Welcome to the Growery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!
I realized that I could artificially modify DNA to change the functions of an organism. Thanks to my findings, a four-year-old girl had her own white blood cells removed, augmented with the genes that produce an enzyme called adenosine deaminase (ADA), and then reinjected into her body to treat ADA deficiency, a genetic condition that hampers the immune system’s ability to fight disease. She began producing the ADA enzyme, but new white blood cells with the corrected gene were not produced.
--------------------
Learning to love life by living through loss and mistakes
Lessons learned then gradually surfacing, Letting go, stripping naked to scream
I am not perfect nor do I strive to be, I am alive in this world of face first falls and public breakdowns
I'm a retarded, disfigured clown
Dying to be heard through the simple art of letting this heavy wall finally fall
I'm an equal being of no race, or color, a hallucination if you will
Sneaking into the lives of strangers, and letting them fall apart to a new rhythm just to feel better
I realized that I could artificially modify DNA to change the functions of an organism. Thanks to my findings, a four-year-old girl had her own white blood cells removed, augmented with the genes that produce an enzyme called adenosine deaminase (ADA), and then reinjected into her body to treat ADA deficiency, a genetic condition that hampers the immune system’s ability to fight disease. She began producing the ADA enzyme, but new white blood cells with the corrected gene were not produced.
So you're an 83 year old dude from Oklahoma, currently posting from prison, serving out your sentence for sexually assaulting one of your labmates' daughters...who was a minor at the time of the assault?
Seems legit.
-------------------- “The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you” -NDT
Don't judge, me dawg. I was young dumb and horny. Besides, she said she was 18.
--------------------
Learning to love life by living through loss and mistakes
Lessons learned then gradually surfacing, Letting go, stripping naked to scream
I am not perfect nor do I strive to be, I am alive in this world of face first falls and public breakdowns
I'm a retarded, disfigured clown
Dying to be heard through the simple art of letting this heavy wall finally fall
I'm an equal being of no race, or color, a hallucination if you will
Sneaking into the lives of strangers, and letting them fall apart to a new rhythm just to feel better
Learning to love life by living through loss and mistakes
Lessons learned then gradually surfacing, Letting go, stripping naked to scream
I am not perfect nor do I strive to be, I am alive in this world of face first falls and public breakdowns
I'm a retarded, disfigured clown
Dying to be heard through the simple art of letting this heavy wall finally fall
I'm an equal being of no race, or color, a hallucination if you will
Sneaking into the lives of strangers, and letting them fall apart to a new rhythm just to feel better
These mother fuckers are excited because they think they might have found an exoplanet with life.
This fucking "planet" is 124 light years away. It takes about 20k years to travel 1 light year which means it would take us 2,480,000 years to get there.
Are you fucking kidding me!?
That's a loooong ass fucking time... Forget about it.
Take all that time, effort, energy, money, and put it somewhere else that might actually do us some good.
Yes, I get it, it's exciting, but you can't do nothing with it.
Until we can travel at the speed of light, get the fuck outta here.
--------------------
Learning to love life by living through loss and mistakes
Lessons learned then gradually surfacing, Letting go, stripping naked to scream
I am not perfect nor do I strive to be, I am alive in this world of face first falls and public breakdowns
I'm a retarded, disfigured clown
Dying to be heard through the simple art of letting this heavy wall finally fall
I'm an equal being of no race, or color, a hallucination if you will
Sneaking into the lives of strangers, and letting them fall apart to a new rhythm just to feel better
Learning to love life by living through loss and mistakes
Lessons learned then gradually surfacing, Letting go, stripping naked to scream
I am not perfect nor do I strive to be, I am alive in this world of face first falls and public breakdowns
I'm a retarded, disfigured clown
Dying to be heard through the simple art of letting this heavy wall finally fall
I'm an equal being of no race, or color, a hallucination if you will
Sneaking into the lives of strangers, and letting them fall apart to a new rhythm just to feel better
I think they're just using the results of the research to refine the range of exoplanets that can be "habitable". This would ultimately form the list of candidates to observe for biosignatures or even technosignatures. I think it's well understood that we won't be visiting anytime soon.
-------------------- “The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you” -NDT
I get it, I really do. I think it's great and exciting.
However, nerd boy, what are they going to do with all that... Data.. eh? Get it? You get it.
It is now 2025. It's an eerie desolate land. The worlds population has been cut down to half its size thanks to the Wuhan-Clan. There's really not much going on due to everyone being depressed or crazy especially with our climate becoming more unstable by the day.
But! The group of lab rats that found and studied K2-18b are still alive and kicking AND they have their bio and techno? Untz untz untz... Signatures.
Now what? What will they do with all those signatures? Keep it in a sig book? Frame it and em on their wall?
Oh? They need more time? 5 years isn't enough? Ok, fine.
It's now 2050.
Now what?
Still nothing. They can't do anything with these signatures that will positively boost our economy as a whole.
I wonder how much time, money, effort and energy they used just to get these sigs... These pointless sigs.
Look, I think space exploration is cool as hell. I think going to Mars might be a little too expensive right now, but I'm def on board.
Wasting valuable resources on anything that 2,000,000 years away is dumb.
It's not like they are going to snap a couple pics and be done with it.
--------------------
Learning to love life by living through loss and mistakes
Lessons learned then gradually surfacing, Letting go, stripping naked to scream
I am not perfect nor do I strive to be, I am alive in this world of face first falls and public breakdowns
I'm a retarded, disfigured clown
Dying to be heard through the simple art of letting this heavy wall finally fall
I'm an equal being of no race, or color, a hallucination if you will
Sneaking into the lives of strangers, and letting them fall apart to a new rhythm just to feel better
Your attitude is/has been shared by the majority of the population since the dawn of time.
Whole branches of mathematics came in to being decades or even centuries before we found something "useful" to do with it. Ancient astronomers solve seemingly useless problems like "why does this one star move around throughout the year, why doesn't it move like I think it should? What is causing these movements through the sky?" centuries before we ever had the ability to make it above the karman line. Their research has ultimately led to successful spaceflight, near-earth object tracking systems, GPS, etc.
Relativity was just a novel way of looking at things to again close the gap between theoretical and empirical data...and we now use its results to realize a sub-meter GPS system, control nuclear reactions, and advance the state of modern medicine. The only way that such a theory comes about is by gathering shitloads of empirical data, comparing that data to current models, and trying to tweak or improve the model to fit a more general dataset. We cannot improve on our understanding of the universe without observing it.
Knowledge is power, and knowledge can drastically change humanity's path of development. Positive bio-signatures would give real data to estimate the distribution of life in the galaxy, shattering most sane people's ego regarding earth being the only life-harboring place in the universe. Discovering microbes or even multi-celled lifeforms elsewhere in the solar system would have an even bigger impact, similar to living alone on an island your entire life, with nothing but coconuts and the occasional seagull to keep you company, and suddenly meeting a dog on your morning walk. Think about how people are currently reacting to an new terrestrial lifeform that suddenly became relevant to them, now imagine the reaction of finding out that there are lifeforms completely foreign to their multi-billion year evolutionary path on a planet or moon close enough to travel to in less than a lifetime. Techno-signatures from an exoplanet would be even more impactful, indicating not only life outside of the local neighborhood, but intelligent life. We may not have luminal/superluminal spacecraft, but what about another intelligent lifeform? We may not currently be able to survive multi-century space flights, but what about them? And what does that say about the prevalence of intelligent life in the local section of our galaxy? My guess is that findings like these would fundamentally change the way humanity views its place in the universe, as well as its priorities moving forward.
And either way, the people who know where the closest truly habitable exoplanet is can best plan an escape attempt should our planet truly go to shit. Again, knowledge is power.
This is why researchers tend to push back when met with this type of mentality. Research is not and should not be business-centric. You shouldn't require a practical application to justify the research, because the ultimate application for the research results may be decades or centuries out. You certainly can go into research with an end-goal in mind, but it shouldn't be a requirement.
-------------------- “The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you” -NDT
Again, I'm all about space exploration and gaining knowledge to further expand us as a humanity and quite possibly have an out.
My point is that we need to pick and choose our battles, so to speak...
I think it's cool that they found a habitable planet. The idea of earth being the only planet in our galaxy that can sustain life is garbage. Finding this planet opens so many doors. Doors that we shouldn't be opening right now.
We need to focus more on our problems at hand.
I'm not just talking about K2-18b. I'm talking about all space exploration right now..
Shit is all sorts of fucky and if we don't do anything about it, all those nerd boys will have wasted all their resources for nothing.
--------------------
Learning to love life by living through loss and mistakes
Lessons learned then gradually surfacing, Letting go, stripping naked to scream
I am not perfect nor do I strive to be, I am alive in this world of face first falls and public breakdowns
I'm a retarded, disfigured clown
Dying to be heard through the simple art of letting this heavy wall finally fall
I'm an equal being of no race, or color, a hallucination if you will
Sneaking into the lives of strangers, and letting them fall apart to a new rhythm just to feel better
We are the civilization that can figure out how to take a polaroid of a planet 20 trillion light years away but can’t figure out how to get homeless mental patients to stop shitting on the streets of San Francisco. Homelessness, ain’t no money in that!
This place is so twisted around, money trumps logic. All this suffering is self inflicted. Pretty soon wheat will be $4,000 a pinch and water will be reserved only for the royals.
Human nature: Figure out how to fly to another planet before we kill this one because adjusting our behavior is wack yo. People think the earth is a balled up McDonalds bag.
Learning to love life by living through loss and mistakes
Lessons learned then gradually surfacing, Letting go, stripping naked to scream
I am not perfect nor do I strive to be, I am alive in this world of face first falls and public breakdowns
I'm a retarded, disfigured clown
Dying to be heard through the simple art of letting this heavy wall finally fall
I'm an equal being of no race, or color, a hallucination if you will
Sneaking into the lives of strangers, and letting them fall apart to a new rhythm just to feel better
I agree with both of you that there are definitely more pressing issues at hand, which is why most astronomy work is done with as little grant money as possible, and usually relies on maintaining equipment that is way older than it should be. Having worked in space-related research, I can tell you that your opinion is what is happening right now. There is very little money available for space research, even though it gets an overblown media presence due to its ability to be polished up and easily presented in click-bait form.
The fact of the matter is that NASA in general gets a tiny fraction of the federal budget as compared to defense spending (the increase in the defense budget from 2019 to 2020, representing a 3% increase in the defense spending, is equal to NASA's entire 2020 budget). NOAA's budget is even less than NASA's, and the entirety of the NSF research federal expenditures represents about 1/20th of our federal defense budget. It isn't that we should only research one field at the expense of another, there is plenty of money to be had, but our leaders are choosing to spend it on other things that don't really address our problems. As far as relative expenditures on research topics, the NSF funding allocation numbers are out there to review, and tend to reflect what you are talking about. So again, its not a matter of fucked up priorities within the sciences, its more a matter of fucked up priorities within our society.
Furthermore, a ton of research happens in the private sector, which is primarily driven by market demands. This research is much more well-funded, but tends to focus on more predatory/wasteful/superfluous garbage than towards things that help society. And even if it does help society, its only available through a massive paywall. Changing the minds of the populace or the motivational scope of corporations (beyond the quarterly earnings report) would open up tons of research funding towards whatever fits your ideal of important. Until then, its just dollars spent figuring out how to fuck us harder.
There is also the issue of specialization. A researcher dedicated to exoplanet research is not going to make a good design engineer coming up with near-earth space debris cleanup systems. A propulsion researcher is not going to be good with climate research. If the researchers exist, and they can do limited research on a very sparse budget, then why not let them?
Finally, I have said multiple times that I agree a better and more feasible solution to our problems would be trying to fix them here, on this planet. However, its always smart to have multiple options. Its like not bringing a flotation device or lifeboat on a deep sea fishing drip because you've got a sump pump and a bailing bucket. Research is also a cross-disciplinary practice. The understanding gained from observing planetary systems abroad could help dial in planetary models at home, thus helping in the struggle to fix our local problems. The number of times my prior interests/hobbies/personal research into seemingly unrelated topics has helped me solve a practical problem in my official research is pretty significant, thus I tend to place high value on the concept of a well-rounded research scope.
So I guess I agree and disagree with various parts of your opinion?
-------------------- “The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you” -NDT
Really, it is what it is and people will do what they do. Not much I can do about it.
The nerds of tomorrow will have to come together and overcome the bullshit leaders of the yesterday so we can finally get out priorities in order.
Until then... Love and let live!
On a side note. Mad Mike the homemade rocket man. The spokesman for all the flat earthers. The trailer park mascot of the site died a few days ago. A parachute sucked into his engine which caused his to rocket to fail and down he went.
--------------------
Learning to love life by living through loss and mistakes
Lessons learned then gradually surfacing, Letting go, stripping naked to scream
I am not perfect nor do I strive to be, I am alive in this world of face first falls and public breakdowns
I'm a retarded, disfigured clown
Dying to be heard through the simple art of letting this heavy wall finally fall
I'm an equal being of no race, or color, a hallucination if you will
Sneaking into the lives of strangers, and letting them fall apart to a new rhythm just to feel better
Threaded
Previous
Index
Next
[Re: 
Edit 
Reply 
