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But, there aren't very many stars within that radius we think might have any life, much less an advanced technological civilization.

The 50 closest stars are in a sphere of 16ly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

G-Stars, stars similar to our sun in the 100ly spehre are 143: http://www.solstation.com/star...

The total amount of stars in 100ly around our sun is a few thousand stars. Probably all with 5 - 15 planets.

Even if the theoretical Alcubierre warp drive actually works,
Of course it works.
We only don't know how to build one and if we had one we would not know how to power it ...

And the odds of any such body being in any solar system within even a hundreds-of-light-years radius is miniscule.
That is nonsense.
We have over 500 sun like stars in 100ly range: http://www.solstation.com/star...
I'm not as optimistic as those guys: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

And I'm to lazy to look for a star map holding all stars in 100ly range ...

However I would say that we have a few earth like planets harbouring life in the 100ly range is a given fact We simply don't know them yet.

Our solar system resides in an area of our galaxy called the "Local Bubble", roughly a few hundred lightyears across. This region is very empty compared to the average interstellar medium in the galaxy, as a result of a large number of supernovae that blew out a sort of cavity in our interstellar neck of the woods long ago. In actual structure it's more of an irregular "Local Chimney" going right through the galactic disc rather than a spherical bubble.

As a result, pinning the cause of TFA's observations to a single supernova is not all that simple, as supernovae were very common in the Sun's general neighborhood in our galactic past..

Here's a nice graphic of the larger features in and around our local bubble. It's a fascinating subject if you enjoy understanding our location in a galactic context.

I can't get google's app to run in my browser, but if it's leaving out stars like Wolf-359 what's the point?

Sol Station has had similar functionality since 2001, and afaik doesn't leave anything out. Although the interface probably isn't as polished, it works just fine:
http://www.solstation.com/47ly-ns.htm

Make it up? Wholly shit you don't even know the theories you prescribe to do you? Until about a year ago, the teaching from Cosmology was that the Universe expanded from a ball of spinning mass, estimated at 170,000 light years across. This is what is being taught to kids in school presently, go ahead and visit your local schools and read their science books (this in addition to searching the web for similar text). Of course the size of the mass and rotation has changed as often as aging the Universe in the last 30 years. Today, you will find not less than 3 different ages according to the links in the paper below.

In the last couple years papers have been released stating the Universe came from mass of less in size than the head of a pin. Here is the link. This is not the globally accepted model, but is the current cosmology.

Notice that the hypothetical values here for invisible made up things like Dark matter and Dark energy (not to be confused with physics probable Heavy Elements) puts the actual value of atoms and energy at a whopping 4% of the total Universe.

96% of the Universe by this model is invisible and speculation. We have never detected the actual presence of Dark Matter or Dark Energy after over 4 decades of space travel, including numerous trips to our Moon, Mars, Saturn, and even 2 space craft hitting the edge of our solar system.

Believing that much is okay, but if you believe there was a creator that started the event one is just insane right?

And yes, by all of the current cosmology descriptions available for the Big Bang and expansion of the Universe you end up with a condition of nothing as the precursor as an atheist, unless of course you are using a non-standard definition of atheism. A creator would be the cause for the mass and event, and an atheist does not believe in a creator.

You're right about the key being the harnessing of better propulsion systems. However, we can easily achieve interstellar travel at relativistic speeds once we are capable of producing the necessary thrust and we can even do it at a comfortable 9.8m/s^2 acceleration. Once we're travelling at near light speed the time dilation effects would further shorten the journey for those aboard. A good article on the subject can be found here. A journey of 20.5 light years would only seem to take 6.1 years for those on board rather than the 22.4 years for observers on Earth. There are 135 stars within 20ly, 7 of which are Sun-like. The big issue here isn't our physiology, but our propulsion technology.

And away from sensationalist reporters going for "OMG! Big Bang didn't happen says genius kid!".

http://www.indystar.com/article/20110320/LOCAL01/103200369/Genius-work-12-year-old-studying-IUPUI

Meanwhile, Jake is moving on to his next challenge: proving that the big-bang theory, the event some think led to the formation of the universe, is, well, wrong.

Wrong?

He explains.

"There are two different types of when stars end. When the little stars die, it's just like a small poof. They just turn into a planetary nebula. But the big ones, above 1.4 solar masses, blow up in one giant explosion, a supernova," Jake said. "What it does, is, in larger stars there is a larger mass, and it can fuse higher elements because it's more dense."

OK . . . trying to follow you.

"So you get all the elements, all the different materials, from those bigger stars. The little stars, they just make hydrogen and helium, and when they blow up, all the carbon that remains in them is just in the white dwarf; it never really comes off.

"So, um, in the big-bang theory, what they do is, there is this big explosion and there is all this temperature going off and the temperature decreases really rapidly because it's really big. The other day I calculated, they have this period where they suppose the hydrogen and helium were created, and, um, I don't care about the hydrogen and helium, but I thought, wouldn't there have to be some sort of carbon?"

He could go on and on.

And he did.

"Otherwise, the carbon would have to be coming out of the stars and hence the Earth, made mostly of carbon, we wouldn't be here. So I calculated, the time it would take to create 2 percent of the carbon in the universe, it would actually have to be several micro-seconds. Or a couple of nano-seconds, or something like that. An extremely small period of time. Like faster than a snap. That isn't gonna happen."

"Because of that," he continued, "that means that the world would have never been created because none of the carbon would have been given 7 billion years to fuse together. We'd have to be 21 billion years old . . . and that would just screw everything up."

Plenty of time for Carbon at the beginning of things.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallicity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-alpha_process
http://www.solstation.com/x-objects/first.htm

IANAA, so my GUESS here is that kid lacks the knowledge necessary to put the whole thing in perspective.
As indicated by astrophysics Professor Scott Tremaine's reply to his theories that suggests "Jake to spend as much time as possible to learn more and to further develop his theory".
It's a polite way to say "Well thank YOU Mr. Smartypants. Us poor astrophysics scientists here would have NEVER thought of THAT had YOU not come along. NOT!".

And the journalist simply doesn't have a clue on the subject and is clearly going for a sound-bite.

In your calculations you forgot the small factoid that it may be another thousand years before it goes supernova. It has brightened considerably in the past only to dim back down. It was Fox news (fair and balanced) that mentions it going supernova, not the paper presented at the meeting that merely states a 15% shrinkage and nothing else.

Well, yes. It's been known as a variable for a very long time, and while I don't know how long its diameter has been monitored, it seems likely that its changes in brightness would be accompanied by changes in size. A 15% change in diameter isn't quite so impressive against a history of twofold changes in brightness.

In fact, here's an article claiming that its diameter varies from 550 to 920 times that of the Sun (alas, the link the article cites is dead). They might mean, though, that measurements using different techniques yield results in this range, not that the actual size varies within that range. From the Berkeley press release:

"Since the 1921 measurement, its size has been re-measured by many different interferometer systems over a range of wavelengths where the diameter measured varies by about 30 percent," Wishnow said. "At a given wavelength, however, the star has not varied in size much beyond the measurement uncertainties."

In a hundred or so years when we have the technology to get there. Might even be the ideal place for a colony someday.

Look, I agree that it's a nice place to go visit, but if you looked into things, you would find that it is 10.5 Light Years Away from earth it would take close to an eternity to get there with current rocket technology and certainly what is being developed. And not to rain on the parade again, but before anyone goes touting ION ENGINES will get us there, no, they really won't. You see Ion Engines need large amounts of power to run. Really large amounts that are generally limited to the amount of juice that can be generated by huge solar panels. Short of putting a nuclear reactor on this ship to get us there, we simply won't have enough sunlight to make the engine run once is starts to fade away from the centerish part of our solar system.

In short, I would love to agree, but I really think that you would need to change the "hundred or so" part of your post to be "many hundreds or so".

That's assuming we can deal with the massive solar winds that are 30 times as powerful as the ones in our system. Did I forget that part?

...this is only in a lab environment with only oxygen. The reality is that the split off oxygen cells bond with other gasses and molecules, not just with other O^1 molecules.

My point was that I didn't think O^1 would occur in "normal" conditions. I didn't say that other molecules are not possible - they are indeed mentioned by chemical equations in said Wikipedia article.

See http://www.oxygenmedicine.com/o3laymanview.html

While not being a scientist myself, I do have a cursory interest in science and I always attempt to not just believe what I read, but try to think with my own head and draw my own conclusions. And the article you mention has couple of "red flags" preventing me from taking it on a face value.

The article basically says that since anaerobic cells do not like oxygen, all we have to do is pump oxygen into our bodies (quote from the article: The basic concept is to "flood the body with oxygen" and ozone.) and we will be purified of many ailments.

This foregoes that fact that to parts of our own cells, including DNA and many organelles, oxygen is toxic (even O^2, not to mention O^3 and many compounds produced from it). As explained here and (more verbosely) here, our cells are product of evolution of both aerobic and anaerobic life. The life of an average eukaryote cell is a balancing act between metabolic need for oxygen and a need to protect its own DNA and organelles from it. Simply pumping oxygen indiscriminately into our bodies would offset this fine balance.

Later, the article even goes on to claim that Ozone has been used to "cure" cancer and aids and many other "incurable" diseases in Germany for more than 50 years!. Now to claim for a chemical that damages DNA to cure a disease that results from a damage to DNA is a very strange claim indeed!

In any case, we agree that "too large of a quantity is bad" :)

The star is only about 47%-56% enriched as our Sun in elements heavier than hydrogen, so it stands to reason that any planets that formed around the star are similarly deficient in heavy elements/metals. See the following web page about the star, but keep in mind it has not been updated with this latest planetary information:

The star is a variable, so it may periodically hammer planets in a close orbit with massive flares. If the planet was covered in a sea that might offer enough protection from the hard radiation of the flares to let life develop. It's surprising that a planet in this new orbit wasn't disrupted by the Neptune size giant closer to the star.

I am not an astrophysicist, but there is some good information at the following link regarding the Alpha Centauri system (which is basically a dual-star system if you discount the temporary incursion of the Proxima Centauri red dwarf star):

Seems the most important factor is not the duration of energy that two stars give, but whether liquid water can exist. Even though Alpha Centauri A and B range between 11 and 35 AU from each other, habitable planets that have liquid water could exist within one or two AU of each star (both stars even have decent light for photosynthesis to occur), and planetary orbits would be stable within a few AU of each star. Granted, there might be long time periods when you don't get a "night" because there are stars on either side of you, but I think that would just be a matter of whatever life arose there adapting to conditions.

Altair is NOT double.

http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~kaler/sow/altair.html

http://www.solstation.com/stars/altair.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair

The closest they get is HD 10307. The entire list is:

Tau Ceti, 11.9 light years
Alpha Centauri B, 4.35 light years
Epsilon Eridani, 10.5 light-years
Epsilon Indi A, 11.8 light-years
http://www.glyphweb.com/esky/stars/keid.html">Omic ron 2 Eridani, 16 light years
Beta Canum Venaticorum - 27.31 light years
HD 10307, 41.2 light years
HD 211415>/a>, 44.4 light years
18 Scorpii, 45.7 light years
51 Pegasus, 40 light years

There is also a top 50 list

The closest they get is HD 10307. The entire list is:

Tau Ceti, 11.9 light years
Alpha Centauri B, 4.35 light years
Epsilon Eridani, 10.5 light-years
Epsilon Indi A, 11.8 light-years
http://www.glyphweb.com/esky/stars/keid.html">Omic ron 2 Eridani, 16 light years
Beta Canum Venaticorum - 27.31 light years
HD 10307, 41.2 light years
HD 211415>/a>, 44.4 light years
18 Scorpii, 45.7 light years
51 Pegasus, 40 light years

There is also a top 50 list

The closest they get is HD 10307. The entire list is:

Tau Ceti, 11.9 light years
Alpha Centauri B, 4.35 light years
Epsilon Eridani, 10.5 light-years
Epsilon Indi A, 11.8 light-years
http://www.glyphweb.com/esky/stars/keid.html">Omic ron 2 Eridani, 16 light years
Beta Canum Venaticorum - 27.31 light years
HD 10307, 41.2 light years
HD 211415>/a>, 44.4 light years
18 Scorpii, 45.7 light years
51 Pegasus, 40 light years

There is also a top 50 list

The closest they get is HD 10307. The entire list is:

Tau Ceti, 11.9 light years
Alpha Centauri B, 4.35 light years
Epsilon Eridani, 10.5 light-years
Epsilon Indi A, 11.8 light-years
http://www.glyphweb.com/esky/stars/keid.html">Omic ron 2 Eridani, 16 light years
Beta Canum Venaticorum - 27.31 light years
HD 10307, 41.2 light years
HD 211415>/a>, 44.4 light years
18 Scorpii, 45.7 light years
51 Pegasus, 40 light years

There is also a top 50 list

The closest they get is HD 10307. The entire list is:

Tau Ceti, 11.9 light years
Alpha Centauri B, 4.35 light years
Epsilon Eridani, 10.5 light-years
Epsilon Indi A, 11.8 light-years
http://www.glyphweb.com/esky/stars/keid.html">Omic ron 2 Eridani, 16 light years
Beta Canum Venaticorum - 27.31 light years
HD 10307, 41.2 light years
HD 211415>/a>, 44.4 light years
18 Scorpii, 45.7 light years
51 Pegasus, 40 light years

There is also a top 50 list

...21.5155818 Astronomical Units

which puts it just inside the closest approach of Saturn, but well outside Jupiter's orbit.

That depends a lot on perspective. As distances between stars go, that's really quite close. Keep in mind that the sun is a fairly small star. For comparison, however, compare this orbit to the diameter of Betelgeuse.

Admittedly, Betelgeuse is huge -- a supergiant, AAMOF. Nonetheless, we're talking about a size that would basically put the two into direct contact --though, admittedly, "contact" with Betelgeuse is a somewhat tenuous term, given that at the outside, it's basically a vacuum (i.e. lower density than our atmosphere).

BTW, they did trace the trajectory back to the center of the galaxy, more or less so that part is relatively solid.

For one, you aren't even simulating nebulas (to use English pluralization) or galaxies. In a rough calculation, Andromeda is roughly 1E12 Solar Masses and a solar mass is 2E20 kilograms. So Andromeda is 2E32 kg. Each simulation element is 2E39 kg. So each element is simulation 10 million Andromedas! For an element of scale, the Local Group contains 30 galaxies, while the Local Supercluster contains only 100 galaxies and galaxy clusters. It is estimated that the Local Supercluster's mass is 10E15 solar masses or 2E36 kg. Each simulation elemnt is then simulating 1000 Local Superclusters! Not only that, but they are not taking into account light or electromagnetism (AFAIK) and don't take into account the possiblity that an intelligent civilization has discovered the ability to teleport entire galaxies across the universe. But considering that the universe is, on the whole, fairly neutral (I think) and we have not detected such a civilization, the only force we have to worry about is gravity, and they are only trying to model the gross universe, not figure out whether John D. Customer will choose coffee or tea tomorrow to wake up with, and don't have sufficient data to make a starting point that would allow them to come anywhere close, I would say that it is a reasonable model with reasonable trade-offs in accuracy to efficiency. If it looks reasonably similar to our universe, they will probably get a more powerful computer to run the sim on.

I believe the first exoplanet was discovered in 1996, by Marcy and Butler, around 70 Virginis

The up to date list (minus these recent 100) can be found at exoplanets.org

In the most recent star wars movie, ObiWan and Yoda are looking at a big 3d map of the star system. Obi refers to a small planet to the north of something. Being a map maker for a living, I was somewhat incensed - cardinal directions aren't really applicable in space.

For a cool website on interstellar mapping, check here.

Gong Sixue leaned back in his captain's chair and rubbed his eyes wearily, muttering to the computer to turn off the display. The projected holograph dissolved as the mist flow to the screen was shut off, revealing the starscape through the window beyond. The bow of the ship dipped away, giving a wide angle view of the gray, lifeless planet floating below.
"Four hundred and seventy-eight Sol-type stars I've visited now," Sixue sighed. "And not even a single clue as to the location of the ancient home of man, 'Earth'."

;)

I don't see what the problem is...

-T

Time to get back to the basics folks.

Good writing should really be done on the primary writing environment - that is cuneform and clay.

You should really forego the modern inventions of typewriters, ink and paper and such as they will contaminate the muse and offend the gods. Nothing like the smell and feel of freshly pressed clay tablets.

This has been done; a few years ago, someone thought they saw a planet in orbit around Proxima Centauri (the dwarf companion to the binary Alpha system). But this has apparently not been confirmed. See this link for more information. As far as beaming transmissions at it, I'll bet somebody has done that. And I'll bet that radio telescopes have been pointed at it.

how is 7.8 lightyears local?

It's local if you're headed in that direction. Alpha Centari, Barnard's, and Wolf 359 are all on the same side.

Also, for gravity assist, it's not the size of the mass that matters so much as its relative motion.

it's rather misleading to make Sol so large, but hey, what can you do?

Solstation has a nice 3-D star map Java applet.

how is 7.8 lightyears local?

It's local if you're headed in that direction. Alpha Centari, Barnard's, and Wolf 359 are all on the same side.

Also, for gravity assist, it's not the size of the mass that matters so much as its relative motion.

it's rather misleading to make Sol so large, but hey, what can you do?

Solstation has a nice 3-D star map Java applet.

There were earlier reports of a "Jupiter-like" planet around this star (see "http://stardate.utexas.edu/pr/pages/20000807.html ").

That planet had a 7 year orbit, was about the size of Jupiter, and was about as far away from its sun as our ateroid belt is from our sun.

Epsilon Eridani is about a billion years old, so the dust has not had a lot of time to be collected by planets, but it is possible that the level of bombardment by comets has settled down to where bacteria-like life could exist on a planet closer to the star.

The authors of the paper linked above speculated on a second planet based on dust ring evidence:

Asymmetric, primordial dust rings made up of 1-mm-size particles extend 60 AU from Epsilon Eridani. The irregular shape of this ring may be due to another, undiscovered planet. "If there is indeed a second planet, the asymmetry of the disk would suggest that the planet is orbiting just inside the ring, at a distance of 30 AU -- much farther out than the planet we have found and with a much longer orbital period than the one we've discovered," according to Hatzes. "Thus, it might also be responsible for the possible overall slope in our velocity measurements. And where there's one planet, there may be more."

The discovery of the planet around Epsilon Eridani raises the likelihood of detecting planets with longer orbital periods and multiplanet systems like our own. "Given its close proximity to Earth, a one-arcsecond separation between the planet and its central star, and the relatively large degree of perturbation -- about 1.4 milli-arcseconds -- of the star from its orbiting planet mean that we could very likely resolve the true mass of this planet, using both direct imaging and space-based astrometric measurements with Hubble Space Telescope," Cochran noted.

Another good source of more information is: http://www.solstation.com/stars/eps-erid.htm.

You believe wrongly.

HD28185 b and IotaHor b both could support moons with liquid water, year-round.

HD27442 b (aka Epsilon Reticulum) could also do it.

Other planets visit their star's habitable zones, too. Even though most of these other planets have eccentric orbits which would take them in and out periodically, they still "come close to matching those criteria".

Also a much better link to details of the Gamma Cephei system can be found here.

http://www.solstation.com/stars/gl229.htm

Wolf 359 is a real star, the third-closest to Earth, as you can see if you go here.

Damn, link didn't work. I did a preview and everything...

Wolf 359

http://www.solstation.com/stars/asteroid.htm
http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~fringwal/w11b.asteroi ds.txt
http://galaxy.ngc.peachnet.edu/~jjones/astr1010hom e/a1010out.html

You have the internet, you have Google, use them.