tadair

That footage was specially made for Children in Need night, consider it a brief part 1 of the episode :)

I cant give you 10 (well, its only been out 3 months in the UK so far...), but I'll give you these: GTA: Liberty City Stories (almost the same city as GTA3, completely new story and different characters) Lumines (Tetris, but trickier and more fun) Mercury Infection Pursuit Force WipeOut Pure (brand new tracks and racers still being released as downloads to add-on to the game) Oh, and you can run emulators on it too :D (Amiga 500, Apple II, Atari 2600, Atari 800, Atari ST, Lynx, Chip8, Commodore 64, GameBoy/GBColour/GBAdvance, Genesis/MegaDrive, Master System, MAME, MSX, Neo Geo, NES, SNES, ScummVM, ZX Spectrum, and even x86 - running Win95 and Linux)

Having read about this in this months PC Gamer (UK), I have a feeling that a majority of the players will gravitate towards the Security and Flight Command classes, since Engineering seems to just involve pressing buttons to keep the engine running, and while Science get to go on away missions, they're less involved in the fighting. Also, with real crew levels, even if many are NPC's, you may end up with squabbles over who gets the helm and so forth, with some people coming online for a play, but finding no available jobs to do. However, one thing that could aid it is the bunch of existing fan-run RPG's around the web, if a number of them gravitated over, it'd help establish a community, they'd still be able to run their stories on the side too. Monthly cost is also a minus for me, I play Guild Wars which only costs for buying the original game and any expansions you want (the first expansion is due out about 10-11 months after the original game, so they're not overdoing that either).

Something I havent seen mentioned in this thread, in 'Sacrifice of Angels' the Defiant is the only ship to make it through the combined Dominion/Cardassian fleet of 1200 intact, dodging and taking shots from every class of ship on its way (and I don't think the Jem'Hadar would worry about the possibility of friendly fire, their primary objective would be to make the kill), its only later that we find another 200 starfleet ships have survived after the Dom/Cardie fleet retreated with heavy losses. In 'First Contact', the Defiant is still salvageable after Worf and crew are recovered, when at least one other ship still capable of moving and fighting was destroyed by the Cube's explosion. I forget the episode title, but where the allied fleet is decimated by the Breen super-weapon, the powerless Defiant still takes 4 or maybe even 5 torpedo hits before its destroyed, and thats not just with no shields, there's no inertial dampening to lessen the physical shock of weapons, no structural integrity field to stop the ship's secondary hull and internal walls buckling under those strains, and I would assume they kept the polarised hull technology from Enterprise (why throw away a means of defence that may just give you the edge), so that would be gone too. To quote Riker: "Thats a tough little ship."

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin. Funny how wise words like that are ignored at the times when they're most appropriate, I'm sure the Patriot Act had him rolling in his grave, same for the continued detention of hundreds of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, without charge, contact with their family, any legal status, or even the prospect of a trial. And as for the supposed influx of terrorists into Iraq, it would actually seem that the Iraqi terrorists are moving their operations out to the surrounding countries now, with the recent bombings in Jordan. I think the question now becomes, with the situation in Iraq increasingly heading for open civil war, whether British and American forces (and any other nations crazy enough to still be there) remain as peacekeepers, or cut their losses and leave them to it (which might lead to slaughter on the scale of the wars in the former Yugoslavia or the Rwandan genocide)... tough decision there.

I've gone for evolution/big bang, and as I'm a second year Geology student, I have a few (ok, a lot of) things to add regarding the age of the Earth and some of the history of geology being mentioned here :) Warning: Very, very long :) Fossils were first defined as being once living creatures by Nicolas Steno (1638-1686), who saw the similarity between modern sharks teeth and Glossopetrae fossil teeth; previously the word had meant anything dug up from the ground, from rocks to archaeology. He also developed some key ideas on how sedimentary rocks formed and were related to each other (sediment is deposited horizontally, oldest layers of rocks are at the bottom, rock layers are continuous in every direction - when there are no other factors to alter/limit them). As an interesting footnote, Steno was beatified in 1987 by Pope John Paul II for his work for the Catholic Church. James Hutton (1726-1797) published a paper, 'Theory of the Earth 1788', promoting his idea that geological processes to alter and deposit new rocks took a long time, since while they were clearly happening at the present time, no changes could be observed; after initial resistance (his later 1795 book with 2,138 pages was little understood due to the poor explanation of his ideas within it), his ideas were accepted following Charles Lyell's (1797-1875) promotion of them under the collective name of Actualism-Gradualism (later known as Uniformitarianism in North America), and following this acceptance it was realised by the geological community that the age of the Earth had to be in the order of millions of years, not thousands. Biostratigraphy (using fossils to date rocks) was developed by William Smith (1769-1839), who produced the first large scale geological maps, of Bath in 1799, then of both England and Wales in 1815 (the first of any country), he recognised that there were repetitions of certain groups of rock layers from place to place, and that within these rocks, various fossils were restricted to certain places in the rock layers (and thus would only have lived during the times these rocks were initially deposited). Smith named these groups of rocks based on the key fossils that were contained within them, giving rise to the geological periods such as the Cambrian, Silurian, Triassic, Jurassic etc. He was not able to give an exact age, but was able to determine which was older than the other, and identify such rocks elsewhere, based on the fossil content. Biostratigraphy is used as the primary method of determining the ages of rocks in the oil industry today, since with the large amount of known fossil types and the times they lived in, it provides the most accurate dating method available. There are two limitations to it however, it only works on sedimentary rocks (not igneous or metamorphic), and it only works for the past 550 million years (prior to which, fossils did not have hard parts - shells or skeletons, and as such are much harder to identify in sufficient detail). In 1859, Charles Darwin publishes 'The Origin of Species ...' (yes, Smith figured out Biostratigraphy without knowing about evolution). In 1947, Willard Libby discovers Carbon-14 dating (50,000 years constraint). This leads to the discoveries of other radiometric dating methods including K-40 -> Ar-40 (1.3 billion years half-life), U-234 -> Th-230 (75,000 years half-life - 450,000 years constraint), and Uranium-Lead dating (U-238 -> Pb-206 has a 4.5 billion years half-life, and U-235 -> Pb-207 has a 700 million years half-life, providing a useful cross-check on the results, accuracy of 2 million years for rocks ~ 3 billion years old). This all sounds great, but it should be noted that radiometric dating has several limitations, first the crystals being tested must not have allowed any contamination or escape of the decay products since they formed, some crystal types are too weak to constrain the products (especially as Ar-40 is a gas), also rocks undergoing metamorphism are essentially 'reset', so you can only date when they were metamorphosed, and finally the margin of error involved is sometimes fairly large (bigger half-life is not necessarily better, Rb-87 -> Sr-87 has a 50 billion year half-life, but an accuracy of only 30-50 million years for a rock ~3 billion years old). An additional method of dating is by looking for variations in rock layers caused by Milankovitch Cycles, there are three of these cycles, Precession - where the direction the Earth's Axis points in wobbles in a complete ellipse over a 25,800 year period, Eccentricity - how different Earth's orbit is compared to a perfect circle, this has several components to its variation, working out approximately as a 100,000 year period, with the variation ranging from 0.005 to 0.058 (values towards 1.0 increasingly parabolic, 0.0 is perfectly circular), and Obliquity - the variation in the tilt of the Earth's Axis, from 22.1° to 24.5° and back over a 40,000 year period. These all lead to regular climate changes, which are recorded in the layers in many (not all) sedimentary rocks, and allow numbers to be put to the geological periods created by Smith. The motion of the Earth's plates over history also provide indications that the Earth has been around for quite a while, rocks within England and Wales trace the movement of that part of what is now the European plate across the equator (at which point the coal deposits were formed in the tropical climate), right down to near the south pole (about 490 million years ago), on the West Gondwana part of the Vendian super-continent, while Scotland followed a similar course to near the south pole (about 580 million years ago) on the Laurentia part of the Vendian super-continent, this later broke up into: Laurentia (North America), Siberia (NE Asia), Baltica (Scandinavia/E Europe/NW Asia), Avalonia (England/Wales) and Gondwana (South America/Africa). Scotland joined the rest of Britain around 425 million years ago, forming the Caledonian mountain range (which reaches across into Scandinavia). The last method of dating rocks (I've still probably overlooked something) is palaeomagnetism, where the Earth's magnetic poles (essentially the Earth can be considered to have a big bar magnet tagged with N and S inside it, not quite true, but close enough for comparison) swap over every 70,000-100,000 years, taking only a few centuries to do so. The pattern of these reversals is entirely unique over geological time. As crystals in igneous and metamorphic rocks form/reform, the magnetic minerals they contain align themselves according to this field (like a compass needle), and then retain that position once the crystal solidifies, so examination of the orientation of the crystals within a section of rocks allows their position along the historical pattern of reversals to be located. This basis for this technique comes from rocks on the ocean floor, where spreading of new rock from the oceanic ridges allows large areas of uninterrupted rock sequence to be seen, up to rocks formed 400 million years ago. Each of these on their own could be dismissed as 'just' theories, but their mutual support of each other suggests to me that there is rather more to it than that. Finally, a few points on the creation of fossils, evolution itself, and the origin of the 'big bang': One of the reasons that relatively few fossils are found compared to the amount of animals/humans that were believed to be living at those time periods is that quite specific conditions are needed for fossils to be well preserved: rapid burial in an oxygen free/poor environment, with little/no diagenesis (alteration of the shell/bone after burial, this can lose the finer detail in the specimen, eg. as the aragonite in a shell is converted to calcite). Also, there are a lot more fossils than perhaps most people realise, just that most are of relatively uninteresting marine invertebrates, as opposed to the dinosaurs, of which there were only 26 known species alive, prior to the mass-extinction 65 million years ago. My general palaeontology text book spends a generous two pages on dinosaurs, out of over 300 :) Evolution and adaptation are not mutually exclusive, evolution occurs through a random mutation providing a creature with an advantage over others of its species, so that creature can live to produce offspring, which would each carry (if they're lucky anyway, but thats the realm of genetics) this mutation, and be able to pass it on, thus the species as a whole will adapt to better live in its environment, the more important of these changes can range from being able to avoid predators better, attract better mates (coloured plumage in some birds), process/catch different foods, and even the most dramatic, a new method of mobility (fins->legs, arms->wings, legs->snakes). A single species that moved into two areas (which they then cant/dont move inbetween) with different environmental conditions would therefore be able to evolve to adapt best to suit those particular environments, and you would then find after a long while that you had two distinct species, incapable of interbreeding and producing a fertile offspring. Virii (regardless of whether you consider them to be truly alive) are perhaps the ultimate example of evolution at work, adapting to new hosts, changing to find the best way to replicate themselves, and all on a timescale that is easily observable. String theory (there are actually several theories, this is just the one I'm familiar with from my formation of the universe and solar system module last year) proposes that our 4-dimensional universe exists as a 'bubble' within another 5-dimensional space, and all the matter within this universe was created from the energy of an impact with another 4-dimensional universe, via energy to matter conversion according to E=mc², thus leading to the big bang. Well, that pretty much finishes it off, if you read it all, thanks :)

Birth of the Federation :D A decent quality Civ-style game, playable as the Romulans, Federation, Klingons and Ferengi, each with different names for techs (though comparable results), occasional Borg invasions to fend off, just a pity it was a little prone to crashing. I actually prefer the original Armada to the sequel, each ship actually served a purpose in that, rather than having 2 or 3 ships for each task, and adding the third dimension was pretty pointless, a ship could still fire all the way from top to bottom :) Of course, the fun bit was stealing another races construction ship in skirmishes/online battles, then building their best ships to use against them :)

You'd need quite a bit of fuel in order to get it to pass by each planet in every orbit, and a sizeable rock too, Cassini's gravity assist with Jupiter only slowed the planet in its orbit by 1 metre every trillion years, and this is a spaceprobe as big as a bus with a nuclear reactor on board. I think it would be easier for humans (providing we live long enough for this to be a concern for us, the sun will be stable for another 5 billion years or so) to simply colonise planets and moons outwards from the sun as it expands, Mars, the Gallilean moons (especially the icy ones, plenty of water), Titan (1.5 times our atmospheric pressure, water and simple hydrocarbons already present, should be a lot easier than Mars to terraform), then on to Pluto, where we'll be safe from any expansion by our sun (which will swallow anything up to about Mars' current orbit) and the increased solar ejecta. After the sun starts cooling off, its on in generational ships or whatever we have to a warmer solar system, the current star forming regions of the Horsehead Eagle and other nearby nebulae are good bets.

Well, there is this Nielsen sweeps thingy they have for US telly, but that seems kinda pointless for a cancelled show...

Not even one episode in March any more? damn them. :mad: And the last 3 episodes are supposed to be an arc, according to what I've read on trekweb. At one point, the final two episodes were titled "Untitled (Solar System), Part 1" and "... Part 2".

Yeah, the shuttle doesnt have the radiation shielding to operate outside the protection of Earth's magnetosphere. However, the new vehicle contractors are going to bid on soon for a ~2014 launch will be designed for at least Moon missions, so that has to be fully shielded. As for zero-g, we do know a lot of the long term effects now, there have been a number of astronauts with >200 days continuously in space on Mir or the ISS, exercise programs have been developed to prevent muscle wastage. As for human advances, just keeping the list to space milestones: Pioneer 10 and 11 have nearly left the solar system, although neither are transmitting any longer, Voyager 1 is also leaving the solar system, transmitting data about the changes in the solar wind, Voyager 2 is not far behind on a different trajectory, however, none of these four will come within 3 light years of another star for 30,000 years. Voyager 1 and 2 also gave us the best images of Jupiter and Saturn until the past few years when Cassini and ground based telescopes have caught up. We have mapped the surfaces of 48% of Mercury, the whole of Venus, Earth!, Mars, several of the major Jovian moons, observed the cloud formations of all the gas giants, located planet-type objects far beyond the orbits of Pluto (Quaoar, Sedna, etc). Huygens landed successfully on Titan, sending back in excess of 2 hours more data than even the most optimistic expectations, including around 700 images, and Cassini will continue in its observations of Saturn, its rings and satellites for several more years to come. Spirit and Opportunity continue to operate on the surface of Mars, more than 13 months since each landed, well in excess of their expected 3 month lifespan, they have send back spectral analyses of rocks, atmosphere and soil. Mars Express and Mars Global Surveyor are returning high detail images of the Martian surface. Smart-1, an ion drive spacecraft, recently entered close orbit around the Moon, taking two less months and less fuel than anticipated to do so, and will study the Moon for surface ice hidden in permanently dark crater floors. If this alone isnt close to star trek, I dont know what else will be, the Romulans using ion drive in the original series for their cloaking prototype. NASA, the ESA and Russia are pursuing their own plans for sending men to Mars (Russia are being rather quiet, so far they've just asked for volunteers for a 2 year isolation test, as a dry run for a mission), looking to arrive in 15-25 years time. NASA are also undertaking the planning of the first exclusively interstellar mission, with no set time for launch (probably the longer they wait, the quicker they can make it go, so no rush), heading for Alpha Centauri. There is also a probe on the way for a mission to Pluto and its moon Charon, which we only have very low resolution images from Hubble of. After its initial problem with a flawed mirror, Hubble has imaged countless nebulae, galaxies, star clusters and other stellar objects of interest, and is complemented by other telescopes which image in InfraRed, X-Rays and Ultra Violet wavelengths. Through ground based telescopes, there have been over 130 extra-solar planets discovered, down to the size of Neptune, and two have been faintly imaged. These telescopes have also discovered thousands of the asteroids that lurk in inner solar system orbits, and pinned down many of their orbits for the next century or so. I could probably go on for quite a bit longer, but this will suffice B)

Comets are about 90% ice, 10% 'dust' (which is just basically the same material as asteroids in powdered form). Essentially the whole solar system contains the same elements, with a skew of the heavier elements towards the sun, and lighter elements further away, this is due to the solar system forming from a more or less homogenous nebulous cloud.

That'd be interesting, with just under 1% atmosphere (so virtually no air resistance), and 0.375 Earth gravity... build those glass screens higher :)

Here you are: :) http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEMCHPYEM4E_0.html

This ones mine, no start bar because windows is playing up and wont let me use printscreen, and paintshop pro wont capture it. The picture of Earth updates each half hour, based on the real position of the Moon (the viewing point), and uses separate Day/Night maps to generate the surface. You can get the application from http://xplanet.sourceforge.net/ , freeware under the GPL (does need a bit of configging to setup to work nicely).

The problem with adding to the mass of Mars, is that you must conserve angular momentum, by adding to the mass, you either reduce the speed of the planet (leading to an orbit further away from the sun), or the angular momentum of the impactors will add up to affect the orbit of Mars in other ways, depending on where they come from, how much they weigh and how fast they were going. In addition, even with Mars' reduced atmosphere (7 millibars, ~1014 being Earth normal), dust will be thrown up into the atmosphere from these impacts, do them too frequently, and you will have enough dust to reduce the temperatures on Mars, which runs contrary to any terraforming efforts. About the only feasible way to terraform Mars (which also gives the planetary geologists, geomorpholgists, etc. time to study all aspects of the Martian surface) is to do it over a period of 1000 years or greater, transporting raw materials in by ship from the asteroid belt, using as little mass as possible to release the right chemicals to sustain plant life, and thicken the atmosphere. Until then, its glass domes and spacesuits. :) One bit of recent good news is the ice sheet approx 900x800km in size discovered near the equator, its only under a thin covering of dust, which prevents it sublimating (solid directly to gas, no liquid stage due to the low pressure) away, so could provide an indefinite source of water (after purification) to any base there, also meaning that tricky polar landings arent needed to use the polar ice caps as water sources.

There was an article on TrekWeb the other day, where Berman says he has got a writer and two more staff for working on Trek XI, only the writer doesnt show up on IMDB, the forums there are speculating its actually a pen name for Berman :(

What I've heard so far is that Riker and Troi are in the finale, as themselves... but no time travel. The only way that works that I can think of is if the show ends with a charter/treaty/alliance being signed by Andorians, Tellarites, Humans and Vulcans, to form a pre-runner to the actual UFP (which would only properly form in that name after the Romulan Wars in 2161), then pull out to see Riker and Troi in the ready room of the USS Titan, where they make some comments on the events they have just seen (nothing silly, I hope), without giving too much away, in case a Romulan Wars series or film is green lighted 5 years down the road, or if Enterprise somehow gets a 5th season.

For those of you tired of the current intro music, the two parter 'In A Mirror, Darkly' is planned to have an alternate title sequence and music, to fit with the episodes, then back to normal for the remaining episodes... Just a pity there are these silly big gaps in the airing sequence, Divergence this Friday, Bound in 4 weeks, In a Mirror, Darkly in 7 weeks!!! (In a Mirror, Darkly both parts, and the final 3 episodes - which are an arc :) - are shown in a continuous 5 week run at least)

The Russians are planning to send a sample return mission to Phobos for 2009, called Fobos-Grunt (Grunt being Russian for dirt), the plan is for a 350 day voyage from Earth to Mars, the probe will orbit Phobos several times to determine a suitable landing spot, the 110lb (50kg) lander will land, take about ½lb (200-300g) of soil, and part of it would lift off to orbit Mars for a year before a window opens to return to Earth (where it will hopefully fare better than the recent solar wind collection mission that failed to open its parachute and dropped straight into the desert floor), the rest would remain on the surface as a science package to study Phobos, Mars, and the space immediately around Mars (in case there are any moons too small for us to detect from Earth). The Russians have had experience with automated sample return missions from the Moon, making several successful ones in the 1970s, and they attempted to land two probes on Phobos in 1988, however one was lost due to a computer error en route, and the other lost control during final approach.