it is a lonely trek for a little robot

[miriam_e]

Here is a wonderful picture taken by the cute little Opportunity Mars Rover. This was taken looking backwards on its journey to "Alvin" crater.

If you want your breath taken away then click here to see the whole enormous panorama. (Careful, the file is 3.5MB.)

Gosh! That little robot, all alone out there on another world!

And if that didn't affect you enough have a look at the pic the other rover, Spirit took last month as it approached "Larry's Lookout". (2.6MB) This pic makes my heart ache. Look to the left, far in the distance, mountains are visible beyond the plain. [sigh]

These pictures are very recent and haven't been adjusted yet for dynamic range and different camera settings in parts of the mosaics, so you are seeing them raw.

Hands up those of you who knew that there are still 2 little robots wandering around on Mars right now, perfoming experiments, exploring, and sending home postcards.

It isn't surprising if you didn't know. Our news media, like vampires, love blood, but have little or no interest in good things. Along with 99% of humanity, you are rarely told of the wonderful things we humans can do.

Comments

[rpeate.livejournal.com]

"Science"--is that something you liberals do?

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

heheheh :D

Actually, even crazy religious* people can do it. It all begins with questioning things.

(*By religion I mean mean any faith-based belief structure: belief in a god, the marketplace, government, weapons... even belief in science. That last is in some respects the most pernicious; it pretends to be science, but just recites dogma.)

[patchworkkid.livejournal.com]

'If it bleeds, it leads', as the industry mantra goes. And yeah, it is a real shame. The psychological climate of the world might be a little sunnier if there was interest in actual good news.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Yeah.
Our leaders don't lead; they do polls and then appeal to our basest motives and hates.
And our news reporters don't report news, just the same old fears.

Thank heavens humanity is getting better in spite of politicians and media. Violent crimes have been on a downward trend for as long as they've been keeping records; property crimes continue in a similar downward slope, just occasionally hiccupping in times of financial hardship (but whaddya expect?); religion has been waning for decades, including fundamentalism; each generation is smarter than the one preceding it (known as the Flynn Effect after the person who discovered it); society (on the whole) is more moral, peaceable, and respectful of diversity than ever before.

Things have been getting better for a long time... just don't expect to find out from the traditional media.

[patchworkkid.livejournal.com]

Wow. If that's for real, it has completely eluded me.

Each generation is actually getting smarter? For real? I must look into all of this.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Yep the Flynn Effect is for real. It has puzzled scientists since it was found, and there are various explanations. My own theory is simply that smarter parents produce even smarter children, so it is a self-fuelling phenomenon, and that it works by each generation of parents stimulating their children more. Once upon a time (not very long ago) children were owned by their parents, put to work in mind-deadening tasks as soon as they could walk, and were seen, not heard... preferably not even seen. These days we lavish great effort on stimulating children's minds from a very early age. There have been countlessly repeated studies showing that brain mass and intelligence of babies increases with amount of stimulation. In fact it doesn't end with children; brains grow smarter and more complex if we continue to stimulate them throughout life. (You have to be careful though as not all stimulation is good. Loud noises can cause stress to set in and worsen a child's frame of mind, though some amount of stress seems to be good.)

These days children in late primary school understand concepts that challenged the world's greatest geniuses of only a couple of centuries ago, and their twitch-speed exceeds that of highly trained jet fighter pilots.

January 1999 issue Scientific American had an interview with James R. Flynn, who discovered the effect. Only a teaser is online, but I can scan the entire article for you if you wish (I have Scientific American issues going back to the late 1950s). But a better for a quick overview on it is at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Flynn believes that although IQ is rising people aren't getting smarter. I've never understood how he can reconcile those two, especially when it only takes a minute to look around at how smart kids are now. Perhaps he really means "wiser". I actually think we are getting wiser too, but that it is a slower process than simple intelligence gains.

I can find references for all those other things too if you want. The downward trend is of crime well known in criminology circles. Papers and TV do such a great job of making the reverse look true that many people simply flatly refuse to believe it when told. (Religious people especially, who often seem to be hoping for armageddon and think their perception of worldwide degeneration is the herald of the coming rapture.)

I placed a small piece on religious decline online a while ago for someone to read. It is still at:
http://users.tpg.com.au/miriame/lj/religious%20decline.html
Only born-agains show increases on the graph, and I think that is a temporary blip. There is other info to indicate that even they are losing followers overall. This is possibly related to growing intelligence.

[patchworkkid.livejournal.com]

I just linked to that, hope you dont mind. Thanks very much!

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

no probs :)
glad to help

[damien-wise.livejournal.com]

Jeez, that a beautiful pic. :)

Gosh! That little robot, all alone out there on another world!
Hey, it's got an identical buddy [doing the martian equivalent of wheelies, I'd like to think] somewhere else on the planet. And the mothership is still doing laps overhead, relaying messages and taking aerial photos, isn't it?

It's a pity that media interest is waning, because they're still doing useful work and teaching us more and more about remote robotic applications/tech.
I was sad the other day when I heard that they're going to pull the plug on the Voyager programme.
I know it's got a tiny (low-wattage) transceiver and its solar panels aren't too effective at that distance from the sun, but I'd like to think that we can at least keep in touch a bit longer...

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Lonely, in that there is nothing else out to the horizon. Its partner robot is far away, elsewhere on the red planet. The mothership is in regular contact, but still... that landscape is pretty darned bleak. I can just imagine it, trundling its way slowly along... all alone.

Yes, I heard they were going to end the Voyager programme. That does seem a pity. How much would it cost to look in on it from time to time? Sad.