NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's salty ocean

Re:NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's ... by jvanderbot on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @02:26PM (#41650378)

If your claim is that it'd not be worth it to pay two million dollars for a surface lander that successfully samples and conducts experiments on Europa's ice in situ, returns HD video, etc, then I can't really agree with you or even see how we would reach agreement. A Europa lander was at least considered as a viable billion dollar mission when I left JPL.

If that's not your claim then I don't understand your valuation and the rest of the comment doesn't track.

And not to engage at a base level but my use of immeasurable is correct in being interpreted as "large" unambiguously, at least by Merriam webster.

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Re:NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's ... by pclmulqdq on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @02:49PM (#41650657)

My claim is that the pictures themselves are probably only worth $100k or so, and you can read the comment again to see how that tracks semantically. The experiments, maybe ten million unless they can demonstrate that they have some sort of value.

A "viable billion dollar mission" includes all sorts of other things that are of value, including developing capabilities to do things that are strategically important, which I would claim is where a large majority of that billion dollars comes from. Similarly, I would expect that JPL would very much inflate the value of their own work. Everyone does.

Also, I see "incapable of being measured" with "broadly : indefinitely extensive" tacked on in the MW definition. There is no requirement there that "immeasurable" mean "large", just "incapable of being measured" with the expectation that it is used when describing things that are extreme. My most recent use of "immeasurable" was "immeasurably small" which I'm sure you would agree is a proper use.

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Re:NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's ... by poopbutt9 on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @03:56PM (#41651220)

YOu can just ctrl-i on the picture file and see how big it is, it's pretty easy to measure. Even if there are a lot of files you can select all, it's definitely not immesurable.

Hosting the photos costs money too, which I don't think GP is considering.

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Re:NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's ... by nickpeterson on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @04:32PM (#41651550)

This is true of pictures here, but who knows with European pictures, they might be in alien or metric.

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Re:NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's ... by jvanderbot on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @03:04PM (#41650802)

I think we're just interpreting each other's comments too narrowly. I'd be repeating myself to reply further.

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