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Planetary System Similar to Sol Discovered
Anonymous Coward writes: "The Washington Post is carrying its own copy about a planetary system very similar to Sol in the Big Dipper. 47 Ursae Majoris has at least two large gas giants in circular orbits, similar to many of Sol's satellites, and the possibility exists for smaller, currently undetectable rocky planets closer to the primary. Circular orbits are less common than highly elliptical orbits, and are more promising. Read the whole article to find out why."
Whoa! Lots of fun tonight for you isn't it.
Lets see, where to start. Oh yeah I liked this one...
You obviously have not understood the point of moderation points
Yeah, but the great slashcode god keeps giving them to me anyway. I hope some day that it will be proud of my decisions and I will be justified for my actions. In the mean time, Angry evil half-step-brother of slashcode named Anonymous Coward is displeased with such actions. [you sense a struggle between Slashcode and Anonymous Coward, you feel the power of Anonymous Coward decrease.]
What else did I like, oh yeah right before it...
You say that it is I who does not understand before posting, but it is you who continues to insist that moderation downwards is a more important task than moderating upwards.
Am I missing something? Those seem to be unrelated points and the latter is totaly unsupported and false. I don't know that I need to compare you to a black hole, but on your second point, the moderator guidelines do mention that it is better to mod up than down. That is why I think the informative posts deserve top billing.
I've said it before but I'll put it even more plainly. I'm for moderating up good posts. I'm for moderating up funny posts, they are good. I'm just for moderating up informative posts becuase they are usefull and good. Sometimes its just unfortunate that a moderation cap gets in the way.
You keep wanting to say that I want to mod people down in some superiority trip. Indeed ascribing evil motives to personal choices is one step away from admitting you have no intelligent input. That step is just realizing it for yourself first.
In fact you never mention a good reason why funny posts should rate as high as intelligent posts, did you. I waited but all I got was some personal slander, misrepresentation of actions and not even someone to stand behind the comments.
You tried to re-enforce your misrepresentation with redundancy by repeating the first sentance twice even though I showed it false, twice. Is this what I'm supposed to accept as lucid argument? Keep saying it but won't make it true.
Moderating on slashdot is one thing. Making life changes to value systems is another, and I'll need real reasons to do that. I don't think I should change because some AC thinks such actions are a superiority complex, or the result of a vacious mind. If you can't understand what is going on, why should I listen to you?
Let me end with this one, its classic brown-boxing...
Do you feel that only those posts that you deem important are *real*?
All posts are *real*. Some are just real stupid, some are real clever, some are real useless and some are real informative. Not all posts are created equal. And yes, I moderate accordingly according to my own value judgement. Do you not moderate by your own judgement system? If not, what value system do you use to moderate?
I've had plenty of people complain about things that I do. Your not the first, you are not even the first to complain about something I do that everyone else does.
I like constructive criticism, I appreciate diversity of thought and even seek it out. In the end, I give you the same challenge I give anyone else who doesn't like what I'm doing.
If you can show me something better to do, I'll do it. It's what we call being open minded, but that means you actually have to come up with reasoning. I'm here to tell you that if all your going to do is complain (and all you have done is complain) then it will fall on deaf ears. Theres too much to life to stop and listen to someone who is just a critic.
"Nope, tighter orbits would mean shorter years. The spin period is the length of the day. "
Yep, you're right. They're great engineers because they meet the schedule even though the years are shorter. So I guess engineers on short term projects are no better, just the ones who measure in man-years rather than man-months. Fredrick Brooks would be proud! It turns out though, that though the variable was mis-named it still serves the 'year' function. The error is merely semantic, you see. 8^}
Cheers,
Zero__Kelvin
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Your calculations are all on the ball for the solar system, but you're looking at the results of something astonomers still don't fully understand - the birth of the solar system.
For all we know, every time there's a dust cloud with size > X and < Y, there will be exactly 9 planets with exactly a 4/9 chance of terrestrial planets, 1/2 chances of being in the life zone, 1/63 chance of a significantly sized moon, etc. People who quote statististics on the likelihood of alien life are working with too many unknowns - I've heard estimates ranging from 1/4 to 1/universe.
Back to the subject line though, sure, Earth's unique - just about everything out there is, but the question is if there's a planet that could support life. Until there's more information on the statistics involved (statistics that can probably only be achieved through the study of other solar systems), there's no way to quantify the likelihood of life.
Last post!
Even taking your most empirical probability, that 4/9 planets are terrestrial. This is pure speculation, because we have no idea how typical our solar system is. The rest of your numbers either suffer from the same reliance on a single known instance from a pool of billions, or from an assumption about what life requires (life needs a large moon? How do you know that?) Life on Earth probably started around hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean; why not add plate tectonics to your list of speculations?
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Even in this case, the light is only moving at the speed of light, the information dosen't travel any faster.
The concept of molecular bifrucation communication is hardly useless. The basic concept is that when certain sub-atomic particles, when split off of their original Atom, exhibit an amazing property: when you change the spin of one, the spin of the other reverses -instantaniously-, faster than light. That is to say, not only was the time between the two changes in spin -unobservable-, it was -definately- longer than the amount of time it took to project a beam of light from one to the other.
Instantanious communication is ultimately useless?
Hardly.
This is completely misleading and incorrect. I actually thought of this in high school physics class and asked my father (a physics professor about this) about it...
The part that you're making an incorrect assumption about is the fact that the spot is not actually an entity capable of moving. All you're seeing is a grouping of photons bouncing off atmosphere and returning to your retina. As you swing the flashlight across the sky at ever-quicker speeds, less and less photons compose that "spot".
www.Jackassery.com
it is funny, but I'm glad the previous poster pointed out what he did.
However much it kills my karma, I always use my moderator points to moderate down all +5 funny comments because information and insights are more valuable than comedy.
Well, the occasional Simpson-quality post that is insightful and put in a funny way I leave alone.
I believe such a satelite would probably be tide locked, so that one side always faced the gas giant, and the other either faced the sun, or away.
It seems to me that a thicker-than-earth greenhouse gas layer would help out the problem a lot.
Of course, you have to be far enough away from the planet to not get your atmospher sucked away.
Tell that to Jon Johansen in Norway who contributed in making DeCSS.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I am very surprised at the low score this line of suggestions gets. Moreover it's been ignored by slashcode developpers so far. Isn't the following principle obvious ? Humor should not be imposed I suppose that's the reason for the funny flag in slashcode. That flag is quite useless without filtering capabilities. PS : I like fun, less so at work.
Here are some things to think about.
:-) (Well that and the defense department....get to that later.)
1) The age of the Universe is estimated to be about 12-14 billion years old.
2) Earth has existed for about half that time and in all that time, through billions of years of Evolution, only ONE species has emerged sentient.
Half the lifetime of the known Universe, and on one planet, it took about half that time to make ONE species remotely sentient on earth, with BILLIONS of years to try, "eveolution" or whatever the process is you want to call it, got it right once and only once.
Sentient life, it would seem is pretty RARE. In fact, it would seem even in the most IDEAL conditions, such as Earth, it takes a HUGE amount of time to develop.
This is a very very BAD thing. Continue reading on to find out why.
3) We now know, that our Sun is NOT an ordinary star. How do we know that? Because we do spectroscopic studies and we can know the composition of nearby star systems, with no guess work.
These studies reveal that 80 percent of most stars, many of them are not candidates for worlds that would require life. They end up:
4) Having poor amounts of metal content. No metals means it is highly unlikely the star will be stable over its lifetime. Metals it would seem moderate the stars nuclear reactions, and keeps it radiating energy with very little variation of its lifespan.
This finding is relatively new, thanks to Linux Beowulf clusters.
5) Stars that lack Metal cannot have formed from clouds of intergalactic material that contain any amount of heavy metals by definition. Why is that significant? It is significant because without heavy metals, planets, specifically rocky planets won't form around these stars. What you get is heavy Gas giant's like Jupitor or Saturn.
6) Doesn't look good so far and it gets very much worse I am afraid. It turns out that a galaxy is a very very hostile place to live in.
So what you say? It can't be that dangerous we are here? Right?
Yes, but consider this. You have heard arguments that there are billions and billions of stars in our galaxy....yadda yadda yadda=life should be everywhere and lets give another billion to SETI to find it.
7) No, I am afraid not my friends. You see the Sun and WHERE it is located is also VERY important, in our galaxy. You see those big dust clounds obscuring the core of our galaxy on a clear night called the Milky way? Consider them a security shield. In addition we are 2/3rd or more on the way out towards the outer middle of what we presume to be one of our galaxies arms. Very very far from the galactic core.
I won't get into the complete details, but the galaxy is a very very VERY dangerous place to live anywhere near the core.
Why is this important? It is important because the closer you move towards the center of our galaxy, the less likely you will have Stars that are stable for long periods, that do not expose thier accompanied planets (if any) to the extreme pasturizing effects of the galactic core, and dense stellar neighborhood. By definition, these populations of stars as one moves towards the center of the galaxy CANNOT be habitable because they have more materials available to them and are very large, have short life spans, and violently blow themselves up, along with the planets they carry, if any remember!
Short lifetime stars we know, cannot provide enough time for life to evolve to sentient states if the earth is any example, it took HALF the lifetime of the KNOWN UNIVERSE to produce ONE species.
Location, Location, Location. There may be billions and billions of stars, but it really doesn't matter. Most of them are not suitable, and we can prove that. It would seem, that a narrow band exists that goes around our galaxy that provides a habital region for the development of life. Very similair to the habital region around our own star, where luckily, earth is currently located, and I exist to type this!
So, no, life just can't pop up ANYWHERE in our galaxy and more than likey it can ONLY pop up in a very narrow field or band around a galaxy.
Each galaxy, should have its own band or habital region of stability where sentient life could evolve.
8) Oh my, and then we have the observations of a naturalist I am a fan of, Mr. Stephen J Gould. A quote from Mr. Gould:
"Sentient life has occurred in only one species over billions of years of life on this planet. It is not at all clear if this is a survival trait, as so many have put forth. Dinosaurs and thier kind ruled this planet quite successfully for 100's of millions of years and they didn't need intelligence at all, and in fact did quite well without it. Far better than we have and we have only been around for about 100 thousand or so years. In fact, long term, one could argue that sentient intelligence is a negative survival trait and actually hurts a species long term survival."
I could not agree more. We have debates that long term, with Nuclear Bombs in suitcases available now for your local nut case, intelligence is probably not a good thing if you are a life form and want to be here, or your decendents, 100 million years from now.
9) It gets even worse with current research comming down the pipe my friends, and well, then we have SETI and thier Radio antenna.
Stupid.
Why?
This is my opinion of course, given our current observations and understanding of how life works and why another billion should not go to SETI in the future, they already spent a Billion, with ZERO results, and I think it speaks volumes about current research into life at the moment.
Any life that has survived as long as it has on Earth, and develops sentient life forms, you have to understand, will not use Radio waves for communication. The time spans we are talking about are so enourmous, that the civilization we are looking for either has either died a long time ago or is so advanced, our preconcieved notions about what sorts or kinds of travel with our pitiful little science books, is at a child like understanding at best. If they do have those solutions, they won't use radio waves to communicate, it would take too long to manage a galactic empire on that scale.
They won't, Oh God, another DUMB idea, use lasers either. Stupid, idiotic, and DUMB.
Which is why SETI after plowing through about a billion dollars now, hasn't found DINGY.
And they won't find what they are looking for.
10) Now, during this whole discussion I point out why SENTIENT life is probably not very wisespread . Certainly not enough widepread to devote anothe r billion dollars to SETI to look for it.
I by no means, claim there is not life out there. I bet we find life in our general vacinity in our part of the galactic neighborhood because it would seem we are in a fine part of town, the Earth and the Sun. We probably will find life, or possibly hints that it at one time existed outside Earth.
I believe life is very resiliant and if given the right conditions, will spring up.
I don't claim to know why, but if it happened here, it can happen again someplace else nearby. Life has survived some enourmous catastrophes on this planet we call earth in the past, so it must be rather resilient and not easy to snuff out.
But given this series of arguments, I believe life is not as wide spread as we believe. What IS neat about this new evidence is it allows us to focus more of our searches, instead of what SETI is doing just pointing an antenna up in the air and waiting for a signal in any direction.
These are things SETI doesn't want you to know, and given what we know already, I would LOVE to see that money put to taming space for economic and peaceful uses.
We may disagree about SETI, but I bet we dont' disagree that having all of our eggs in one basket with nuts running around today and people killing each other, we should probably put a human outpost OFF OF THE PLANET. Just so we don't become a layer in the fossil record just like the dinosaurs.
Because that is something we CAN prevent and is a very very REAL danger every day.
Certainly a better investment than another billion for great screen savers, which is about what SETI is, in my opnion.
-hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Of course, your values are just as valid as mine. Or as invalid. But, the process is the same.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
Anything greater than 21st technology and chances are they'll find us a LOT sooner than we'll find them.
Chances are they'd have blown themselves to kingdom come.
too bad that some people first post and then read article just to get the first post :(
important thing about this discovery of the new gas giants is not the discovery of the gas giant itself but the location of its orbit and preferences it has that possibly imply smaller rocky planets in habitable zone.
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
I wouldn't wait for an ack if the distance was 45 Light Years. I'd keep broadcasting. At least 45 years later, we'd have a pretty good rate of information coming through.
Get a clue. "Ursa Major" is a constellation made of many stars at vastly varying distances, none of which is 3 light years. The closest star (after the sun) is Proxima Centauri which is something like 4.25 light years away.
As others have pointed out, there are a number of things which could moderate (or for that matter, extremize) this situation, including atmosphere, energy from the mother planet, internal energy, oceans, and so on.
But even a fairly extreme temperature range is not necessarily unsurvivable. Earth has a number of examples of life that goes dormant under extreme conditions, including high-altitude bacteria which essentially freeze solid every night and thaw out each morning. Desert spores, blossoming briefly during rare moments of moisture, are another instructive example. Of course, 'higher' life may be more limited- or not ; at this point we have very little basis for deciding.
"The greater the mind, the greater the need for simplicity of play."
I think that this would be a very sterile environment indeed if all we had were serious comments on each subject. I myself look for both funny and interesting comments on a subject, to keep my interest and to just have fun.
I look forward to the 'geek jokes,' funny remarks said on a subject that only we would get. I think it makes for a better sense of comradery with the people around here.
I do like the suggestion of having the option in the slashcode to filter out Funny, but I would be the last person to use it.
Absence of any form of interstellar communication doesn't mean there's no intelligent life where we're looking.
What's the old saying? "We know there's intelligent life out there because it's not talking to us."
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
"
So it seems that they have shorter days then? Wow
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
From the appropriate vantage point in space, you have succeeded in doing nothing more than waving a garden hose back and forth really fast. Information about the flashlight's lateral motion won't arrive any faster than it would have if the light was traveling in a straight line.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Perhaps we should start by sending them Comer & Stevens as UDP (I wouldn't wish the RFCs on anyone) and follow it with a connect?
Discovering irrefutable evidence of extraterrestrial intelligent life would mean the end of religion...
No,no. Quite the opposite.
Most religions have a strong belief that the existence of God can't be proved.
We have a ton of research showing how planets and life can be produced. At this point it's scientifically almost inconceivable that other planet systems and life wouldn't exist. Therefore the nonexistence of those would be very strong evidence of external intervention (hand of God).
Since non-proof of God is so important, it is, therefore, of great religious importance for extrasolar life to exist.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
post our messages to them on Slashdot and by the time we hit "submit" the aliens' response will already be on its way back to us.
There are no other^H^H^H^H^H aliens posting to this forum. Nothing more to see here. Move along.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
I got these numbers from his book "The Creator and the Cosmos". I should also say that Hugh Ross is an "Old Earth Creationist". (That is he believes the universe is 14-17 billion years old and that there was a creator.) He puts together a good argument in favor of some creator fine tuning the universe for life on earth.
Don't underestimate the amount of information that data-starved astronomers can get out of what's available, though.
:-)
You mean funding starved, don't you?
"Source... The Final Frontier" -- keepersoflists.org
This is good news. If the inner region is empty and our earth explodes someday in the future, we can move our earth there. Even if we can't move the entire earth there, we may build a new one. All it needs are some dirts and lots of energy, anyway.
What is sol?
People spend billions of dollars per year doing non-profitable things, such as watching football. Why? It's entertaining. Space launches are also entertaining. Any other benefit is an additional bonus.
Remind me, what would be the effects on the funding of this project if they hadn't "proven" both their technique and the existence of planets?
It's amazing how scientists, who work in a world of almost bizarre openness, are often subject to more suspicion than, say, corporate CEOs.
People were looking for extrasolar planets for a good five years before they refined their techniques enough to find one. Funding continued because it was good science. Their findings were immediately subject to intense scrutiny from a large community of astronomers. Independent observations were done and continue to be done. Alternative theories were proposed. Some supposed planets have been removed from the list; those that remain have, by and large, very clear signatures, well-defined periods, and no obvious alternative theories. One (which is about the number expected) has been extremely well-confirmed by observations of its transit. As a researcher in this field, believe me, mistakes are found quickly and fraud is extremely rare.
Incidentally, Geoff Marcy's team out in California has demonstrated precision in their observations to about 3 m/s- a good factor of three better than needed for this particular detection. The papers are all on-line and not even hard to find. It might be prudent to look at them before making vague accusations.
Their funding has been going for at least 10 years, and their technique is as accurate as it sounds. Iodine absorption spectroscopy *is* as accurate as the the numbers claim (about 3m/s at the last look).
The phrase "By focusing extremely precise measuring techniques..." is poor english - they don't need a sharp image of the star, they just need as much light as possible to put into spectrograph.
And although 99% of astronomers agree they're probably detecting planet-mass objects, there are a couple of people who think they're seeing brown dwarf stars at high orbital inclinations, and they're not planets at all.
Actually, colonizing a new planet isn't going to solve any problems. They'll just get twice as big. We reproduce exponentially right now - double the habitat, and it only takes a few generations to absorb the new resources. Look at North America, for instance. If we want to survive in the future, we need to learn to work with what we've got. Either we learn to control our population, or it gets controlled. War is a pretty effective retro-active birth control. Do it now, or do it later - we choose.
Of course there's life in that system! But, don't expect to hear from them anytime soon.
/. effect. Took them several days to restart their systems while they muttered something about a something called a "cmdr taco" and intergalactic war.
How do I know? Well...during my last alien abduction, they told me so (The captain even has a pet shnitzoid named Spazmork). While passing through our solar system, their systems were knocked offline when they encountered an intense wall of RF energy packets originating from atop a coffee shop in NYC. They called it the
They are now posting warnings and to other civilizations warning of the danger of passing through the Sol system.
(C) Kaki Sain, 2011. By reading this, you have illegally copied my property to your brain.
... they called it "flutter and wow".
Damn! Only a slashdotted site has a higher latency than that! :>
Join the TWIT army now!
Indeed Ursa Major should be a probable place to find life and stuff.
After all, Ursa Minor Beta already has more life than it can handle: "When you're tired of Ursa Minor Beta, you're tired of life"
-- "If you had fallen into a shit pit during a battle, lick yourself off and move on." - Jaroslav Hasek
a feature currently suggested on sourceforge for slashcode is to be able to filter out all funny comments... that'd solve your problem
There are a lot of things that happen faster than light. You can even demonstrate one to yourself right now.
Go outside. Shine a flashlight into the sky and sweep it back and forth. At some point Out There, your spot of light will be moving from side to side faster than the speed of light. Do the geometry if you want to figure out how far away that is.
The problem is this: there is no way to exploit anything like that into an information-transmitting system. That quantum interconnected stuff you alluded to is the same way. It's cool, but ultimately useless.
We're not going to trick physics that easily.
nice to see OSS being nearly bug-free. I've seen this error plenty O' times.
WTF? You mean you can go on dates with women? Here I am thinking that their primary function is to lower my self-esteem!
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
Now you're +5 Funny. :P
This sig is worse than my last.
Of course we wouldn't find out about the DMCA infringement for 45 years, and the statute of limitations is only 5 years.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
46 Lightyears.
Dancin Santa
The rotating disk is another interesting thought experiment, but this one has a different explanation, which is simply that you will find that no matter what construction you choose, the energy needed to bring that disc spinning fast enough that the outer edge is going faster than lightspeed exceeds infinity.
Sorry, it's harder than that to come up with a violation of relativity.
www.Jackassery.com
Of course, this isn't what you do. You say.
"Hi, we think we have detected someone who might be able to receive this message. Here are 90 years of transmissions from our encyclopedias, archives, libraries, etc., with lots of redundancy, various frequencies etc. etc."
90 years later, if all goes well, you start receiving replies like
"Hey, good to talk, we've decoded your language primers. Here are our encyclopedias etc."
Then a few months later
"Based on what you've sent so far, we'd like to hear more about fly fishing, barbecue cookery and string theory (or whatever). We're also starting to skip the basic physics in our encyclopedias where it matches up with what you're telling us you already know."
If you haven't already sent the requested info, you slip it in when the question arrives.
It's not exactly a conversation, but if both sides are willing, you can learn a lot about one another in a couple of centuries.
I have to agree - thank you, NASA, for screwing the public - launching all those darn weather & communications satelites has cost the American public way too much $$$ & given us so little in return. Lets come back to earth - all that useless stuff floating around out there . . . .how dare they scam us by launching it!
The spot will appear to move faster than light, but it is important to note that the photons comprising the beam are moving at the speed of light. Once free of the laser, the photons will continue in a straight line forever. Changing the direction of the laser will not change the direction that the photons are travelling. You are describing a giant laser space whip.
Jesus saves and takes half damage.
The method is a straightforward application of the doppler effect. Conceptually simple, but it did require the development of new technology to achieve the amazing velocity reslolution quoted in the article.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
So your way of contributing to the discussion is to pound down posts that you don't like instead of raising up ones that you think are important?
Coward,
That is *a* way to contribute, but its not my way. Not to put to fine a point on it, I never said I didn't like funny posts. They are just overrated when put next to *real* posts. You should probably pay more attention. Read the sig, take it to heart and join us again sometime.
Why would anyone think that just because some discovery will not grant you immediate benefits it shouldn't be pursued? You wouldn't be reading this on a computer if the people working on batteries and that new fangled, but completely useless, electricity 300 years ago had decided it wasn't worth it as there was no obvious short term payoff. A hundred years is a blink compared to even the short history of humanity.
We are not going to be stuck on the Earth forever. Mars will be terra-formed, people will fill up the solar system, and eventually move to other star systems. This may seem far fetched, but I'm sure the idea that men would walk on the moon seemed far fetched even 500 years ago.
Anarchists never rule
The REAL problem with hunger in the world stems from a local lack of freedom, democracy, and capitalism.
Well, if they are ahead of us, odds are they have solved some problems that we are currently facing. If they could show us how to make sky scrappers 200 stories high cheaply, (think big apartments downtown), and how to grwo food a lot more efficantly then we do now, many population problems would be solved.
If they are behind us, it can't be far because we have just barely got the ability to communicate. We can quickly bring us up to our level, and odds are good they have discovered something that we haven't yet. 45 years isn't a lot of scientific progress. That isn't to say we won't discover something while the knowledge is in transit, but even still it is useful to exchange knowedge.
Just a warning though, if we exchange information we can't determin who is in the right in their local wars for years to come, we should therefore make sure that knowledge we transmit is avaiable to all.
Well....assuming that FTL travel becomes possible then by default FTL communication will become available, even if it has to be hand-brought by a courier ship...
--Jubedgy
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis hebes
Attention - Anyone who thinks I havn't caught onto the concept of long ping times between inter-stella distances.
The idea of deathmatching with people on mars on a 6 minute ping, at first, made me laugh. Not in the that's really funny kind of laugh, but in the monkey who's a little nervous about his situation kind of way.
Honestly, it hurts to try and work out a way around that lag. I usually fall into the "can't we just use sub-space?" trap.
Anyway, incase you didn't know, your comments are not funny, original, or even nearly observational.
(Sorry -Having a bad week - not usually so anal)
Get the Hell off my planet, you slimy mobster Bush!
Energy and heat can be derived in a number of different ways. Gravity (from the mother planet as well as its own) itself in conjunction with other factors such as friction on a solid ice planet may be enough to produce vast oceans.
Of course, all you will see is an ordinary-looking dim star. But it's the thought that counts.
Edith Keeler Must Die
I suppose the point is, once we discover how to travel faster than light, that system might be first on our list of places to swing by.
As for communication lag, the concept of molecular bifurcation (bifrucation?) communication (which would allow instantanious communication regardless of distance) is steadily gaining acceptance as something that might be viable in the not-so-distant future.
All this space nonsense is just a way to distract us from what is really important in our lives.
Hmm, the meaning of life would be second on my list, right behind "women". Discovering aliens seems like it could contribute to that goal.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Uh huh. When I did astronomy, back in the day, we worked in powers of ten. Anything with the right number of digits was "close enough".
Now here we have a bunch of astronomers who have been funded to find planets. They come up with a single observation technique that they reckon will prove the existence of planets. They have no way of correlating their findings. They look for this observation, expecting to find it. They find it. This proves the existence of planets.
Remind me, what would be the effects on the funding of this project if they hadn't "proven" both their technique and the existence of planets?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Forget talking to them, what about playing quake with them? 45 light-years?! Thats a ping of 141 Billion. I guess I can forget trying to headshot a grey any time soon...
I respond to your sigs
A planet of the size they talk about will give off enough infrared to probably keep some of the closer satellites warm.
"If there is nothing you are willing to die for, then you are not really alive." Myself
That's only one example of how NASA provides a return on investment for the American public. It's an old example, and there have been many, many, more since then.
it's green.
We've already sent the first message to an extraterrestrial civilization.
... interesting.
Of course, anyone who used Usenet 20 years ago has some rudimentary experience in this sort of conversation. Back then, it took between 3 and 10 days for replies to make it back to the original poster, because much of the traffic was sent via 2400 baud modems in the middle of the night. Conversations were
Earth is quickly running out of resources. Fusion reactors seem to become promising but commercial use is still decades away. Nuclear reactors create too big a waste problem. Oil is running out (ofcourse I'm thinking 'decades' here). The number of humans on this planet is going up dramatically. Hopefully before the time comes that we're out of energy sources, we will somehow be able to set out on a trip to a planet that could support us.
Of course if there is life there, and they're getting our signals, they'll at least know we're an inquisitive race, because the first episodes of Perry Mason should just be arriving...
Why aren't we watching their TV shows? There's something to be said about the degradation of the signal after a certain point, especially omnidirectional broadcasts. Background radiation and interference would make NTSC decoding impossible after a certain point.
...I read about this system, and about five or six other known systems that "might support life" in Figments of Reality, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen's sequal to The Collapse of Chaos.
I'm no astronomer, but I know what infinity is. Of course they're out there.
Consider that it has an year that is 3 years long. This would put it where we have the asteroid belt now, roughly. I suspect that Jupiter could be in closer without causing too much of a problem for us.
On a separate, but slightly related angle, there was a paper released a couple months back (see CNN Story) that came to the conclusion that something very weird happened in the Solar system about 65 million years ago. Studies of ocean sediment patterns reveal that the earth has been going through a 400,000 year climate cycle that is directly related to planetary distance. The problem is that these patterns change at about 65 million years ago. This is obviously related to the asteriod thast knocked of the dinosaurs.
Fringe groups have been looking at this and speculated that this is when the asteroids were formed, and when mars got its weird pattern of craters that cover only half the planet. You can download a nicely done 60 page document of this sort of thing (PDF - HTML). Unfortunately, the authors like to occasionally bring in things that are not relevant, so it sort of ruins the flavor, but it is not bad, and interesting reading, even if you do not take it seriously.
Which of course goes to the question in orbital mechanics of how close can you have a gas giant before it messes things up.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
In case you didn't notice, 277205 hours ago (well, now about 277206 hours) was January 1, 1970, aka the Unix epoch. Some timestamp was incorrectly set to 0 (or perhaps -1).
I would expect that we could stop world hunger within six months if we really wanted to. But we don't.
To the original post: Most of the extrasolar planets found so far have orbits that are far more elliptical than any planets in our system. And many of the detections are well above the limits of our abilities (depends on the mass and size of the orbit). Check out these radial velocity diagrams. (Click on the star name to see its plot)
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
And despite what you believe, there are no green women who beg to be shown more of this Earth thing called kissing.
Much apologies to Chris Barrie and Craig Charles, Rob Grant, Doug Naylor, and the rest of the Dwarfers.
Woot w00t w007.
The fact that they are made of gas doesn't help much either.
do a web search on "quantum communication". Granted, most of the stuff is hypothesis and conjecture, but a few of the pages i came across mentioned actual sucessful tests. but if you look at the replies a couple Parents up, i responded to someone else's posts with some interesting tidbits. Put them in your pipe, ignite, and inhale deeply. No, no one's made a communication device that utilizes this concept, but quantum teleportation has been observed.
Fortunately, for all the masses of people who like to say something will never work, because it reinforces their view of reality, there are a few who persue their goals anyway. If everyone had been content that the microprocessor, rocketship, telephone, relational database, lazer beam, nuclear reactor et al were pipe dreams, we wouldn't have them (of course, a luddite would respond that we're better off without such things, but luddites shouldn't be using computers in the first place).
If current research on cold fusion and the room-temperature superconductor suddenly vanished, we would be missing out on an advancement that would radically improve the quality of human life, as we would if everyone just threw up their hands and said "screw quantum mechanics, this shit's just too hard!".
Saying that something would or would not work based on the math involved is a mistake that, thankfully, few theoretical scientists get too tripped up over. Many of the equasions that we use to describe physical reality have been "dumbed down" by popular scholars who "didn't know what all those fiddly extra variables were for", and the imminant marrige of the theories of gravity and quantum physics may bring about a drastic revision in how we describe what goes on around us.
I don't think this is an issue for a couple of reasons.
First of all, gas giants are massive, and hence the satellites will orbit pretty quickly. Io is about the same distance from Jupiter as the moon is from the earth, and its orbital period is about two days. It would only be in eclipse for a few hours. And that would only affect the Jupiter-facing side. The other side would have a normal day/night cycle.
Secondly, the amount of time spent in the gas giant's shadow is dependent on the planet's axial tilt. Jupiter is at 3 degrees, so the Galilean satellites go into eclipse pretty much on every orbit. (Callisto may be an exception near the solstices). Saturn's tilt is 27 degrees, so the only time a satellite would go into eclipse is if it's close to the equinox, or if it's really close, in which case it would be torn up into rings.
I would worry about the radiation around gas giants. If a satellite is close in, it would get bombarded by a lot of radiation, unless it had a strong magnetic field. If it was far away, it would rotate slowly and I don't know how that would affect the day/night temperatures.
Another thing to worry about is getting hit by meteors - the gas giant has a huge gravity well and will be pulling stuff towards it all of the time. Catastrophic impacts probably wouldn't be too uncommon.
There's only ever been one justification for the US space program:
Bombing the crap out of Russia
All of that early rocket research was focussed on big missiles, dropping bigger and bigger bombs. By the time some real biggies (Redstone, Atlas) started flying, some bright spark realised that they could carry an astronaut too. OK, so space exploration is cool, but it was the nukes that got the funding through Congress.
Since the mid-60s and the clearly established capacity to crisp Moscow to a cinder, that would even stick to Trevor's beloved frying pans, the need for NASA has waned somewhat. Exploration is still cool, a few people still think it's worth spending money on - but the defence budget money doesn't flow anything like as easily as it used to.
Secondly, America is the richest country on the planet. You've already got cable, drugs and big cars - what else are you going to spend the surplus on ? I'd much rather spend it on looking out into space than have Bush spend it on trying to nuke "rogue states" that most US citizens can't even find on a map.
Only in the world of science fiction and dilber cartoons. The idea of "molecular bifurcation communication" in all of its forms is based on a misinterpretation of J.S. Bells' theorom (referenced in the Dilbert cartoon where he tries to make one, sorry I don't have the date).
Bells theorom losely states that it is possible to construct two particle systems -- two photon, two halves of a molecular decay, whatever -- in which the state of the system cannot be explained in terms of the state of part 1, and the state of part 2.. ie, there is some non-local correlation between them.
However, you can't actually *do* anything to one particle and have it affect the other. You can only see this correlation after you measure both particles, and compare their states -- which means you have to communicate over a "classical" channel first.
As for FTL travel/communication in general, I am not an expert in general relativity, and it is still actually an open question, but I don't believe that FTL communication will ever be possible.
Oh, what a witty comeback.
That's all you space cadets can ever come up with. Have you ever noticed that? Whenever somebody has the temerity to criticize NASA, the only argument in favor is fucking cookware?
Sweet mother of Jesus, how would we ever survive on this planet if it were not for Teflon?!? Why, just think of what it was like back in the olden days! I can not count the number of wars that were directly attributable to some general having his pancake stick to the skillet! And the plagues! God, who could forget those! Recent scientific studies have concluded that the Black Death was not caused by fleas from rats as once suspected, but in fact was due to a unique case of tendonitis that resulted from scouring the fry pan when the yak burgers prevelant at the time where left on a bit too long and some of the icky bits got burned right onto the bottom.
And there's more! Did you know that Teflon has reduced the number of catastrophic earthquakes by over 74%?!? And that non-stick cookware has been identified as a leading candidate as an AIDS vaccine? Or that traffic fatalities involving nuns could be eliminated entirely is their habits were coated with Teflon?
I must say that from the vantage point of 40 years of history, the billions and billions of dollars spent blasting monkeys into space has resulted in some of the mst important developments known to man. Clearly the invention of Teflon was well worth the cost, and the impact on society simply cannot be understated.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We also have planetary formation theories, which while we don't have a lot of data to test them, can be useful.
The problem is that not only do you need a planet with a circular orbit in the habitation zone, you need a solar system free of other massive objects with eliptical orbits. If 50 % of the large objects in a solar system have highly elliptical orbits, it is going to be hard for life to form on one of the other 50%. If you have a large gas giant like Jupiter in a circular orbit, it is going to capture or eject most of those objects, leaving the habitible zone relatively clean.
Water is considered a requirement for life because so many chemical reactions occur in aqueous solutions. The main assumption is that for life you need chemical reactions. I also believe that oxygen is considered a good indicator because oxygen gas is hard to keep around; it's always getting tied up with other chemicals.
Jesus saves and takes half damage.
Damn dirty apes!
Jesus saves and takes half damage.
No Jupiter moon I know of has an atmosphere more substancial than that of Mercury (ie practically none at all). You may be thinking of Titan, which orbits around Saturn.
There is considerable study going on at the present time in things like planetary in-migration. Just because a planet is currently at 2.1 AU, doesn't mean that it has always been there. Other possibilities include resonances and trojan points. It's quite hard to simulate this well, but at our present state of knowledge it is definitely not time to rule things out categorically.
I don't think you are thinking about the laser spot thought experiment the right way. Imagine a giant movie screen, or a giant screen of photodetectors. Wave the spot around on that. The "spot" could have data encoded in it, and it could travel from one end of screen to the other just as fast as you please. The only point of the thought experiment is to demonstrate that things can, in fact, move faster than light -- but in the end it's a "so what" situation.
Ask Dad about a giant rotating disk. As a thought experiment it is trivial to see that for a big enough disk, the edge will move faster than light. It's also trivial to demonstrate how even if such a thing could be built, it would be useless for communication. No free ride.
The only confirmed life on other planets far away will be from "Intellegent Life" (Meaning they have access to radios).
Unfortunately, there is only a very short span of time between "Intelligent Life" with access to radios and access to television which destroys all "Intelligent Life" it comes into contact with.
Now, get your hands of my TiVo control. <grrrr>
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Bleh! Think of the horrible ping times!
Not true. Confirmation of life on another distant planet would derive from a planet having an oxygen-rich atmosphere. There is NO way for the earth's atmosphere to exist as it does by accident - only life produces such a highly oxidizing atmosphere rich in oxygen.
If you have a sensitive detector and spectrophotometer and you are able to point it at a distant planet (we're talking future tech here) and you detect an oxygen-rich atmosphere, you have just confirmed that life exists on that planet. It may not be technological life and could well be algae/plant/bacterial, but it is life.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Actually, that's not entirely true. The orbits of the moons would not have to be perpindicular to the plane of the system. In fact, if they were, that would probably be worse since their rotation would probably be parallel to their orbit, meaning they'd have one light side and one dark side, all the time. Not particularly good for life either.
Remember, the moon would be orbiting pretty far away from the planet. It would only be blocked by the planet for very short periods of time in it's orbit. Draw a circle and call it the planet, then draw a circle around that about 3 or 4 times the diameter of the planet, and call it the orbit. Now consider one direction where the sun is shining from. And look at how much of that orbit is blocked by the sun. I think this is a pretty realistic model.
Therefore, life could easily flourish in this type of environment. The cold darkness would last for a few days at a time. Not enough to cause any major heat change beyond what we experience between summer in the tropics and winter in northern Canada.
That's definitely a habitable range.
Hmmmm. I thaought that Bode's "Law" was a little more accurate than that.
But, OK. We have Earth a 1.0 AU, Mars at 1.5AU and Jupiter at 5.2AU. That puts the place of the missing planet at about 2.25AU.
The precise location of the habitable zone is dependant on the star's brightness, but lets assume that it's in roughly the same place as on Earth.
That means that this star's asteroid belt is about at Mars location leaving room for a rocky planet at or slightly in closer to that star than Earth is to the Sun.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
A lot of what we call intelligence is very self serving. If we changed the definition of intelligence to include gorrillas or whales or dolphins or golden retrievers it would be very difficult to continue some of the businesses that depend upon the exploitation of those creatures.
Do you think the Japanese could get away with the "scientific" slaughter of whales if whales were generally considered to be intelligent with souls and self-awareness and desires? Buddism, for example, doesn't make the arbitray distinction between a human soul and an animal's soul the way Christianity does.
I truly hope we don't have to cope with the quandaries of extra-terrestrial "intelligence" until we've dealt the same issues much closer to home. But, on the other hand, perhaps the discovery of extra-terrestrial intelligence will force us to face these questions. Food for thought.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
So let me see if I understand this: "world hunger" is not due to any shortage of resources, but instead is caused by resource-allocation decisions made by those in power. Most of those who can influence these decisions are too apathetic, uninformed, or distracted to do so.
Therefore, no new technology needs to be developed to solve world hunger. Rather, a new ethic, or value-set must be developed. It is the philosophers, the ethicists, the gurus who will solve world hunger - by developing and disseminating new social paradigms. This leaves us free to spend our surplus material resources on space exploration.
Of course, it could be argued that this NASA-thingy is one of the many distractions that impede us from seriously considering the humanitarian problems (such as world hunger) that plague us today. In that sense, it probably should be abandoned as proposed.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Actually, in the planets detected thus far, ciruclar orbits extremely close to the star and highly elliptical orbits are about equally common, with big circular orbits indeed being much rarer.
However, it should be noted that the stellar-wobbling method of planet detection is highly biased toward detecting large (Jupiter sized or larger) planets in close orbits. We can't even detect Earth-sized planets, or a Saturn-sized planet at Saturn's distance from its star. So we are getting a very distorted picture of what constitutes a "common" type of planet. It may be that Earth-sized planets in wide circular orbits are the norm, but we won't ever see them with the tools currently available.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Gah! Show me who's built the gadget. Last I read up on this topic, the paper went on at great length about how it was not possible to exploit the phenomenon for purposes of communication. Now I have to go look for it because you have watched too much Star Trek.
Here, check out the math.
Here's the critical bit:
"An important first result in quantum information is "no-cloning" first proposed by Wooters and Zurek (1982) and Dieks (1982). It states that:
It is impossible to clone an arbitrary unknown quantum state."
[Proof follows]
"Interestingly, no-cloning rules out a mechanism for using entanglement to send superluminal classical signals. Suppose Alice will choose between performing a {|0>, |1>} basis or {|+>, |->} basis measurement. Bob can determine which she did instantaneously if he can produce multiple copies of his entangled twin particle."
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Spock. It doesn't work, it doesn't work, nyah nyah nyah!
If you have a big movie screen sufficiently far away, and you wave a laser pointer across it, the spot of light on the screen will be moving faster than light itself. The thought experiment works with a gigantic rotating disk too, but you can't build one, whereas you can "do it yourself" with light.
The point is that there ARE possible superluminal events, but that they are ultimately useless for actually transmitting information.
I thought that the big dipper was a subset of the stars that makes up Ursa Major. Same with Ursa Minor and the Little Dipper... Then again, it could be the crack.
They "Greys" were supposed to be from Ursa Major! ;) Now it looks like all those abducties may not have been blowing as much smoke as was thought.
Hey, you forget Velcro, too :)
Hm. So then there's only ever a dark side in the time that the moon's behind the mother planet and you're facing away from it. THe other 3/4 of the time, you've got a sun on one side and a gas giant heating the 'night' side. It's still not stable, and 'winter' (behind the giant) would be a shitload colder than summer. Bugger, eh?
toeslikefingers.com - because
I can just imagine it... "All Your Base"... naaaahhhhhhh, I'll spare everyone for now.
Karma whorin' since 1999
Celebrate the finer things in life
>Circular orbits are less common than highly elliptical orbits, and are more promising.
Is that true? If so, how do we know?
Yes, it's true for the extrasolar planets we've already found, and also true for the planets in our own solar system.
Remember that the only way we can currently detect planets outside our own solar system is by their gravitational influence on the primary star
Not true. We can also detect extrasolar planets due to the amount of their sun's light they block when they pass between us and their star. Unfortunately, (statistically) less planets will be found with this method (than by gravitational influence), as all probable planetary systems would need to be viewed edge-on from the Earth's vantage point.
We're seeing lots of massive gas giants in orbits that bring them close to their primaries because we can't (yet) detect anything else.
Only due to the fact that we haven't been able to make our instruments sensitive enough to be capable of detecting extrasolar planets further away from those stars that would have smaller gravitational tugs due to the distance. Or perhaps, since studies of the effects of the bodies on the stars are often done over shorter spans of time (days, weeks, or months), and orbital periods of planets further away from the star would more likely be longer than bodies closer to the star - possibly hundreds of years, like Neptune's or Pluto's - the planets are just not being detected because the body has yet to reveal itself to the detection methods.
UNIX: Find it, fsck it, forget it.
This isn't true at all, although I guess you can seriously restrict your definition of confirm to make it true.
If you can examine the atmosphere of a planet, you can tell how much of what elements are present. From this it's possible to make a good judgement if life was needed to generate it.
Examining the atmosphere from this distance isn't exactly easy, but it's possible under the right circumstances. You might watch changes to a light spectrum as the planet occults a background star, or compare refracted light from the star that it's orbiting.
Don't underestimate the amount of information that data-starved astronomers can get out of what's available, though.
I wish! Spurs could really need one, after that traitor left for A*senal.
Show me one government research program that has come anywhere close to the return on investment that the space program has. In tax dollars and technology the space program has amply repaid it's development and if we can ever get the cost to orbit down the benefit to humanity will be immense. But I digress, it is amazing to me that somebody so anti tech as you have just made yourself to be could turn on a computer let alone find Slashdot. The corrective fixes for Hubble are promising to bring better than 20-20 vision to those of us cursed to wear glasses. Egg crate foam matresses such as are used for bed-ridden patients are an offshoot of tech developed to keep astronauts well. GPS is and will only get more useful at keeping people from getting lost or finding airplane crashes and many other uses. Cell phone technology has brought communications to many parts of the world where the infrastructure isn't there for good reliable landlines. Satellite tv has brought the news and education to many parts of the world that had no idea of what was happening in the rest of the world. Those are only the things I could think of real quick that NASA and government funded space research have brought about. There are a whole lot more. So get off your high horse and realize that money spent on research is never in vain. There will always be some kind of payoff even if it isn't obvious to idiots like yourself.
"If there is nothing you are willing to die for, then you are not really alive." Myself
us:Hi them:a/s/l ? us: /ignore them
If we assume that there are intelligent, communicative extraterrestials there, and that they were listening to us with their radio telescopes, and they picked up the old broadcasts of I Love Lucy, then were able to convert these radio signals to the 525 line, 60 hertz NTSC format, and then watch them, they would not be in violation of the DMCA, as they would be decoding an ANALOG signal that is 'cast out into free air. Last time that I checked, a few of my engineering buds at the University had reverse-engineered an old RCA teevee set, and built their own out of varied electronics parts that one of them had lying around in his workshop (minus the crt, which if these aliens are advanced enough to build radio telescopes, it would be assumed that they would have the technology to have built a simple cathode-ray tube). Then, in another 20 or so years, these aliens will see the utter horridity of those Hanna-Barbera craptoons, and mobilize their battlefleet to wipe out a civilization that dared defile the airwaves with such filth. --Steve, out
Why is it when I hit ^R that ZSH calls me a cocksucker?
Shortly after your cosmetological experiments with a curling iron and motor oil, Slashdot made it so you can't post and moderate in the same discussion.
In the mean time not all of us have intelligent input on all topics. So the logical conclusion is if you have something to say, say it. If you don't --moderate.
Thank you for your time,
Well said!
It doesn't help that moderators tend to mod up funny remarks to 4 or 5 and the majority of regular, useful comments are 2 or 3.
If I set up my filter to be 4 or higher, I'll get 9 comments, 7 of which are labeled as 'Funny'.
Because moderaters always mod up funny posts, the karma whores rush in on an active thread and post their most comical comments, and the cycle is repeated.
Software Wars
Maybe things become more serious once all of the obvious jokes are used up.
A karma score of 1??!! Come on...that was funny! And he makes a good point: How much more advanced will another race/planet/society need to be to come over here and dance on our faces?
From the article: "This is the only star that has a big empty zone in the habitable region around a star, the place where water could exist."
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
Which is probably exactly what the other forms of intelligent life out there are saying right now, to justify not looking for us.
Wouldn't it be a shame.
What is this 'Sol' ?
Furthermore, is its version 8 any better than its version 7?
You're right. Let's get rid of our Teflon pans in protest.
Ok, they're about 45 light years away, which means that they're probably watching I Love Lucy, a great comedy show. Sadly, by decoding the signal, they're violating the DMCA. I'm sorry, but they're going to have to be arrested. Anyone know if California courts take Buckazoids for bail?
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
We can see signs of life from unintelligent life too. Oxygen in the atmosphere, for example, is highly unlikely without life (like we know it).
All opinions expressed herein are not my own; I haven't had free will since last year when aliens ate my brain.
Fry: Are there an unlimited number of alternate universes?
Professor: No, just one.
it's a sig, wtf?
In an incident unknown since the early 60's, Yhwh, a diety in good standing, has demanded that Earthbound scientists "return my friggen mirror". Apparently his shaving problems, as well as those of his son during his brief stint in the middle east, all stem from the inability to see one's own reflection probably.
Science claims ignorance, swearing that it was like that when we got here, all we did was find it. The classic battle between faith and reason is expected to reach yet other heights later this week, when God discovers what we have done with His slippers.
From the article
"By focusing extremely precise measuring techniques at 47 Ursae Majoris, which is about 45 light years (more than 200 trillion miles) away,"
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
"Look how long it took them to admit that evolution might be real"
Or how long it took them to admit that *gasp* Earth revolves around the Sun!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
"if you read this then you are gay"
Well, duh. You DID post it on Slashdot, did you not?
Only stars in the spiral arms of the Galaxy (like us) will continue for a long enough period of time without being smashed by comets and other space stuff to develop life, and this is apart from the fact that the majority of star systems are binaries. (Around which a stable-temperature orbit is impossible, as we all know;).)
Other unique aspects of our Sun include its containing 50% more heavy elements than other stars of its age and type, and a third in the variation of brightness.
Put briefly, the article explains how over 95% of the stars in the Galaxy could not harbour life simply due to their position in it, and that the rest must comply with very specific conditions if life is to form.
Things might look promising for this star so far, but personally I wouldn't get my hopes up.
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
I meant, chalk one up for the Non-AC. Am I making any sense?
Furthermore, given that Jupiter orbits the Sun at 5.2AU, preventing planet formation between 2 and 5AU (cf. our asteroid belt), and that one is at 2.1AU from its star, I don't see how an Earth-like planet could be within that star's habitable zone, between 1 and 1.5AU.
In fact, I think the data from this table and that from the article are incompatible, even though the latter is scarce in hard numbers. Has the data been revised for the solar system of 47Uma since the table was written, or is it the article that has it all wrong?
No, wait, it's not a coincidence the parent is posted in this thread! This is how we can communicate with the inhabitants of these new planets -- post our messages to them on Slashdot and by the time we hit "submit" the aliens' response will already be on its way back to us.
...About 45 lightyears...
From the article.
--MonMotha
it says it is 45 light years away, equivalent to 200 trillion miles. read before posting?
By comparison, Jupiter exerts a wobble on the sun of 40 feet per second. Earth, being much lighter, exerts a wobble of about 4 inches per second, Fischer said.
It doesn't matter how scientific the context is, the word "wobble" just makes me giggle like a fool.
//ct
At one time, rocket ships, wireless communication, lazer beams, and complex computer systems also existed merely in the realm of the imaginary. It is from this creative foundry that some great advancements emerge.
I tried to track down the report I read originally about a specific test proving that this theory works, but I only found a referance to it, it's the last "snippet" in the following.
Some snippets about the current state of quantum communication:
>>Bennett, Brassard, Crépeau, Jozsa, Peres and Wootters have now shown how an unknown quantum state can be "teleported" from one place to another (Phys. Rev. Lett. (1993) 70
1895). As in the previous example, Alice and Bob are each given one particle of the entangled EPR pair (see (b) in the figure). Then Alice brings together her particle and the particle in
an unknown state, and performs jointly on those two particles a special measurement using the quantum gate M. This measurement has four possible outcomes - it is, in fact, the same
measurement that is performed at the end of the two-bit communication process. Alice then communicates the result to Bob, by any ordinary channel, such as a telephone or radio
transmitter, According to this result, Bob, who has the other member of the EPR pair, performs one of four operations on his particle (the same four operations that were used in the
communication scheme) using the quantum gate U. The effect is to leave Bob's particle in exactly the same state that Alice's particle was originally in.
So far neither of these miracles is yet practical. Quantum gates such as U can be built, but the operation performed by the gate M, sometimes called a "Bell measurement", is beyond
present technology. Harald Weinfirter and Anton Zeilinger from the University of lnnsbruck in Austria have designed optical experiments, using so-called "parametric down-conversion
and a simple photodetection scheme, which would allow communication with more than one bit of information per physical bit. They are developing techniques that might allow quantum
teleportation too. But the theoretical results, whether they are practicable or not, are already of considerable importance, because they force us to fundamentally revise our concept of
information in physics.>Entanglement Generation
The generation of entangled photon pairs is routinely done in the laboratory using parametric down conversion. However, many of the applications contemplated involve the use of single
photon pairs upon demand.
1.A photon "function generator" is desired that would generate a single photon upon demand with near 100% efficiency. A more general capability would be the ability to generate a
deterministic number of photons upon demand. Single photon rates of 1-100 MHz are desirable.
2.Strongly nonlinear chi-3 media are needed that would produce nonlinear optical effects at the single photon level. This would lead to an efficient two photon nonlinear optical
converter.
3.The clear requirement for practical quantum teleportation will be to demonstrate completely deterministic generation of entangled photon pairs upon demand. The development of
multiphoton (entangled 3, 4, 5 etc. photons) sources will be needed for error correction and repeater systems. High count rates (>1MHz) demonstrated at fiber optical wavelengths
will be needed.
Photon Transmission and Detection
Generation of entanglement is but the first step in quantum communication. Efficient transmission and detection of the photons will preferably be accomplished through improvements in
existing technologies, but the need for quantum error correction and quantum repeaters was also mentioned.
1.As important as the requirement to generate photons on demand with high efficiency is the need to detect them with equal or superior efficiency. High efficiency, low noise, single
photon detectors (>70-80%) operating at the telecommunications wavelengths (0.8, 1.3, or 1.55 microns) are required. Dark counts less than 100 Hz and data rates of 10 MHz-1
GHz are desirable. Quantum nondemolition may be exploited to develop a new type of high efficiency detector.
2.Low loss transmission links over 100 km are necessary. For fiber optical communication, it is desirable to have fiber attenuation below 0.001 dB/km. For free space line of sight
communication or quantum key distribution, demonstration of ground-to-satellite links will require advances in adaptive optical technology.
3.Ultimately, existing telecommunications equipment must be used for any practical quantum communication network to be implemented. It will be critical to demonstrate the
feasibility of transmitting quantum information into, through, and out of commercial telecommunication links.
4.Demonstrate entanglement purification, then error corrected transmission of quantum states. For superdense coding applications to become a reality, it must be demonstrated that
robust photon pairs can be reliably transmitted and received. The objective will be to demonstrate 2 bits of information transferred per photon.>Recently, a close connection was established between nonlocality, Bell experiments, quantum communication, and quantum cryptography, on the one side,
and quantum logic gates, quantum computing, and quantum logic, on the other. [C.H. Bennett et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 76, 722 (1996)] All of them, Bell
experiments, quantum communication/cryptographic schemes, and quantum computers use entangled systems as their inputs and the detection efficiences
of the latter were so far very low (under 10 experiments carried out so far relied only on (nanoseconds) coincidental detections and that made them
inconclusive in principle. [E. Santos, Phys. Rev. Lett. 66, 1388 (1995); Phys. Lett. A 212, 10 (1996)]. Recently we discovered a new kind of
entanglement [M. Pavicic and J. Summhammer, Phys. Rev. Lett. 73, 3191 (1994)] and a new preselective scheme of entangling independent systems [M.
Pavicic, J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 12, 821 (1995)] which should enable over 70 main hypothesis of the proposed project is that preselection of entangled photon
pairs can be used for designing quantum logic gates for quantum computers, for obtaining user-ready input pairs in quantum cryptography and quantum
communication, as well as for a long-wanted loophole-free Bell experiment, on the one hand, and that the algebraic representation of quantum logic (new
desarguesian orthomodular lattices) can provide necessary algorithms for quantum computers, on the other. The aim of the project is to carry out all the
elements from the hypothesis. Our basic methods will be our theory of the spin-correlated interferometry. [M. Pavicic, Physical Review A, 50, 3486
(1994)] and our new representation of quantum logic [M. Pavicic, Int. J. Theor. Phys. 32, 1481 (1993)]. First feasible loophole-free Bell experiment and a
feasible interaction-free experiment with over 95 so far) are expected as first testable results. An objective indicator of the importance and influence of a
branch is the number of papers in the leading journals, e.g., Phys. Rev. Lett., Phys. Rev. A, J. Opt. Soc. Am. B, and App. Phys. B. Only Phys. Rev. Lett.
with the highest impact factor, 7.2 of all physical journals published more than 20 papers in the branches of quantum computers, cryptography, and
communication (Bell experiments, quantum interferometry, etc.). On the other hand, we published in all the above journals recently. Therefore, the
proposal may be ranked as important. >I have already remarked that multiparticle quantum systems are described in terms of tensor products on Hilbert space , and that this implies existence of non-local interactions between
components of a quantum system. In principle the whole universe is entangled and you cannot take a chunk of it and isolate it from the rest. Even particles that are on two opposite sides
of the universe are connected by entanglement. This interaction is not mediated by any conventional field known to physics such as electromagnetism or gravity. It is instantaneous and in
clear violation of special relativity. The latter can be restored for the so called ``expectation values'', i.e., measured quantities, but the anti-relativistic correlations are still there. Bohm
[12] demonstrates that these non-local interactions can be described in terms of a very special anti-relativistic quantum information field that does not diminish with distance and that
binds together the whole universe. This field is not physically measurable though and the only way in which it manifests itself is through the non-local correlations. So it is, at least at this
stage, a matter of religion whether you want to believe in it or not. But the idea is interesting and derivable entirely from the Schrödinger equation .
Anyhow, whether you want to describe the non-local correlations in terms of Bohm's field or magic, they are there. Their existence was demonstrated experimentally by Aspect, Dalibard
and Roger in 1982 [1] , and predicted by Bell in 1964 [5] . But they manifest themselves also in superconductivity, superfluidity, and even in the Bohm-Aharonov effect . The first two
are macroscopic phenomena, and in the Aspect, Dalibard and Roger experiment, the existence of non-local correlations is demonstrated over a distance of . More recently
non-local correlations were demonstrated over a distance of some .
Quantum teleportation uses this non-local interaction, combined with a classical information channel (e.g., telephone wires) in order to transfer a quantum state, intact, from one location to
another one. How exactly this is done will be explained in Chapter 5.
So, there you have it. Can we communicate instantaniously now? well, no, we can't. That dosen't mean that we'll "never" be able to do it. People all over the world are doing experiments suggesting (and sometimes proving) that this could work.
You say that FTL communication will never be possible, but it has already been observed, we just have to utilize it.
Hmm, the meaning of life would be second on my list, right behind "women". Discovering aliens seems like it could contribute to that goal.
Actually you could put the two together and pursue "alien women". We know that the most of the people who read slashdot have more of a chance getting a date with an "alien woman" than a date with an "earth woman".
Maybe that's why see a lot of space stories on slashdot.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Some of us come here because it's funny.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Lighten up.
Ultimately, nothing matters. 99.9999% of the things that occupy your day to day thoughts really don't amount to anything. In my opinion, this makes the things that don't matter much more important than the things you do. "The less meaning, the more meaning", if you are into that "and then he was enlightened" type koan crap.
The French have a word for that other existentialist/nihilistic crap, but I don't know how to spell it. Ultimately it doesn't matter.
"Hi" (45yrs)
"Oh, so THAT'S where we left our science project." (90yrs)
"Hi" (45yrs)
"Hi" (90yrs)
"How are you?" (135yrs)
"We're fine on this planet, how are you?" (180yrs)
"We're doing okay. Too bad the person who originally sent you this message is dead now." (225yrs)
Our condolences. (270yrs)
Looking for life this way is not only difficult, but nearly futile. Anything lower than 20th century technology on their side and they won't hear us. Anything greater than 21st technology and chances are they'll find us a LOT sooner than we'll find them.
That, and they'll be using something other than radio waves to communicate. Maybe I'm just dreaming.
Either that, or bend space just to send an alien over here to bitchslap us and tell us how silly we are.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
this just proves how bad my reading comprehension is when I'm about to fall asleep..
---
I post links to stuff here
Seriously, this doesn't really seem to be too far away. Probably related to the fact that it's easier to see something closer. If I weren't so tired, I would probably be excited!
funny munging
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 277205 hours , 7 minutes ago. No need to try again.
Nice to see the slashcode is as tight as ever
//ct
as well, while the planets may not harbour life, their moons may.
My cat's breath smells like cat food.--R. Wiggums
Oh, well I missed it too. I had to break out google to get the answer.
funny munging
yup, you are missing something, Atmohsphere! you just need a think enough atmoshpere for the temperature to not be too extreme. And, i cant remember which, but some of jupiter's moon's have atmospheres, so it is possible
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
This is not insightful. It's crap.
I'd swear that you were some sort of DuPont shill, out there to plug the word TEFLON as many TEFLON times as you TEFLON can.
Grow the hell up man. There really wasn't much cost involved in the development of TEFLON. TEFLON was an accidental (or serindipitous, if you will) discovery by a DuPont scientist who was working on the formula for an artificial rubber substitute, as the Japanese had control of most of the islands in the Pacific that we (the Americans) imported natural rubber from.
TEFLON had nothing to do with the space program, and the whole thing with coating cookware with it was a marketing desicision, as they had tons and tons of the stuff just lying around at the labs that they needed to get rid of.
So, in short. shut the fuck up, retard
Why is it when I hit ^R that ZSH calls me a cocksucker?
it doesnt say similar to the mars, it says between mars and jupiter + this star doesnt have to be as big as sol is. if it is smaller the habitable zone is much closer to the parent star.
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
That's one way of looking at things, or you could take the opposite approach - ferinstance, quite a bit of computer tech was developed specifically for NASA's moon push in the 60's - would we be talking today if not for space exploration? As to world hunger, it might not end it in the short term, but in the long term, who's to say it won't? If cheap space transport and effect terraforming can be developed (who knows if they can, but who really thought computers were possible a relatively short 150 years ago?) we've got two planets pretty close by, Mars & Venus, that would make great big-ass farms.
Mining other planets and asteroids has the potential to provide plenty of precious metals, and on the war front - a few extra planets to expand to could stop war quite easily - or make it 10 times as worse, but war isn't something that's going to be solved by us staying on planet either, and if anything I think the population constraints that living on just one planet provides are much more likely to cause war than anything. And of course there's species survival to think about... as a whole humans are more likely to survive indefinitely if we're on many different planets, cuz right now if we blow up this one, well, that's it. I'm sure any sci-fi hack can flesh this out better than I have, but since I'm up...
Check out Treesandthings.com for offbeat news
it says so right in the article
45 light years (more than 200 trillion miles) away
time for bed...
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I post links to stuff here
Why should we bother wasting time exploring space when the world we live on is not perfect? You're right, it costs money, and there is not immediate gain to discoveries like this. However, there are several good reasons.
Firstly, I suggest you watch the show connections sometime. It's a wonderful show for history if nothing else. In it, the narrator shows how each invention or discovery led to others, building the very foundation of knowledge without which the current world you live in would not be possible. Many of the inventions in that chain were considered, at the time, to be useless. Impractical. A novelty at best. However, when applied with some other idea (or 2) from other people it blossomed into a very useful invention.
So how does this discovery help us? Directly, not at all. But indirectly, it may be very important. Remember the story within the last few days here on /. about those astronamers who were trying to prove that constants changed over time, and thus help string theory? If the advances made by others needing to look farther into space, for things exactly like this discovery, were not made, that may have never been possible.
Another reason we should do this is that it helps explore, discover, and explain our universe.
Societies are judged, from a historical standpoint, by the advancements they make for humanity. Think of what Rome is remembered for. The roads they made which allowed trade across great distances. The aquaducts, etc. These were made possible by taxes, just like NASA is today.
We have the ability to explore more of the universe than anyone in history. Does this mean we should do it to the exclusion of helping suffering in the world? No. But it does mean that if we have the ability, and resources, and do nothing with it, we will be holding back progress which could ultimately help humanity expand it's knowledge of the universe we live in. And personally, I am willing to give a few tax dollars to that.
Here's a thing not really talked about. If a moon of a large planet harbours life, they'd have to be orbiting in a perpindicular plane to the rest of the solar system to sustain it. Pretty unlikely. And if they weren't, they'd disappear behind the planet every 'night' for long periods. Hence, you've got a moon with huge long nights, freezing the planet, and long hot days. The only way round it is an incredibly fast orbit, which would stuff everything up. Am I missing something here?
toeslikefingers.com - because
As it is now, the industrialized countries throw away more than enough food each year due to "overproduction" to be able to cover for the food shortages in the rest of the world.
So why doesn't it happen? There's no profit in it, and they're conserned that it might find it's way back to their respective countries and bring prices down.
Wow, I had never before given much consideration to the fact that the two sides of an orbiting moon would have completely different day/night cycles. Imagine what the early model of the solar system would be for a species living on the far side of such a moon. Such a species would never see the planet they were orbiting around and would be almost certainly be convinced that they were on a stationary body. Meanwhile another species on the near side would have the planet at a mostly fixed point in both their day and night skys, and would be able to tell the time at night by where in the cycle of wax and wane the planet was from the light of the star. There must be a science fiction novel with a similar setting... suggestions?
Ursa Major aka the Great Bear is the same thing as the Big Dipper.
It's been a while since I read the stories, but I'm pretty sure this is the system of the Kzinti homeworld!
Quick, somebody get Larry Niven on the phone for a comment!
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Actually you could put the two together and pursue "alien women". We know that the most of the people who read slashdot have more of a chance getting a date with an "alien woman" than a date with an "earth woman".
An earth man asks an alien woman in the midst of love-making:
"Honey, what is this cute little thing stuck here?"
"Weird! He asked the very same question thousand years ago!"
(Ok this is an old joke.)
i'm probably going to be modded down for this post but i'm going to post it anyway.
why does discussions about any science/space article has to be ruined by people who do nothing else but posts idiotic comments that has nothing to do with the article, and then some even greater idiot mods them up and we end up having like 10 comments who are at 5 Funny ? This usually kills all serious discussion on the subject. There are actually people who prefer to read something smart and not just your idiotic comments.
Goto segfault.org and be funny there!!! stop posting if you dont have anything serious to say!!!
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
For all your backyard astronomers, here are the coordinates : (all information is for London at GMT)
Position information for 16 Aug 2001 09:54:45 (Julian day number 2452137.91302)
- Flamsteed number: 47 Ursae Majoris
- Tycho catalog number: TYC 3009-2703-1
- PPM number: PPM 52175
- SAO number: SAO 43557
- Henry Draper number: HD 95128
- DM number: BD +41 2147
(Courtesy of SkyMap Pro, (c) C.A.Marriott)This page will also show you where to look with the naked eye. (Its a few years old but the picture is very useful for finding it with the naked eye).
Uh, no one said science had to be your version of "productive." See, there's this thing called curiousity...
Knowing about it doesn't end world hunger. It doesn't stop war.
Boy, are you right on this one! If only everyone embraced your message that building technology at the expense of stopping world hunger and ending war is wrong, just think of the world we'd live in.
I mean, we could have spent all of those resources wasted creating microchips on growing soy, and we could have given the money used to build the Internet to the United Nations for better policing of world conflicts.
Of course, then we couldn't have this conversation on Slashdot, because we'd be living in mud huts, you simpleton.
Invisible Agent
This post is a mirror; when a monkey stares in, no hacker gazes out.
...or at least we're decently confident of it. It's the drake equation (right?) that says that SOMEWHERE there's almost got to be life out there, if either of the two methods used in there, maybe we can talk to little green men (or whatever they happen to be).
:)
--MonMotha
(And I woulda had FP if I hadn't read the article, so please read the article before you post so as not to insult me
You can see a quick summary of the star here They estimate that the inner planet will remain in the habitable zone for 1.2 gigayears. Right now it is on the outside edge, in the cold zone, with a 3 year orbit. but the expect the star to start to get warmer, and that may heat things up nicely for a while.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Is that true? If so, how do we know?
Remember that the only way we can currently detect planets outside our own solar system is by their gravitational influence on the primary star, and the effect is right on the edge of what we can detect. We're seeing lots of massive gas giants in orbits that bring them close to their primaries because we can't (yet) detect anything else.
In our own solar system, the gas giants are in large circular orbits. If our solar system is typical, we're only seeing a small distorted sample of what's out there.
Teflon has many uses, frying pans might be the most well known to the average joe, but some people find the other uses more important, especially those that save lives