Primary Takeaway

"In space you can put on your pants two legs at a time."
- Commander Chris Hadfield

the beauty you cannot see

"You don't have to play every note."
- Thelonious Monk to his band on "space"

gravitas

"Sleeping is difficult in space. No matter what you feel the same. On earth due to gravity, sitting down or reclining you're increasingly more comfortable, which signals your brain to fall asleep."
- Scott Kelly

there goes De Beers

It rains solid diamonds on Uranus and Neptune. Elon Musk will fill Olympic stadium sized auto-piloted  space crafts with them. Instead of paying $25k here for a Tiffany rock or less for one man equivalent made on Earth, the naive will pay $1m for a space rock for the prestige, provenance, branding. Same shit different status. Massive increase in thrust could make a one year harvesting return trip manageble.

motto

"Great work and folly may be indistinguishable from the outset."
-  Adam Steltzner, NASA 

trial and error

"If you make no mistakes, you're not on the frontier."
- Neil deGrasse Tyson

boom

"If nothing goes wrong, you're not on the frontier."
- Neil deGrasse Tyson

rocket programs brain

Wernher von Braun was a victim of his own success. He wanted Hitler's attention then got it. His V2 program launched 3000 rockets killing 5000, but JFK ultimately honoured him for his USA space program contributions, including putting men on the moon.

unintended consequences

Sputnik may have been the Soviet Union's greatest mistake, as it enabled freedom of space; the USA could now photograph any region in the world.

26

"The average age of the (NASA) systems engineers, the controllers on the day of the moon landing was 26."
- Al Gore

jazz spirit

"If you don't improvise, you disappear very quickly."
- Sir Richard Branson

How we know the earth is older than 6000 years

All our evidence for changes in the Earth comes from looking at rocks. Folds and fossils in sedimentary rocks, radioactive dating and the weathering of ancient craters show that the oldest rocks are about 4000 million years old. That means the Earth must be at least as old as this. It is from being able to understand the age of the rocks on the earth that we know how old the earth itself is. The technique of dating the age of rocks is known as radiometric dating:

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

For specifics of how the rocks are used to evaluate the age of the earth, please see this article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth, which gives much more detail on the geological calculations used in this science. 

 You might also be interested in this recent data from National Geographic:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/02/140224-oldest-crust-australia-zircon-science/, 

which finds the Earth to be 4.4 Billion years old (4400 000 000).

Kind regards,

Victoria

Public Information Volunteer
David Suzuki Foundation
219 – 2211 West 4th Avenue
Vancouver, BC V6K 4S2
604-732-4228
www.davidsuzuki.org

did you know this?

Chris Hadfield is afraid of heights.

"I'm not trying to sell something; I'm trying to share the wonder of this entire experience."
- Chris Hadfield

not an alcoholic

"A beer can wait six months."
- Chris Hadfield

"Don't look back; that's not where you're going. Accept things that have happened in the past, but pay attention to where things are going in the future and focus on that, because that's your life."
- Chris Hadfield

Image source here.

38 year old standing on the moon

A tour of the International Space Station here.

"It's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog."
- NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden

Four

"Out of 58 billion people who have lived on the earth, only 12 of us have walked on the moon."
- Alan Bean