English Deutsch Français Italiano Español Português 繁體中文 Bahasa Indonesia Tiếng Việt ภาษาไทย
All categories

I'm thinking if scientists from all fields of scientific inquiry focassed there efforts by longitude dividing the earth into 36 degree sections and measuring whats there in every possible way while respecting peoples individual privacy getting the entire big picture every decade would allow us to discover whats actually on earth and whats happening whats changing and how.

2006-08-15 08:46:12 · 3 answers · asked by Stan S 1 in Science & Mathematics Other - Science

what i meant is taking a complete survey of the conditions from the center of the earths core to the top of the atmosphere and seeing every single thing that's happening from the largest scale to the smallest scale possible in every way possible in every timeframe possible, using satalites and physical measurements for every single square mile, and when a particular field has no information of intrest in that square mile a quick survey and moving on would be done while when a field has a large amount of relavent data enough time would be spent studying it to get all the relavent information and when all the data is collected putting it all together to get a complete picture of whats there, what has happened in the past there, whats happening there in the present and possiblely what will happen in the future.

2006-08-15 10:18:52 · update #1

3 answers

There are satellites working day and night surveying the Earth right now.

2006-08-15 08:56:13 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 0 0

First, you need to have a grasp of what you are asking. What resolution is your survey? We have not surveyed the whole earth yet down to certain scales. And 'measuring' whats there for some types of measurement is very difficult. To measure things in the depths of the oceans with any high resolution is beyond our capability at this point. Also, the earth is constantly changing, so your idea of doing this once every ten years will only yield information on cycles greater than that. Some things need to be measured yearly, some daily, some on the order of minutes. Furthermore, large areas of the earth have little interest to many fields of science, it would be a waste of resources to go there. Hope this helps.

2006-08-15 16:21:00 · answer #2 · answered by Karman V 3 · 0 0

I dont understand what type is changes you want to track. But i am taking a guess. Do you mean like tracking changes weather, ocean currents, geological activity etc? If so, you have to understand that scientific organisations are monitoring these things day and night regularly. And they are using some powerful tools to make predictions. Still the predictions are not always good enough for even short durations.
Now to the reasons. Lets take weather as an example. Suppose you want to predict whats the weather is going to be like tommorrow around 10 kms radius from your house. And you have all the tools. Still are they enough? Its not like you can cut the atmosphere like a cake and consider only that part !! The weather around your house is part of a wider interdependent system. So even if you can measure every parameter around your house to a great deal of accuracy at a certain time (which you cant do), still your predictions would be hopelessly wrong. Moreover the mathematics involved is such that even if one measuement is slightly wrong, that would give a huge deviation in predictions. Such a system is called a chaotic system.
So you need to monitor every single region of the atmosphere and measure every parameter with CERTAINTY. Thats impossible, let me assure you. Not only is it practicaly impossible, but even impossible in principle. Its a fundemental property of physics that there will always be some error in measurement.
So what we have is a system where measurements at any one time are both inadequate and inaccurate on which we need to base our predictions. And the math is such that the errors would result in huge errors in prediction at longer duration. It only works partially during very short durations. It is for this reason that weather prediction is so hard.
With all the modern tools for measurement and supercomputers for calculations, we are still able to give reasonable predictions for only short durations.

2006-08-15 16:43:46 · answer #3 · answered by Maverick 2 · 0 0

fedest.com, questions and answers