No, no, no: Turning Jupiter into a star will save all that precious life. All those worlds are ours except Europa. As long as we attempt no landing there, everything will be fine.
Have you read it yet?
People just have no sense of scale, when it comes to astronomy.
aryk29, this is a picture of some NASA technicians working on Galileo. It’s about thirty feet high, and weighs a little under 5000 pounds. The planet Jupiter is 89,000 miles in diameter. Are you getting the scale differential here? If the Galileo probe were the size of this period > . < then Jupiter would be three times the height of the World Trade Center. I don’t care what you put in it, there’s no way something that small could cause something that big to completely combust.
Secondly, we’ve learned a whole lot more about plutonium from the days of Ed Wood B-movies. It doesn’t give people superpowers. It doesn’t make giant lizards. And it doesn’t accidentally blow up planets.
Also, there’s no chance of any Earth bacteria from the probe surviving entry into Jupiter’s atmosphere. Resistance to radiation is one thing (although I’d like to know where that quote about “radiation that would kill a human 1,000 times over” came from.), but nothing on Earth could withstand the heat of an unshielded re-entry into our own comparatively thin atmosphere. Sufficient heat will kill any life form native to Earth. The native life on Europa or Jupiter (if there is any, and I’d like to see a cite for the discovery of “organic matter” on Jupiter) might be a different story, but that’s not what the NASA scientists are trying to kill.
And lastly, when it comes to astrophysics, what exactly consitutes being “overqualified”? For such an incredibly complex field as space exploration, I should think that one could not possibly have too many qualifications.
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.
I’m half crazy all for the love of you
Good show, Miller. I just want to add that Jupiter already had many, many times more plutonium than is in the Galileo probe. In fact, given its huge size, it may well sweep up several Galileo’s worth of plutonium from interstellar dust every mumblemumble years. You might as well fret that a meteor shower will add extra iron to Earth, thus upsetting its delicate magnetic field, thereby ending civilization as we know it.
Personally, I blame all those movies like The Wretched Remake of the Time Machine or The Day the Earth Caught Fire, in which a really big nuclear blast knocks an entire planet out of orbit.
Strange, I was about to post that very thought myself. Flying ass monkeys and all. Stop reading my mind. :eek:
Just out of curiousity, aryk29, what would you rather they did with the thing?
Let it wander around through the jovian system until it finally hits a moon? Oh MY GOD, it’s full of PLUTONIUM! It could ignite the moon on fire!* It could start a runaway nuclear reaction and blow the moon out of orbit so it crashes into the Earth!* Because moons have low gravity, the impact could blow plutonium through the whole Solar System and give us all cancer!* I mean, scientists don’t think this would happen, but we don’t know!!!
Or do you have equally well-informed notions about plunging it into the Sun or something?
[sub]*No, not really.[/sub]
BTW, organic matter isn’t a very good indicator of the potential for life. There’s organic matter in asteroids and comets. There’s organic matter in interstellar dust. There’s organic matter in vast clouds of gas. Organic matter is just molecules made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen, which, if you consult a chart of cosmic abundance of elements, are four of the five most common elements in the Universe. (The other one is helium, an inert gas, incidentally.) While organic molecules are one requirment for life as we know it, a more critical and rarely-found prerequisite is liquid water (or liquid something, anyway). This makes Europa a potential place to find life due to the possiblity of an ocean under the surface, and the atmopshere of Jupiter a pretty unlikely place to find life.
This reminds me… wasn’t there something about a year ago with vaguely similar catastrophism? A Liberal
Democrat site – definitely not the Official DNC Site – procaimed the dangers of a proposal to mine
the moon? Something about “Upsetting the delicate gravitational balance of the earth-moon system” or
words to that effect.
Ohmigosh! The moon is heading straight for us! And it’s all the fault of those wacky, wascally
Wepublicans!
True Blue Jack
Republicans are evil, but luckily, I don’t think they have that kind of power over time and space. 
Alright, you guys, this is the BBQ Pit. Usually I’m the one deriding peoples’ knowledge of science.
So you want cites. First, the 13Mj cite:
Dead Badger, I’d be happy to explain to you my calculations. Based on data in the Gliese catalog, which used to be available at http://adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/adc/adc_cat1_holdings.html, an M9 main sequence star, the coldest and reddest in the classification system, has an absolute magnitude of 11.27. That’s how bright it would look at a distance of 1 parsec.
Magnitude is the negative exponent of 2.512 that specifies how bright a light source is. Thus 2.512 raised to the power of -11.27 is 3.103x10^-5 which is a relative measure of an M9 star’s intrinsic brightness. The Sun’s absolute magnitude is 4.85 or .01148 relative intrinsic brightness. At a distance of one A.U., the Sun has an apparent magnitude of -26.72 which is 4.25 trillion times as bright as it would appear from 1 parsec.
Since light intensity is proportional to the inverse square of the distance, we must figure Jupiter’s distance from the Earth at closest approach. Jupiter orbits the Sun at 5.204 A.U. which, minus the Earth’s semi-major axis, gives us a minimum distance of 4.204 A.U. which is .0566 times the brightness it would have at a distance of one A.U.
The above figures give us a result of 7.464x10^6 relative apparent brightness, from Earth at colsest approach, if Jupiter were to be replaced by an M9 star. That’s a magnitude of -17.18.
Europa orbits much too close to Jupiter. If the behemoth planet were replaced by an M9 star, its icy moons would vaporize.
And no, I do not have a cite for the discovery of organic matter in Jupiter, however, it has long been known that 1.) Jupiter has electrical storms that far exceed Earthly thunderstorms, and 2.) passing an electric current through a mixture of the gases present in Jupiter’s atmosphere invariably produces amino acids, the precursor to proteins.
Oh, and True Blue Jack, the Moon is actually receeding from the Earth at the rate of 3.8 centimeters per year.
Which is remarkable as a M class star has 0.5 to 0.1 Solar Masses while Jupiter has 0.001 Solar Masses. So where exactly is this Jupiter -> Star reaction picking up the mass?
I would also like to point out that smog is nothing more than organic matter and it still has yet to produde a life form.
This scares me.
I don’t think that anybody would dispute that. However, there is no known physical way for Jupiter to become an M9 star, mostly because an M9 star is, at a minimum, one tenth the size of the sun, which would make an M9 star’s mass rougly 1.9 * 10^29 kg (google, “mass of sun”, god I love goodleCalc). Jupiter, on the other hand, is only about 1.9*10^27 kg, which leaves Jupiter about 1000 times too small to be an M9 star.
No 30 pounds of plutonium, and no amount of copying irrelavent examples out of your astronomy textbook, is going to change that.
-lv
Textbook?
My point was that it’d be too dim to wreak havoc on Earth.
See, the lowest number I have is for an M9 star because that’s as far as the scale goes…
[crickets chirping]
Ah the hell with it.
What the hell are you going on about anyway? First we get this
The damn planet will not turn into a star. I don’t care that we don’t know the lower limit of a brown dwarf, we’re damn sure it’s not 1 Mjupiter otherwise we have a damn brown dwarf already no? Then there’s the small fact that the damn RTG is not going to suddenly trigger proton-proton fusion across the Jovian atmosphere.
Oh and the “organic matter”. Trying to link a 1960 glass chamber experiment that required atmospheric gases passing through a liquid “ocean” seems to be a poor analogy to the 20 km of thin atmospheric gases that vaporized Galileo.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
LordVor, that scares you? Do you know me personally? Have you ever even met me? are you going to judge me based on one piddle ass thread? Is it my fault pobody’s nerfect? Alright so I forgot about the damn heat of reentry. Big whoop. So sue me. Or better yet use a 1920s stlye death ray.
Oh, right, I forgot. That’s right, you’ve actually been to Jupiter and you know for sure that it has a solid surface underneath those 20 km of atmosphere and it has NO WATER WHATSOEVER let alone liquid water, and hence there is no possibility whatsoever that any kind of life will ever exist on Jupiter.
Yup.
What ocean? Can you give me a cite that says there needs to be an ocean?
I just hope when they send manned missions outside the solar system looking for life, people like you are stuck on Earth. :eek:
What’s with all the attitude? Is it really a matter of life or death that what I say is 100% accurate? Sheesh! This is getting childish. You guys feel free to post whatever you want here. I’ll never see it. And I’m not going to dignify any of you people with a response anymore.
Tell that to the folks in Japan, or haven’t you seen the documentary they made about it?
Just FYI, but yes, we are going to judge you based on this one piddle ass thread, beacause that’s pretty much all we have to judge you on. And, really, “Plutonium on the Galileo probe is going to turn Jupiter into a sun!” scores pretty damned high on the Crank-o-Meter. You’re out there in the cold with Bart Sibrel and Immanuel Velikovsky, and frankly, that sort of ignorance about basic science is pretty frightening.
Well, I’m hardly an astronomer, but it seems pretty obvious that there has to be some source for the gravity holding all those miles of atmosphere together. Otherwise, Jupiter would just be a big gas cloud, and would have disipated centuries ago, no? There’s got to be some sort of solid core down there somewhere. And considering the immense volume of all that gas, the pressure down at the surface must be extreme. Since pressure equals heat, I doubt that water would stay liquid. If anyone with a more relevent education than a undergraduate degree in English Lit. can confirm or deny that, I’d appreciate it.
Well, as far as we know, 100% of all life in the universe started out in an ocean. Of course, we are dealing with a pretty small sample (i.e. just Earth), so we could be wrong about that. Still, seems highly unlikely that Jupiter could develop any sort of an ecosystem, all things considered.
Hey, if we ever get to the point of sending manned misisons outside of the solar system, I don’t care who they send. I’ll just be glad we’re finally going.
On the off hand chance that you’ll still be back to this thread despite having proclaimed your intention to never return (but really, how often does something like that happen?), you should probably note the motto on the SDMB homepage: Fighting Ignorance Since 1973. I’m really not trying to flame you, here, but this sort of uninformed pseudo-science is exactly the sort of ignorance this board was formed to fight. If you don’t want your presumptions challenged, there are (tragically) all sorts of boards out there run by people who would love to hear about the dangers of igniting Jupiter, provided you’re willing to put up with their equally implausible theories on rogue planets, NASA cover-ups, and cattle-abducting space-aliens. On the other hand, if you aren’t afraid of vigorous debate and are open to the idea that you just might be wrong, then you can learn a hell of a lot about how astronomy and the space program really work.
You forgot about the heat of reentry. Big whoop. The bit that scares me is that you seemed to forget that you stood up to repeated cites showing and scientifically explaining why the 30 pounds of plutonium in the probe couldn’t possibly ignite Jupiter and turn it into a star, and seem to continue stating that we cannot know anything that we haven’t witnessed in person.
I imagine, for instance, that we can tell by the amount of radiation that Jupiter emits that it’s internal temperature is too hot for liquid water. Or that, for instance, we can tell by Jupiter’s volume (which we can measure by observation) and mass (which we can measure by the effect that it’s gravity has on the rest of the solar system), and the known densities of the elements that Jupiter can’t have a solid surface.
It wouldn’t even scare me if you held that initial opinion, but to not bow before the greater knowledge presented? Scary.
Actually your greatness you are still completely full of it. From JPL’s Galileo site
So, thin clouds to 50 km and then 21,000 more kms of clouds. Hmmm.
You brought up the Urey experiment. Not my fault the experiment set up was based on a scenario not possible in Jupiter’s atmosphere. I suppose it’s just another mistake…:rolleyes:
What a loss! A rant againt NASA based on wildly inaccurate information and astounding stupidty, I’m sure we will all miss your insights.
Well it’s better than the flying moth. Did I miss something or is there a late model Zotti in the lower left corner? 