Comics I Don’t Understand

Exoplanets

Cidu Bill on Aug 31st 2010

Metatext: “I’m just worried that we’ll all leave and you won’t get to come along!”

Filed in Bill Bickel, CIDU, comic strips, comics, humor, xkcd | 27 responses so far

27 Responses to “Exoplanets”

AMC Aug 31st 2010 at 12:12 am 1

We are in an exciting time of exoplanetary discovery. However, the consequences of those discoveries are - optimistically - to be realized in a “few generations”.

The “joke” is the juxtaposition of the magnitude of what is being discovered with the need to take some immediate action based upon those results - there is no need to miss any sleep, regardless of the excitement the discoveries merit. We aren’t going to be building nuke-riding-city-ships anytime soon.

In fact, we are basically shutting down NASA and our country’s space faring capabilities as these discoveries are being made.
fett101 Aug 31st 2010 at 01:49 am 2

An alliterative look, there are all these amazing discoveries happening but so many people are completley “asleep” to them. They’re out trying to teach creationism in school and stopping kids from getting vaccines.
Rebecca Aug 31st 2010 at 01:52 am 3

Well, astronomers are discovering planets that orbit around stars other than our own. Some of them might be habitable. Some time in the future, we might start building giant nuclear-powered spaceships that can house people long enough to travel to a nearby solar system. White Hat is very excited about this, even though it would take, as he says, “generations,” and therefore there’s no need to wake people up early.

I can relate. I get very excited about the possibilities of exoplanets myself. I’m more in favor of probes, though. I’ve read too much science fiction.
Igelino Aug 31st 2010 at 03:08 am 4

Reminds me of one of my friends, he was excited about mile-long spaceships and hollowed-out moons. He hoped it would happen within a generation or two. That was 30 years ago. It’s good we have new generations to get re-excited.
Kilby Aug 31st 2010 at 04:18 am 5

The fallacy in getting over-excited about manned spaceflight is that everyone likes to think that they will get to ride the spaceship (as a kid I did, too). However, before we start a new manned space program, there needs to be some clear-headed discussion about the actual goals of the mission. It requires a huge amount of logistics and money to keep the flimsy ISS tinkertoy operating at all (let alone manned to an extent that permits any actual experiments to be conducted). If you count all the people doing the aerospace engineering, the ratio of “ground support personnel to astronauts” is about the same order of magnitude as “US population to presidents”.

The race to the moon was started because of ideology, and the effective results had nothing to do with the lunar rocks, experiments, and especially not the six flags planted on the surface: it was simply an excellent way to foster engineering development (such as of computers and ICBMs). That goal has already been achieved, so it’s not a sufficient reason to send people back to the Moon or onward to Mars. Someday there may be an adequate rationale for putting a permanent base on the Moon, but for the foreseeable (long-term) future, the only sensible way to explore outside of the Earth’s orbit will be robotic probes, similar to the ones we’ve already sent to Mars and Venus. Sure, exoplanets are exciting, but they are a subject solely for astronomers, not aerospace engineers.
pepperjackcandy Aug 31st 2010 at 04:54 am 6

the six flags planted on the surface

Now that’s what I’m talking about! Thrill rides, junk food, maybe a water park . . . .

Oh, wait . . . .
Detcord Aug 31st 2010 at 05:29 am 7

Kilby (5)

I don’t disagree with anything you’ve written. I would like, however, to note that Helium 3 is considered key to nuclear fusion’s future. He3 is rare on Earth, but thought to be abundant on the Moon.

Until recently, it was thought the lack of water on the Moon would be a major obsticle to retreiving He3 from the Moon, but as we’ve recently discovered, there is plenty of water there and thus one key obsticle has been removed.

Even so, robotic devices would probably best, as providing habitat for humans off-planet is extremely expensive.
Detcord Aug 31st 2010 at 05:31 am 8

Um, … Obstacle
Ian Osmond Aug 31st 2010 at 06:58 am 9

Detcord: Helium3 is only marginally more common on the Moon than on the Earth. And it’s part of the regolith. The energy required to extract it is prohibitive. I’ve heard that it would be energetically less expensive to get it out of the Sun than out of the Moon.

The claim that He3 mining is an economic reason for lunar bases is an acceptable backstory for science fiction scenarios, but it’s not realistic.
The Bad Seed Aug 31st 2010 at 07:12 am 10

Tang!
Detcord Aug 31st 2010 at 07:44 am 11

Ian Osmond (9)

I’m not saying you’re wrong, but this link is saying something different.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19296/

I don’t think it’s Science Fact yet, but I do think the idea has moved past Science Fiction.
Andréa Aug 31st 2010 at 08:08 am 12

Synchronicity - I just finished reading Mary Roach’s “Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void” . . . interesting reading, written right before the decision to practically shut down NASA.
Matthew Aug 31st 2010 at 10:05 am 13

Whenever I see this comic strip i just want to draw faces on everybody. Is that wrong?
Jessica Aug 31st 2010 at 10:35 am 14

I interpreted it as someone making fun of a person who has a hard time waking up by using verissimilitude to make up a panicked situation. It’d be like if a mom woke up a 6-year-old for school by telling him to hurry up and pack for Disney World.
Detcord Aug 31st 2010 at 12:36 pm 15

Matthew (13)

Nope. It’s clear that, when it came to faces, the artist drew a blank. You’d simply be ‘filling in the blank’.
Matthew Aug 31st 2010 at 01:36 pm 16

Detcord (15)

I’ll call it xkcd plus artwork. It’ll be big. It will be huge. It will be bigger that Garfield minus Garfield.
Mark in Boston Aug 31st 2010 at 05:40 pm 17

It’s disappointing to watch the movie 2001 and see all those things we should have had by now but don’t (routine flights to the moon, PicturePhones, velcro no-button suits, Zero Gravity Toilets). On the other hand, did you notice the astronauts had iPads in the movie?
Chakolate Aug 31st 2010 at 05:59 pm 18

I loved this comic. I wish we all got so excited about something like this - it’s so unbelievably fabulous, yet hardly anybody knows about it.
Ian Osmond Sep 1st 2010 at 06:53 am 19

Mark in Boston: Picture Phones are one of the three “We’ll Have Them In THE FUTURE” inventions that don’t exist primarily because nobody wants them.

The other two are food in pill form, and flying cars. Remember: if you get a flying car, so does that idiot who totally blew through that stop sign in front of you.
CIDU Bill Sep 1st 2010 at 11:00 am 20

Ian, we do have picture phones now: they go by names such as Skype.

But it remains true that not many people want therm.
Mark in Boston Sep 1st 2010 at 07:14 pm 21

If you have an iPhone 4, you have a picture phone. Four years from now, every cell phone will be a picture phone.
Dave in Boston Sep 2nd 2010 at 03:22 am 22

Kilby: thing is, “fostering engineering development” isn’t something you finish. There are plenty of things that could appear as spinoff tech from a big space program. It’s sort of by definition hard to predict what, but I’ll venture one guess: cars that e.g. tell you to go replace some specific hose or gasket now in order to avoid being left on the side of the road by a coolant leak next month. This is something that is possible in principle now but has a number of technical problems that need to be sorted out to make it practical in deployment.

However, that’s moot. The real reason for a serious space program is that it’s essential as a matter of long-term survival not to remain limited to a single planet.
Kilby Sep 2nd 2010 at 05:00 am 23

Continued space exploration could provide additional spinoffs, but there is no reason why space has to be the anchor for future engineering subsidies. There are plenty of other projects on this planet that need work (such as renewable energy resources).
As for guaranteeing human survival: there is not a single ball of rock in this solar system capable of supporting a self-sufficient colony. If we can’t solve our environmental, economic, and social problems down here, then nobody up there is going to survive for very long, either.
Even if I’m wrong, I would be more worried that as soon as an independent Moon colony gets sufficiently large, some idiot who has read Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” will try to play Napoleon by dropping rocks on our heads.
Dave in Boston Sep 3rd 2010 at 07:27 pm 24

Space missions are exciting things that capture the imagination. They also have a pattern of goals and requirements that allows developing useful stuff that isn’t commercially viable until later on, without (mostly) getting stuck in boondoggles and pet projects. Space projects are not unique in this regard; military R&D sometimes has similar properties. It has to do with having a clear goal (this prevents distractions) that’s sufficiently cool and interesting that smart people want to work on it, and also sufficiently broad that it sweeps up a wide range of useful topics and ideas. For example, you mentioned renewable energy resources; any long-term space mission cares a great deal abouot efficient and lightweight solar panels.

As far as habitability, it all depends on your assumptions about available technology. Right now we aren’t good enough at closed ecosystems to make anything self-sufficient, but there’s absolutely no reason that can’t improve as long as people continue to try.

As for whether a colony would be likely to eventually take up arms, that depends almost entirely on how they’re treated by the powers back on Earth.
David A. Rooney Sep 5th 2010 at 06:16 pm 25

Dave in Boston - “depends almost entirely on how the’yre treated by the powers back on Earth”. Which virually garauntees a revolution, given how good our polititians are at sacrificing long-term goals for short-term objectives.
Morris Keesan Sep 8th 2010 at 12:10 pm 26

fett101 (#2), I have no idea what you think “alliterative” means. I don’t see any alliteration in your comment.

(Catching up on comics, and CIDU, after having been on vacation for two weeks.)
Todd Sep 12th 2010 at 03:17 pm 27

Picture phones didn’t exist before Skype because you had to have the exact same model on both ends to make a call. And instead of a video, they were a series of still images, if you were lucky. And the image was horrible.

But you’re right about the flying cars.

Where’s my oven that can turn a frozen pizza the size of a CD into a giant cooked pizza.