So what’s with all the nutty baseball players? First there was Curt Schilling, raving creationist, and now it’s Jose Canseco, space cadet. Fresh off the embarrassment of shooting off one of his own fingers in an accident while cleaning his gun, he’s now twittering about taking over the entire galaxy by riding on comets, and Galactic Beings have used comets as star taxis for eons
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I don’t think he knows much about comets.
Note quite right. Comets are what result when the Galactic Beings flush the loo.
(And you thought Khepri, the ancient Egyptian dung beetle sky faerie was a myth. Think again…)
That article contains an unfortunate turn of phrase:
I hope that was mean to be “his wife, the model Leila Knight”.
Yeah, it takes eons to get from one star to the next at the speed of a comet.
According to ESA’s FAQ on the Rosetta mission:
Let’s assume this to be an average speed for comets. The nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.22 light years or 39,900,000,000,000 (3.99^13) km away. So to ride a comet from our solar system to Proxima Centauri would take a mere 80,000 or so years. Space is a lot bigger than Jose Nine Fingers thinks.
And if you have matched speeds with a comet – caught up with it to land on it – you have expended all the energy need to get to your destination without the comet. There is no energy savings in tagging along with a comet.
The Churyumov-Gerasimenko taxi service (“Anywhere in the known universe for 67p each parsec”) — and it is carrying a passenger, name Philae — is simply obeying the Galactic Council’s speed directive: “No faster-than-light travel though stellar systems, or when anyone’s looking.”
As I’ve saying for a long time, they really need to get rid of these loopholes. Of course, the Big Time Travel™ corporate elites keeping blocking such legislation.
I need more coffee.
“I’ve been saying” and “keep
ingblocking.”Another prawn in the Big Coffee pot.
Menyambal, perhaps you’d still do it to burrow into the comet to protect yourself from radiation or maybe use resources in the comet, etc. So your little ship wouldn’t need to be so heavy whenever it started, using less energy to get to the comet. Then, you can make a nice comfy home for the really long part of the trip.
I guess that explains the umbrella that Philae found in the back seat.
I thought comets were the detached chunks of ice that form on the wings of starships as they fly through unusually cold space weather.
@Menyambal #5: I have no doubt that Canseco believes spacecraft need to run their engines the entire time to get anywhere, like he does when he drives his car.
I think this could explain why Canseco thinks the way he does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLs0pjWnzTY
Somebody needs to keep an eye on Canseco the next time a bright comet shows up in the sky.
WHA??? Who cleans a _loaded_ pistol? Isn’t the first step to unload it, and empty the barrel so you can clean it with one of the stickbrush thingies? Not trying to cast aspersions (*wink*), but I am truly baffled by this common excuse for random gunshot “accidents”.
Reading his TWEETS makes me think the ‘pain relievers’ they are giving him for his former finger are having secondary effects on his rationality and amplifying his imagination.
one of his tweets:
uhhh, “..solving OUR two problems.” ?? Or is he saying that: The two problems we face are (1)going fast, (2)have its own power. ?? I guess he doesn’t realize that gravity is the comet’s “own power” and totally disregards that we sent a robot to rendezvous with that comet, so we had to get it to the same speed as the comet.
and he also tweeted:
Galaxy cruises? This guy should really tweet with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. NDT will let him know that Space is REALLY Really BIIIIIGGGG. That even comets at top velocity will take a LOOONNNNNGGGGG time to cross the galaxy.
To me, all these tweets are just childhood fantasies, reawakened by the pain medicines (I’m sure he’s being given for that “accident” with his finger).
Back in high school, I used to have a huge framed poster of Canseco hanging on my wall, my favorite comedy albums were Bill Cosby’s “I Started Out As A Child” and Woody Allen’s “Stand-Up Comic,” and I thought Gary Glitter was kind of cool.
Oh what I’d tell 14-year-old me if I could…
The stereotype of “dumb jocks” makes it sound like sports makes people stupid. I’d argue it’s the other way around – the chronically stupid seek fields that will let them be successful with the least intelligence. It certainly explains Glenn Beck and Ted Nugent.
“Riding comets”? It sounds like Canseco was reading the nonsense spewed by Will Smith’s kids recently. At least we know now that he can read.
As for the unintentional shooting, what sort of person talks about it publicly and shows those pictures? I’ve never seen a close up photo of Tony Iommi’s damaged finger, and he’s had that for over forty years. (There probably are some pictures, but I’ve never seen them, and I’ve followed his career.)
If Canseco had shot off his finger during his MLB career, it probably wouldn’t have made difference to his fielding percentage. His batting average, maybe, but not his fielding….
@Menyambal #5
Sure there is: The comet is a big source of propellant, which means that your ship can run at a much lower mass ratio and thus can also use lower thrust engines.
Reducing deltaV requirements is only one way to save energy in spaceflight.
“I don’t think he knows much about comets.”
– ‘don’t think’?
I don’t think he knows much about star taxis either.
@blf
Nonsense. Comets are hairballs coughed up by Ceiling Cat.
Any being riding one of those chunks of cosmic kitty litter would probably be even thicker than Canseco and too slow to communicate with us.
“Er, hello, was that a solar system? Damn, missed out again.”
Well, hitchhiking on comets (ie building small colonies on comets and/or turning comets into jury-rigged space vessels) probably IS a viable method of space colonization – but one that works on timescales of multiple thousands of years, not within single human lifetimes.
left0ver1under wrote:
Perhaps. Or maybe it’s just the insulating bubble of being popular, and powerful, where no one will tell you that your ideas are stupid.
Regarding the post title, perhaps they didn’t wear helmets during batting practice and took a few fastballs to the head. Nah, more likely they just haven’t taken a science class past middle school.
Use of comets for interstellar travel is not new. They are actually would be quite good for that for several reasons:
1) They have lots of volatiles, unlike asteroids between Mars and Jupiter.
2) Some of them are sufficiently large, so there’ll be a lot of material for interstellar travel.
3) Oort-cloud comets are very loosely bound to the Sun, so a careful nudge at the aphelion of only several hundred meters per second might be enough to put a comet on a trajectory for a gravitational slingshot around some planet. Lots of Oort comets have not visited the Sun even once!
Of course, such journeys will be measured in thousands of years. But if you can get to the Oort cloud then you probably have mastered the art of suspended animation (or perhaps you are a digital lifeform already).
And Schilling has made the news again
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-big-league-stew/curt-schilling-s-son-brings-fake-grenade-to-logan-airport–bomb-squad-responds-181247309.html
Minor quibble, but CTE is a real thing that’s fucking up a lot of lives, including victims of domestic violence. I highly doubt making an ass of oneself on Twitter is unique to CTE sufferers. You can probably poke fun at the shit Curt Schilling and Jose Canseco say without basically calling CTE sufferers “nutty”.