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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.
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!
Here is something that may interest you. This is a time-lapse video of asteroids discoveries. You'll notice the amount and distance increasing considerably as we reach the present. This shows the difference between technologies 20 years ago and the current ones.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_d-gs0WoUw
According to TFA it looks to be habitable in principle (using Earth-centric assumptions about complex life, of course) but toxic to humans, so perhaps not a prime candidate for humanity's first extrasolar excursion.
Sir,
We do not even have a self-sustaining colony on Antarctica, which is warmer than mars, and has unlimited air and water. Our colonies on Antarctica are nowhere near self-sustaining. Mars is colder than Antarctica, water is scarce, and there's NO oxygen and barely any atmosphere.
In other words, calling Mars "habitable" is like calling rocks "edible". The rocks might become edible if you ground them down to dust, added plants, and then ate the plants.
--PeterM
Antarctica is not a good comparison. The reason why we do not have a self-sustaining colony there is not primarily technical, but rather economical. It is way simpler to fly in supplies to the few research stations we have there than to setup a whole economy there. Technically - set up a nuclear reactor, use waste heat to heat some greenhouses and off you go.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
You won't find oxygen in an atmosphere without life already on the planet. Oxygen is too reactive.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
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
So, you'd rather toil away for eons in fear, ignoring the doomed hope that we can someday explore and populate the cosmos because we'll be exterminated once we've been noticed.
I say: Let's scream our bloody heads off -- At worse, we were doomed anyway, fuck it. However, it's possible we had nothing to fear at all. At best our neighbors are just waiting for us to exhibit good will and adequate technology before they visit and help expand our race across the universe.
This is the plot of Julian May's Intervention & Metaconcert books of the Galactic Milieu Series. Perhaps, it's best to let some species die of self immolation if they don't survive the trial by fire that is the discovery of atomic and/or quantum power. It may be better to wait until we are mentally mature rather than risk a pre-mature induction into the galactic society.
TL;DR: One solution to the "Fermi Paradox" is that the "aliens" are benevolent and mark primitive worlds as off limits; Would you trust us with a warp-drive?
P.S. Pussy. Whatever happened to Live free or Die? It's your fearful ilk that hamper progress and allow corrupt governments to control the masses by fear.