has a snowball's chance in hell of getting anything.

Daft cow (not you Kat, the Russian woman).

@ Kat

I doubt she'll get anything too but the fact that resources are going to have to be wasted on this is absurd. Tax dollars are now going to go to legal counsel to defend against this.

If she wins, can we sue her for infringing upon our system of spiritual and life values?

Im on her side, first we go destroy the world, and we dont learn from that, then we go spread our destructiveness into outerspace.. Considering that new age environmentalism is the new spirituality, I can see how she has a case.

I dont think she will win either, but im sure shes not the only one who thinks like this, and it really is an issue our species has to face as a group, not just some government sponserd military/scientific nerds who like to blow shit up.

@ Kza

From the article:

Sure... years earlier:

"Hey, Bob, I'm getting kinda frustrated with all this math and astrophysics and junk. Have you ever wished we could just blow some shiat up?"

"You know, Bill, I really have."

But seriously, this mission doesn't have anything to do with the military and comets plunge into the sun all the time. Might as well learn something from this (ultimately) doomed one.

You mean that I can get the government to sponsor this activity? Hell, I do it just for the fun of it.

Physicist AND professional astrologist (shouldn't it be astrologer, anyway?)? Oxymoron if I ever heard one.


Kza, you know, every time I go and start to think that maybe, just maybe, you've got a brain cell or two devoted to reason, you go and spoil it.

If the case is based on the possible damage that can be caused by blowing this comet up, OTHER than the "psychological" damage, and the "mass Anxiety", meaning the asteroid shower and the radio wave disruptions... I don't suppose its possible that NASA would launch a mission without properly studying the implications would they?
And I suppose studies are well documented, Hence the case is being built on the basis that such actions would end up fucking with her daily horoscope?

@CB

The case is based solely on the psychological effects that altering a heavinly body's path, mass, etc. would cause.

Wait, the exact alignment of unseen forces and physical matter all over the universe makes me feel damn good right now. Nobody move!

...damn you!

I guess this wouldn't be the right time or thread to go into the reasons I'm becoming more convinced that we live in a deterministic universe, huh?

woof.

I do have brain cells devoted to reason, but they didnt find a role in forming this opinion, which is mostly based on emotion and preference. I did try to use reason to form an opinion on the issue, but the weaknesses of reason itself stood in the way.

I am after all not trying to claim that one side or the other is fundamentally, objectivley, beyond doubt correct, and the other not, as its not that type of situation. All I am doing is giving my opinion. How the hell can reason play a part in that without getting in the way?

I'm not going to go into another argument with you about reason, but I'll just say this. If you think that reason can "get in the way," then you do not understand the concept of reason.

One born every minute...

PP

Maybe someone in NASA is just trying to change a lousy horoscope ?

If she wins, I quit. wait, no, for the fact that this bs is happening in the first place, I F'ING QUIT!!! I can't stand people who get offended by stupid sh*t. I'm sorry that your little spiritual world will come crashing down if science wants to learn something new. Was the vatican happy when it was proved the world was round? Hell no. Were they happy when it was learned that we are in a helocentric system? Hell no. Did they sue? no. They just accepted it (after a while of arugment).

That comit was f'ing with my Feng Shui anyway!!! Get rid of it!!! I WANT MY CH'I BACK TO NORMAL! I will counter sue that b*tch if she wins on the grounds of her attempting to screw my ch'i

decaf, jip, decaf

Lets make it class action. Count me in. I know some good lawyers

Why wait for her to win? Sue her now! I'll join you since her complaint and action have already put my chakras out of balance.

woof.

Yeah, me too - I'm in. My yin and yang are yunned and yonged.

Seeing as she believes all that astrology bullshit she'd probably get away with an insanity plea.

I know. I also noticed that something was not right with my nuts this morning. Lets sue the bitch.

Is she HAWT ??? If so I'd give her something...

I don't agree with her sueing for whatever reason. I am however sick of the arrogance of NASA (sorry DW) of going out into space and just dumping obsolete gadgets on planets and blowing things up for whatever reason. Who gave them the right to do that? I see it on par with people destroying rainforests on earth.

There is no life there, unlike the rainforests which are teeming with it. It will never be seen by/negatively effect a living thing ever.

NASA has never blown anything up for no reason (or not accidentally). This comet, if left alone, will eventually melt by comeing to close to/hitting the sun. This inannimate object's fate is set by orbital mechanics. Might as well learn something about it first.

The goals of this mission are a lot more important than a little space junk floating around (again, where it will never be seen/negatively effect anything ever). One of the questions that NASA hopes to answer is "Can the course of a comet be altered to reduce the effect of, or avoid, a collision with Earth?" The Earth will be in the pathway of something big sooner of later. Might as well figure out how to stop it from hitting us. That's the future of the human race we're talking about. Is that arrogant?

We don't know that yet. Not that I have anything against NASA

I am still waiting for the morther ship to arrive though

Astrophysicists enter stage right on my three: 1... 2... 3!


Even if the comet were teeming with little cometbugs (it isn't) I think it safe to say we're not negatively effecting a huge biosystem by blowing a crated in a comet like the rainforest analogy.

My mothership arrived long ago. I brought me here

EVERYTHING comes back at one point or another. Those 'insignificants' you talk about...they will effect us in some weird way we're not realizing right now. By even putting explosives out into space, you are altering what kind of objects are normally found there. The reminants will react with what is naturally out there now and change the way things are sooner or later.

There aren't any explosives on the probe.

Should early man ever have left Africa? Clearly by doing so they effected what was normally found on the other continents. By taking an airplane you put abnormal amount of water vapor into the atmosphere causing known climate change. Should we ground all aircraft? Everything we do effects everything around us.

The notion that the universe on every level is in some sort of perfect ying-yang stasis and that we need to walk on tip-toes to refrain from upsetting it is a false one.

I wouldn't mind if she had a legitimate case, such as NASA targeting her home for the Hubble de-orbit.


Arrogance? I don't think that's the word you're looking for. NASA is the best and the agency constantly has to ask for funding and explain exactly why to a bunch of currupt twits who don't understand any science beyond kickbacks, graft and redistricting.


When you spend $80 million - $4 billion on a project, you have a pretty damned good reason for doing it. NASA does: science and exploration.

There is nothing that NASA send up which is obsolete, save for the Space Shuttle, and it's still helping do good science. Everything is a mixture of cutting edge and reliability. You don't seem to understand how big space is nor how long it takes to get somewhere out there. Even if the camera on Cassini is obsolete by our consumer standards, it worked, after eight years of being in outer space, the harshest environment known! No matter how well you take care of it, your little camera will be dead in two or three.


Human curiosity and a thirst for knowledge. Or do you think we'd be better off going back to the Dark Ages, understanding nothing, working the land for our masters, dying in our thirties, etc.?

That "junk" we leave up there tells us a lot before it becomes junk. We aren't "blowing up" a comet; we're dropping a little 400kg piece of copper on a piece of rock /snow/ice/??? that's 4-6km wide. How much damage does a little don't-slip-on-the-snow pebble do when it hits a truck? That's about the scale, except the truck would have to be half a mile long.

Whz are we doing it? Because we -- humanity -- has wanted to know WTF comets are made of ever since we saw them. We can finally find out.


How many species do you think are living on an cold rock in outer space which will probably eventually be drawn into Jupiter and slam into that planet just as so many other asteroids and debris have done over the aeons?

There are a bajillion rocks out there. This one's close enough to get to.

woof.

How do they use conventional explosive without oxygen is what I want to kno? DW can u help ?

Well said, and I particularly liked the above. I have to explain to people all the time why the computer network on the Space Station uses 386 computers (Intel is on rev Z of the chip and thus they are dead reliable, power and heat rejection capabilities are a valuable resource and 386s are stingy on both, you don't NEED any more than that when you have no GUI and build a taylored operating system directly to the hardware and the task you are trying to complete, etc.).


It's purely kinetic. 400kg moving at about 40,000kmph (Dang!).

I'm not a chemist, but I'd thought that the explosives have the oxygen build in, some chemical structure with a lot of Hs and Ns and Os.

I cannot believe that I read this thread anymore than I can believe people actually give a shit about a law suit that won't happen concerning the partial destruction of a piece of lifeless rock several hundred thousand miles away that none of us will ever/would ever have seen. Even in America you can't sue people for reasons as spurious as those.

@ Jimbo
Wrong - DaimlerChrysler claim

I didn't realise the latest Mercedes was capable of space exploration Parnell?

Nope the DaimlerChrysler claim has already reached infamy amongst the (re)insurance and investment community - a group of disgruntled former Chrysler shareholders took DaimlerChrysler to court on the basis that the merger they had been sold was in actual fact a takeover. The combined sharevalue fell after the merger and hence their holdings did as well.
Bear in mind that :
The Chrysler portion of the business was haemorraging
The Daimler portion was/is highly profitable

The case involved a long drawn procedure costing DC and its reinsurers in several hundred million $ of court costs. Finally DC won (but we still paid costs).
http://www.deutsche-welle.de/dw/briefs/0,1...1546895,00.html

Several HUNDRED million $ in costs? What fucking law firm were they using? I'm clearly in the wrong job.
Nevertheless, I don't really see the correlation - that claim at least had some sense to it - suing NASA for attacking a bit of rock further away than the moon is just insanity and it won't get anywhere so I doubt that TTM's class action will be required.

Well, I came to the thread to interject, as I normally do on all things space related, but it looks like my work has been done for me. BD and DW have made good points.

can we change it up to directly sue anyone filing retarded lawsuits? Ie, an open-ended class action that will include all retardedness in the future as well? Would it be possible to go retro-active as well and get the McDonald's chick who spilled her coffee because she was an irresponsible driver in the first place?

I vote we ship people like this russian chick to the comit. Then study how quickly it blows itself up.

Asbestosis
Baycol Lipoba

both much higher

...and I was called away from the orgy of consumerism that is the Jackson Outlet Mall to inform you that there are estimated to be ~150,000 objects larger than 100 m across whose orbits intersect with that of the Earth. This one, which will be at best chipped, will not be missed.

One of the project aims is to find out a lot more about the structure of these objects, so that if we end up needing to get rid of them we can. Lots of interesting info on Near Earth Objects here - although probably best not to read it if you have a nervous disposition or worry about radiation from lettuce leaves.