back to article It’s payback time as humans send a probe up alien body

“We hit something the size of South London from ten years away.” Thus spake Reg reader Colin Ritchie the other day in response to The Register’s ongoing coverage of Rosetta’s extraordinary space odyssey. 2001: A Space Odyssey - The Monolith On The Moon The significance of such an achievement should not be underestimated. In …

  1. Conundrum1885

    Cue Photoshoppage here

    "Need a jump.. ?" (Crank 2:High Voltage)

    I expect all the conspiracy theorists are spaffing all over their copies of "Weekly World News" right now trying to explain how the rocks have moved between pictures etc.

    Hint: Before anyone comments it is due to the comet rotating and causing the light to change.

    Gives the illusion of movement and in fact there is no life on the co(u()udq <NO CARRIER>

  2. ukgnome
    Alien

    Bouncy bouncy

    all your washing machine sized probes belong to us.

    1. Mark 85

      Re: Bouncy bouncy

      Are we sure it's not a probe sized washing machine? Rumor has it that the aliens aboard the comet/spaceship haven't done laundry in quite a few millennia.

      1. Anonymous Custard
        Joke

        Re: Bouncy bouncy

        Well it would certainly explain the reported bad smell that the comet has, based on the analysis and all the various hydrocarbons and such...

  3. xperroni
    Paris Hilton

    That refreshing anal angle

    We might as well ask for a custom icon, for the off chance of Lewis not writing about violating someone else's behind.

    Oh, and I don't think this was addressed to Scotland's team, oh no.

  4. xyz Silver badge

    Catford calling...

    The wordsmith is welcome south of the river anytime for a right Phileaing

    1. Alistair Dabbs

      Re: Catford calling...

      Bromley replying: already here, pal.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Alien

    I had to laugh

    the expectation of having to put up with a lot more piss-taking from the Americans

    Those dumbass Yurpeens don't know nothing about space. *cough*

    1. Mike Flugennock

      Re: I had to laugh

      Point well taken. Robert Goddard (US) may have invented the liquid-fueled rocket, but it took Von Braun's team to really make something out of it.

  6. Sinical
    Childcatcher

    Soft landing a probe (if it is a probe) on a comet (if it is a comet) 500 million kilometres from earth (if it is earth) is OK but what is more impressive is that someone has managed to ignore 15 years or so of trends, guidelines, good manners, good judgement and common-sense and managed to produce a blog quite that offensive to the eyes. Sadly I didn't get to read the no doubt well thought out and robustly argued contents as my not so stupid mind (stupid, stupid) forced me to close the browser to prevent permanent damage from that horror.

    I salute your courage Sir for venturing into the wilds to find that monstrosity, but condemn your willingness to promote such filth.

  7. Bill B
    Coat

    Escaping aliens

    One word

    Clangers.

    (walks away whistling)

    1. David Given

      Re: Escaping aliens

      *cough*

      https://twitter.com/hjalfi/status/533027465053356032

  8. Scott Broukell
    Meh

    Amatuers !

    My missus always keeps the batteries on our probes fully charged, even when, more often than not, they are deployed where the sun don't shine. (eew)

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It was outrageous!

    That the poor scientists had to make do with only a 26Kbps connection. This simply demonstrates the dire state of broadband connectivity forcing our scientists to use a V.34 link. But at such low bitrates and 28 minutes lag, alien noobs won't be beating us at CS or CoD any time soon.

    1. AndrueC Silver badge
      Joke

      Re: It was outrageous!

      That the poor scientists had to make do with only a 26Kbps connection.

      Indeed. Even Ofcom insists on a minimum of 28.8kb - this is the 21st century after all!

    2. Jes.e

      Re: It was outrageous!

      "But at such low bitrates and 28 minutes lag, alien noobs won't be beating us at CS or CoD any time soon."

      I don't think the bandwidth matters here.. that ping time is a killer!

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bwah ha ha

    That ufosightingsdaily site is a lot more readable than the Daily Mail one.

  11. MrT

    Don't drop a Clanger...

    ...but I'd rather it be Mathilda May* from Lifeforce who arrives on the back of this comet.

    * other less SFW images do exist... 8-)

  12. Zack Mollusc
    FAIL

    The most depressing part of the whole mission is that it has taken ten whole years to refit the sound stage on Mars (formerly used for the Apollo 'landings') to look like the surface of a comet.

  13. Stoke the atom furnaces

    Nuclear RTG Battery

    ESA, next time take some plutonium-238 with you, instead of relying on unreliable, intermittent solar panels.

    1. Mike Flugennock

      Re: Nuclear RTG Battery

      In all fairness, Philae was originally aimed at a flatter, more sunlit space, except that its anchoring harpoon failed to fire, and the lander ended up bouncing a couple of times and finally skidded into a spot that's shadowed by a cliff. If not for the harpoon malfunction, there'd have been no solar power generation issue. Shit happens. Who coulda' known?

  14. Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

    Success?

    ..The unexpected success caught me by surprise.....

    I suggest that you look at the mission aims. The idea was to put a lander on the surface of the comet TO FILM THE OUTGASSING PROCESS AS IT PASSES PERIHELION.

    We have got a lander onto the surface, but it won't be able to do its main job come perihelion next year. I count that as a failure.

    1. David Nash Silver badge

      Re: Success?

      Actually that's what the orbiter (Rosetta) will do, still doing very nicely flying around the comet and watching (and listening in case the lander does wake up as it comes closer to the sun).

      The lander Philae was designed to have a primary mission of around 60 hours, and includes a hammer, drill, and instruments to analyse the comet's surface. Not to "film" the outgassing, which I imagine would be best done from slightly further away anyway, as Rosetta is.

      http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Pioneering_Philae_completes_main_mission_before_hibernation

  15. Mike Flugennock

    Well, what about the Huygens Titan lander?

    It's not as if ESA hasn't pulled off great stuff like this before.

    OK, granted, Huygens had to hitch a ride with Cassini, but, still... the first probe soft-landed on the surface of a planetary moon other than our own? Not too shabby.

  16. Glenturret Single Malt

    Hoots, mon

    Should have been made clearer that the reference to Scotland was related to the CRICKET World Cup.

  17. This post has been deleted by its author

  18. Oninoshiko

    In fairness to the foil-hatted conspiracy theorists...

    we keep sending "whiney and warbly signals ... for no discernible reason!"

  19. beep54
    Thumb Up

    Plan 9!!!!

    I, for one, must say a hearty 'Thank You!' for the entirety of Plan 9 From Outer Space. It messed with my head decades ago. As in, "What the fuck is THIS shit??" They just don't make 'em like this any more :)

  20. Kepler
    Boffin

    2001 and 2010

    "Alistair Dabbs . . . . has watched 2001: A Space Odyssey at least 20 times, read the short story* once and fought through the book on three occasions, and still doesn’t understand what the bloody hell Arty was on about. In his favour, at least it wasn’t as contrived and muddled as 2010."

    The ending and implications of 2001 are clear enough (at least in the book), and they render the entire plot of 2010 and the other sequels impossible. If what was clearly supposed to happen next when 2001 closes actually had happened, everything in 2010 would have been overtaken by events several years earlier.** Any single one of us would have been just as able and just as inclined to protect Europa himself as the transformed Dave Bowman was, and there would have been no ordinary humans left to threaten Europa.

    Viewed on its own, 2010 is a perfectly OK (if contrived and muddled!), or perhaps even more than OK, story; so are the other sequels (2061: Odyssey Three and 3001: The Final Odyssey). And the discovery of liquid water on Europa was new enough when 2010 first appeared (1982) that a story about the possibility of life on Europa was appealing.*** It still is, for that matter.

    But if you understand what happened and what was at issue in 2001, 2010 and its successors are the greatest anticlimax in history. Perhaps even the greatest anticlimax imaginable!

    .

    * I assume by "the short story" he means "The Sentinel"; there is no short story entitled "2001" or "2001: A Space Odyssey".

    2001 also draws heavily on at least three other Clarke short stories, though I forget what they are at the moment, and I do not have either my copy of 2001 or my collection of all his short stories at hand to check. However, "The Sentinel" is indeed the one that inspired Kubrick to approach Clarke about a joint project, and the one that 2001 draws on most centrally.

    .

    ** I can elaborate on this claim if necessary, and spell out "what was clearly supposed to happen next when 2001 closes". But I resist doing so for now. No one who has read the book should need it spelled out, and people who haven't read the book yet deserve the thrill of reading the final paragraphs and realizing what comes next for themselves. Clarke's repetition of the final sentence of Part 1 kind-of hits you over the head with it, if it weren't obvious already.

    .

    *** It is possible I am mistaken about how long it has been known or suspected that Europa has liquid water underneath its frozen surface. However, the 1977 discovery of chemosynthetic life around undersea hydrothermal vents on Earth — strongly suggestive of a similar possibility on Europa — was only about 5 years old when 2010 was published. That discovery coupled with the knowledge that Europa has a liquid ocean underneath its surface is what inspired Clarke's idea for the sequel.

    1. Kepler
      Pint

      Re: 2001 and 2010

      ". . . and fought through the book . . . ."

      I must concede and agree, though, that the book is tough to get through. The first two times I tried to read it, I couldn't get past Part One!

      (In fairness, I was only ten years old the first time. I lacked sufficient patience, and had no idea yet what a mind-blowing payoff lay further into the book.)

      .

      ". . . has watched 2001: A Space Odyssey at least 20 times, read the short story once and fought through the book on three occasions, . . . ."

      My own stats are remarkably close to those of Mr. Dabbs. I, too, have watched the movie at least 20 times (somewhere after 10 or 12 I started losing count!) and read the novel at least thrice (not counting my first two, aborted attempts). It's possible my reading count now stands at four or even five, but I just don't recall. And I hope to read it at least once more before I die.

      I've read "The Sentinel" at least twice, and probably thrice.

      .

      P.S. In every respect in which the novel differs from the short story, the novel is better:

      * using the emission of a signal rather than the interruption of an ongoing signal as the sign that "Hey, your tea is ready!";

      * burying the object instead of leaving it out in the open, but surrounding it with an intense and unusual magnetic field sure to attract the notice and attention of anyone looking;

      * that in conjunction with both the decision to bury the object in an especially geologically stable region of the Moon (so it almost certainly wouldn't ever be pushed to the surface by natural geological forces) and the decision to use exposure to the Sun's light as a trigger

      every detail in the novel pertaining to the alien object on the Moon not only made perfect sense (and far more sense than the counterpart details of the short story), but represented sheer genius, both on the part of the aliens and on the part of Clarke (or Kubrick?). It was a thoroughly masterful playing of the odds by the aliens, in light of the experiments they had just performed on those apes on the neighboring planet.

      1. Kepler
        Headmaster

        Re: 2001 and 2010

        "Clarke's repetition of the final sentence of Part 1 kind-of hits you over the head with it, if it weren't obvious already."

        (1) I meant the last two sentences, not the last sentence alone. (This fact should be obvious to anyone who has read the novel.)

        (2) Actually, in some ways the same two sentences are rather misleading the second time around, for their use implies that Dave Bowman/the Star Child has a host of options available and can do pretty-well whatever he damn pleases, when in fact he quite obviously was sent back to Earth for a very specific mission.* So one could argue that the novel's last two sentences make the story's ending less clear rather than more — just the opposite of what I asserted previously.

        However, by using the same two sentences in reference to Bowman that he had already used in reference to Moonwatcher, the ape, Clarke signals that Bowman — like Moonwatcher before him — is at a nodal point in the history of human evolution. The repetition and comparison-suggesting juxtaposition produce the kind of irony or je ne sais quoi that makes so many of Clarke's story-endings so delightful. And again, it's still quite clear what Bowman came back to Earth to do.

        .

        * Technically he can do anything he wants, I suppose — certainly there is no one and no thing that can stop him! — but he has a very definite purpose in mind that was his sole reason for returning to Earth in the first place, and that will incline him to take a very specific action in short order and not bother doing much of anything else until after that action has been completed.

        At which point he really can do anything in the universe he wants to, and so can the rest of us!

        Though presumably all our desires — like his before ours — will have been transformed and elevated, so that all sorts of baser possibilities previously imaginable will no longer interest or appeal.

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