For those of you in BBC land........

Tuesday 31 October 2006, 9pm on BBC Two:

Summary Page from the BBC website :
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes...d/tx/robotrace/

"We follow 20 robot cars on a remarkable race across the Nevada desert. These cars drive themselves. There are no drivers and no remote controls, they must navigate entirely on their own."

Looks like fun!!

Cheers

Brian

Thanks for pointing this out Brian, overall a good documentary about the competition between Stanford and Carnegie Mellon

Horizon BBC 2 – Panspermia, are we the aliens?
Overall a good documentary starting with the red (alien ?) rain of Kerala in India, discussed the extremophiles living in hot springs and even in a nuclear reactor…
It also showed the DepthX submersible test-submarine for conducting tests of a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa… I believe they said in 12 years time.
Intro viewable online:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes...tx/aliens/vote/

I agree - I was a bit worried that they were going down a totally kook filled route for a while but overall they did a good job.

Reminds me of one of Terry Pratchetts books where life on Earth gets started by a half-eaten egg-and-cress dropped by a time traveller: "If only there had been some mayonnaise, life might have turned out a whole lot different"

tty

I can accept panspermia within any given solar system, but interstellar? The odds aren't beyond the pale within a nice, deep stellar gravity well, but accelerating life-bearing material to solar escape velocities and having this stuff survive millions of years in space and assuming that it strikes at least a marginally habitable planet by sheer luck in another solar system (and it has to be a big enough chunk of rock to survive reentry, of course) seems to be pushing it...can't see life propagating thoroughout the Universe that way.

Although I am very skeptical about the idea, it would be very cool if it was true. The nice thing about the universe is that it is very big [insert Douglas Adams quote here]. It's also very old. So even things with very small probability per event have a reasonable probability of actually happening a few times, since there are so many events taking place. So I agree that I don't think it will spread life all around the universe, but it might have given life on a world or two (or a dozen...). I also don't think there would be one single source of life, if this is all true, but rather have life forming independently on a few spots due to some freak combination of events (Earth?) and then some limited spreading due to transpermia. The statistics are like with the Drake equation I guess. Unfortunately, the uncertainties in all these numbers are so big, that we can't tell either way what's likely and what's not. I think.

A thread on the subject on the Red Rain was deleted a few months ago because it was fundamentally off topic for UMSF. I wont delete this thread as it's about the program - but if it moves that way....I will.

Doug

Folks,

This thread is absolutely off topic as I originally posted it to flag up an entirely different edition of the programme: The Great Robot Race shown on Tuesday 31 October 2006, 9pm on BBC Two:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes...d/tx/robotrace/

"We follow 20 robot cars on a remarkable race across the Nevada desert. These cars drive themselves. There are no drivers and no remote controls, they must navigate entirely on their own."

Could one of the Mods split the thread into it's component parts rather than deleting the entire thread if this is deemed necessary?

Cheers

Brian

That was the plan SL - if it wandered too far from the subject, it was a swathe of OT post deletions and not a deletion of the entire thread that I had in mind.

One thread of Pure Science/Sheer Drama is probaby enough though

Doug

Perhaps someone should set up a Panspermia Forum?

Hows about "UNPLANNED SPACEFLIGHT.COM"

Nah, maybe not.........

Brian

Very good, Skyelab!