Slashdot Mirror
Gliese 581d Confirmed as 'Habitable' Exoplanet
An anonymous reader writes "A rocky world orbiting a nearby star was confirmed (PDF) as the first planet outside our Solar System to meet key requirements for sustaining life." The "key requirement" was actually a Starbucks — astronomers were pretty surprised to find out that they like their coffee burnt on Gliese 581d too.
From TFA:
However, humanity has already tried to make contact with the new planet. During Australia's National Science Week in August 2009, Cosmos magazine partnered with the Australian government, NASA and the CSIRO to run a 13-day campaign to collect goodwill messages from the public to be sent to Gliese 581d.
The initiative, known as Hello From Earth, collected 26,000 messages, which were transmitted by NASA's Tidbinbilla facility. The signal is not due to arrive until January 2030.
At which time it will be returned because we failed to include sufficient postage.
It would be a waste of time to go there within the near future. What we should do, is wait until we've mastered time travel, travel into the future for light-speed transportation, and hope we don't overshoot and end up when we've destroyed ourselves. Wait a second, why does that sounds like a cheesy sci-fi sitcom?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Since it's within the Goldilocks zone, I'm guessing that the Starbucks serves oatmeal not too hot, and not too cold.
Get off my launchpad!
When you get readey to go, don't forget the pox laden blankets.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
so it's probably still pretty cold for us? maybe hoth-like?
Has it only been 16 years since we discovered the first exoplanet?
I remember before I graduated university, the astronomy geeks were excited about this as something that was being worked on and the concept of finding a planet by detecting transit in front of the star made my brain hurt.
Now we can tell all of this ... of course, if it would take 300,000 years to get there with current technology, it's still unimaginably far. Still, it's hard not to believe that if there's one that might be habitable "only" 20 light years away ... the universe must simply be teeming with life.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I call dibs on the tall blue chick with the hot body and prehensile tail. ...hmm..after reading the article, it seems that she'd probably be a short , squat woman with reddish tinged skin. ..oh well, I'd still hit it,
D
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
At first, I read:
"Gliese 581d orbits on the outer fringes of the star's 'Goldilocks zone', where it is not so hot that water boils away, nor so cold that water is perpetually frozen. Instead, the temperature is just right for water to exist in liquid form."
But then I also read:
"The denser air and thick clouds would keep the surface in a perpetual murky red twilight, and its large mass means that surface gravity would be around double that on Earth....A spaceship travelling close to light speed would take more than 20 years to get there, while our present rocket technology would take 300,000 years."
Can't we find a more habitable planet closer to home that has water, and is reachable within say, 2 months?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Then start Earth 2 on Gliese 581d.
It's the only way to be sure.
(We'd put all the telephone sanitizers on the 3rd ship, right?)
I love how our definition of "habitable" is "kind of like Earth."
Palm trees and 8
I can easily say it all taste awful. I don't drink coffee because it taste like bile. Gussy it up with cream, sugar or anything you want and it still taste awful.
It doesn't bother me since I'm not a caffeine addict. Aside from what naturally appears in foods, I don't consume it at all.
Gone!
It should get better. The Doppler planets and early Kepler results are biased toward extreme planets. By 3rd year Kepler should be seeing 1 A.U. planets.
It's a pretty loose definition of "habitable" to include only "You probably won't burst immediately into flame or turn into an instant icecube upon stepping off the ship." Methinks it might also be good to include little things like "oxygen," "survivable air pressure," "water," "soil that can support some form of planet life," "enough atmosphere to protect against cosmic radiation," etc.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
there are no aesthetic qualities to discern in the flavor. its a bitter bean. in the rainbow of coffee flavors, its stilljusta bitterbean, and therefore without aesthetic attraction
maybe you can just admit you are a caffeine addict likeme, and your supposed aesthetic considerations are just a case of the emperor's new clothes
Or maybe you should admit that you don't like coffee, never have, but you started drinking it because you saw other people enjoying it and because you had no real taste for it, you guzzled it in such quantities that you became addicted to caffeine. You should probably switch to energy drinks; you will find the addition of sugar gives you more energy than caffeine alone. Meanwhile I will continue to enjoy my single cup of cappuccino of the day, lovingly handmade from my favorite coffee by me, just the way I like it.
Breakfast served all day!
if you put a blueberry in a pile of shit i think it would change the flavor subtly, but it will still taste like shit
likewise, i have no doubt that bean type, soil, growing conditions, etc., changes the taste of the coffee bean... something that tastes bitter, and always tasted bitter, and always will taste bitter, as the overarching flavor, no matter what the subtleties
what i am saying is that it does not matter the subtleties when the overarching flavor always dominates. and since with coffee the overarching flavor is hot and bitter, that condemns all flavors of coffee, no matter what the slight modifications that fills your mind with supposed merit that is essentially meaningless, since you are willfully ignoring the dominant flavor for psychological and addictive reasons
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Slashdotted already... man, the article has been up like what, thirty minutes?
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
like i said, emperor's new clothes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
IANAScientist, but does that usually mean that genetic mutations, and most "big steps" in evolution, would be stunted?
I want to observe that 'their models suggest that the planet is habitable'. Don't get all excited until their models are validated, verified, and well-tested. Until then, it could indeed turn out to just be that trick of curved space-time that brought in a few funny photons in the right place.
That video was amazing - what you don't know can certainly hurt you. Thanks for the, uh, "heads up".
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
So, when does the B ship leave?
There you go... not that anyone should read it, this being Slashdot and all...
First 'habitable' exoplanet confirmed
Tuesday, 17 May 2011
Agence France-Presse
PARIS: A rocky world orbiting a nearby star was confirmed as the first planet outside our Solar System to meet key requirements for sustaining life.
Modelling of planet Gliese 581d shows it has the potential to be warm and wet enough to nurture Earth-like life, scientists have said. It orbits a red dwarf star called Gliese 581, located around 20 light years from Earth, which makes it one of our closest neighbours.
Gliese 581d orbits on the outer fringes of the star's 'Goldilocks zone', where it is not so hot that water boils away, nor so cold that water is perpetually frozen. Instead, the temperature is just right for water to exist in liquid form.
Zarmina's World
"With a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere - a likely scenario on such a large planet - the climate of Gliese 581d is not only stable against collapse but warm enough to have oceans, clouds and rainfall," France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said.
More than 500 planets orbiting other stars have been recorded since 1995, detected mostly by a tiny wobble in stellar light. Exoplanets are named after their star and listed alphabetically, in order of discovery.
Until now, the big interest in Gliese 581's roster of planets focussed on Gliese 581g. It leapt into the headlines last year as 'Zarmina's World', after its observers announced it had roughly the same mass as Earth's and was also close to the Goldilocks zone.
No doubt that it exists
But that discovery has since been discounted by many. Indeed, some experts suspect that the Gliese 581g may not even exist but was simply a hiccup in starlight.
Its big brother, Gliese 581d, has a mass at least seven times that of Earth and is about twice our planet's size, according to the new study, which appears in a British publication, The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The planet, spotted in 2007, had initially been dismissed as a candidate in the hunt for life. It receives less than a third of the solar radiation Earth gets, and may be "tidally locked", meaning that one side of it always faces the Sun, which would give it permanent dayside and nightside.
300,000 years to get there
But the new model, devised by CNRS climate scientists Robin Wordsworth, Francois Forget and colleagues, showed surprising potential. Its atmosphere would store heat well, thanks to its dense CO2, a greenhouse gas. And the red light from the star would also penetrate the atmosphere and warm the surface.
"In all cases, the temperatures allow for the presence of liquid water on the surface," said the researchers.
For budding travellers, though, Gliese 581d would "still be a pretty strange place to visit", the CNRS said. "The denser air and thick clouds would keep the surface in a perpetual murky red twilight, and its large mass means that surface gravity would be around double that on Earth."
Getting to the planet would still require a sci-fi breakthrough in travel for earthlings. A spaceship travelling close to light speed would take more than 20 years to get there, while our present rocket technology would take 300,000 years.
However, humanity has already tried to make contact with the new planet. During Australia's National Science Week in August 2009, Cosmos magazine partnered with the Australian government, NASA and the CSIRO to run a 13-day campaign to collect goodwill messages from the public to be sent to Gliese 581d.
The initiative, known as Hello From Earth, collected 26,000 messages, which were transmitted by NASA's Tidbinbilla facility. The signal is not due to arrive until January 2030.
You are pretty ignorant. GOOD coffee, properly made, will have zero to almost zero bitterness in it. Almost no oil, and should NEVER be burnt.
Starbucks BURNS their beans.
Also, contrary to popular belief, caffeine is NOT ADDICTIVE.
a review of the literature:
http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00952990600918965
You have been sold a hill of beans. Look for good coffee, learn how to make it. 7:1 ratio is a good start.
This is science, not opinion. I go to a place the uses a spectrometer to get there coffee right. It's the only place I have been going to where I can taste the difference between beans.
I'm 46 and only been drinking coffee regularly for a few years. Because the place I go to make s tasty coffee.
Public Domain, Portland Oregon.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
i hate beer
i don't understand how bitter becomes a desirable taste attribute. ever
but regardless, you have to admit that if it weren't for the alcohol or caffeine, there would be no driving reason to ignore the repulsive bitter taste and "acquire" a taste for it. children are repulsed by the taste of beer and coffee. children's reactions are psychologically honest. adult reactions are due to the pharmaceutical qualities, not the aesthetic ones
it's classic pavlov: ring a bell, give a dog food, and eventually, the dog will salivate just because you rang a bell. likewise, you perceive pleasure at a taste which is essentially repulsive, because of pavlovian conditioning: you got drunk on the alcohol or amped on the caffeine, and that's the true source of your pleasure, not the taste. but, just like a dog salivating at a bell, a completely nonsensical reaction, you now perceive pleasure in nasty bitterness. equally nonsensical. you now confuse the secondary meaning, the taste, with the primary motivation, the drug. you associate pleasure with the pointless and essentially repulsive
it's about drug delivery, and always has been. no matter how many people fool themselves with empty symbolic meaning to subtle variations of shit flavor. the emperor's new clothes: a bunch of fools wasting money on empty pavlovian signifiers of "quality" when its just about some asshole getting drunk or amped. stupid
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Habitable? It 'potentially' has liquid water and that makes it habitable?
It also says it has a "Heavy carbon dioxide atmosphere... so we wouldn't be able to breath there... and the pressure at sea level might kill us as well. Not to mention all that CO2 as probably turned the oceans highly acidic. It maybe habitable... but not to humans.
The common explanation for the concept of land ownership is more like a lease. No one owned it, but the locals agreed to give up use of the land for a time in exchange for a good. They didnt realize that this meant to leave forever, as they had a different understanding of the idea of "use" of the land.
So let's see. It's only 20 light years away, but wait...the speed record for a space craft is 157,078 m/hr...hmmm...that works out to only 4,272 *years* to get to Gliese 581d. On second thought, maybe I'll stay here a while longer!
Keep in mind that you can't go from stationary to 157,078mi/hr instantly without killing every living thing on board. So you need to gradually accelerate to your cruising speed at a constant acceleration of about 1g to keep it comfortable for your colonists. 9.8m/sec^2 is 1G acceleration, so that's about the limit at which you could accelerate and still keep it comfortable. At that rate it would only take two hours to reach 157,000 mi/hr (or 70.19km/sec), assuming you had sufficient thrust to accelerate a gigantic spacecraft at this rate. Real acceleration in space would probably only be a small fraction of this number.
Also keep in mind that you can only accelerate for half of your trip. Everyone seems to forget this. The second half of your trip is spent slowing down, which increases travel time. I don't have the energy to work out the curves right now, but if you're accelerating for the first half of the trip and decelerating for the second half of the trip, there's only a brief time in the middle where you're actually traveling at your peak velocity, whatever that turns out to be.
Coffee is the second-most traded commodity in the world, second only to oil. (source) Billions of people around the world drink coffee every day (myself included) and many of them really enjoy the taste (again, myself included). Are you trying to say that this multi-billion-dollar industry and these billions of people are all engaged in some mass group hypnosis, hysteria, or hallucination? I find that unlikely. Are you trying to say that, universally, coffee really tastes horrible to everyone but they pretend to like it for social reasons or are addicted to caffeine?
Or maybe you just have some overly sensitive "bitter" taste buds and coffee does nothing for you. I, for one, love the taste of coffee more than I love the caffeine rush. I usually do a half-caffeine blend because caffeine makes me far too jittery. Some mornings I get a full decaf. But I drink coffee every day because when it's well made, it tastes incredible. End of story.
300,000 years would be longer than there have been anatomically modern humans on Earth. If we make it, by the time we get there, we'll be a whole new species.
That can work for the colonists. Consider a generational ship that slowly changes the onboard environment from something resembling earth to something resembling the destination over the trip. Gravity, temperature, chemical composition of atmosphere, etc. There would also need to be some mechanism to implement natural selection.
Of course this is most likely somewhat academic. When scientists use the word "habitable" they are generally referring to some place habitable by something other than humans, maybe something closer to algae. Humans would require sufficient technology to manipulate raw materials to create artificial environments for themselves.
I fear we may have only 40 years left before the invasion fleet (or planet busters) arrive.
Don't you people read any (bad?) science fiction? One solution to the "Fermi Paradox" is that there ARE aliens but they are definitely NOT friendly. Once they detect another civilization they move to wipe it out. In fact maybe they do so out of prudence thinking that if they don't, the new civilization will wipe THEM out! Sort of like an intergalactic version of the MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) policy that STILL underpins the basic relationship between the superpowers.
In fact the first civilization to think this way doesn't even need to be around anymore Just start making some self replicating probes and within a very short (geologically speaking) period of time the entire galaxy will be filled with automated systems capable of snuffing out a fledgling civilization (us). (This is the plot of Greg Bear's "The Forge of God"). So instead of telling everyone "We're here, we're here!", we should be as quiet as possible like a lamb all alone in the deep dark woods filled with wolves. I didn't mind the Arecibo transmission sent out in the 70s (and used as the plot device for the movie "Species") because it was aimed at one of the Magellanic clouds; hundreds of thousands of light years away. But Gliese 581? Cosmically speaking, that isn't just next door it's on our door mat!
So great an intellect as Stephen Hawkings has expressed his concern on this so it bears thinking about! Anyway, it's too late now so let's hope that if anyone's there it's E.T. or the Vulcans rather than Predators or Aliens!
children's reactions are psychologically honest. adult reactions are due to the pharmaceutical qualities, not aesthetic ones
it's classic pavlov: ring a bell, give a dog food, and eventually, the dog will salivate just because you rang a bell
likewise, you perceive pleasure at a taste which is essentially repulsive, because of pavlovian conditioning: you got drunk on the alcohol or amped on the caffeine, and that's the true source of your pleasure, not the taste. but, just like a dog salivating at a bell, a completely nonsensical reaction, you now perceive pleasure in nasty bitterness. equally nonsensical. you now confuse the secondary meaning, the taste, with the primary motivation, the drug. you associate pleasure with the pointless and essentially repulsive. it's about drug delivery, and always has been
and i am sure there are people like you who like certain bitter tastes on the merit of the bitter taste alone. but there isn't a radish or tonic water stand on every other corner in every city in the world. because its about the drug, not the taste
bitter taste evolved as part of an arms race between plants and animals. plants that acquired a poison tasted bitter due to the poisonous compounds, and animals that then evolved the ability to taste the bitter were able to avoid the bitter tasting, and therefore poisonous, plants. some animals eventually evolved livers that could metabolize and neutralize some bitter tasting poisonous plants, but there's no reason to seek out the bitter compounds (unless you are some insects which seek out bitter plants and eat them to sequester the plant poisons in their own flesh, thereby inheriting the repulsive bitter poisonous taste themselves)
what i just wrote is hard science. not subjective aesthetics. in fact, morning sickness in women is triggered by bitter taste. because an embryo is very sensitive to plant poisons at early stages of fetal development, unlike an adult. therefore early in pregnancy, women must avoid bitter compounds, and evolution has forced them too
bitter is nasty and poisonous
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Nerd fail! There can be only 21 million Bitcoins, see Wikipedia
Fight for your digital freedom, join the EFF *now*: http://www.eff.org/support/
Count me as one of those coffee-haters. I can't stand any coffee. I love the smell, but never got used to the taste.
Tea snob here. Gives me all the caffeine I need.
I'm really a low 5-digit Slashdotter, but this ID is where I am now.
"Are you trying to say that this multi-billion-dollar industry and these billions of people are all engaged in some mass group hypnosis, hysteria, or hallucination?"
yes
it's classic pavlov: ring a bell, give a dog food, and eventually, the dog will salivate just because you rang a bell
likewise, you perceive pleasure at a taste which is essentially repulsive, because of pavlovian conditioning: you got drunk on the alcohol or amped on the caffeine, and that's the true source of your pleasure, not the taste. but, just like a dog salivating at a bell, a completely nonsensical reaction, you now perceive pleasure in nasty bitterness. equally nonsensical. you now confuse the secondary meaning, the taste, with the primary motivation, the drug. you associate pleasure with the pointless and essentially repulsive. it's about drug delivery, and always has been
"I find that unlikely. Are you trying to say that, universally, coffee really tastes horrible to everyone but they pretend to like it for social reasons or are addicted to caffeine?"
yup. children are repulsed by the taste of coffee. children's reactions are psychologically honest. adult reactions are due to the pharmaceutical qualities, not aesthetic ones. i am sure there are people who like certain bitter tastes on the merit of the bitter taste alone. but there isn't a radish or tonic water stand on every other corner in every city in the world. the reason for the existence of millions of coffeehouses is about the drug, not the taste. anyone who professes it is the taste is suffering from the same pavlovian conditioning as the dog salivating at the sound of a bell
bitter taste evolved as part of an arms race between plants and animals. plants that acquired a poison got eaten less because animals that ate them got sick. animals then evolved the ability to taste bitter aromatic poisonous compounds to avoid poisonous plants. next, animals evolved livers that could metabolize and neutralize some bitter tasting poisonous plants, all the while plants trying to cook up more fiendish poisons. as a side effect, some of the poisons, whether partially metabolized or taken in low doses, had psychological effects, like caffeine, or physiological ones, like nightshade/ digitalis, that modern medicine and modern cubicle workers are able to exploit
but there's no reason to seek out the bitter compounds (unless you are some insects which seek out bitter plants and eat them to sequester the plant poisons in their own flesh, thereby inheriting the repulsive bitter poisonous taste themselves)
what i just wrote is hard science. not subjective aesthetics. in fact, morning sickness in women is triggered by bitter taste. because an embryo is very sensitive to plant poisons at early stages of fetal development, unlike an adult. therefore early in pregnancy, women must avoid bitter compounds, and evolution has forced them too
bitter is nasty and poisonous
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I like that article better. The title is hilarious as well.
"Planet with British weather found 20 light years away
Cold, rainy, inhabitants likely to be hostile"
"Are you trying to say that this multi-billion-dollar industry and these billions of people are all engaged in some mass group hypnosis, hysteria, or hallucination?"
yes
Ugh. Well you win I guess. Billions of people vs a single individual who knows what is going on in the heads of those billions of people. I don't deny that there's a lot of sense in what you say regarding bitter compounds being poisonous, avoidance of those bitter flavors, etc... Children are also repulsed by the taste of dark green vegetables - spinach, broccoli, brussel sprouts, asparagus, artichokes - because they are full of bitter compounds as well. Those aren't the least bit poisonous to humans; in fact millions of people love these vegetables and eat them every day despite the fact that there is no 1) socially-driven pressure to eat these foods or 2) caffeine to create a psychological addiction.
Just because you can't taste anything besides bitterness, it doesn't mean it's not there. It just means you're not able to taste it. Let's not be bitter about it.
(sorry, couldn't resist)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2163136&cid=36155912
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How can you say that when there was a rebel base on Hoth? Next your going to tell me that was all just rebel propaganda!
I guess everyone is missing the part that we haven't actually confirmed the composition of the atmosphere and whether it corresponds to one of their simulated atmospheres to such a degree that their results are applicable *or* that the simulated atmosphere is actually usable by life of any kind.
For all we know, it has an atmosphere made entirely of nitrogen or one that doesn't have sufficient carbon dioxide to sustain a greenhouse effect and has substantially frozen out.
This is purely hype of a simulation based on mostly made up stuff to determine what compositions *could* work to sustain a temperature-habitable environment. Mars is nearly temperature-habitable but no one would ever claim that it is 'habitable'. The only really interesting bit is the ability to, in the future, spectroscopically analyze the atmosphere and plug the values into their simulation to get results based in reality.
Omeganon
I love how the significance of error for this is that on one side you can write of an entire article about the planet, its characteristics and features, and on the other side they argue the equivalent that the scientist blinked and nothing really exists.
I was at KSC for the launch. We toured the visitors center while we were there. It's really sad to see the Apollo capsules, and the great advances to the Space Shuttle, and now we're looking "forward" to the Orion, which is just a slightly larger Apollo capsule.
We may have been advancing from 1957 through 1981, and then a final burst of activity in the 1990's with the ISS. What significant advances have we made in the last 20 years? No innovated new spacecraft. No new propulsion technologies. Everything that we've thrown into space from this rock we call home, was conceived decades earlier.
I've said for many years that we will keep advancing. We will innovate newer and better things. If we planned an interstellar craft in the 1980's and launched in the 1990's, in the following decade we'd have something bigger, better, and faster, to pick up the original crew with, and get there in a fraction of the time.
I guess it's good that a generational interstellar craft was never launched. In a few decades, we will have found ourselves traveling no farther than orbiting our own rock. There was some excitement about probes finally reaching the heliopause. In the direction that we're heading, no human will ever see it. In 100 years, we'll have forgotten about that mysterious place beyond our own atmosphere. In a couple hundred years, humans will probably believe the earth is flat, and the stars are marks high in our own sky, rather than understanding that they are really distant stars, planets, solar systems, and entire galaxies with billion of stars and planets in each.
Yes, in a couple hundred years, we will again be alone in the universe, because we took it on faith that we are alone, and ignored science. Science would have shown us that we aren't alone in the universe, because we would have colonized planets throughout our own galaxy. And then maybe, just maybe, we would have a bit of insight into how the universe really works, which is something we just guess at now.
But as you said, financial and market domination are for more interesting than knowledge and expansion of the human domain. More was lost in the stock market from Oct 2007 to Nov 2008 ($21 trillion) than was spent from 1958 through 2008 ($471 billion or $9.4 billion/year). If just 2.25% of that "lost" money had been put into NASA or an cooperative international space agency (a real cooperation, not competition between agencies), there would have been a budget surplus for almost 50 years. What kind of spacecraft would 50 years worth of budget built today? This conversation wouldn't be between people sitting on the same rock in space. We'd be discussing this between distant planets and possibly galaxies.
{sigh}
Unfortunately, the general public, or even the majority of the politicians and decision makers, will ever understand or comprehend this. They'll continue to want the newer car, nicer house, and fight over the limited resource of the year.
When the end of the human race comes, it won't be with a bang. It'll will be with a soft whimper. People losing their money, power, and fame, and a few of us crying with the knowledge that it could have been different. Theorized catastrophes such as "global warming" "next ice age", "killer meteorite" or other ELE's wouldn't be the end of humanity as we know it. It will only be a reason to evacuate to another home. Future archeologists may find that we were on a good path for surviving these, and completely failed at our own ability to save ourselves.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
That's exactly the kind of mistake that phishing scam suld have in it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Evolution works with thousands and millions of years, and thousands of generations.
Not decades. And 50 years is barely enough for 2 generations.
Heck... Knock it down to the bare physical/physiological minimum (lower mark of the puberty age for girls) and even then it is only 5 generations.
Only FIVE generations. IF we accept the "eleven-year-old mother with two point five kids" option.
Rats reach five generations in about 11 months. That's 100 generations about every 18 years. Seen many rats evolve into another species during your life?
It would take about 2500 years for humans to reach even those 100 generations. And guess what? NOTHING WOULD CHANGE!
Oh... you might BREED a slightly different subset of the species in that time - but not evolve it.
Let it go for a generation or two and all those traits you tried so hard to breed out would rear their ugly head once again.
Oh and BTW... IQ has actually been going up over the last century or so.
And most of it on the "dumber" side of the scale.
In the future, try not to give too much credit to "science" you pick up from Hollywood comedies.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
... to having irrefutable, see it for yourself, proof that the Bible is a fictional soap opera story book. Oh, I hope hope hope it's actually inhabited by Cuthulhu worshippers!
I8-D
I can think of another planet with a dense CO2 atmosphere and in the goldilocks zone around its star, and that is Venus. Venus is hardly habitable. How much else about this planet do we know that isn't speculation?
Slick it up, it's party time!
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
"However, humanity has already tried to make contact with the new planet. During Australia's National Science Week in August 2009, Cosmos magazine partnered with the Australian government, NASA and the CSIRO to run a 13-day campaign to collect goodwill messages from the public to be sent to Gliese 581d.
The initiative, known as Hello From Earth, collected 26,000 messages, which were transmitted by NASA's Tidbinbilla facility. The signal is not due to arrive until January 2030."
In January 2050 they will arrive here and humans will cease to exist.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
"Modelling of planet Gliese 581d shows it has the potential to be warm and wet enough to nurture Earth-like life." Wow, modeling shows the potential for warmth and wet...one of us doesn't know what the word "confirmed" means. Or maybe one of us doesn't know what "modeling" and "potential" mean.
-nod- I realize this is an expression of the spam problem, and therefore the "Your plan won't work for the following reasons" form letter applies. However, without the financial incentive to get their shit through, plus the fact that every target potentially has a different set of filters (as opposed to say, Gmail, where if you can get something through it goes through for everyone) we might not be in worst-case territory here.
At any rate, the least you could say is that it *would* be an arms race, whereas now the non-trolls are completely unarmed.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
There would also need to be some mechanism to implement natural selection.
Easy solution: put lions on the ship and give them free reign. That ought to do it!
While I eagerly await the SyFy channel's Colosseum 2400AD as much as the next slashdotter, I was thinking of something a little less dramatic. Perhaps letting a person have 1, 2 or 3 children depending on how well adapted they are; hit your max and its off to the doctor you go for snip-snip. Everyone gets 1 for morale purposes, a sense of hope and psychological health - and the potentially useful recessive gene. Maybe a bonus kid for going above and beyond one's duty at great personal risk, plugging the hole in the just-breached hull sort of stuff. And of course lets not forget a lottery where winners get an extra kid, we should not forget to breed for luck. ;-)
Yes the above is morally reprehensible in various ways. However sending current humans to a planet with gravity, temperature and other environmental conditions beyond their comfort/safety zone is a bit morally reprehensible to begin with. Especially so when they did not volunteer for such hardships, as is implicit with generational ships. Then there is the practical concern that breeding has to be limited on a generational spacecraft.
While ultimately futile it does force the trolls to be creative, which would be an improvement.
Starbucks actually does not burn their coffee, they grind the coffee finer than most in order to produce the maximum amount of brewed coffee per pound of beans. This process also releases more of the bitter tannins which, combined with a darker roast to begin with, lean towards a burnt taste on the palate.
The fact that the planet's situation in orbit is consistent with the existence of liquid water does not mean that any liquid water actually exists there. The place could be bone dry. There may not be a CO2 atmosphere, so it might be too cold for liquid water after all.
We can't, to my knowledge, actually tell whether this planet has liquid water or not. This is all just a very small step above wild speculation at this point.
Whereas Mars, on the other hand, is totally cheap to colonize! Dude, here's a hint: it's ALL about economics. If money were truly no object, we could colonize Mars right now. The trouble is that it would be insanely expensive and there's no conceivable (economic) payoff.
Should be getting the Cosby show about now.
Great. In another twenty years the vanguard of their invasion fleets will to arrive to destroy us and steal all our jell-o pudding pops...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The 700 Club is already building a spaceship so a Missionary can be started there.
We had realistic h-bomb powered starship technology in 60s, what is the excuse for not going half a century later? Sure there are big risks for astronauts and small risks/big expenses for the rest of us, does that mean we crawl back into stone age caves and stop trying to progress?
1. People DO talk about methane, a lot.
2. The problem with CO2 isn't it's absolute strength as a greenhouse gas, but the very large quantities emitted AND the stability in the atmosphere of CO2 (methane, by contrast, does not last very long at all compared to CO2, it doesn't accumulate like CO2).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
It would be a pretty strange place, given that there would be no day or night. One face of the planet would have permanent day, while the other side would have permanent darkness. That would be very weird for us humans. However, we might be able to extract a lot of "free" energy from tapping into that heat differential. Can you imagine the weather in a place like that? Is it possible that the atmosphere on the dark side actually liquifies in the extreme cold?
likewise, you perceive pleasure at a taste which is essentially repulsive, because of pavlovian conditioning: you got drunk on the alcohol or amped on the caffeine, and that's the true source of your pleasure, not the taste. but, just like a dog salivating at a bell, a completely nonsensical reaction, you now perceive pleasure in nasty bitterness. equally nonsensical. you now confuse the secondary meaning, the taste, with the primary motivation, the drug. you associate pleasure with the pointless and essentially repulsive. it's about drug delivery, and always has been
Ah, but now you've argued yourself out of your own argument. If, as you say, it's all about drug delivery, then it should make to difference to anyone whether they drink cheap well gin from a warm glass -- and it does, to pretty much everyone.
As for coffee, clearly not every cup contains the same ingredients. Some are more acidic than others, at the very least. I know this because if I choose my coffee unwisely the result will be watery diarrhea the next day. Hence I tend to mostly make my coffee myself, and I stick to a type I know won't do that to me.
You claim that it doesn't matter that all coffees don't contain the same stuff, and that nobody really likes any kind of coffee because "bitter = poisonous" to the human animal. How then to explain the appeal of dark leafy vegetables such as spinach or arugala, which taste bitter because they have a high concentration of nutritious compounds?
Also, lots of people add sugar to coffee, so they're not claiming to be attracted to bitter coffee. (In fact, this thread started because someone said Starbuck's coffee tastes excessively burnt, and I agree.) When you add sugar to coffee, it doesn't just mask the bitterness; the flavors combine to create something new and quite pleasant. If nobody drinks coffee for any reason but drug delivery, explain the popularity of Haagen-Dazs coffee ice cream, or why you won't find a gelato stand without a coffee flavor.
Breakfast served all day!
Nope. People do not talk about methane.
Not even mentioned in the IMF report on global warming. Even Al Gore, the worlds expert on Global Warming who won a Nobel prize for his break through research on the subject doesn't mention methane.
I mean if a world class expert like Al Gore doesn't mention methane, it really isn't talked about much.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I read it had a CO2 atmosphere. Thats not particularly nice for animal life and may also mean that the ocean oxygen sinks have not been filled, which is not good for marine life. Maybe there is some algea there, thats about it. The earth had an oxygen atmosphere for some 3 billion years or so and little happened during that time. It does not seem at all favourable for complex life to exist.
The more I look at everything, the more I've come to realize that society simply optimizes outcomes for the "average" and the mediocre.
Average intelligence, average curiosity, average motivation, average honesty. It's why we see white-collar crooks walk. Why people say they admire whistle-blowers, but won't hire one - because they're not that honest. Why avarice and greed are rewarded - people ARE greedy.
It's easy to get ahead - just drop your ethics, lie, cheat, steal, and believe that you're entitled to the rewards because it's hard work making lying, cheating and stealing look like it's semi-honest, both to yourself, and to the rest of the world.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Did I say stop all exploration or even all attempts at communications? No, even though we are "babes in the woods" galactically speaking, there ARE safe ways of carrying this out.
First, if you're really sure the cosmos is a safe friendly place, a few decades (centuries at most) of listening should determine that once and for all. I believe that an Areceibo sized dish could hear its counterpart clear across the galaxy. So a little patience (on a civilizational scale not necessarily on your ego-centric lifetime) is all it would take.
Even if we still heard nothing, we could still venture out even if the wood was full of wolves. Probes/starships communicating on tight beam quantum encrypted communications through scattered relays could provide cover until we were SURE the coast was clear. We could even do some deliberate broadcasting of our own (as opposed to our current radio leakage) IF we placed the transmitters sufficiently far enough from our home solar system, say on an interstellar colony. That way if we screwed up well too bad colonists but at least our home world wouldn't be immediately found.
Of course the chance of interstellar civilizations being HOSTILE as opposed to friendly is probably(?) very small, I'm willing to concede that. (Actually most people would probably say our ever FINDING anyone out there is very small.) The stakes though, being (for us) are infinitely high; if you're wrong you could lose literally EVERYTHING important to us (our species, biosphere maybe even planet!).
It's like nuclear power, the risk is (supposedly) very low but the consequences very high. As Fukushima has recently shown it is hard to calculate very small risks. (By the way, the latest in is that ALL four cores completely melted, they've got to actively keep them cool for six months more to keep them from breaching the containment vessel. So it isn't over).. Would you take the (very small) risk to TALK to the aliens but putting everything we hold dear at (a very small) jeopardy? Or would you just wait a few decades, LISTENING ALL YOU WANT and even sending probes with a few precautions? While YOU might want to talk with E.T. NOW the rest of the world (and all your descendants) might prefer it is not the last conversation to ever take place.
(I'm assuming it's obvious to you that even after a long time (thousands or millions of years) if we meet any aliens we are overwhelmingly likely to be the newest technological species. Also in my original post I thought of writing we should lay low "until WE become the wolves" but I thought people might take it as being too belligerent. I guess from your gung-ho attitude that's not the case.)
10 Bars to keep the atmosphere from freezing out? How much visible light would get through that? Think Venus at 0 degrees C. I think the article needs a more doubtful title.