The years were worth the wait. JWST gives us an amazing view of Neptune's rings The James Webb Space Telescope has snapped the clearest picture of Neptune, capturing its dust rings and seven moons, in more than 30 years. Neptune, designated the furthest planet in the Solar System after Pluto was demoted to a dwarf world in 2006, is more than 2.6 billion miles away from Earth. The only spacecraft to visit …
I was asked on an American forum what my favourite present was, I replied the ISS. I had an app on my phone that alerted me when it was overhead and would show me it's cameras of where I live. Except I live in Scotland so I only ever saw the topside of the cloud above me.
Somebody smart once said that an intelligent species on a world with a dense atmosphere might not realise space exists and so would never think to explore it. Even in Scotland we see the sky sometimes, just never when the ISS is overhead. I deleted the app. I'm curious if the James Webb space telescope can see my home town on a day like this.
"Somebody smart once said that an intelligent species on a world with a dense atmosphere might not realise space exists and so would never think to explore it."
Yep, like the Masters of Cricket, in Douglas Addams' "Life, the Universe and Everything".
If you're in the UK, mate, you have no excuse for not having read it already !
They flew out of the cloud.
They saw the staggering jewels of the night in their infinite dust and their minds sang with fear.
"It'll have to go," the men of Krikkit said as they headed back for home.
On the way back home they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life, and the obliteration of all other life forms.
Oh, I've read it, even listened to the Radio 4 series, but now my eyesight is poor so I can't reread it. I'm grateful for you lot filling in the potholes in my memory. To be honest I think that was one of the many pre-existing ideas that Adams righteously recycled.
I think I mentioned I've been a bit poorly lately, like death's door poorly without the strength to knock (why don't they have a doorbell?) and last week was feeling self pity. I watched Frozen Planet 2 and fell asleep to Wonders of the Universe by Brian Cox, like being hugged by my mum and cuddled by my first love at the same time. They should play that constantly on hospital radio.
I think the idea that denizens of a cloudy planet wouldn't know about space was common in science fiction before the Mariner 2 flyby in 1962, when it was still thought that Venus might be a hot, swampy, inhabited planet. The only two examples I can think of are :
- _Tumithak of the Corridors_, written in the 1930s (humans land on Venus, are immediately killed, Venusians realize there's an outside universe, build spaceships and invade Earth). Don't remember the author.
- Don't remember the title, but Heinlein wrote a story in the 1940s in which humans have colonized the poles of Venus, the equator being uninhabitably hot. One character explains to another that the natives near the north pole think humans came from the south pole, and vice versa; tell them about Earth, and they think you're explaining your religion.
Both predate Douglas Adam's fine work, and I think Asimov and/or Clarke may have touched on this subject as well.
They would figure out something exists beyond what they can see once they had the ability to detect different wavelengths and could see their Sun as a disc instead of diffuse light, and certain stars/galaxies as radio and gamma point sources.
That would drive them to launch rockets above their cloud layer - and they would just be astonished at what they saw! And how big it was when they did their first parallax measurements.
If their dominant religion held that their planet was all there was in creation, such discoveries when they were at a level of technological development where nuclear weapons were a possibility could be problematic. Imagine the Crusades fought with H bombs.
Why are we looking at junk in our backyard when the aliens are in the Andromeda galaxy? I suppose if you looked at one red-shifted ancient galaxy you've seen them all and boredom has set in. Maybe they should try to catch a meteorite with that big mirror.
(Disclaimer: I find JWST fascinating. Been following this since it was just a pile of parts in a clean room).
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