Okay, so maybe some of you may think this is stupid, but you are gay.
Google's galactic empire
Apparently Google has run out of things to catalogue on Earth. The internet behemoth has now joined a project to catalogue the visible universe, using a telescope that will scan the entire sky each week.
The 8.4-metre Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is being built in the mountains of Chile by a team of 19 universities and laboratories. Once completed in 2013, it will repeatedly image the sky, watching for the flash of supernovae, moving points of light that indicate near-Earth asteroids, and anything else that changes out there.
This will generate 30 terabytes of data (30,000 gigabytes) every night, so it will be essential to develop software that can aid astronomers in sorting through this deluge for objects and events of interest. The search and sorting expertise Google has developed for internet searches will no doubt come in handy for this task.
The announcement of Google's participation in the LSST comes just a few weeks after NASA announced a joint project with the company, which aims to allow internet users to virtually explore the solar system using data from the space agency's robotic probes.
Having secured domination of Earth, it was only a matter of time before Google sought to extend its reach beyond the confines of this little planet. I think mapping the cosmos is just the first step. When it's finished, that's when the fleet of Googlebots will launch to colonise every last inch of the universe. Newscientist.com
Here is the link
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/space/ I thought it was neat. I'll download it when it's out.
Topic: Fellow Geeks. (Read 2504 times)