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Finding Twin Earths Is Harder Than We Thought
Matt_dk writes "Does a twin Earth exist somewhere in our galaxy? Astronomers are getting closer and closer to finding an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit. NASA's Kepler spacecraft just launched to find such worlds. Once the search succeeds, the next questions driving research will be: Is that planet habitable? Does it have an Earth-like atmosphere? Answering those questions will not be easy. 'We'll have to be really lucky to decipher an Earth-like planet's atmosphere during a transit event so that we can tell it is Earth-like,' said Kaltenegger. 'We will need to add up many transits to do so — hundreds of them, even for stars as close as 20 light-years away.'" The abstract of their paper offers a link to the complete paper as a 17-page PDF; here is a short description from 2007 of the same researchers' work, outlining the type of spectral signature that an Earth-like atmosphere would be expected to show.
Build in a FTL drive and have Starbuck magically... oh fuck it.. what a cop out. :\
that it will take hundreds of years to tell if they are truly Earth-like. And that is complete nonsense.
Once we find a sufficient collection of candidate planets using this instrument, we can devise a different device/experiment to narrow down whether they are Earth-like. That should take maybe a few years to ten years.
That is more-or-less the pattern we have been following, and it has been successful so far. I see no reason to change.
If they're at a similar point in the evolution of intelligence, that's kinda scary in a way. Maybe they've already made the jump to a pervasive machine intelligence; that would probably be less distressing.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
I mean a few to ten years to build the device; a few to ten years to operate it. That is still vastly better than hundreds.
IANA Astronomer, but perhaps it may be prudent to start looking at the more obvious candidates in terms of how conducive they are to human habitation and evaluate them in terms of what it'll take to make that possible. If an alternate habitat for humans is a moderately serious concern, why bother looking at worlds whose characteristics are under heavy risk of changing by the time we get there? Have we even found a better candidate that one of Jupiter's moons or Mars?
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
Two huge issues in as many sentences.
There is no logical reason to assume similar development, barring further evidence. That could be a good or bad thing.
But your second sentence... wow! Where do you get off making an assumption like that? First, if they have anything like "a pervasive machine intelligence", then their technical development would be VASTLY beyond ours. We are not even remotely close to anything like that.
Second, even if they did, how in the world do you conclude that would be "less distressing"?? One does not follow from the other.
Let's just assume for a moment that a 2nd Earth was discovered with life an all. Would this be a turning point for actually dropping vast amounts of money in R&D for interstellar travel? Iâ(TM)m talking about developing some really exotic technologies ranging from point-to-point FTL travel to wormhole-like jump drives.
If the laws of physics permits, such a discovery might be what provides the justification for investors and government agencies alike.
Life is not for the lazy.
There's an important distinction between it being hard to find an earthlike planet, and there not being an earthlike planet to find at all.
Our mechanisms for finding planets are all in wobbles in the wavelengths from the light of stars. And because of that, we tend to only see the big wobbles, because small wobbles tend to get lost in the noise.
It would be nice if we could shine a flashlight and get a real look out there, but in most cases, we'd never see what we shone light upon in our lifetimes.
The universe is a HUGE freakin place, filled mostly with stuff we can't get a good clear look at yet.
Entire worlds like ours are are both all we know, but at the same time, are too small for us to even notice in the grandness just outside our atmospheric window.
Ryan Fenton
Second, even if they did, how in the world do you conclude that would be "less distressing"??
This is Slashdot, and you're wondering how someone decided that a machine would be easier to deal with than a living creature. Hmm...
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Finding a "twin" earth, no matter the distance (assuming if we can see it, we can get to it at some point in the future) is possible _the_ most important thing for the continuation of the human race.
As for being harder than "we" thought, to me at least (IANAA) it seems pretty damn hard to me. Even if we find a planet that could have human life, would it have life on it? Would that life be toxic to us? etc...
Of course, it will only be possible to tell if it was Earth-like X number of years ago. Since there are only a few stars within 100 light years, X will usually be more than 100. In the meantime, there could have been a planet killing asteroid, or an advanced civilization could have nuked itself. So, we can only really find "twin Earths" from the past. We'll never actually know what it's like until we go there...
...actually, even that's not true, in the sense that "we" means everybody on Earth. Only the travelers will know it's true. Earthlings will have to wait for the return trip or signal, to tell them that it *was* true. Even then, for most stars it would be your great-great-great.... children receiving the signal.
Bottom line? The Universe's speed limit sucks. Where's the fuzzbuster?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
We're all familiar with the term already.
After all, Battlestar Galactica did it.
According to theories of what the earth's atmosphere was like before life flourished, the atmosphere was full of CO2 and nitrogen. There was no oxygen. According to our understanding of the earth 4 billion yrs ago, the earth would be a VERY different place today if there were no life here because oxygen is a byproduct of photosynthetic life. I theorize that the moment we find a planet like ours, we will have found life on another planet.
Speaking of intelligence inhabitants, it would be wonderful if we could detect such, but very unlikely, unless those inhabitants also happens to be at a technological development similar to ours, where they are leaking radio signals all over the place. Good candidates for SETI to focus its search. Maybe even the SETI@HOME crowd can put actuators on that satellite dishes to focus on said planet...
The real killer here is that even if we did find a so-called "twin Earth", we wouldn't be able to do a whole lot about it. Sending a probe there would take thousands of years. Maybe we could do a massive interferometer in space to study the planet in more detail. Forget the manned mission fantasy so many have. We have yet to put a man out past the orbit of the Moon and we're going to travel to a distant star many light-years from Earth?
The physics of Interstellar Travel is daunting, to put it mildly. When I was a kid diddling around with the Special Relativity equations, I was all elated until I realized the ENERGY required to make time dilation a useful thing -- for the travelers, anyway -- is way beyond anything we humans are likely to be able to do now and in the future -- if ever. And all those dreams I had as a young boy of going to the stars died.
Later, I got into the whole Wormhole stuff, and read some of the stuff Kip Throne and others wrote, and got depressed again. Wormholes -- if they even exist -- is far more daunting in terms of energy requirement than even lightspeed travel, by many, many orders of magnitude!!!!!!
Well, wonderful if we can find. But then we'll be more frustrated when we all have to face the realities of physics. Science Fiction lost a lot of its appeal for me because most of it turned out to be simple fantasy, impossible to achieve. My ignorance as a kid is gone.
Meanwhile, we have made tremendous strides in Science and Technology since my teen years, the stuff of Science Fiction 30 years ago. We do live in a marvelous age. It's just that Interstellar Travel will not be a part of it. :-(
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Bullets hurt people because of human blood circulation (loss of blood) and the size of our organs (heh). If robots were built differently or little green men evolved differently, bullets would most likely be ineffective. There is no reason that there is only one wire connecting processor to leg and opening one loop should not hurt the other parts of the circuit. Also, there is almost no reason why the processor needs to be 15 cm big, or the leg motor has to take up the whole length of the leg. There is also no reason why the robots or green guys have to be human size.
However, as long as they are still made of molecules, high amounts of energy should still be able to separate the molecules that they are composed of, and hopefully eliminate them.