Comments by "Itinerant Patriot" (@itinerantpatriot1196) on "Destiny" channel.

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  3. As a kid who grew up during the age of Apollo, videos about exoplanets hold a certain amount of interest. But as we learn more about these alien worlds it seems Drake's Equation becomes more of a pipedream. Like that tidally locked planet they mention as a candidate for life. What life? Bacteria? Sorry, I'm not that jazzed about the prospect of finding microbial life on an alien world, even within our own solar system. What does it prove? That life can exist? All the proof we need that life can exist is found right here. Intelligent life, life that is conscious of itself and its surroundings, now that is an entirely different matter. When I was a kid, I was absolutely convinced the galaxy was teeming with civilizations and it would only be a matter of time before we met up with our interstellar cousins. I figured it was pure human arrogance to think it's just us. But the more I learned, the more skeptical I became. The balancing forces that allow intelligent life to exist on our planet are so precise that it is actually mind boggling. If our moon is just a bit smaller, or just a bit further away, our oceans behave entirely differently. If Jupiter isn't exactly where it needs to be the solar system itself becomes chaotic. If not for plate tectonics we end up with a big land mass that is mostly arid and inhospitable. And then there is the great life sustainer and guardian, our magnetic field. Take that away and you get a bigger version of Mars. There are so many other factors, too many to get into. Suffice it to say ET ain't phoning anytime soon. I still think stopping our manned exploration of the planets after the Moon landing was a mistake. We are explorers by nature and we need big dreams and goals to advance as a society. But as far as finding our cousins go, I am now regrettably in the camp that believes it will never happen. The cosmic speed limit is set and no matter how many movies about worm holes and such that we make, some limits just weren't made to be broken. And that, may be our greatest blessing. Some things, we just weren't meant to know in this lifetime.
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  6. "Maybe you have an idea of how we can stop a world ending asteroid." Well, short of calling Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton the answer is simple, it can't be done. Maybe if you had decades worth of warning you could try screwing with the trajectory but I get the feeling the one that has our name on it will come from the Ort Cloud and we won't see it until its tail fires up. As I understand it, the solar system oscillates as it traverses the galaxy and this motion causes its gravitation to interact with the gravitation of stars in our general neck of the woods and its this interaction that nudges the really big snowballs floating around in the Ort Cloud. I recall some computer model that lined up these nudges with big impacts and found the positioning lined up just right every 40-60 million years. Now, lets say one of these nudges brings another Hale-Bopp our way only this time Hale is not as accommodating and this one is going to Bopp us right on the nose. No one spotted Hale Bopp until it fired up and that sucker was 18 miles wide. If some long-term comet that big is headed our way we would have maybe six months to figure something out. Why bother. And the powers that be probably wouldn't. They would send out public service announcements saying all is well to avoid WWIII but eventually people would figure it out and WWIII would happen anyway. People are panicky and when you combine that with a fallen nature you get what Billy Bob described as: "The worst parts of the Bible." And that would be that. Most everything on Earth would be dead and the only thing left to let the aliens know we were ever here would be the litter we left behind on the Moon. And plastic. The lunar landing platforms and an empty bottle of Mt. Dew. That's why I don't worry about such things. But that's me. Live long and prosper gang. 🖖
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