** The Official Space Flight Thread - The Space Station and Beyond **

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If you like films like Contact then Arrival is a belter of a movie. The linguistics expertise the makers employed was scientifically sound from the behind the scenes interviews and things I watched. Also the way it was done was really nice, too.



This is another possibility, but then we also have to look at our own planet. We know through historical evidence in rock weathering and archaeological findings that ancient civilisations we have absolutely zero record of existed that had technical knowledge of principal physics, gravity and the cosmos because they built structures and monuments either either aligned to the stars, in near perfect symmetry with nature or other things that we today would use computers to first blueprint. I'm by no means pointing to ancient aliens and rubbish like that lol, but the evidence still stands that civilisations built massive things that we today consider impossible which later civilisations like the Romans and Egyptians later took over. The fact that neither of the latter took credit in any writing or hieroglyphs for those structures even though they wrote about their achievements and beliefs on everything else raises the very question.

Civilisations come and go, even without a technological revolution they are smart enough to find a way to do things we simply don't fully understand today. There's every chance a civilisation on Earth only lasted a few thousand years and any record of them as people got washed away in one of the many cataclysmic events that have happened in the past like whatever turned the Sahara into a dessert land since it once had a large chunk of the Nile running all the way through to the now Western Sahara. Asteroid impact or geological event? Nobody knows at least yet anyway but as ground penetrating radar and other tech advances, they are finding out more and more every few years so I guess we will find out soon enough.

The same could easily apply to space. If a single gas giant in one seemingly perfect solar system (like ours) gets hit by a big enough asteroid to impact its position enough to change its orbit or rotation, then that could cause a chain reaction to smaller planets like ours as rocks that would otherwise be captured by their gravity might not any more - Or a CME big enough to cause surface havoc (look up the Carrington Event as an example of one in the late 1800s).

Life is quite fragile from all we know now, we are extremely lucky to have multiple gas giants taking the strain of further rock bombardment from the Oort cloud and other bodies that fly in from outside the neighbourhood. Other planets don't get so lucky, look at Mars which was once like Earth, and Venus is now said to have once been like Earth too before some climate event turned it into a bakery.

So we have strong evidence that at least one or two planets were once like Earth in our own solar system. Those are favourable odds that similar exists elsewhere. But because of how volatile space and local events are, life just comes and goes and each civilisation (assuming intelligent) may not even know one existed, just like what we are finding here on Earth.
Things like this are mind boggling, could Venus have supported life? Did they have their own intelligent creatures which made a mess of their atmosphere? We'll never really know as everything vanishes with enough time passing by.

I do think their has to be other life out there but it's just going to be impossible for any to ever meet. Maybe this is the biggest tragedy of the universe and life.

Just to add I don't believe in aliens and ancient civilisations being helped out by tall grey men but it's nice to imagine what could be going on out there.
 

TNA

TNA

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These SpaceX launches really are a low key affair now aren't they. Sounded like a team of two sat in their bedrooms controlling everything :o
I know right. It is all so blasé now.

I think the next step that will get a lot more peoples attention will be if they successfully get Starship working. Just imagine it lifting off and landing on the other side of the world within minutes. All in tact and fully reusable the same day. Now that will be something else where you say the future is here :D
 
Soldato
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Inmarsat-6 F1 launch window from around 2pm GMT.
https://www.inmarsat.com/en/about/technology/satellites/i-6-f1.html
"The world’s largest and most sophisticated commercial communications satellite is scheduled to launch from the JAXA Tanegashima Space Centre in Japan with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries onboard its H-IIA Launch Vehicle No. 45 (HIIA F45)."

Direct link to the Youtube live stream:

These H-IIA rockets are really something to behold, especially this one as it'll have the 4x SRBs attached too.
 
Soldato
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Webb rolled out to the pad for Xmas day launch, it's actually happening :eek:

Webb-on-launch-pad-51770400554_e8d47d1a5a_o-768x999.jpeg

https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2021/12/23/nasa-partners-complete-webb-rocket-rollout/
 
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