New Horizons: Pluto displays rippling terrain | Hacker News Reader

New Horizons: Pluto displays rippling terrain

bbc.co.uk

138 pointsantouank71 comments

I feel like we're all saying "amazing" or "incredible" but it warrants taking a few seconds and drawing a mental picture of just how - pardon the term - astronomical the task of getting New Horizons to Pluto is.

115 years ago we didn't really even have airplanes. Now we're taking color photographs of something nearly 5 billion miles away from Earth.

It's insane. I can't help but daydream about the insanity of 2130.

Come to think of it, 115 years ago we didn't even knew Pluto existed.

And it made less than half of the orbit since discovery.

> It's insane. I can't help but daydream about the insanity of 2130

this this this. I'm constantly amazed at the world and what we're accomplishing. I switched over to Engineering about 5 years ago and feel like I've finally found my happy place in life :)

Facts like this always make me wonder if perhaps we, as a species, haven't undergone some major mutation in the last 100 years or so as a result of .. I dunno, some cosmic event or something .. to accelerate our intelligence and understanding of the universe, and propel us so rapidly into the current state of things. Sometimes, it sure feels like the human species took a major, major leap somewhere .. and I wonder what it is? Sure, it can be explained culturally - the Enlightenment, world wars, medicine, etc. But how come things are being compelled along at an exponential rate so rapidly .. penicillin? Electricity? All of the above? Just: whoa. The next 100 years is probably going to be amazing ..

The simplest answer is probably that we stopped spending 90% of our effort as a species on feeding ourselves. And sure, a lot of that freed up labor went to people becoming car salesmen or yoga instructors, but a lot of it also went to people becoming scientists and engineers.

A good deal of humanity also started to "believe" in science and technology. Maybe for thousands of years people would live in spirits, gods and nature; but since the 19th century society keeps running after progress and feeds the research structure to do so. Think about it, until the 17th century, you'd risk death to dare question religion.

It's the result of a large culmination of factors. For one, it's largely an incremental process. For example, someone didn't just build the first personal computer out of thin air. There was electricity, then transistors, then microchips, etc. all 'invented' by different people but each previously needed for the latter. Secondly, in order for incremental processes to happen, there needs to be large knowledge-sharing so that people know what's possible and can build on top of previous advancements. The 20th century brought rapid globalization, long-distance communication, and now the internet, which have all rapidly increased the dissemination of information. Lastly, the population has been steadily growing, and if you believe that the more people there are, the more inventions there will be, then it makes sense that they have increased over time.

There was no major leap. Have you ever heard of the Antikythera Mechanism [1]? A small device built two thousand years ago to predict astronomical positions. As a counter argument it shouldn’t have taken us two millennia to reach the first computer. Science should have progressed a lot faster, there was no shortage of intellect. There was a shortage in political support of science though, especially if you put in the mix the strong opposition of religion which used to have a huge influence in how things were run a few centuries ago. Once that influence withered science flourished.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

If you really want to blame religion, you're going to have a hard time making the case. The ancient Greeks were quite religious, but were also quite advanced in some fields of philosophy and mathematics. They also (largely) moved war away from their mainland. They actively worked to remove the daily effort of living onto a working class, which consisted largely of non-Greek citizens. This freed up the Greeks (at least a large class of their citizens) to expend energy on what would previously have been considered trivialities or indulgences. See the Roman empire, war on the fringes made the core of the empire safer and advancement of various schools of thought much more feasible. The same story has played out in other locations at other times.

Move war and famine away from your core population. Move the core population closer together (to enable communication, this is a non-issue today with the internet). You'll see a surge in productivity and advancement of knowledge.

Humans weren't a bunch of cavemen 100, 300, or even 500 years ago. We've had things like microscopes and telescopes for 400 years. Things like algebra and geometry are over a thousand years old.

Things have just been snowballing ever since. And things will be even more insane in another 100 years.

Exactly! We've been building huge things out of stone, just because, for at least five thousand years.

Electricity is a VERY big deal. Simply having light at night is huge.

Now: add in washing machines and refrigeration.

There were two history professors recently who attempted to live with their family like it was the late 1800's. The wife broke down because all she ever did was cook and wash. If I remember correctly, the husband didn't do much better as his physical "job" left him completely exhausted every day.

I wish I could find the link, but my Google-fu is failing.

You're describing Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns.

If you subscribe to it, you'll note that innovation is exponential, such that we were innovating faster in 1900 than we were in 1800 by a greater factor than 1800 to 1700.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns

Also, lets not forget that this all really kicked off once we changed our style of governments feudalistic to capitalistic. It's not the last 100 years but rather the last 200 that made the difference the industrial revolution put into place the foundation for the advances of the 20th century. It's hard to get headwind on advancements when every few years all your stuff is being taken away due to the whims of the king/queen/new invaders etc..

I suspect, and the evidence seems to support, that things have pretty much always seemed like this. Because advancement is accelerating, it seems to an observer at any given point that things have been advancing much more rapidly that they did previously.

In The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch "discusses the rapid progress we've seen since the Enlightenment, and its cause: the rational quest for good explanations. [The book] unifies many themes of reason and unbounded progress." (http://beginningofinfinity.com/interview)

Innovation builds on itself. It's not only a positive feedback loop it's also an exponential. It builds like compound interest. Basic chemistry leads to creating the periodic table which leads to an explosion of understanding which leads to further innovations which then lead to yet more innovations. Exponentials start slow and accelerate rapidly.

Google "Accelerating change", it's basically what you're talking about and there's a lot of information about it.

Apparently the rate of inventions per capita is approximately constant. We just became a lot more.

One way you can think about it is that humanity's finally hit the "elbow" in the exponential curve of technological advancement.

That doesn't work... every point in an exponential curve is the "elbow." That's its defining characteristic, actually.

While technically true, if you stop at any point and zoom out far enough you will get something reminiscent of a hockey stick moment.

And for every way you zoom it, the hockey stick moment will be in a different point. A completely different point if you try completely different views.

Just try it.

So I think the elbow analogy has value when you note that there are two ways of describing in an elbow in the exponential function when considering finite human lifetime.

Given two points in time t,u they have progress exp t and exp u and relative rates of progress exp u / exp t = exp (u-t). So of course the relative rate of progress between 2 points in time is fixed and so we can scale our y-axis to make any 2 points have the characteristic "elbow" of an exponential.

But if we consider absolute difference between 2 points on the scale of a human lifetime over different periods of time we can see that absolute difference doesn't have the same property as relative rate of progress.

exp u - exp (t-u+u) = exp u - exp u (exp(t-u)) = exp u (1- exp (t-u))

Which I guess I'll interpret as saying that the absolute difference of progress between 2 points in time is proportional to an exponential. So for most of history that exponential was very close to zero and humans did not experience must change in a lifetime. Now however we live in a time where the exponential can be said to be nearing an "elbow."

So while over time relative rates of progress between 2 points do not vary, absolute progress between 2 points certainly does vary can be described as an elbow when measured against a human lifetime.

Ok, the lifetime of a person is a preferential zoomlevel for the time axis. But a zoomlevel for the productivity axis is still missing, so that everybody for the last 500 years did experience an elbow just before the time they were living.

And if our growth had been exactly exponential+, everybody for the last 500 years would have experience an elbow with the exact same shape. Just the magnitude would change, and so fast that everybody would dismiss the previous generation claims, just like you are doing now.

+ Now, it hasn't been exactly exponential. The exponent is accelerating since we got precise enough measurements, and funny thing is that this fact just extends that "no sudden change of behavior" further back, while still not creating any privileged zoomlevel for the productivity axis, and not letting any new generation have any claim that their time is different.

I don't disagree :)

Hopefully mankind will have invented fusion power or at least perfected solar/wind/whatever alternative power source they will invent in the coming decades, up to the point where the whole civilization is carbon-neutral, or the insanities of 2130s will be a little... insane.

Let's hope the good guys at NASA can convince politicians and pundits in the near future.

85 years ago, we didn't even definitively know that Pluto was out there.

I didn't see this link the first time, but here's a 30MB photo of the whole surface. It's absolutely incredible!

http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/cro...

I made it into a 1920x1080 wallpaper. I love high res photos of the planets for wall papers.

http://imgur.com/6EU8Tc4

The really big craters with the mountain in the center -- is that the remains of the projectile?

Phenomenal shot thanks!

Pluto being that red never crossed my mind. Although I'm a little unclear on whether or not it even gets enough sun for the human eye to see that color. If it was daytime on Pluto, would one even be able to, say, read outside?

I wonder if the light from the stars of our galaxy would provide more or less light than the sun?

Edit: To answer my own question, Phil Plait wrote about this here: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/03/15/ba...

> "[on Earth] the Sun is about 400,000 times brighter than the full Moon, so even from distant, frigid Pluto, on average the Sun would look more than 250 times brighter than the full Moon does from Earth"

NASA have a tool here:

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/plutotime/

Tell it where you live, and it'll tell you what time the light there matches an average day on Pluto, so you can go out and try it. It's surprisingly bright.

Quite surprised by that - it said 7:10pm for here in Edinburgh - which is just after sunset so still fairly bright.

I checked at 7:10pm and perfectly easy to read a book - really not what I would have thought at all.

Oh, wow. That's really neat. A little after 7pm for me. I'll be stepping outside with a book to see if I can read it.

Careful: Pluto would not look like these latest pictures to the naked eye. This image is constructed from blue, red, and near-IR color channels that have been mapped to blue, green, and red in the pictures. There's a bit more about how this image was constructed here: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/0924142...

(The earlier "true color" pictures shared over the summer were created indirectly: my understanding is that they fit a spectral curve to the raw blue, red, IR data and then used software to reconstruct the green channel.)

Another HN commentator once gave me an excellent tip for getting an intuition for that sort of question: the ratio between a mile and an inch (63,360) is almost exactly the same as a lightyear and an astronomical unit (63,239). Pluto is at 40 AU, and the closest stars are at ~4 ly. So if you're sitting on Pluto and the sun is 40 inches (~ 1 m) away, the closest stars are about 4 miles (~6 km) away.

As far out as Pluto is, it is nowhere close to the next star, and the Sun is still overwhelmingly the brightest thing in the sky.

What's even weirder to think about, is the edge of the Oort cloud is about half way to the next star. So if it is possible for some sort of bacterial (or proto-life material) to survive, life could jump from one star to another via the intersecting oort clouds.

It's not. That's an "enhanced" color picture, meaning the colors you see include information from stuff like infrared images and whatnot. Maybe the contrast has been increased, or colors added to make certain features visible. Well, certainly a lot of work has been done to that image as the article suggests. Not surprising considering the extreme conditions the photograph was taken in (the speed of New Horizons, the light available, the instruments used, the fact that the data has to be sent over such a long distance, etc).

It's great seeing a big publisher like BBC linking to raw data and full resolution images. It seems they are beginning to understand the medium.

Where is New Horizons headed now?What is the destination goal as "deeper into the solar system" doesn't say precisely where? It says it is 90mil km from Pluto.

"The New Horizons mission has formally selected its next target after Pluto: a tiny, dim, frozen world currently named 2014 MU69. The spacecraft will perform a series of four rocket firings in October and November to angle its trajectory to pass close by 2014 MU69 in early January 2019. In so doing, New Horizons will become the first flyby craft to pass by a target that was not discovered before the spacecraft launched. However, NASA has not yet committed to keeping New Horizons operational long enough to perform science at 2014 MU69; that decision will be made next year, when numerous other solar system extended missions are all up for review."

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/0901160...

"We really don't want to know more about a Kuiper belt object" -- No priorization committee ever.

The 2014 MU69 flyby is happening.

Yeah, it's thoroughly explained further in the article, I just didn't want to quote too much.

What does it mean it has not committed to keeping it operational? Are the costs that high to send those signals to consider just ditching the entire project?

It means there is no decision yet, but it's very likely that the extended mission will be approved:

"When NASA committed to build New Horizons, it committed to operate the spacecraft and support its science team through its primary mission goal: the Pluto encounter. NASA’s budget projections reflect this (page PS-32 in their 2016 Request, for example). You can see NASA requesting about $20 million per year for New Horizons until 2018, at which point the requests promptly drop to $0.

This isn’t as scary as it looks. It merely reflects that, on paper, the New Horizons mission is only approved through the Pluto encounter, the time it takes to downlink all of the data, and the time it would take to close out the mission. Continued funding is approved every two years based on scientific proposals submitted to NASA and evaluated by an independent review panel. These are called extended missions, and nearly every science mission gets one, owing to the fact that not scuttling a spacecraft actively returning great science to save 0.01% of your budget is a stupidly easy case to make (for the most part).

So while the New Horizons team must make a scientifically sound argument for extended mission funding, it won’t be too hard to do. New Horizons was submitted to a NASA proposal for a “Pluto Kuiper Belt Mission.” The first planetary science Decadal Survey (which prioritizes the scientific goals in the solar system for the decade New Horizons was launched) recommended a mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. New Horizons itself is over-engineered for Pluto (just like Voyager was over-engineered for Jupiter and Saturn). The capability to reach and study a Kuiper belt object beyond Pluto is built in to this mission, and it would be a highly embarrassing and unlikely misstep for NASA to deny a mission extension, particularly a few months after its greatest public outreach moment since the landing of the Curiosity rover."

+ Salaries for engineers, scientists, mission control etc

Does anybody know what caused the large beige "smooth" surface feature slightly to the right of centre in the article's large photo of the planet? I think it forms part of the "heart" that was all over social media.

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/6490/production/_...

That's Sputnik Planum. Supposedly it's a water/methane glacier?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_Planum

It must have melted "recently"

Does anyone know if this is a true or 'false' color image?

http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/the-rich-color-variations-... says it's a false-color image incorporating blue + red visible light along with infrared.

Here's a true-color image: http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/global-mosaic-of-pluto-in-...

It says “enhanced colour view of Pluto” in the article.

Incredible. Is this the highest resolution photo, in terms of smallest resolved features, that we will receive covering all of Pluto? Or covering just a section?

See LesZedCB's comment* for the 30MB image of the whole surface.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10277891

No, sorry, I was actually referring to that image. I should have replied to him.

Is that image the highest resolution?

And it's depressing that we're cutting the budget of stuff like New Horizons while funneling ever more money into killing other humans.

Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10277938 and marked it off-topic.

Good work!

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom"

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/4078-the-saddest-aspect-of-l...

Don't worry, I'm sure we'll get to a point not too long from now when setting algorithms in autonomous drones and robots to kill other humans for us will mean we get to "save money".

It is depressing but sometimes we have to kill them - I mean the folk who enjoy burning people alive and creating sex slaves, not to mention horrendous refugee misery for everyone concerned - before they kill us.

and your bombs don't burn innocents alive, men women and children? And don't say "oh the intent". The intent is there both sides, I believe the media sound bite is called "collateral damage", but the burning alive of innocents means the same

and your country has no trafficked women and girls forced to work as prostitutes.

and these people are most annoyed about what? Outside meddling in their countries. They are but pawns in geo-political manoeuvring that has been going for years.

We all live in glass houses and none of us should throw stones

Not going to defend the US, but do you really know what the Taliban did in Afghanistan? It's definitively not a "glass house" situation. It's a civilian massacre, rape of woman of all ages, prohibition of education, promotion of religious extremism situation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban#Human_rights_abuses

Is that the same Taliban that was trained and funded by the west to fight the USSR? Sounds awfully similar to the situation in Syria.

Edit: this is so far off topic that I regret posting it, but I don't like deleting things and will leave it in place. Can we get back to talking about Pluto?

I think it's relevant just what the 'West' did to each other over the last 100 years. We killed more people in single bombing raids than entire 'modern' wars. Precision bombing used to mean little more than attacking the right city.

This fact does not excuse the current behavior of either side.

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