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Newfound Planet Has Earth-Like Orbit
Raver32 writes with a link to the Space.com site, and an article discussing an extra-solar planet that looks a lot like ours from a distance. At least, its orbit does. The planet is located about 300 light years away, in the constellation Perseus. It circles its giant red star every 360 days and was discovered by 'looking for wobble', the shift in a star's movement that hints at orbiting planets. "The discovery could help astronomers understand what will happen to our sun's brood of planets when it exhausts its store of hydrogen fuel and its outer envelope begins to swell. When that happens in an estimated 5 billion years, our sun will be so big that it will engulf the inner planets and most likely Earth. But long before that happens, life on our planet will have perished and its seas will have boiled away."
The thing is Jupiter or larger in size orbitting a red dwarf.
I see more and more of these new-found planet stories and building a census is great stuff, but all the stories hype up the earthlike part to new levels of strain to get a headline.
Call me when we get liquid water and an atmosphere and maybe we can start writing the "Earth-like" headlines.
Not really, since mass doesn't really have anything to do with life forming. A planet with a similar sized star and distance from it would be much more interesting, since it would mean similar temperatures, and thus more likely to have liquid water and organic molecules, meaning life.
Intelligent people (and all people, really) like to work on things they're passionate about. There are plenty of very intelligent people who are passionate about solving the many issues that plague our civilization, and they are working very hard to do so. These particular intelligent people are passionate about finding new planets.
I must be in the mood because there's a box sitting at home for me with The Lost Tales inside.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Some of the most outlandish and theoretical research have resulted in insights and technology that have helped mankind take a small step forward. A research project might, for example, require the development of better instruments, that can turn out to be of immense value in other domains and help other scientists answer seemingly unrelated but important questions. Also, don't forget that grants and resources are allocated by people far more capable of determining the usefulness of research projects than I or you are.
No, because you would be looking deep into the past, well before humans or the Earth existed.
Unless humanity and its derivatives evolve to the point of self-extinction of some insurmountable galactic event wipes out the solar system (e.g. a rogue black hole swallows the entire system) the sun will *never* become a red giant.
People do *not* understand that once a civilization has become an "advanced technological civilization" (as we are), natural technology developments, esp. molecular nanotechnology, enable the dismantlement of the planets (think swarms of nanorobot miners) and the conversion of the solar system into a Matrioshka Brain. During that time period (centuries to a few million years) a materials shortage develops (one needs *all* those atoms when one starts storing zettabytes and yottabytes of data) and the closest available materials are all harvested -- including a significant fraction of the sun! Remove the material from the sun and it goes from being a G class star to an M class star with a significantly longer lifetime (hundreds of billions of years). The most probable situation in an engineered system is to extract and store much of the Sun's hydrogen and add it back to the star gradually producing a relatively constant fusion reactor power source for a several trillion years. During that time period we have presumably figured out how to navigate the solar system to enable close encounters with undeveloped star systems where we can pick up additional hydrogen resources extending the lifetime of our sun (and the surrounding Matrioshka Brain) until the energy resources of the galaxy are exhausted.
Once intelligent life arrives on the scene all natural evolutionary vectors (e.g. natural stellar and galactic evolution) are subject to modification. A far more interesting topic for conversation, IMO,is *why*, if 60-70% of the Earth's in our galaxy are significantly older than ours have they not made the KT-I to KT-II transition (converting their systems into Matrioshka Brains in the process)? Or have they? [1]. Note that this is somewhat different from the classical Fermi Question, "Where are they?", which is really derived from "Why aren't they here?" or "Why haven't we heard from them?" and is instead the more modern variant, "Why don't we see more stars disappearing?" Matrioshka Brains can navigate around the galaxy but they don't go solar system hopping on a whim.
1. "Dark matter" can be explained by the activities of advanced technological civilizations if one sets aside the arguments of theoretical physicists which depend in large part on assumptions of a "natural" universe. I've never observed a theoretical physicist sit down at a table and say, (a) here is a natural (dead) universe and (b) here is a universe developed to its full potential by intelligent civilizations and (c) there must be a phase transition from a dead universe to an engineered universe -- what do our observations tell us about its current state as we look back through its history? Cosmological discussions are inherently incomplete unless they incorporate how intelligence alters the nature of the universe.