Slashdot Mirror
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."
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/
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 --
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.
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.
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.
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.
... they called it "flutter and wow".
a feature currently suggested on sourceforge for slashcode is to be able to filter out all funny comments... that'd solve your problem
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?
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.
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.
Based on pure speculation? Not really. Let's look at our solar system, shall we:
Odds of a planet being a terrestial planet: 4/9 Odds of a planet inside the life zone: 2/9
Odds of a planet inside the life zone having and keeping a life-bearing atmosphere: 1/2
Odds of planet having a significantly-sized moon (for tidal forces, intertidal zones being a key area for the evolution of aquatic life to non-aquatic life): 1/63
Odds of planet bearing any life whatsoever: 2/9
Odds of planet having significant amounts of surface liquid water: 1/9
Total odds of intelligent life: 16/826686 = 1.94e-5
Or: intelligent life springing up once every 51668 planets. Now, feel free to massage the data as you see fit; I made the assumption that every event was mutually-exclusive (IE: intelligent life needs both life and water, but life in general doesn't need water). As well, I based the assumption that the odds are standard across the universe. From what I have read, the odds of a planet have such a disproportionately large satellite is very remote.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
Edith Keeler Must Die
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
Celebrate the finer things in life
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.
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
And has 10 replies (not counting second-level ones like this reply).
Maybe things become more serious once all of the obvious jokes are used up.
What is this 'Sol' ?
Furthermore, is its version 8 any better than its version 7?
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 ]
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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 --
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