Question to be answered in full 4-5 Sentences.
1. If you were a human on the Earth a thousand years ago, what would you have thought as you looked up at the night sky? How would you explain the moons and the stars? What kind of information would you try to gather to explain what you saw?
2. Watch this short clip from the movie Gravity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYDaIyfitn8
Post one or two things that you think is right or wrong in terms of Kepler’s & Newton’s Laws, then discuss.
3. In terms of what you learned about the seasons and daylight, where on Earth would you like to live and why?
4. NASA has named you Mission Director for a series of crewed exploratory flights to Mars. The crew will spend 6 months to a year on Mars. What kind of explorations and experiments would you plan and who would you send?
(This is meant to be a technical discussion. Although one may want to see kitty cats and Matt Damon on Mars, I mean for you to answer this as a scientist.)
5. If we were to achieve controlled fusion on Earth, what would change?
6. Do you think humans will still be living on Earth when the Sun starts to become a red giant? What kind of changes/developments will we need to survive that long and be able to relocate to another planet?
7. Imagine (way in the future) that a space agency is planning a mission to the nearest black hole (which would be really far away, but in this imagination, we have the technology to get us there and back.) The mission is to go near it but observe from a safe distance away from the event horizon. Would you volunteer to go? Why or why not?
8. There is a strong consensus among cosmologists that the universe will continue to expand forever. Discuss the long-term consequences of this. What will astronomy look like very, very far into the future?
9. Studying astronomy tends to make people feel that we are very insignificant, or very special. How do you feel about our place and time in the universe?
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