Alien Solar System Much Like Ours

MrGort writes "Wired News reports that British astronomers say they found the first sun-like star with a giant gas planet in an orbit similar to Jupiter's, which leaves plenty of room for worlds like Earth and Mars. This system is a quick 90 light years away. The similar solar system to ours means that this gas giant could attract most of the debris, allowing smaller planets closer to the sun to develop like ours did!"

Comments

This is not Star Trek

[rudy_wayne]

>> This system is a quick 90 light years away.

This is the problem with the whole "is there life elsewhere in the universe" debate. I call it the "Star Trek Syndrome". People have gotten so used to movies and TV shows where space ships go zooming all over the galaxy that they have lost any understanding of the enormous distances involved.

There probably are planets out there with intelligent life -- maybe lots of them -- but they are so far away that it is impossible to have any contact with them. You can debate all you want about whether or not there's life out there, but you can't change the math.

If we could build a spacecraft capable of a speed of 16 Million Miles per Hour (which we can't -- that speed is far, far beyond any technology we have or have even dreamed of) you could reach Pluto in a few days, but it would take 360 years to reach that system that is only "a quick 90 light years away". Even trying to communicate via radio -- we would send a message and it would be at least 180 years before we got a reply.

Re:This is not Star Trek

[Christopher Thomas]

There probably are planets out there with intelligent life -- maybe lots of them -- but they are so far away that it is impossible to have any contact with them. You can debate all you want about whether or not there's life out there, but you can't change the math.

"The math" also says two things:

• We can most definitely contact systems within a few hundred light-years by radio. We'll need an array of phase-locked transceivers in space to do it, but it's not difficult or even horribly expensive to do. Contact by optical carrier depends on us building very large interferometric telescopes, which is a tougher engineering challenge but can also be done.
  
  Communication occurs at the speed of light, so round-trip time to 90 light-years is 180 years, and one-way time is 90 years.
  
  
• This is useful because anyone who can hear our signals and generate signals for us to hear in return is almost certainly far more advanced than we are.
  
  Modern humans have existed for about 30,000 years. Human civilization has existed for on the order of 6000 years, depending on who you ask and what you call "civilization". If the lifespan of an alien technological race is longer than this - and it will be, especially once it decentralizes (makes colonies not on the same easily-bombed planet) - then, of the stretch of their civilization's existence where they can hear and respond to us, the segment where they are more advanced than us is much longer than the segment where they are less advanced than us. This makes it likely that _if_ we find someone to contact, they're in the "more advanced than us" stage.
  
  This makes communication, even with a multiple-lifetime time lag, worth it.
  

This discussion overlooks the impact of any future technology that would confer either extreme longevity, or the ability to store and reconstruct a human mind-state/personality. In the first case, slower-than-light travel between the stars becomes feasible because we have the patience for it, and it doesn't take that large a chunk out of our lives. In the second case, we can be sent at the speed of light as data, with no subjective time elapsing en route, to be reconstructed at the other end.

In conclusion, communication is both possible and worthwhile even without FTL travel or exotic technologies.

Re:This is not Star Trek

[sk0pe]

Yes, the Wright brothers managed to apply proven physical laws through engineering. However, in the 1600's, those laws of physics (specifically Bernoulli's principle) were not theorised, let alone proven. Peope did, however, dream of flying like the birds.

The same applies to space flight now. We can dream it, but we can't figure out how to do it. Some day, a bunch of different people will come up with a bunch of theories on "super-luminal" travel, then set out to prove their theories. One of them will be proven.

Soon after that, someone will apply that "proven" law of physics (as the Wright brothers did), and a short time later interstallar travel will be like catching a plane is now - nothing out of the ordinary.

Unfortunately, it's not likely to be in our lifetime. (Oh, that it were!!)

Re:This is not Star Trek

[barawn]

... assuming that said craft does actually carry its own fuel (which you limited yourself to, but...)

That's, of course, not the only kind of craft: ramscoop ideas have been around for a while, and while they're not exactly "production quality" ideas, there's nothing fundamentally killing them. We'd just have to figure out how to do fusion much better than we do now - which is not exactly new physics - it's new engineering. We'd also want to get the hell past the heliopause, to interstellar space. Ramscoops can easily build up to relativistic speeds, because, well, their fuel is free.

Especially when you get to decent Lorentz factors things start to work in your favor: space is compressed, so the interstellar density becomes higher (drag isn't exactly an issue, because presumedly your ramscoop is strong enough to drag in material even at a decent spatial compression) and so you get more fuel as you go faster.

It's not an issue of viability (because it is viable), it's simply scale. A ramscoop type ship would probably need to be large, and the "initial speed" required to start up the reaction is probably high as well, though this depends on exactly how good fusion technology becomes.

Also, as a brief comment, antiproton synthesis is very difficult, but antiproton storage is much easier than positron storage, because they're charged and heavy, so once you cool them, you lose very few. So again, production of large quantities of antiprotons is not difficult at all - it just takes time.

Your final conclusion, though, is definitely right. Relativistic travel = huge cost (in 2003 dollars! note that economies of scale and necessity can help here. Automated antiproton factories, etc.: thank god for that tremendously huge fusion generator sitting next door pumping ungodly amounts of energy out all around us.)

So, finally, calling them "practical problems" may be a bit harsh on them. It's just that, as a species, we're not motivated enough to do it.

Maybe, just maybe, if we ever find a planet which we have a good belief that we could live there, that'll be enough of a motivation for some country to do it.

Re:This is not Star Trek

[sbaker]

What's different about our society looking to develop super-luminal travel compared to people in the 1600's thinking about heavier-than-air flight is that whilst there were no known scientific laws that would enable a heavier-than-air craft to stay aloft, there were no laws to prohibit it either. They had birds, insects and bats flying around all over the place - all demonstrably heavier than air. They knew this was an achievable goal.

With faster-than-light travel, we have a very different situation. He have actual scientific laws courtesy of that Einstein guy that show that you cannot accellerate an object up to the speed of light without consuming infinite energy . Those laws also indicate extreme difficulties with even the concept of something travelling FASTER than light (if you ever got going faster than light, it would take infinite energy to avoid travelling infinitely fast - and getting to a nearby star at infinite speed is MUCH harder than doing it at subluminal speeds.

Then, we also have no examples of super-luminal objects to point at and say "Ha! Those laws must be wrong".

That's an entirely different (and much more depressing) situation than the situation in the 1600's. They could look to a simple child's kite and imagine a hang-glider with a motor replacing the force provided by the kite-string. They could see birds doing that exact thing - taunting us with the ease of it all.

We have no similar thing to look towards - and one of the greatest minds of the last century showed us clear mathematical proof that this isn't going to be an easy matter.

Re:This is not Star Trek

[JoeRobe]

They required no novel physics to accomplish their feat, only the application of known physical laws.

However, travel to other stars in less than a human life-time in our frame of reference will require super-luminal speeds. There is no physics known yet that will allow us to achieve this.

True, but it should be pointed out that for decades after that, most scientists thought it was physically impossible to break the speed of sound in an aircraft. There was no physics that allowed > Mach 1 speeds to be achieved. With time, that theory was also proven wrong.

Re:This is not Star Trek

[turgid]

There was no physics that allowed > Mach 1 speeds to be achieved
Not true. Newtonian physics allows Mach 1 to be broken. Einsteinian physics does not allow c to be broken (or to be achieved with rest mass).

Re:This is not Star Trek

[The Unabageler]

have actual scientific laws courtesy of that Einstein guy

last I checked it's still the General Theory of Relativity.

Re:we might be able to find intelligent life.

[Xilman]

All we have to do now is make a craft that can go 90 light years within a reasonable amount of time. minor detail.

We already have the technology that could get us there in around a couple of thousand years --- and only 1000 if you were happy with a fly-by mission. The 1970s Daedalus study by the BIS showed us how it could be done using only technology known at that time or reasonably expected to be available by the turn of the millenium. To this extent, it is indeed a minor detail.

There are two major details, IMO. The first is cultural: we no longer seem to want to embark on projects that are expected to have payback times measured in centuries, as the builders of the Egyptian pyramids and the European mediaeval cathedrals did. The other is economic: even if we wanted to do something like this, the cost would be enormous. OTOH, perhaps the cost might be no greater in societal terms than the price to the Egyptian economy almost 5000 years ago of building the great pyramids.

Paul

Re:90 Million L.Y.?

[trompete]

I think the article actually said 90 LY, which isn't that far at all, considering that our galaxy is 100,000 LY across.

Re:Old radio waves from the earth

[tiled_rainbows]

"...but from a long distance one would see a superposition of all those signals for different TV and radio stations, i.e. noise."


Ummm, has someone told those SETI guys this? Maybe that's why we haven't found anything yet...

The universe does not care what we dream.

[Christopher Thomas]

The same applies to space flight now. We can dream it, but we can't figure out how to do it. Some day, a bunch of different people will come up with a bunch of theories on "super-luminal" travel, then set out to prove their theories. One of them will be proven.

Why are you certain that one of them will be proven?

The universe is what it is, regardless of what we _want_ it to be. This may or may not include mechanisms for FTL travel, but we have seen no evidence of such phenomena occurring to date, and our models of the universe are self-consistent without them.

In the absence of observerations of FTL effects and of a theoretical mechanism by which it would occur, the most reasonable assumption is that it _doesn't_ occur.

If our universe is truly bound by the speed of light, wishing for FTL drives won't change a thing.

The wise thing to do is plan for STL, and continue learning all we can about the universe in the hopes that a loophole eventually shows up.

[ObPedant: Yes, I know about the various types of "space warp" drive proposed; however, these rely on negative energy density, which causes serious problems (does not appear to be consistent with our models of the universe). A few groups have been trying to demonstrate that negative energy density is possible. If they succeed, great, but until then the null assumption holds.]