How about Percy, for Percival Lowell?
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Last week the giant black sarcophagus was openned.
This week water is found on Mars.
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE!
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So who will get a submarine down there first
- NASA
- Roscosmos
- Elon Musk
- Cohl Furey
- Donald Trump’s Space Force
0 voters
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Missing option: The Beatles.
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Perhaps a bit depressing, and I am not saying it’s true, but:
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The good news is that over the next billion years the earth will become less and less habitable so the outer planets will look more and more attractive by comparison 
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Logical, but so Eurocentric!
For one, there are tonnes of examples in non-Polynesian languages of the same phoneme having the same or very similar meaning thousands of kilometres away from each other. My personal favourite is how “oma” is “grandmother” in Dutch and other languages, but also means “mother” in Korean. Then there’s the “- sta -” group of words, like stand, stay, ecstasy – all words about being still in the moment (ecstasy = standing in happiness).
Humans have been travellers for a long time.
But the other flaw in his argument, a bigger one, is communicated in Moana, and was a key thing the Disney writers had to learn: the Polynesians did not see themselves as living on tiny islands isolated from each other by an ocean. They saw themselves living on an ocean which was dotted with islands.
Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and some of the other ones lost their trees, and so lost the ability to built ships and travel. So yeah, they became isolated, like a small town in rural Nebraska with no petrol or horses would become isolated.
Everyone else travelled. There’s a thousand-year stretch where they just stopped, and no-one knows why – Moana tells a fictional version of the end of that era.
So in terms of space travel, NASA would do well to learn what made those Polynesian ships worth living on for weeks at a time, and try to work out how that experience could translate to space.
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With a word like “oma,” you have to allow for coincidence. Especially when babies may need the words, that may limit the sounds you can use for those words.
With -sta- you hava common origin for Indo-European, analogous to Austronesian.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/steh₂-
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Yes.
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A possible fix, but lets hope not. Actually I think Fickling’s thesis takes too little account of the level of technology, but that’s just intuition.
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Well there’s two routes technology could take:
- Make it significantly easier to reproduce and transport environments friendly to human life
- Sufficiently change what a “human” is that alien environments are friendlier with fewer changes
I suspect neither is close, though second is closer.
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I don’t get it. Why didn’t they go at night?
My apologies.
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Yikes.
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Latest tweet says they have landed safely.
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