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Three Neptune-sized Planets Found Nearby
WillAffleckUW writes "CNN reports the discovery of three Neptune-sized planets found in orbit around a sun 41 light years away. The star they orbit is similar to our Sun, and the planetary distribution is probably similar to our Solar System. Recent observations by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope last year revealed that HD 69830 also hosts an asteroid belt, making it the only other sun-like star known to have one. No word on if they have habitable moons, or monoliths yet."
For those of you not immediately familiar with exactly what a Neptune-sized object is, it is about 12.645679 sextillion Volkswagens (go ahead, look it up. I have time). Now, as to why they would categorize an object that is 41 light-years away as 'nearby' is another question.
(Go ahead, tell me the tale of how immensely huge the universe is and how 41 light-years away can only be described as nearby. Then tell me you won't mind helping me move if it's 'nearby')
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along" acquires an odd meaning in a story about the discovery of new planets.
Nearby? 246 trillion miles is close now?!
As opposed to something that is over 7,000 - 10,000 light years away, 41 isn't very far. I mean it's no Alpha Centauri, but it's close in astronomical terms.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
ba-dum-cha. Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.
...And by nearby, we mean 41 light years away.
Geesh, they find evidence of three planets around a Sol-like star, and you want them to have more details than that? Give them some more time to analyze the data, it's hard to pick up smaller perturbations at a 41 lightyear range.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
There could be sentient being living there. Odds are 50/50 they have more advanced technology than we do. If they can travel at near light speed, they could arrive here 82+ years after we started beaming massive amounts of radio and tv into space, which would be soon. Maybe we should prepare a "reception" for them or something.
It's only a matter of time until somebody picks up our signals and comes to crash the party.
Pretty soon, astronomers will eventually find solid earth size plants orbiting sun like stars. When this happens, then it will be time to get excited about the possibility of finding life outside our own solar system. But this won't happen till the next gen telescopes replace todays' such as the aging Hubble.
Nothing beats +2 minerals, +2 nutrients, and +2 energy without having to waste time with formers.
Also good for quick healing of troops. (But don't overdo it!)
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Nearby, like many words, is not an absolute term. It is relative to the scale of the things involved. No, 41 lightyears is not nearby if you're talking about the distance from your house to the nearest gas station, but when you are talking about interstellar distances, 41 lightyears is much more near our sun (i.e., nearby) than say a star on the opposite side of the Milky Way.
Think of it like this. We'll use another word whose meaning is varaible in a similar way: close. A scafolding platform collapses and a pile of bricks comes within one foot of crashing down on you. You might say, "Wow! that was close." You throw a pitch in a ball game and you throw wide one foot left of the strike zone. No one would call that close. You'd need to be in a range of, say, a centimeter from the plate for a pitch to be called close.
my pet machine
maybe you won't mind going and picking my drycleaning... it's in Australia.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
We might not have the technology to travel there physically in my lifetime (or lifespan, whatever) but that should be close enough to warrant some refocusing of more than a few SETI dishes. And for the longer term maybe a satelite designed to last 500 years to send there. This might be a project worth investing in even though we will be long gone before it would achieve fruition.
We are all just people.
welcome our new-neptunian overlords
Can't we all just get along
Ehm, cosmology has allowed rational people to do away with bronze-age tribal myths in favour of actual science.
Yeah, some might consider this a possible life site. But how can we know the planets are indeed distributed as they are in our Solar System, with a rocky planet with the right elements located in zone around the star that can support liquid water for billions of years?
Also, three Neptune sized planets probably would not protect such a terrestrial world against frequent life-exterminating collisions as our Jupiter and Saturn (and to a lesser extent Uranus and Neptune) have done. Neptune is no where near Jupiter's size, and Jupiter has almost certainly saved us from death.
Heh, it's just like an article about a press release on the morrow, or some shit.
I'm really impressed by the speed of progress here. I'm hoping that in ~30 years, we'll actually be able to SEE these planets. That's really exciting!
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
What's the sum of radius^2 taken over everything in the asteroid belt? It's known that the total mass (sum of radius^3) isn't that big, but its cross-section gives a better indication of how visible it is. I doubt that ours is very visible, and therefore any belt we detect out there must be so much denser that by comparison our asteroid belt shouldn't really count as one.
"Nearby" is a relative term; so it "walking distance." Remember, Marco Polo walked to China!
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Didn't Marco Polo walk through a swimming pool?
j/k
Geesh, they find evidence of three planets around a Sol-like star, and you want them to have more details than that? Give them some more time to analyze the data, it's hard to pick up smaller perturbations at a 41 lightyear range.
No kidding. It'll take us at least ten years to find any monoliths.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
if you can get the truck to get there.
I would also help you move here on earth. Assuming the distance you want to move is the same percentage distance of the earth that 41 light years is to the galaxy.
Seriously, it about context. What was the article talking about, finding something in the galaxy. There for nearby will be relative to the size of the galaxy.
Man, nobody understands context anymore.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Space is big. Really big. You might think it's a long way to the chemist on the nearest non-Milky Way Nuptune-sized planets 41 light years away, but that's peanuts compared with space
Good luck sometimes arrives disguised as bad
By my calculations, we should have found a monolith 6 years ago.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
assuming they have radio.
They could be 1000 years behind us, and they would still be intelligent life.
And if they can travel at near light speed, they probably have ahd the technolgy long enough to have already checked us out.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
First, I doubt this is costing "billions". Secondly, what country are you refering to? A bit of reading of the article and some fast research and you'd find the observatory in question is funded internationally.
Why is it anytime any article comes up that involves space does someone have to whine "why are we spending money on this instead of fattening up the masses who refuse to be productive"? OK, so we feed the poor. What's next? Do you want us to hire them servents to wipe their asses too?
I'm seriously not a cold person but I am sick of giving the most to the least deserving.
What does science give us? It gives us the ability to produce so much that we have excess to give to the lazy masses who refuse to do for themselves.
You got another question about that, shithead?
Yeah? And I'd like to know why this country spends HUNDREDS of billions of dollars on unnecessary wars. One gains knowledge for all mankind, the other pisses off the rest of the world and generates more enemies for us to have to fight down the road. I'd say the billions for space study is much more worthwile than many of the other things we do.
There is intelligent life, they think we're amoeba.
... great, Jerry Springer just became our galactic first impression.
We are all just people.
From the Article:The newly discovered planets have masses of about 10, 12 and 18 times that of Earth and they zip around the star in rapid orbits of about 9, 32 and 197 days, respectively. Based on their distances from the star, two inner worlds nearest the star are rocky planets similar to Mercury, the scientists suspect.
The significance of the distinction is that rocky planets may be much more likely to harbor earth-like life than are gas giants. Of course, being so close to their home sun that they have a 9 or 32-earth day year, it seems likely that the "earth-like" life may be mere bacteria living in subsurface water, rather than human-like meat-bags getting suntans on the surface.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
Assuming we can spot Neptune sized planets, if we were looking at our Solar System, we would see four planets well outside the "habitable" zone. Here we see three big rocky planets where only one is "just inside" the habitable zone--and I rashly assume it's just within the too-hot side (the outermost planet has a year of 197 days, compared to Venus's 224).
How is this "similar"? Seems pretty different to me...
after we started beaming massive amounts of radio and tv into space
What with dispersion, atmospheric absorption, and general background interference from the sun and other far more powerful sources of radio waves, I reckon aliens would have a hard time picking up TV stations from mars, never mind light years away. I mean in real terms, what are the odds that anything except a very, very powerful radio telescope pointed directly towards earth and listening on the correct wavelengths is going to pick up anything but background static? Fairly minimal I reckon.
Besides which given another 200 years or so we are probably going to invent or discover some entirely new and far more efficient means of communication than radio, and the first scientist to turn it on is going to be blasted out the window by the storm of alien TV and radio he just tuned in to.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Leading names of a planet that would be less embarressing would be to
1) Urectum
2) Urpenis
and 3) Urbutt
Why, if I went around pointing out that the p-p chain warms Uranus, or that once in a while, a hard rocky body is enveloped by Uranus (though this happened much more frequently when Uranus was young), or told the one about low-mass stars ("She's like anyone else of her type - she blows off, and then - all of a sudden! - you've reached her turn-off point."), I wouldn't be respected.
Lets be mature, and discuss things like degenerate pressure, the instability strip, the Jeans length, and Hadrons like adults!
People who complain about the government supporting people who are incapable of working is really quite inexpensive, since there are very few people who can't work. It's things like the military, health care, and public works that suck up all the tax revenue. Welfare is insignificant.
I'm so sick of compassionless conservatives bitching about the couple of dollars per year that they pay for welfare, while at the same time endorsing the wars that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars paid per person for wars.
Here's an experiment, to convince you that the myth of the lazy jobless guy is just that -- a myth. Approach someone without a job (preferably one who isn't insane, as so many homeless folks are). Offer them a fulltime job (no benefits necessary) at minimum wage doing something that is within their capabilities. I guarantee that 90% of the welfare / disability recipients you make this offer to will accept your job offer. Of course, no one will ever make those offers, since most people are profoundly bigoted against the jobless -- which in turn is what KEEPS those people jobless. And disabled people are, for the most part, simply incapable of doing enough useful work to justify a salary that would keep them housed and fed. And so no one offers them jobs either. It's nothing to do with laziness. And if you don't believe me, just try my experiment. Go down to the local homeless shelter and try it (but avoid the schizophrenics -- they don't really count, being too crazy to know what's going on).
http://iesucks.org
Hey, at least the war is making jobs for Americans again. For the last few decades, the billions that the US spent on wars mostly went to people like Saddam Hussain and Bin Laden. Just goes to show how bad an idea outsourcing war is. But finally, it's AMERICANS dying for America's stupid inane goals, not foreigners. In the long run, that will produce fewer enemies, and will turn Americans into pacifists as everyone who likes war gets the chance to die young in one...
What makes you think a monolith has NOT been discovered? ;)
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
It wasn't that long ago (err, wow, 10 years, maybe that's long) that the first extrasolar planet was discovered. I still remember that news announcement I watched on TV...
Anyway, since the discovery of those 3 planets, another planet has been found. Check out the exoplanet encyclopedia (my favourite exoplanets site). It has a catalog with all the data of those planets, some with uncertainty factors. Discovery method, size, catalogue number, the whole lot. Try chucking all that into a spread-sheet, and plot some scatter graphs. Should be a lotta fun. The last time I tried this, it was a bit problematic because the masses are not really known (for planets discovered using spectral shifts), but are merely minimum (maximum?) limits only. But still, an order of magnitude plot could be fun.
Anyway, the 3 planets are already in the catalogue under HD 69830. Don't forget to check out this one as well. Exciting times. I look forward to 200 planets!
...A star with three Uranuses.
totally agree here, it has not been maybe 100 years or so ( correct me if i am wrong ) that humans started using radio waves for communication, these radio waves do not travel at the speed of light,
Yes, but it wasn't until the 30s that any of our transmissions were strong enough to get past our own atmosphere and into space.
Also, where did you get the idea that radio waves don't travel at the speed of light? They are light -- just not part of the visible spectrum we usually mean when we say "light". Still, it's all just photons. Radio, like X-rays, gamma rays, infrared, ultraviolet, etc, most certainly does travel at the speed of light.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
By my calculations, we should have found a monolith 6 years ago.
But we did. Turns out that the MPAA has all IP rights to said monolith. It was confiscated and rumor has it, it's now being used as a coffee table at the MPAA-HQ.
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
There is no sense in looking 41 light years away to find "inhabitable" planets, when one is right in our own back yard. Go directly to http://marsanomalyresearch.com/ and look over the mountain of taxpayer financed material from various Mars missions of NASA, which has been expertly analyzed and reviewed by J.P. Skipper - and see that our own sister planet, Mars, is cuurently inhabited, and as close to Earth in the most important ways that can be imagined. It has trees, lakes, grass, ruins, humanoid skeltons, megalithic structures, metropolis cities of huge, dense skyscapers, like New York City on a grand scale. See for yourself! I'm not kidding. Sure, some of the photos are carefully layered with masking application to cover up details, but many photos are not. And what is revealed in them will shake you up...go on - I dare you. If you can't do this, with an open mind, then you are the "anonymous cowards".
Lets loose the sarcasm when talking about the poor. My wife remembers nights where she slept under a pick nick table when she was a child because her dad lost his job during the rescission in the 80s. They had so little that all their belongings could fit in their car. However, the last word I would use to describe my father-in-law is lazy. He made a dollar here and there by fixing cars, or taking odd jobs, however he didn't make enough to put food on the table for his children every night. My point is, a little bad luck in life doesn't make someone lazy. And I find it offensive that you would categorized the poor that way. I hope you never have to experience that way of life.
I'm totally in.
The article states that the two inner worlds are about 10 and 12 times the size of earth but are likely rocky worlds much like Mercury. So, how big can a rocky (solid) world get? Can you have a rocky world the size of jupiter and be nothing but rock? Or the size of the sun and be nothing but rock? Seems like there would be an upper limit and I would imagine Neptune size worlds would be it.
well, well, so you gave this "anonymous (gentleman)" a big fat '0' for his effort...at showing you the truth! I went to that site - http://marsanomalyresearch.com/ and found exactly what he has described. I suggest you all get off your high horse and do the same. You might find it "educational".
I always have to laugh whenever someone says somehting along the lines of "A single Shuttle launch could feed a million people for a year."
My answer: yeah - if you could get them all to the Cape, and have them all eat Aluminum and LH2 and LOX!
You need to understand that governments do NOT work on the principle of monetary equity: if they saved 500 Million dollars here, NO ONE says "OH, that means we can send 500 Million to the staving people in _________ (place country name here)!"
There is no political will in any nation to EVER do this kind of thing. Also, money spent on this kind of "research" invariably tends to spin off into all sorts of other areas. The benefits to mankind of non-obvious-payoff research is incalculable (and no, not because the number is "0"!) and humans are curious by nature.
So, it is entirely disingenuous to try and match X dollars spent on "space" to X dollars NOT spent somewhere else. The world just does not work like that.
Tree-huggers and people-feeders still don't seem to understand this though - and thank fuck none of them are in power anywhere on the planet!
Remember: give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. But teach a man to fish, and he will spend all day in a boat drinking beer.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Assuming that Bode's Law applies there, it's a reasonable assumption that a planet resides within the habitable zone around that star.
However, unless it has through some miracle of coincidence a large moon to provide the environment of constant change via tides and crustal flexing, I doubt that Darwinian processes would have had the time to produce an ecosphere like ours. Maybe something along the lines of the Paleozoic era might be possible.
But then, with an asteroid belt comes catastrophic encounters, and maybe that would be the larger driving influence for Darwinian change.
But in any case, I doubt that the coincidence would be strong enough to extend to a similarity of geography that would support an ecological mechanism similar to ours, that regulates climate change between two quasi-stable regimes.
Quite possibly, once life developed on such a world it might quickly drive it into a greenhouse state like Venus, without the mechanisms that switch us between greenhouse and icehouse that we have.
Lets loose the sarcasm when talking about the poor.
Ah, go fuck yourself. mwhaahahahahahahaha.
How did you calculate those odds? Is that based on a large sample size of similar situations? Or is this based on the number of Vegas betters being equal both ways? If you want to state a fact, please provide the source. IMHO there are not many planets supporting "move advanced" life than earth. Why? most planets aren't in the 'sweet spot' where water is in all three states. Plus, by logic, if there were many more advanced cultures, then they would either be out there laughing at us, or we would be their slaves. I don't hear an laughter from space, so ...
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
We spend more on foreign aid in the US than we do on NASA. And I'm not counting any of the goings on in Iraq or wars as foreign aid, either.
Space travel is a fraction of the budget. The RIAA makes more money every year than the NASA budget for any given year. And they've contributed nothing to man kind like NASA research has. Just, you know, for some perspective: We waste more money on shitty music than the government spends on NASA and research.
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A. I agree B. We are both feeding the troll -- "I seriously don't understand the purpose of scientific research." C. Build a man a fire, warm him for a night; light him on fire and warm him for life.
It's highly unlikely that any two civilizations who have been completely seperate will meet and be at the same or a similar level of advancement. Small advancements can make huge differences. Look at the huge differences between the different human civilaztions that have had semi-direct or indirect contact with each other. We also see that once technology begins to take root the rate of advancement can be astonishing. The technological differences between the civilaztion occupying the city of Rome in 2000 and 1500 AD is much greater than the differences between the civilations occupying the same city in 1500 and 50 AD. If there are other civilizations out there they are likely to be completely different between us. And if we were able to establish communication with them but neither is able to travel the great distance, its impossible to say whether the more advanced civilization among the two will still be more advanced when the initial hellos end.
I reckon aliens would have a hard time picking up TV stations from mars, never mind light years away.
Assume that the aliens have a radio telescope that is comparable to the one at Arecibo. I don't have numbers on its sensitivity after recent upgrades, but a ball-park figure I have heard is that it can pick up a cell phone transmission within a sizable part of the solar system near earth.
A rough calculation reveals that perhaps a 10^14 W source at the centre of our galaxy (2.2 x 10^4 light-years away) could be detected by Arecibo. Compare this to terrestrial television (~10^6 W) and radio (~10^5) stations, and you'll find that it could be on the edge of possiblility for Arecibo to pick up TV transmissions from a planet 41 light-years away.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
And if we were able to establish communication with them but neither is able to travel the great distance, its impossible to say whether the more advanced civilization among the two will still be more advanced when the initial hellos end.
And they'll probably just mute us once we send the inital a/s/l anyway.
I don't buy shitty music...I download it. But I agree. Mankind can be better served by pouring money into NASA and space research and exploration then 99% of what governments and people spend money on. That 1% includes food, clothes, housing,...xbox360s, bmw's, Hi-Def TVs, trips to europe, and swedish massages
In any case, do you actually know how many Canadians are on disability and welfare? Take that number, and multiply it by about $10,000 -- the upper limit on all forms of government support. Most people get much less; you have to be utterly crippled to get that much. I think in BC, someone who just has no job and is eligible to work gets $6120 a year for a maximum of two years, contingent on demonstrating sufficient evidence that they are in fact job hunting. It's really not much money, and it's such a tiny, tiny amount compared to the genuinely expensive provincial programs like health care, common infrastructure, and that kind of thing.
In fact, for what the city of Toronto spends cremating the homeless people who die every winter, a homeless shelter could be operated year-round. Welfare is unbelievably cheap compared to other programs. I just don't get how conservatives can bitch about it. Why don't they complain about the billions of dollars in corporate support that the US uses to mask the fact that its economy is crumbling and its industry unsustainable? Why not the massive subsidies to pharmaceutical companies that are supposed to be supported by the prices of their drugs? Why not complain about the enormous cost of maintaining puppet regimes in third-world countries? Is keeping a few disabled people alive REALLY so horrible?
From reading the article, it seems the planets have semi-habitable climates, possible liquid water, that's interesting...
Perhaps these planets contain intelligent life, advanced far beyond our own. Perhaps they have learned the better way of pacifism and build technologies directed toward bettering life rather than destroying it.
If that's the case, I vote we conquer them, enslave their kind, take their technologies and patent them as our own, and propel ourselves toward a new age of luxury. It will serve as a witness to the galaxy that No One messes with Earth!
Sure is great to have done away with all these tribal myths. I'd post more, but I need to leave now or I'll be late for bible study.
A rough calculation reveals that perhaps a 10^14 W source at the centre of our galaxy (2.2 x 10^4 light-years away) could be detected by Arecibo.
Sorry, typo: make that 10^15 W. And a tad more wouldn't hurt. The rest of my comment stands.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
If the uniweb is so vast as to be /infinite/, then surely there is a reference for what constitutes nearby or simply hypertechnical dimensional folding.
I would imagine a logarithmich scale where 'nearby' meant a solar system or two away, Distant as some galaxy that is the very least observable........ like Britany Spears or somebody? And Far means (and always has) means 'out there'.
Not that they are lacking in intelligence and reconnaissance capabilities (since I would expect any aliens approaching earth to be much smarter than wasting their time with us at this level of so-called advancement...), but ifff they landed here and said "Take us to your leader", I would probably take them to the nearest sanitarium or to the waste treatment plant.
Then I would say, "the flotsam in most national capitols passing for human excuses for leaders are only a cut above this shit beneath your feet. So; nothing to see here; please move along, otherwise those wily, conniving, crafty, exploitative human lookalikes will try to screw you over for you technology".
But, fi you're looking for for them because you need organic sanitary pads, food, fertilizer, rendition torture candidates...
(Oops I think I hear the government agents coming for me...)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I finished my Astro masters online a few years ago, and we studied the techniques being used to detect extra-solar planets. The are lots of these being discovered each year since
Wikipedia lists the current number of known extra solar planets as 180, but this is bound to be out of date. I don't know if you'd call the discovery of 3 more news.
Here's what wikipedia has to say:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrasolar_planet
For those not afraid of the more technical stuff there's a lot of good information in the form of scientific papers at:
http://arxiv.org/
The holy grail at the moment is confirmed discovery of an Earth sized planet that may be suitable for life to come into being on.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Suppose one light year is 1 km. Then the tinyest speck of dust on the monitor is about 5 times bigger than Earth (1 micron), Sun is about half the size of the dot above i (0.1mm), distance from Earth to Sun is the length of the word "length" (1.5cm). The size of the Solar system (Pluto orbit) is about the size of your computer - 0.7 meter. The most distant objects in Oort cloud are probably within your room (a few meters). The nearest star - 4km away, like a gas station. The new planets are 41km away - the state border :-). Our Miky Way galaxy is a few times larger than Earth, maybe half way to the Moon. The nearest spiral galaxy is not too far - just 8 times more distant than Moon. The edge of the Universe (12 bln l.y.) is about the size of Sedna orbit.
So, 41 light years is relatively near :-).
Yea but if they watch TV the whole way here by the time they arrive they'll be totally caught up on world politics - which means they'd fit right in...except to be honest they'll probably just watch Happy Days and Charlies Angels to Melrose Place, and the O.C. - and by the time they get here sure some of them might know what we've done and who we are - but most of them will probably just ask to be taken to our young celebrity soap opera leaders.
If there are any intelligent life forms, I'm sure they could spell "intelegent" correctly.
Joke, not spelling Nazi, mmmkay?
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
Basically, the human body atrophies during Space Travel from SAMENESS AND LACK OF PHYSICAL STRESS. My Fountain of Youth Temperature Oscillation Health System brings back the stress to ALL BODILY SYSTEMS. When you're on the hot side of the AC unit, the circulatory and lymph systems get reamed out & pumped, pores open wide, while on the cold side of the system you begin shivering as hypothermia is quickly achieved in 5-10 minutes from the induced rapid cooling. Shivering exercises every muscle group in the human body, all the way through.
Someone here mentioned it would take a long time to reach all those desperate women in the Neptunian ("greener pastures") Worlds but really, it will not take nearly as long as you think. I have developed an engine that can be adapted from producing electric current to making plenty of thrust for Light Speed. I have theorized a way to make a Quantum Leap (upon achieving Light Speed) that goes beyond the Speed of Light. How fast I don't know but Speed of Thought? Maybe. But there wouldn't be any way to know for sure you wouldn't come out in the middle of the Neptuninian aphrodite women's Sun... so maybe I'll pass on the 1st expedition.
btw, when you set up the Fountain of Youth System, use the Low Setting on the air conditioner. IT IS NOT A TOY. Cooling and warming the lungs and muscles in the inner chest walls overly much and too fast is enough to kill you. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. The system will strengthen the lungs of the wheelchair bound, the crippled & bedridden & disabled as well as recovering their heart health, but it will take months & a good deal of nutritional supplements is strongly advised. It will speed the healing process. For young bucks who are already healthy, the temperature oscillation will take you to a higher physical condition but you still NEED TO START OUT SLOW.
Another beautiful thing about letting an air conditioner exercise you, much like a hyperbaric chamber or an iron lung, is that NO WILLPOWER IS NEEDED; the willpower comes from the wall socket (electrical outlet). If there was a way to make you fall into a deep sleep while lying inside a temperature oscillation chamber you might not suffer the effects of ice crystal formation from suspended animation. In which case, you would arrive on Neptune 41 in great shape AND not have aged. Your mind would function perfectly, not suffering from Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease or strokes nor any heart atttacks from sedentary sleep, because your body was being exercised constantly during all the "(pdf) long trip" (@3-5 years Earth Time) there.
As I have mentioned before on SlashDot, my health system will reverse many diseases in the elderly & it is The Cure for American Obesity (American Poor Health, American Diabetes to some extent, and American children failure in school due to poor circulation & proper brain oxygenation). By bringing so many Americans returned to a better state of health we could save many billions of dollars and reduce national debt by removing the load from our healthcare system budget. Unfortunately the major wire services and television news reporters are refusing to print this lifesaving information, possibly because
Yum, bagels and LOX...
insert interesting sig here
In this case *this* country is Switzerland, which doesn't spend so much for astronomy.
http://fs4.deviantart.com/i/2004/217/a/2/Death_and _Taxes_____.jpg
- a good link that everybody should see...
Dude, you could at least give some attribution to http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/ques tions/question19.html
My business: Farstrider Studios.
Not true, I flew to the US a couple years ago and frankly it was quite advanced.
So you can randomly happen upon another civilization as advanced as yours.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Parent points to the child's question on NASA from which the grandparent is copied-and-pasted.
Long live Google.
Question: What is a karma whore?
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
Piss around, he will die, and you won't have to feel guilty any more. I've never met a tree hugger/people feeder that didn't want us to explore space. Most of us/them want to stop wars so we can feed people. Space is an exellent idea. We need to be on at least two planets within the next hundred years to not go extince, IMO.
/. bug #926803 - Why I can post.
Well guys/gals, a stargate will surely solve our distance woes. Let's call the Ancients!
... Is actually quite a small town which happens to be full of rich people.
Are there extraterrestrial versions of Veronica Mars on these Neptunes? Then they might be worth considering.
Please, I'm just out of mod points...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
they already been there done that. They got here 50 years ago. Led to the technological boom in every industry, medicine and science. The planet has been harvested and when the calendar runs out inside the next decade and mother earth begins her cleansing, they will give credit to the second coming. "He" has come back as told in many stories and books. Only "he" is "they" and they have come to see what has become of thier seeds.
Nobodies out there. Where in here.
Get your ACKs to Mars!
Not only will every civilization you encounter have rougly your level of technology, their ships will also have their top side the facing the same direction as yours when you meet them.
Reference frame, people. The reference frame for this case should be pretty inherent when discussing planetary systems.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
So is 41 light years far? Yes, very. Is this the closest star we've seen that resembles our own galaxy and therefore a greater potential for life? I think so -- can't recall hearing about our twin solar system before. Will we make it there anytime soon? No, not likely.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
ought to be at least credited with inspiring your post, if not 90% of the actual words in the same order...
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Just grab your towell, and you're all set to go.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Don't forget:
"Hell, I can do that!"
and...
"Son, hold my beer."
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Um, do you understand he meant NASA as in "all of the things NASA has achieved in its history"
Reading comprehension is a good thing...
"We're following orders you fool! He told us to comb the desert so we're combing it!"
"Found anything yet?"
"Not a thing sir!"
"How about you guys?"
"Nothing yet sir!"
"How about you?"
"WE AIN'T FOUND SHIT!"
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
when a pile of bricks almost falls on the batter. How do you explain *that* one? So, the pitch wasn't close but the pile of bricks that falls in the same spot was? Hay! Hypocrite!
.
Or on a related issue, find someone that is getting government disability checks for a moderate disability. Hire them. Find out that they are doing a pretty good job. Give them a raise. 6-12 months later, they find out that their $800 a month disability check will be getting cut since they are now making $2000 a month working....So what do they do...You guessed it, they quit their job.
Neither of these are isolated incidents. I have direct knowledge of each event essentially happening tens of times.
Now, this is not the same thing as saying "all people without jobs don't want to work" nor is it saying that "all people on disability checks don't want to get off of disability if they are capable of it.
However, anyone who this that this is not a fairly widespread phenomena is fooling themselves and not making decisions based on reality. As for other points in your bogus post:
This seems pretty bogus as well. First of all, a lot of thay money you spend on helicopters is to pay the salaries of people that build and maintain them. Ignoring that for a moment, looking at the Canadian budget: http://www.fin.gc.ca/taxdollar/text/html/pamphlet_ e.html
Your entire freaking defense budget is 18.3 billion dollars. Lets just make believe that for some reason 10% of that is for helicopters. (1.83 billion).
The most recent data I could find for the number of jobless in Canada was http://www.fin.gc.ca/taxdollar/text/html/pamphlet_ e.html
It shows 500,000 getting regular unemployment checks. I assume since you are complaining that someone needs assistence that is not getting it that the "actual" number of people you are worried about is even higher..But for the sake of argument, lets assume that it is just these 500,000 that you want to help.
Gee, we can spend a whopping $3660 on them instead of buying/building/maintaining a single helicopter.
That seems pretty useless, . Of course don't forget that you will need a bunch of workers, facilities, forms, etc to manage this program. Lets be kind and claim the the governement can do this for 10% of the money they are paying out. Wow, that still leaves a little more than $3000 a year we can just give away to people to do...umm..What are they going to do again? Oh that's right, they can be human shields that we throw at the people that invade the country because we have no helicopters.
--- Liberty in our Lifetime
God, 2 Alpha Centauri references in as many days....
IANAP (I Am Not A Physicist), but my bet would have been on the Chandrasekhar limit there, which puts the limit at a little under 1.5 solar masses. (Admittedly, that does change with the chemical composition, so no idea how that works for heavy enough elements associated with "rocks".) Since we're talking a planet, not a star, I'll assume there was never nuclear fusion in the centre to generate extra pressure, so the limit would be purely and only the limit at which degenerate electron pressure is no longer enough.
Also, rocks (solids, metals, whatever) may be happy to sit in high gravity, but not _that_ high, or not without remaining the same kind of thing one calls a "rock" in casual conversations. A mass supported by electron degeneracy pressure isn't quite the same as the mostly crystalline structure you'd have in mind for a "normal" rocky planet.
I'm also not sure if it would form mountains or trenches (even 3 to 4 mm high) at that point, since the whole thing is held together by the quantum pressure of a "gas" made of electrons. It's, so to speak, some atoms "floating" in that electron gas. What keeps it from collapsing at that point isn't a crystalline structure that can be re-shaped to form a mountain or a trench, but just the fact that getting any denser would force the electrons to occupy even higher energy states, thus increasing the pressure, thus pushing it back into shape. So at a wild guess, that thing couldn't form any long lived mountains any more than you can get mountains on Jupiter.
I'm also not sure if you can get just a little neutronium in the centre, while leaving the surface intact. The way I understood it (but again, IANAP) once it does start to collapse into neutronium, then it goes all the way. (Maybe also blowing a part of itself into space, supernova style. The fast collapse will produce enough energy for that.) If the pressure is enough for the centre to collapse, this will just produce an avalanche reaction where the collapse both increases the gravity (less R --> more g) _and_ takes out some of the electron gas that supported the star to start with. So basically it's like puncturing an inflated balloon: it won't stop at losing just a little gas.
That's why we talk about the Chandrasekhar limit as a hard limit. In fact, hard enough to use Type Ia supernovae as a standard candle for really long range astronomy. You can know pretty exactly at what mass the star went *BOOM* and exactly how bright that explosion was. Because it happened as soon as the star went even a just a tiny little bit above that limit. When that happened, it didn't just get a little neutronium in the core, but started the final countdown.
But again, IANAP, so I'd be curious to hear about it from a real physicist.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
..That's not a moo.. uh, planet - it's a space station!
Their response could come in 2018. Cool.
OTOH, if the planets have oceans then the inhabitants might look like our marine creatures.
Yea, the current incumbents of the White House & Downing Street are doing a bang up job;)
41 light years equals 4.24 × 10^15 football fields.
But I think I saw this elsewhere
41 MILES is a very long distance if I'm walking. But I travel farther than that without even thinking about it in my car. 41 lightyears is certainly a long way with our current technology, but if we ever develop spaceships that can approach the speed of light, that will shrink to maybe half a century. Not exactly a weekend trip, but not impossible, at least for an unmanned ship.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Not only that, but if we DID send 500 Million to the staving people in _________ (place country name here), the starving people wouldn't get 500 million. You'd be lucky if they got 5 million! The rest would go into some 2-bit dictator's pocket.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
By my calculations, about a millionth of one percent of the galaxy is within 41 light years of us.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
...is that if they're smart enough to receive our signals, they would be generating some of their own. Then again, maybe they skipped broadcast and went straight to cable. Too bad. We'll have to send them platinum if we want to catch those classic reruns of I Love Kleebo
....How many libraries of congress would that be?
Huh?
Our first major broadcast went out in 1936, and arrived there in 1977.
...
...
Great, so they think we've been fighting a world war based on race for the last decade, then
No wonder they don't come and visit us - I'd stay away.
Wonder what they'll think of all the Invading Saucer Men flicks that came out after WW II that they'll be seeing soon
It's kind of like Earth has a giant sign saying "Paranoid Hostiles here who will shoot anything that looks different" in orbit around us.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Because I want to move there. $10/hr menial jobs? New York and San Francisco don't pay that well, and they are two of the most expensive places on earth. Seriously, do you need a Linux expert/Network Administrator? I'll move to wherever you are in a heartbeat because most of the world is not like where you live.
I would love to move to Canada, but I've looked into it and without either $100,000 to invest in the local economy or an employer willing to state they need and can't find someone with my qualifications, I am not getting in.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
No kidding. It'll take us at least ten years to find any monoliths.
Well, even if we had FTL, it's still 41 lightyears away.
I figure if we get up to 0.5 light speed, we could have an observatory there by the time I die. Of course, I'd never see the pics, as it would take 41 years for the signals to return.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The US counts as a civilisation?
Wow, I'd be 1,176 years old on the planet with a 9 day orbit.
Seriously though, I'd can't wait for technology to advance to the point where we would be able to tell rotational speeds and get more detail on actual surface conditions, instead of guesses based on orbital distances.
Exciting stuff.
On the other hand, if they are travelling near light speed, in THEIR frame only a few seconds or minutes will have passed, so maybe they won't be able to comprehend the new transmissions in time and blow us away anyway (assuming the most recent 41 years worth of data is enough to vindicate us in the first place).
Interstellar travel is weird like that.
I should point out that using the Doppler techinque can only provide an estimate of the MINIMUM mass of the object. The masses of the planets are not smaller than that of Neptune. It depends on the inclination of that solar system to our line of site. Only when we see the system edge-on, is the actual mass the same as the minimum mass. Since we can detect the asteroid belt with Spitzer, it's a pretty good guess that the system is close to edge-on in this case. But in most cases, you can't tell. Press releases of exoplanet detection tend to neglect this issue.
I was using NASA as an example because that's where a lot of money goes in the US, space research wise.
So you joined the military -- knowing that the military would quite likely be deployed to fight somewhere -- and you didn't want to go to war? How many people become doctors while hoping they wont have to treat patients? How many people become janitors while praying every night that they wont be requird to clean? No offense, but that's seriously fucking stupid. A student loan, a flag, and a christmas tree could easily have satisfied your need for education money, patriotism, and family tradition, respectively.
You're not convinced that Australia can support an army capable of defending against a large scale attack? Are we thinking of the same Australia? The one that kicked unusual amounts of ass during world war 2? The Rats of Torbuk? That Japanese battlegroup that was demolished by a single Australian destroyer on its first mission with an novice crew? For some reason, Aussies are just plain tough.
*cough*
I did put that in there for a reason.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
2.) $3660/year is over half of what someone on welfare gets in BC, which has one of the highest costs of living in Canada. So that's actually doing pretty well.
3.) Not everyone that is on welfare should be on it. By properly funding these programs (instead of keeping them perpetually underfunded as is the norm), we can have enough social workers to actually make informed decisions about who to approve for disability, who to give long-term conventional welfare to (a single parent with a new baby typically needs two years out of the workforce, for instance), who to give the short-term, strings-attached welfare to, who to just stick in a skill retraining course for a month, and who to just tell to fuck off.
There are an awful lot of people that I do think need to be kicked off of welfare. One of the points I was making (since you didn't bother to read it), was that there really aren't that many people who genuinely NEED social assistance, and helping them isn't particularly expensive. Your own digging showed that only 1.8% of Canadians receive social support, and if programs were designed better that could be even lower.
The disabled need long term support (probably for their whole lives), people who have a temporary impediment to working need medium term support (a few months to a few years), people who've lost their job need short term support (one or two months, delivered in a timely fashion), and people whose field of employment has disappeared need a month of support and a ticket to the local technical institute.
4.) If you think that you need helicopters to defend a country, you've obviously never heard of Vietnam. The world's best military defeated by peasants. Besides, Canada has welfare AND helicopters. My point was simply to put welfare spending IN PERSPECTIVE. Military spending is vastly greater. Healthcare spending is vastly greater still.