New Exoplanet Is Best Yet Candidate For Supporting Life

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New Exoplanet Is Best Yet Candidate For Supporting Life

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday February 2, 2012 @05:31PM from the welcome-to-the-neighborhood dept.

First time accepted submitter uigrad_2000 writes "With all the new exoplanets discovered recently with Kepler, it seemed a sure thing that the first exoplanet in the habitable zone of a star would be found soon. The irony is that Kepler was not involved. GJ 667Cc is at least 4.5 times as massive as Earth, and lies in the habitable region of its host star, reports Scientific American. It was discovered by comparing public data from the ESO to recent observations from Hawaii and Chile. As opposed to the stars Kepler is watching, this is only 22 light-years away, making it even more interesting."

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22 light years by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-02 17:36 · Score: 4, Insightful

"this is only 22 light years away, making it even more interesting."
It's like a price on an estate: as remarkable as this is, it's only 55.3 million! Still unreachable :P
1. Re:22 light years by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-02 17:44 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Closer planets are much easier to observe than farther ones. We may not be able to go there in the foreseeable future, but being close means we can study it.
2. Re:22 light years by afabbro · 2012-02-02 17:50 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Visiting this planet is perfectly feasible if the human race wants it.
  I wouldn't say "perfectly" feasible. Visiting the moon is perfectly feasible. Visiting Mars is probably perfectly feasible. But 22LY is a >44Y round trip. I think instead of "perfectly feasible" I would say "probably possible".
  
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3. Re:22 light years by DarkFencer · 2012-02-02 17:56 · Score: 2
  
  It's like a price on an estate: as remarkable as this is, it's only 55.3 million!
  55.3 million what?? miles? not even close...
  The GP was comparing the distance to the price of a luxury estate (55.3 million dollars/pounds/euro/etc). They were not saying it was 55.3 million anything in distance.
4. Re:22 light years by Swampash · 2012-02-02 17:57 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  A 44 year round trip if you travel at the speed of light from start to finish.
  That's a pretty big if.
5. Re:22 light years by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-02 18:12 · Score: 1
  
  Not to mention that we won't be traveling at light speed to get around the universe. When it does happen, it'll be fold space or some other manipulation of spacetime.
6. Re:22 light years by Endovior · 2012-02-02 18:16 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  That's what the greater than sign was for. >44 years, because it cannot possibly be less, given our current understanding of the laws of physics. Naturally, just because there's no way for it to be less in no way means that it can't be more. In fact, it almost certainly will be.
7. Re:22 light years by Belial6 · 2012-02-02 18:22 · Score: 2
  
  Perfectly feasible, and round trip have nothing to do with each other.
8. Re:22 light years by Zakabog · 2012-02-02 18:59 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Well 44 years for those of us observing from Earth. Much less time for those of us making the journey (assuming they're traveling at the speed of light or close to it.) Still that is a huge if. Though radio contact with an intelligent and sufficiently technicially advanced species that close would be very possible.
9. Re:22 light years by symbolset · 2012-02-02 19:01 · Score: 1
  
  Alpha Centauri A is only 4.3 lightyears. It probably has habitable zone planets too. And it's nearly a clone of our own sun.
  
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10. Re:22 light years by Surt · 2012-02-02 19:14 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  I can't see why a modest improvement in our current technology, say the technology we'll have in 200 years would not allow this trip to be quite feasible at 0.10C, for a roundtrip of around half a millennia. And that's only about twice as long as our current government has lasted, and our culture has been around longer. Our descendants could look forward to the trip report. And assuming biology continues to advance, it might just be our great grandchildren welcoming those who return.
  
  --
  "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
11. Re:22 light years by symbolset · 2012-02-02 19:18 · Score: 2
  
  Just rechecked. Our own oort cloud goes almost half the way to Alpha Centari A. If that star has one also, there could be water and fuel available almost the whole way. And the star is getting closer, which is a bonus.
  
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12. Re:22 light years by Surt · 2012-02-02 19:35 · Score: 1
  
  If you really want to feel bad, go figure out how many days work it is for Warren Buffett to buy that unreachable estate.
  
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  "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
13. Re:22 light years by 1u3hr · 2012-02-02 19:55 · Score: 1
  
  there could be water and fuel available almost the whole way.
  
  If you stop and start. It takes LOT of energy and time to get up to speed -- or to slow down again -- to travel interstellar if you want to get there in less than a million years.
14. Re:22 light years by sneakyimp · 2012-02-02 20:27 · Score: 1
  
  I would say "absolutely, completely, utterly impossible with current technology." Come on. Just shooting a laser would take 22 years to hit it and if anyone were there they wouldn't even notice because we are just a speck in their sky too. Not to mention that if you ever got there, you're probably looking at 3G gravity at the surface. I'd go from 160 lbs to 480 lbs. How the hell are you supposed to be a conquistador when you weight 3 times as much as you are accustomed to after spending your entire life weightless? Please.
  An unmanned, multi-generational mission might be feasible. Maybe.
15. Re:22 light years by priceslasher · 2012-02-02 20:53 · Score: 1
  
  Since there is little friction in space what is there from stopping us from reaching an appreciable fraction of the speed of light? I was reading that we might attain lightspeed in about 1 year at 1G acceleration rate which only adds a couple of years to the trip..
  I would first launch a volley of asteroids towards the planet to clear a path, then the equipment, and then follow in their wake.
16. Re:22 light years by allcoolnameswheretak · 2012-02-02 21:29 · Score: 1
  
  The problem with Alpha Centauri A is that it's part of a binary star system with Alpha Centauri B. Both of these stars are comparable in size to our sun. I am not certain, but I would assume that having two massive stars in a system would makes the temperatures and orbits of any planetary bodies extremely volatile.
17. Re:22 light years by Arrepiadd · 2012-02-02 21:29 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Gee, what could go wrong with that?
  First, the fact that the asteroids would be going at a much slower speed than your ship going at the speed of light. Instead of the asteroids clearing your path, you would eventually hit the asteroids.
  Then, let's forget this tiny detail of E=mc^2 and how that influences the mass of a speeding object. Sure it's a negligible factor at our typical speeds but apply the Lorentz Factor to a ship speeding close to the speed of light (let's say 90%) and the mass increases substantially (to 2.3 times the rest mass). Increase speed even more and mass keeps going up (to roughly 7 times, at 0.99c). Then, when you think a bit more about it, more than the 10 seconds it took you to read that forum you showed while completely missing the post of the guy that says basically what I just said, you start seeing what the problem is with keeping a constant 1G acceleration. It takes a lot of mass (read "fuel"), just to keep speeding up. Then, if you think a little bit harder, you may start understanding why they call the speed of light a "limit".
18. Re:22 light years by Bill+Currie · 2012-02-02 21:29 · Score: 1
  
  there could be water and fuel available almost the whole way.
  If you stop and start. It takes LOT of energy and time to get up to speed -- or to slow down again -- to travel interstellar if you want to get there in less than a million years.
  While very true, here's something to consider: with iceballs going that far out, that's a lot of expansion room for any humans willing to live on iceballs (and makes it rather difficult to wipe out the species). Sure, getting there by colonial expansion could take millions of years, so what? Other than the fact that's a long time to figure out how to get there faster :)
  
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  Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
19. Re:22 light years by lachlan76 · 2012-02-02 22:15 · Score: 1
  
  As you approach c, though, length and time dilation work in your favour. 1g (of force, since constant acceleration is not possible for obvious reasons) might produce diminishing returns from the earth's perspective with respect to speed, but from the traveller's perspective the distance from earth to the destination will diminish by an equivalent factor---such is my understanding, anyway.
20. Re:22 light years by cp.tar · 2012-02-02 22:49 · Score: 1
  
  Now if only we had a way to accelerate the ship constantly in that direction.
  It would actually solve all the zero-gravity problems in space, too. You’d just have to realize that the destination planet is down .
  
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21. Re:22 light years by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-02 23:01 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Note that humans don't survive arbitrarily high accelerations. So you'll need some time to get close to the speed of light, and the same time to decelerate on the other side. But then, when you arrive you'll be fried by the extremely blue-shifted radiation (with sufficiently high speed, even normal visible light will turn into hard gamma rays; now imagine what happens to existing gamma radiation and high energy cosmic radiation particles).
  Indeed, one might ask for the maximal speed before you have to fear that any particle hitting you from the front turns your ship into a black hole. :-)
  Oh, and even if you manage to shield away all that radiation, you'll not have much time to avoid those ultra-relativistic stone chippings on your way ... just think what a small gun bullet can do, and imagine a gun bullet with a million times the energy!
22. Re:22 light years by Gravis+Zero · 2012-02-02 23:02 · Score: 1
  
  it's unreachable for now but with a vehicle that can travel close to C, time dilation will occur making the trip seem shorter to the travelers. this is somewhere we may actually be able to travel to without FTL drives which seem like the space travel equivalent of flying cars like in BTTF II.
  however, i'm pretty sure we're just going to die out on this rock.
  
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  Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
23. Re:22 light years by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-02 23:05 · Score: 1
  
  At 0.9 the time is about half for those inside the ship.
  So no, not really.
  To achieve 90% the speed of light it takes an enormous amount of energy something most likely not feasible in our life time or this century. If we achieve that speed the shielding of the craft would have to be beyond anything we can possible imagine, if a ship hits a space dust not bigger than 1cm at that speed it would probably not survive. Although space is quite empty its not that empty.
  10% SoL is more feasible but time dilation is marginable at that speed.
  So going to that planet would take something like 200 years hoping we wouldn't cross some object that could do some serious damage we wouldn't have had detected yet.
  So it is remotely possible at best. We have much to learn in our own solar system regarding space travel first before adventuring with humans to other solar systems.
24. Re:22 light years by Terminus32 · 2012-02-02 23:07 · Score: 2
  
  'To search expectantly for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture bound a presumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant. And yet, this has been chosen as the avenue by which it is assumed contact is likely to occur.' - Terence McKenna
  
  --
  http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
25. Re:22 light years by Dunbal · 2012-02-02 23:07 · Score: 2
  
  what is there from stopping us from reaching an appreciable fraction of the speed of light?
  F = m[(vehicle) +m(fuel)]a. If only there was a way to get rid of the "m(fuel)" part of that equation... You can read fantasy books all you want - it takes energy to accelerate any object with mass, which means you need a source of energy. Unfortunately you need to bring this source of energy with you (if only to slow down on the other side), which means you have more mass, which means you need more energy, etc.
  
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  Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
26. Re:22 light years by MattSausage · 2012-02-02 23:59 · Score: 1
  
  Actually, if you were accelerating toward the planet at a constant rate, despite what Ender may have suggested, the destination planet would be up.
27. Re:22 light years by VortexCortex · 2012-02-03 00:07 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  And assuming biology continues to advance, it might just be our great grandchildren welcoming those who return.
  Well, if biology continues to advance then what's to say it wouldn't be ourselves welcoming those who return?
  I understand that some people don't want to live that long, but my "retirement" plan involves savings for having my organs re-grown...
  For over 20 years (since age 12), I've been developing a machine intelligence "agent" program that has learned my interests from my habits and alerts me to things I might like; Also it performs many other tasks for me -- like email filtering (I no longer see SPAM). My assistant is interested in Slashdot, cybernetics research, Civil Rights, and many other things because I am interested in them. It observes me throughout the day and night (thanks to IR), and can accurately deduce my mood, and current likely relevant interests from my behaviors: Eg: Just waking up, or my posture, or the way I hold my beverage (one drinks beer much differently than coffee) -- Actually, this is incorrect: having no deduction skills at all, its interests I'm alerted to are affected by its "mood" which is simply a direct result of my own physical state and activities -- uncannily similar to how we derive our own moods...
  How far can we take this? We've discovered how to externally recognize decisions in our minds before we're aware of them, we're decoding human word recognition, and we'll be decoding remembered internal speech soon too. At such a point my agent will know my thoughts as instantly as I do -- My machine intelligence already knows my voice and other sounds, recognizes the words I say, and has been taught to read (its got better OCR when it comes to handwriting than I do sometimes). I am able to add new capabilities easily without retraining the whole network because it's a network of neural-networks, taking a page from the human brain & body, I "wire" specialized components together to create a whole.
  The sad thing is that there's a better chance of myself or something very much like me living beyond the time spans you mention than our governments actually launching such a mission. It seems to me that the truly essential and ambitious goals in many areas of exploration will not involve state sponsorship.
  Think of it this way, if the Dinosaurs had a sufficiently advanced space program they wouldn't be extinct right now...
  ( They achieved flight and rested on their laurels tempting fate with all the time in the world. )
  Eventually my machine intelligence will be fully autonomous. Having its own physical state and activities it will be capable of creating its own "mood", able to affect and explore its own interests, and will be much more sturdy than our frail frames are -- Esp. when it comes to the harshness of space. The only problem is that if we launched such intelligences to distant interesting worlds, they may decide never to return. At least then our Human drive to create and explore won't be completely extincted by the asteroid that IS headed for us Right Now.
  P.S. It's a misnomer to call machine intelligence "AI"; There's nothing "artificial" about its very real intelligence. Though not as smart as you are, its intelligence is as real as that of a fruit fly, rat, bird, cat, or ape. True, MI is artificial in that it was created by man, but you don't call clothes "artificial garments" if they include synthetic fibers... It's truly just an intelligent machine.
28. Re:22 light years by houghi · 2012-02-03 00:12 · Score: 1
  
  To be able to talk to an intelligent and sufficiently technicially advanced species I would suggest we first try to reach that level ourselves. Especially the intelligent part.
  
  --
  Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
29. Re:22 light years by grumbel · 2012-02-03 00:22 · Score: 1
  
  22 light years is not all that far away, with nuclear propulsion you could get there in around 500 years. Not good for a weekend trip, but not really unreachable either.
30. Re:22 light years by CPTreese · 2012-02-03 00:39 · Score: 1
  
  Our own oort cloud goes almost half the way to Alpha Centari A
  It's regularly assumed that the Oort cloud exists, but there isn't any empirical data supporting this assumption. IMHO it seems to be circular reasoning to say comets exist because of the Oort cloud, and the Oort cloud exists because there are comets.
  Has anyone actually observed the Oort cloud? Is it even possible to observe it?
  
  --
  If there is no God then free will is an illusion.
31. Re:22 light years by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-03 00:40 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  I would not be so worried about Doppler shifted radiation. I would be more worried about the 3 foot tall super strong midgets who would live on a planet with 4.5x our gravity. They would undoubtedly be able to break a human man in half with little effort.
32. Re:22 light years by Sinn3d · 2012-02-03 00:54 · Score: 1
  
  Keep in mind we will have a moon base going in like 4-8 years, making 21.99~ light years away...
33. Re:22 light years by 1u3hr · 2012-02-03 01:03 · Score: 1
  
  Colonising the Oort Cloud is another issue. Though it would be a nice quiet place to live and safe from any mishaps with planets or the sun. However, that these do seem to extend way out points out a potential hazard, you don't want to run into anything, if you're travelling at any fraction of light speed. You'd need some pretty effective shielding, probably physical (slabs of rock.metal, ice), magnetic shields, perhaps lasers to vaporise anything you can't dodge.
34. Re:22 light years by necro81 · 2012-02-03 01:17 · Score: 1
  
  A 44 year round trip if you travel at the speed of light from start to finish
  For the passengers on board this theoretical spacecraft, practically no time would have passed at all during the journey. It's only for us suckers left behind that 44 years passes.
35. Re:22 light years by butalearner · 2012-02-03 01:21 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  I would not be so worried about Doppler shifted radiation. I would be more worried about the 3 foot tall super strong midgets who would live on a planet with 4.5x our gravity. They would undoubtedly be able to break a human man in half with little effort.
  Actually, the planet's radius is probably going to be quite a bit larger than our own, since (reportedly) there are fewer heavy metals in that system. If the radius is 2.1x Earth's radius with 4.5x the mass, the gravity would be the same as Earth.
36. Re:22 light years by necro81 · 2012-02-03 01:26 · Score: 2
  
  Since there is little friction in space what is there from stopping us from reaching an appreciable fraction of the speed of light? I was reading that we might attain lightspeed in about 1 year at 1G acceleration rate
  What stops us is: 1) we have no way to produce sustained thrust anywhere near that high 2) even if we had a means, it would take something on the order of the entire power output of humanity to propel an interstellar craft at 1 G for that long, 4) to build and supply such a spacecraft would require a significant portion of the GDP of humanity for decades, and 4) special relativity dictates that as you approach the speed of light, your mass increases, which requires more power to accelerate, etc.
37. Re:22 light years by butalearner · 2012-02-03 01:34 · Score: 2
  
  I would say "absolutely, completely, utterly impossible with current technology." Come on. Just shooting a laser would take 22 years to hit it and if anyone were there they wouldn't even notice because we are just a speck in their sky too. Not to mention that if you ever got there, you're probably looking at 3G gravity at the surface. I'd go from 160 lbs to 480 lbs. How the hell are you supposed to be a conquistador when you weight 3 times as much as you are accustomed to after spending your entire life weightless? Please.
  An unmanned, multi-generational mission might be feasible. Maybe.
  There's no info on the radius, but as long as it's greater than 2.1x Earth (I believe it's quite likely since they say heavy metals are scarce in that system), surface gravity will actually be less than Earth's.
38. Re:22 light years by FranktehReaver · 2012-02-03 01:35 · Score: 1
  
  Why would anyone want to come back? :P
39. Re:22 light years by butalearner · 2012-02-03 01:42 · Score: 2
  
  FYI, for comparison look at GJ 1214 b, which is about 6.5x Earth mass, but 2.7x the radius, which gives a surface gravity of 0.91g.
40. Re:22 light years by Muad'Dave · 2012-02-03 01:49 · Score: 1
  
  Maybe they're the ones that kill us with flying spiky balls, shrink us, and send us to work on their high gravity planet.
  There was even a sequel, and another, and another.
  
  --
  Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
41. Re:22 light years by rmstar · 2012-02-03 01:57 · Score: 1
  
  Visiting this planet is perfectly feasible if the human race wants it.
  ...at leas for some value of 'visiting'. We could send a probe that will stay dormant for all the time it takes to fly by the planet, then wake up and send a couple of pictures. If you build it right, it could weight just a couple of kilograms, and be accelerated with a high g value to a halfway decent velocity. All we had left to do would be to wait for 22 years after when it was supposed to wake up.
  What do you guys think? What velocity is realistically achievable for, say, a ten kilogram payload? Just a camera and something capable to transmit a couple of pictures with very high energy?
42. Re:22 light years by El+Torico · 2012-02-03 02:02 · Score: 1
  
  Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
  
  --
  In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
43. Re:22 light years by nharmon · 2012-02-03 02:14 · Score: 1
  
  Arbitrarily high accelerations are not needed. What is needed is sustained low acceleration. Sustained acceleration at about 1 G, accelerating toward the target for half of the trip, and away (braking) for the other half, will make a 22 LY trip take about 23 years (as seen from the departure/arrival points).
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_using_constant_acceleration
44. Re:22 light years by jellomizer · 2012-02-03 02:16 · Score: 1
  
  The fastest man made object is now traveling at 0.006% of the speed of light...That will only take us 366,667 years to get there...
  
  Space is Big Really Big... The Speed of Light is really fast. Science Fiction Speeds are not yet possible as Science Fiction is Fiction thus not True, and science fiction speeds are a plot device to put people in a different set of interesting story telling issues, and may not ever be, even fictional Star Trek (Voyager Speeds) it will take a week at full warp to get there.
  
  --
  If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
45. Re:22 light years by GameboyRMH · 2012-02-03 02:19 · Score: 1
  
  If you have enough cash you could put this thing on a Darwin-OP...
  BUT if this thing is more than a fancy web spider with some other bits tacked on, and you have indeed matched or exceeded the intelligence of a rat, then you're hiding an amazing discovery from the world.
  
  --
  "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
46. Re:22 light years by tmosley · 2012-02-03 02:34 · Score: 1
  
  I wonder if it would be possible to harness the ultra-blueshifted photons that you would see as you accelerate faster and faster. Would the increase in mass be proportional to the increase in energy of the photons? In any event, at least some sort of shielding would probably be vital, as otherwise they would melt your spaceship into nothing. Perhaps a meta-material could allow the photons to move around the ship without destroying it.
47. Re:22 light years by History's+Coming+To · 2012-02-03 02:36 · Score: 1
  
  Well, that depends on your point of view. For the crew of a spaceship it would take zero time, or an arbitrarily small time depending on how close to c you can get, a round trip in the region of a year isn't outrageous if we can build a ship with a good sustained thrust.
  
  But yes, whatever happens it's a >44yr wait for those of us sitting on the Earth.
  
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48. Re:22 light years by elrous0 · 2012-02-03 02:45 · Score: 1
  
  "Only 22 light years away," or as it's better known "About 500,000 years away with the fastest spacecraft we've ever created."
  
  --
  SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
49. Re:22 light years by elrous0 · 2012-02-03 02:49 · Score: 1
  
  Now all you have to do is figure out how to build a spacecraft that can sustain a human population for 500 years on nothing but starlight. Easy peasy.
  
  --
  SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
50. Re:22 light years by Baloroth · 2012-02-03 03:03 · Score: 1
  
  Actually, it can very much be less than 44 years for the people making the trip. Could only take a few months for them, actually, which makes the whole problem of interstellar travel a lot simpler, since if you can travel fast enough, time dilation effects will mean the people inside will live more than long enough to make the trip. Any trip, technically, if you can go fast enough, since the effect asymptotically approaches infinity as the velocity approaches c.
  Not so useful for the people stuck here on Earth, but it does make interstellar travel a very real possibility. Eventually.
  
  --
  "None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
51. Re:22 light years by iggymanz · 2012-02-03 03:18 · Score: 1
  
  visiting with a probe propelled either by focused EM waves, fission power, ion drive, or fusion (if we can perfect it) is feasible.
52. Re:22 light years by priceslasher · 2012-02-03 03:52 · Score: 1
  
  Why would I send the asteroids at a lower speed, they would have the same propulsion system as the ship. The ship would probably be a similarly equipped asteroid. The real problem I see is sustaining that rate of acceleration for a sustained period of two years - the asteroid itself would have to somehow be the fuel and the expent fuel couldn't be in the path so it would have to create a tunnel with it's expulsion pattern as opposed to a trail. I am not suggesting going the speed of light which is why I went to the trouble of saying "appreciable fraction of" and you still heckle me over this like by reminding me it is a "limit" as if I want to break the speed of light. Not even what I said. So what is the point of the mass increasing to a factor of 2-7 anyways, of course you and your craft are going to have mass - so explain without being so patronizing what is wrong with that. Or better yet, why don't you use your imagination to propose a solution to travelling 44light years which is the discussion.
53. Re:22 light years by somersault · 2012-02-03 03:54 · Score: 1
  
  You mean the citizens who will sit at home watching crappy TV, occasionally wondering about who they're going to bone next?
  
  --
  which is totally what she said
54. Re:22 light years by Whorhay · 2012-02-03 04:09 · Score: 1
  
  Why are we even assuming a return trip? I guess there is the highly improbable possibility of that planet having some physical good or resource that would be worth shipping back. But planning that into the process as a given seems a huge waste.
  Sending a ship there would be tremendously expensive but I doubt there would be a lack of volunteers, even knowing that there is no return and that living long enough to actually arrive is very unlikely. Make it a massive spinning colony ship with several hundred or thousand crew members. Put a few million eggs and spem from unrelated donors in the freezer and send them on their way with ion drives or some such powered by thorium reactors.
55. Re:22 light years by countertrolling · 2012-02-03 04:27 · Score: 1
  
  Our great grandchildren may uncover FTL travel and get there many years before the original kerosine burning tin jalopy that was sent out.
  
  --
  For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
56. Re:22 light years by war4peace · 2012-02-03 04:44 · Score: 1
  
  Well, screw this, I'm going anyway. Who's with me?
  (awkward silence)
  OK, let's go watch some crappy movies!
  (crowd cheering)
  
  --
  ...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
57. Re:22 light years by squidflakes · 2012-02-03 04:59 · Score: 1
  
  Oh, that guy who claims he did the Kessel run in less than 5 parsecs? You know he's full of shit right? A parsec is a measure of distance not of time. You can't ride a bike 15 miles per kilometer. How that guy got such a good reputation I'll never know. Drummed out of the Imperial Pilots Corps, flies around in a hunk of junk, strokes his Wookie all the time, and is pretty scruffy looking.
58. Re:22 light years by Nadaka · 2012-02-03 05:01 · Score: 2
  
  That only works if you have a propulsion system capable of accelerating you to near c in a matter of weeks/months/years and enough reaction mass to do so.
59. Re:22 light years by Surt · 2012-02-03 05:09 · Score: 1
  
  It doesn't have to. Interstellar hydrogen is plentiful (at least in terms of the needs of such a ship), and easy to collect.
  
  --
  "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
60. Re:22 light years by Surt · 2012-02-03 05:11 · Score: 1
  
  Indeed, one way is somewhat more likely. I was imagining our descendants being interested in visiting the homeworld. Once they achieve immortality, spending a couple hundred years on a trip to earth becomes much more likely.
  
  --
  "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
61. Re:22 light years by HarvardAce · 2012-02-03 05:41 · Score: 1
  
  Since there is little friction in space what is there from stopping us from reaching an appreciable fraction of the speed of light? I was reading that we might attain lightspeed in about 1 year at 1G acceleration rate which only adds a couple of years to the trip..
  
  Using force = mass * acceleration, energy = force * distance, distance = 1/2 * acceleration * time^2, and e=mc^2:
  to accelerate a 1000kg payload at 1g (9.8m/s^2) for 1 year:
  Energy to do so: 4.8 x 10^19 J
  Equivalent mass of that energy: 532kg. That's also assuming Newtonian physics (no relativity), and not counting the fact that you have to account for the mass of the fuel. Let me know when we can produce 216kg of antimatter and then "burn" it in a controlled manner that directly corresponds to thrust.
  If you use an energy density of 50,000 Wh/kg (very aggressive estimate of high-end energy density in current/near-future rocket tech), you're talking about needing over 2 billion metric tons of fuel (and don't forget you have to accelerate all that fuel too which now means you're no longer talking about a 1000kg payload.
  
  --
  Note to self: Stop putting jokes in my insightful comments so I can get something other than +1 Funny!
62. Re:22 light years by flappinbooger · 2012-02-03 05:51 · Score: 1
  
  Some rough numbers:
  
  If a ship accelerates at 1 G for less than a year it will reach the speed of light, if that were possible. So if it WAS possible, getting there would take less than 24 years (a year of deceleration is needed). For the people going, that is.
  
  The trick would be to find a fuel/engine that can provide 1G for at least 2 years, 4 if they want to come back. Which, they wouldn't because about 340 years would have gone by at .9C.
  
  Or, maybe they would want to come back, say, if this newly discovered planet is filled with jerks.
  
  --
  Flappinbooger isn't my real name
63. Re:22 light years by Anonym1ty · 2012-02-03 05:51 · Score: 1
  
  I read somewhere (I wish I could find it now) That if you were to accelerate at a constant 1G - The time dilation would allow you to visit the known visible universe within a human lifespan.(Well for the traveler anyway) - I really wish I could remember where this came from, I would really like to know if it was true or just something out of someone's ass.
  
  --
  See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
64. Re:22 light years by snadrus · 2012-02-03 05:57 · Score: 1
  
  I always thought of artificial as referring to the fact that it was not able to replicate or repair its physique. That means it was stood up, exists at only the maintaining whim of another.
  
  --
  Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
65. Re:22 light years by Surt · 2012-02-03 06:34 · Score: 1
  
  I'm much more pessimistic about most of this than you.
  First, on biology, the biological researchers I know think that significant life extension is 50+ years away, too late for me (maybe you are younger). Immortality is even further out. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, obviously.
  On AI/MI ... at least there I'm pretty familiar with the state of the art, and it isn't close to human thought. I would personally bet on a machine whose thoughts are comparable to a human's being at least 50 years off, barring a surprise discovery. It seems likely to me that the compute density needed for meaningful MI is probably still 80 years off. Again, I'd be happy to be proven wrong, I'd love to see it in my lifetime.
  
  --
  "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
66. Re:22 light years by Surt · 2012-02-03 06:36 · Score: 1
  
  I feel pretty confident FTL does not exist. Otherwise alien visitors would be too likely to not have happened.
  
  --
  "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
67. Re:22 light years by DaleSwanson · 2012-02-03 06:57 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  I read somewhere (I wish I could find it now) That if you were to accelerate at a constant 1G - The time dilation would allow you to visit the known visible universe within a human lifespan.(Well for the traveler anyway) - I really wish I could remember where this came from, I would really like to know if it was true or just something out of someone's ass.
  Accelerating at 1g allows you to get just about anywhere in about 10-25 years (in your time frame).
  100,000 LY (diameter of Milky Way) 11.8 years
  2.6 million LY (nearest galaxy) 15.0 years
  46.6 billion LY (radius of observable universe) 24.5 years.
  
  Some important notes: First this would get you to these places travelling at near the speed of light. If you'd like to arrive stopped you'll have to roughly double the travel time, as half would be spent decelerating. Second, you could accelerate as long as you had a source of energy (and a functioning ship).
  
  As for the claim you could visit the observable universe in a human lifespan, you couldn't reach all the points of it. But you certainly could reach the edge.
  
  http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/rocket.html
68. Re:22 light years by optymizer · 2012-02-03 06:59 · Score: 1
  
  I dont' get this relativistic ideas everyone seems to understand, except me. 22 light years means it takes _light_ 22 years to get there. Therefore, if you are on a ship travelling at the speed of light and counted 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi, you should reach that planet when you get to 277522560 Mississippi (18 years +4 leap years in seconds). Same for coming back to Earth. Does that sound like "much less" that 44 years to you?
69. Re:22 light years by countertrolling · 2012-02-03 07:09 · Score: 1
  
  We just haven't been found yet... There's lots of planets out there.
  
  --
  For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
70. Re:22 light years by RicktheBrick · 2012-02-03 08:23 · Score: 1
  
  If the radius is 2.1 times that of Earth than its volume is 9.261 times that of Earth. Now if its mass is only 4.5 times that of Earth than its density must therefore be a half of Earth. At that density, I do not think walking on it would be an enjoyable experience.
71. Re:22 light years by Old+Wolf · 2012-02-03 08:44 · Score: 1
  
  Einstein clearly didn't know about Mississippis
72. Re:22 light years by Jarik+C-Bol · 2012-02-03 09:55 · Score: 1
  
  you should read a book called Roacheworld. they use a blueshifted laser to push a solar sail to another planet (and then the ship reconfigures, and uses the same laser to slow down, by reflecting the beam back onto the sail from the other side). it all sounds good, but the radiation issues people have talked about still persist.
  
  --
  I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
73. Re:22 light years by tmarsh86 · 2012-02-03 09:55 · Score: 1
  
  How does hydrogen sustain a human population? Man does not live by H alone.
74. Re:22 light years by Jarik+C-Bol · 2012-02-03 09:57 · Score: 1
  
  i know you're trollin' but i gotta answer. the Kessel run is not a timed event. its a route through a miserable black hole filled patch of space. if you navigate right, the distance is shorter, due to space being warped by the black holes. /starwars nerd.
  
  --
  I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
75. Re:22 light years by Surt · 2012-02-03 10:24 · Score: 1
  
  But he fuses it for power, helium, and likely heavier atoms if he needs them (given he can build an interstellar spaceship, fusion of hydrogen down to heavier atoms should be old hat).
  Alternatively, he just uses it for power, and uses that power for his very advanced / low-waste recycling system, allowing him to carry relatively tiny surpluses of raw materials for a 500 year trip.
  
  --
  "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
76. Re:22 light years by Tracy+Reed · 2012-02-03 10:28 · Score: 1
  
  Unreachable by you, perhaps. Still reachable by plenty. It only needs to be reachable by 1 to take pics of the little green men in the living room and send them back.
77. Re:22 light years by Roger_Wilco · 2012-02-03 11:01 · Score: 1
  
  The calculations are done at least in Sagan's "Cosmos" series. I don't recall which episode; just watch the whole thing again. :D
78. Re:22 light years by spauldo · 2012-02-03 11:03 · Score: 1
  
  The closest they get is about as close as the Sun is to Saturn. That's about eleven times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
  To observers on a planet orbiting in the habitable zone of one of those stars, the other star would certainly be the brightest star in the night sky. It might even show a disk. It wouldn't heat the planet appreciably. Neither star is that much different than our Sun (A is a bit larger, B a bit smaller) so the habitable zones wouldn't be that different than the ones for our Sun.
  As far as orbits go, Wikipedia says a study showed the possibility of stable orbits near or in the habitable zones of both stars.
  
  --
  Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
79. Re:22 light years by DanielRavenNest · 2012-02-03 11:27 · Score: 1
  
  Traveling by vehicle is so 21st century. This is how it will likely get done:
  Send a robotic probe to the destination star, at whatever speed you can manage.
  Have it build a receiving station out of local materials
  Scan human at atomic resolution, send atom by atom description by laser.
  Receiving station assembles human at far end. Apparent travel time to human = 0.
  Bonus points if you have machine intelligence or humans have been uploaded to sentient software, then you can skip the scanning/rebuilding of flesh.
  The reason it will get done this way is it takes a million times less energy to send a description (even an atom by atom one), than to send those same atoms at relativistic velocity. That is a heck of an incentive to work out the technical problems. I fully realize we don't know how scan humans non-destructively, but we also don't know how to build relativistic starships. So given a choice, work on the one that is easier to do.
  If technology is progressing, you expect to build faster ships over time. So up to the point the rate of progress = 1/trip time in years, it makes sense to wait, because a later, faster ship will arrive sooner.
80. Re:22 light years by yurtinus · 2012-02-03 11:28 · Score: 1
  
  But remember - it's not the gravity but the surface pressure that'll kill ya!
  
  --
  +1 Disagree
81. Re:22 light years by mangusman · 2012-02-03 14:34 · Score: 1
  
  I'm neither a scientist or engineer, but I find these dicussions fascinating (and somewhat technically intimidating), however, if there are other forms of life traversing the universe, exactly, HOW are they getting around?
82. Re:22 light years by symbolset · 2012-02-03 18:26 · Score: 1
  
  You don't have to stop and start. As you journey out the Oort cloud is a sidewind along the general rotation of the solar system. You're going to be coated with ices of various flavors as comets are and they're going to alter your course. You may as well make use of them, convert them to ions for thrust. The problem is that you have to take plenty of energy with you to convert the ices to thrust, and drinking water. When you transition to the new solar system border you don't know what rotational direction its solar system is moving in, so it's 50:50 whether your course bounces off unless you come in end-on rather than side-on, and that has problems too because your first gravitic correction from interstellar has to land you somewhere close to the new solar system plane at a delta-V that can be dealt with on what you've got left after a long journey. That requires a massy so you need incredible timing and foresight.
  On further thought this particular star lies almost 90 degrees off the solar system plane so the Oort cloud may not go out so far in this direction and the direction of the environment mass becomes rare and more random - and less likely to provide thrust mass. One would naturally consider the solar system a thin disc, or at least a very squashed spheroid for this purpose. A farther star closer to the plane may be a better first choice for exploration if one can be had that shares our general plane in at least one dimension. The first few probes to escape the Oort cloud should be able to tell us how much windage to allow for in that direction, and teach us some about the nature of our solar system. The research is under way, but it's not happening fast enough to suit me.
  To know the variables we should send probes in all directions. Now. The easiest way to do this would be by establishing a colony on 1 Ceres with railguns that pass through the planetoid to launch the probes. There's more than enough minerals and water there to to this.
  We still need an energy solution that makes this possible. I hope to see it in my lifetime. That is optimistic, but I am allowed to hope still.
  
  --
  Help stamp out iliturcy.
83. Re:22 light years by Filip22012005 · 2012-02-04 08:03 · Score: 1
  
  You are going to stop at that planet, right?
  
  --
  When the policeman of the tie, rule you violate, hello punishment of the kitty?
84. Re:22 light years by cp.tar · 2012-02-04 10:48 · Score: 1
  
  Erm... no. It would be up on departure, but halfway through the journey we’d have to reverse the engine and thus switch the direction of gravity. Therefore, the destination planet would be down.
  
  --
  Ignore this signature. By order.
85. Re:22 light years by rubycodez · 2012-02-04 13:55 · Score: 1
  
  as a craft approaches the speed of light, time passes more slowly inside that ship from the point of view of people on earth. If you were in a craft going 90% the speed of light, every minute for your wristwatch would be two minutes for a clock on earth. That's called having an "inverse tau" of two. The ratio can go even higher the closer the space craft approaches to light speed, for example at 99% light speed it's 10:1
86. Re:22 light years by MattSausage · 2012-02-05 01:42 · Score: 1
  
  Fair enough everyone. I don't see why we don't just come up with inertialess drives, and instantly accelerate to the speed of light like they do in Star Trek/Wars. That would be pretty cool.
87. Re:22 light years by databaseadmin · 2012-02-05 01:52 · Score: 1
  
  most near-light designs have the ship being powered from earth btw. I.e. the earth hits the ship with a laser and a mirror on the ship gets momentum from the laser. The issue isn't fuel, its focus and range.
  If you could make singularities, then a 'romulan' type drive would be possible and you could use interstellar gas as fuel.
88. Re:22 light years by sushithmn · 2012-02-06 22:27 · Score: 1
  
  As we move along, m(fuel) becomes lesser since we'll be burning fuel on the way, and less m(fuel) means less overall mass, less overall mass means less fuel consumption to keep up the acceleration needed.
The universe mocks us by istartedi · 2012-02-02 17:39 · Score: 5, Funny

The universe mocks us.
Here's silver candy,
It doesn't make you fat.
It'll get you girls and all of that.
It only sells for a modest fee.
A quintillion dollars
Or exceeding C.

--
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
1. Re:The universe mocks us by hantms · 2012-02-02 18:37 · Score: 2
  
  Hello, it's 22 light years. It may take up to 22 years to get there, but you don't need to exceed c.
  The biggest problem I see is that you fly away from Earth going close to c, you will never communicate with anyone back home.
  Or to put that in another way: you will never get any new TV shows. You'd launch mid-season of American Idol and 20 years later you still won't know who won it.
  Screw that.
2. Re:The universe mocks us by istartedi · 2012-02-02 19:02 · Score: 2
  
  You're quite right that you don't need to exceed C. I decided to take the lazy way out to analyze this problem. Please note, that site has a crappy interface. There are probably better relativistic trip calculators out there.
  What's interesting is that you can subject both the earth and the ship to a fairly long wait time (we're both in it together) or you can give the ship a reasonably short wait time if you can get to 0.99c. The aforementioned lack of sync with Earth is still a problem of course. Single digit years on the ship, multi-decades go by on Earth. I don't know if that calculator takes into account the fact that you have to accelerate to some fraction of C and then decelerate to orbit. Having the deceleration fail would be a world of suck too, not to mention the kinetic energy of a dust particle at relativistic velocities.
  Anyway, it was a bit of doggeral I banged out on a whim. If you can come up with some good rhyme and meter that's also good physics, have at it.
  
  --
  For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
3. Re:The universe mocks us by MrZilla · 2012-02-02 19:24 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  May take up to 22 years?
  It will guaranteed never take less than 22 years. Never mind that even getting close to c is a wild dream at this time.
  But if you did manage to get close to the speed of light, the trip would take ~22 years from an earth point of view, but for the people on the ship/whatever, the trip will be quite short. If you actually hit c (never mind that it is physically impossible), the trip would be instantaneous from the point of view of the travelers.
  A more realistic scenario, if we pour a lot of money into propulsion research, might be to fly away at 10% c. That would lead to a trip take takes 220 years in earth-time, or 198 years in ship-time. Not exactly an easy trip to plan.
  
  --
  mov ax, 4c00h
  int 21h
4. Re:The universe mocks us by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-02 20:04 · Score: 1
  
  It will guaranteed never take less than 22 years.
  Why? We already know that space can be bent and distorted, so who says our method of travel will be brute force velocity?
5. Re:The universe mocks us by PwnzerDragoon · 2012-02-02 20:06 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  You'd launch mid-season of American Idol and 20 years later you still won't know who won it.
  I already do that. Am I an astronaut?
6. Re:The universe mocks us by L4t3r4lu5 · 2012-02-02 20:29 · Score: 1
  
  For all intents and purposes.
  
  Just thought you should know.
  
  --
  Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
7. Re:The universe mocks us by sneakyimp · 2012-02-02 20:31 · Score: 2
  
  The poetry is great! Your physics sucks. You neglect to address the amount of energy/mass it would take to accelerate someone to 0.99c. Hint: it's a fuckload.
8. Re:The universe mocks us by sneakyimp · 2012-02-02 20:32 · Score: 1
  
  Thank you, MrZilla. Mod parent up.
9. Re:The universe mocks us by istartedi · 2012-02-02 20:59 · Score: 1
  
  Awright, if achieving a fraction of c large enough to make the trip non-generational for the astronauts isn't practical then maybe the poem is spot-on after all. Break the light barrier, or forget about it.
  
  --
  For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
10. Re:The universe mocks us by MLease · 2012-02-02 23:35 · Score: 1
  
  Why does that signature keep getting replies like this (you are not the first I've seen say exactly the same thing about it)? Isn't it obvious it's making a grammatical joke/troll?
  
  --
  I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
11. Re:The universe mocks us by rve · 2012-02-03 00:40 · Score: 1
  
  Don't underestimate the might of exponential growth. Accelerating at 1G for two years (ship time) gets you to over 95% of light speed. Five years (ship time) of constant acceleration at 1G gets you to over 99.99% of light speed. The real challenge is that it's a fire and forget mission: children born on earth at the time of the launch will have died of old age before the message that they arrived safely arrives back on earth.
12. Re:The universe mocks us by Tsingi · 2012-02-03 00:58 · Score: 2
  
  Hello, it's 22 light years. It may take up to 22 years to get there, but you don't need to exceed c.
  You'll need to exceed it, or change the "up to" to "more than"
  
  The biggest problem I see is that you fly away from Earth going close to c, you will never communicate with anyone back home.
  Or to put that in another way: you will never get any new TV shows. You'd launch mid-season of American Idol and 20 years later you still won't know who won it.
  Screw that.
  I've never watched American Idol for more than a minute. I'll go, you stay here and stay current with what's important.
13. Re:The universe mocks us by necro81 · 2012-02-03 01:32 · Score: 1
  
  We already know that space can be bent and distorted, so who says our method of travel will be brute force velocity
  Star Trek aside, we have no way to influence the curvature of spacetime, and hence have no way of taking advantage of it for propulsion. More exotic possibilities like wormholes are theoretical oddballs that aren't (even on paper) suitable for transportation. Perhaps some new theory will point the way, but I wouldn't bank on it. I think that if we ever plan to get off this rock, we're going to need to accept that "brute force" is the most likely way.
  
  And, hey, if there is a faster way, the next ship can just pick up all the people still en route on the brute force ship. Where's the downside?
14. Re:The universe mocks us by L4t3r4lu5 · 2012-02-03 01:46 · Score: 1
  
  Subtle joke is subtle.
  
  --
  Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
15. Re:The universe mocks us by Tim+C · 2012-02-03 01:54 · Score: 1
  
  Also, g, not G (which is the gravitational constant, not the acceleration due to gravity at the Earth's surface).
  
  --
  It's official. Most of you are morons.
16. Re:The universe mocks us by GameboyRMH · 2012-02-03 02:24 · Score: 1
  
  LOL submitted to bash.org!
  http://bash.org/?949572
  
  --
  "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
17. Re:The universe mocks us by elrous0 · 2012-02-03 02:54 · Score: 1
  
  A more realistic scenario, if we pour a lot of money into propulsion research, might be to fly away at 10% c. That would lead to a trip take takes 220 years in earth-time, or 198 years in ship-time. Not exactly an easy trip to plan.
  Not only that, but you would also have to factor in acceleration and deceleration times too. You're probably not going to jump to 10% of c instantly, or stop on a dime.
  
  --
  SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
18. Re:The universe mocks us by canajin56 · 2012-02-03 03:41 · Score: 1
  
  If it takes two years to reach 95% light speed, 2 more to slow down, 23 at that speed to cover 22 ly, that's under 27 years (because I ignored the distance covered during those 4 years), 22 for the signal to go back, 49 years before earth gets the first messages from the other solar system. I sure hope it's not typical to die of old age before you hit 50...at any rate, the "real challenge" is that "just accelerate at 2g for 4 years" is "where the fuck is the next petrol station???". Like it's just that easy. The space shuttle's rockets use 1340 L of fuel per second. You'd need around 170,000,000 m^3 fuel tanks to keep those running for 4 years. Any idea how much 170 million cubic meters of rocket fuel weights? I bet it's a shitload, so the acceleration of that rocket is going to essentially be 0. So you'll need a lot of rockets. Now you'll need trillions of liters of fuel, and you still will have 0 acceleration. So that's why people talk about that speed being thousands of times more than what's possible with current rocket engines, because it's true. Things will change as we invent more fuel-mass efficient engines. Until then you may as well be suggesting we just use the TARDIS.
  
  --
  ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
19. Re:The universe mocks us by istartedi · 2012-02-03 03:43 · Score: 1
  
  Thanks. I've seen that site pop up in Google results before. I always thought it was just a dump of the fortune file that comes with bash. It looks like it's dedicated to quotes and not the bash shell, which is kind of odd since it seems like that would be a useful domain. Then again, maybe not enough people care about bash anymore. Not much of a shell hacker myself...
  
  --
  For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
20. Re:The universe mocks us by countertrolling · 2012-02-03 04:38 · Score: 1
  
  That would lead to a trip take takes 220 years in earth-time, or 198 years in ship-time.
  Let's just hope Virgin Atlantic is offering more than a bag of peanuts on that flight.
  
  --
  For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
21. Re:The universe mocks us by tmarsh86 · 2012-02-03 09:57 · Score: 1
  
  Just because we know something doesn't mean we can do it or take advantage of it. I know what it takes to dunk a basketball on a 10' goal, but I sure as hell can't actually do it, no matter how badly I want it or how hard I work at it.
22. Re:The universe mocks us by rve · 2012-02-03 18:00 · Score: 1
  
  You're right, I phrased that poorly. What I mean to say is: the propulsion is a problem that will not be solved (even if a solution exists), because investments are just not made in projects on the time scale of more than a human life time. Even if there were profit in it, noone paying for it will ever even know whether it worked.
What if we go there? by G3ckoG33k · 2012-02-02 17:40 · Score: 1

What if we go there? 4.5 G?
It woukld take some excersise and quite a few generation in low gravity space before we reach that high gravity Earth2...
Just one of many practical issues.
(No, I don't think we'll ever reach it; 22 light years)
1. Re:What if we go there? by vencs · 2012-02-02 18:04 · Score: 1
  
  (No, I don't think we'll ever reach it; 22 light years)
  AstroNewts will take up this mission
2. Re:What if we go there? by c0lo · 2012-02-02 18:08 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  What if we go there? 4.5 G?
  Probably less. TFA quote:
  
  The discovery of a planet around GJ 667C came as a surprise to the astronomers, because the entire star system has a different chemical makeup than our sun. The system has much lower abundances of heavy elements (elements heavier than hydrogen and helium), such as iron, carbon and silicon.
  Good news: the density/mass of the planet may be less, thus a lower gravitation.
  The bad news: the lack of carbon (which, BTW, is not that heavy) would make the planet unable to sustain life as we know it.
  Other than that, with around 20-something days/year of leave entitlement, living there should be nice, because:
  
  It takes roughly 28 days to make one orbital lap around its parent star
  
  "The planet is around one star in a triple-star system," Vogt explained. "The other stars are pretty far away, but they would look pretty nice in the sky."
  
  --
  Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
3. Re:What if we go there? by camperdave · 2012-02-02 18:15 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  (No, I don't think we'll ever reach it; 22 light years)
  We already HAVE reached it... in a sense. We've been broadcasting radio and television signals for all of recorded history (electronically recorded history, that is). Maybe they are mourning the death of The Skipper from Gilligan's Island (Alan Hale Jr.) who passed away 22 years ago. Maybe they're stunned by the loss of the shuttle Challenger, or dismayed by Chernobyl, or the Exxon Valdez. Maybe they're rocking out to Madonna and Michael "Mr Glove" Jackson. Perhaps they have had a Star Wars marathon, and are hoping beyond hope that George Lucas will make those long anticipated prequel movies. Too bad there's no way we can warn them.
  
  --
  When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
4. Re:What if we go there? by c0lo · 2012-02-02 18:22 · Score: 1
  
  surface gravity based on the same density as Earth ...
  Goshh... I just quoted TFA saying that the abundance of heavy elements is much lower, therefore one could expect a lower density.
  
  --
  Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
5. Re:What if we go there? by osu-neko · 2012-02-02 19:05 · Score: 1
  
  Um, if a planet is 4.5x more massive than Earth, in order to have a surface gravity of 4.5G, it would need to be super-dense.
  
  --
  "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
6. Re:What if we go there? by sgunhouse · 2012-02-02 19:10 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Assuming average density the same as Earth, take a cure root of 4.5 to determine the approximate radius (compared to Earth). Then gravity is M/r^2 which (since we assumed M = r^3) simplifies to r.
  Digging out the calculator, 1.651G.
  (Jupiter is substantially less dense than Earth, that's why it doesn't work for Jupiter.)
7. Re:What if we go there? by chromas · 2012-02-02 19:34 · Score: 1
  
  RTFQ? Does not compute!
8. Re:What if we go there? by Surt · 2012-02-02 19:39 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Because they aren't stupid enough to broadcast their position to the more dangerous gangs in the galaxy.
  
  --
  "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
9. Re:What if we go there? by mr_gorkajuice · 2012-02-02 21:36 · Score: 1
  
  So, TFS should read something like:
  
  "Located 22 light years from us, the best known candidate for supporting life is 4.5 times the mass of Earth, although that's probably wrong, and the chemical composition of the system does not support life as we know it."
  
  That about right?
10. Re:What if we go there? by ArwynH · 2012-02-02 22:34 · Score: 2
  
  You paint a dark picture my friend,
  For if what you say is true, the first thing we will do once we make first contact is to sue thier planet from under thier feet!
  How dare those pirating alien scum view our IP without a license!
11. Re:What if we go there? by WrongSizeGlass · 2012-02-03 00:19 · Score: 1
  
  Other than that, with around 20-something days/year of leave entitlement, living there should be nice, because:
  I'm sorry to be the one who has to tell you this, but the entire duration of the trip will be counted against your current and future vacation time. Plus, you'll have to pay for your own travel expenses. Welcome to the new world order.
12. Re:What if we go there? by WrongSizeGlass · 2012-02-03 00:22 · Score: 1
  
  Assuming average density the same as Earth ...
  The planet's solar system has much lower abundances of heavy elements and therefore will probably not have the same density as Earth.
13. Re:What if we go there? by WrongSizeGlass · 2012-02-03 00:23 · Score: 2
  
  If they could receive our signals, why aren't we receiving theirs?
  Because by now they've received broadcasts of the original Star Trek series and don't want William Shatner to find them.
14. Re:What if we go there? by FriendlyPrimate · 2012-02-03 02:53 · Score: 1
  
  So a planet with about the same surface gravity as Earth, and no iron core. Sounds like a good chance this planet has no magnetic field, and therefore no atmosphere either.
15. Re:What if we go there? by elrous0 · 2012-02-03 02:57 · Score: 1
  
  Oh man, they're going to be so pissed off when Cheers is cancelled next year.
  
  --
  SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
16. Re:What if we go there? by SecurityGuy · 2012-02-03 03:01 · Score: 1
  
  Oh, well that's the cool thing about relativistic weaponry. You don't see them until they hit you.
17. Re:What if we go there? by LtGordon · 2012-02-03 03:34 · Score: 1
  
  How dare those pirating alien scum view our IP without a license!
  I've got it! Instead of trying to get Congress to fund "space exploration", we get them to fund "IP infringement notice deliveries to extrasolar nations".
18. Re:What if we go there? by canajin56 · 2012-02-03 03:51 · Score: 1
  
  Increasing the mass of a planet increases its radius (if you keep the density the same), so assuming (probably incorrectly) equal density with Earth, you would have a planet 1.6 times the radius of Earth. So 4.5 times the force at an equal distance, but at 1.6 times the distance, so 1/2.56 the force (inverse square law) due to distance, 4.5 due to mass. 4.5/2.56 = 1.75 g. But it may have lower density.
  
  --
  ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
19. Re:What if we go there? by canajin56 · 2012-02-03 04:08 · Score: 1
  
  Our solar system has low levels of iron, carbon, and silicon too, but we still ended up with a big proportion of it. Basically, your rocks no matter what are going to be iron, nickel, and then oxides of silicon, aluminum, etc. I believe Earth is somewhere around 40% iron-nickel core, 60% silica and alumina rocks of various sorts, water and atmosphere not even worth a mention. They are surprised to find planets because they figured that there probably wouldn't be enough rock and dust to accrete planets. No matter how low the abundance, the rocky planets won't be mostly water because at that distance, water would not be dust and would not clump together with the rock and metal dusts. This suggests that either the starting protoplanetary halo around the star was much larger than the estimate of our own (so there would be enough rock and metal to form large rocky planets) or that this planet formed farther out, past the "frost line" where water would be ice dust, and so the planet would be almost entirely water. Then it would have migrated closer, possibly another planet nudged it like Jupiter did to so much stuff here at home. In that case, if it has an atmosphere it would quite possible be a giant ball of liquid water. Or ice, if there is enough pressure to keep ice solid at that temperature. But they have no idea! And it will take a long time to get an idea! A third, less likely, possibility is that the elemental abundance in the protoplanetary halo was different that what is observed in the star's spectral absorption lines. That could be because the star flew close to a lot of dust after forming, and most of it ended up in orbit rather than being sucked into the star itself.
  At any rate, this is not the first very low metal (to an astronomer, anything that's not hydrogen or helium is a metal) star that has been found to have planets, so the old rule of "low metal, no planets possible" may be entirely incorrect, rather than having a few exceptional cases. But certainly if the models are quite wrong, their predictions about what such impossible planets are made of aren't very reliable ;)
  
  --
  ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
20. Re:What if we go there? by Quirkz · 2012-02-03 06:38 · Score: 1
  
  Nah, they're on the Kirstie Allie seasons by now; they're probably sick of it and ready for it to end.
  
  --
  The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
If we can find them... by Brad1138 · 2012-02-02 17:40 · Score: 2

in just the last few years (or so it seams) we can now identify "earth like" planets. A more advance race could probably do it much better. All the sudden the thought of ET's finding us isn't so far fetched.

--
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
1. Re:If we can find them... by tiffany352 · 2012-02-02 17:56 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  We have a 75 light year radius sphere of expanding radio signals. If anyone is out there listening, we are the kid knocking over bookshelves in the library of the universe.
2. Re:If we can find them... by TheInternetGuy · 2012-02-02 17:57 · Score: 1
  
  Especially since space is curved in a way scientist could never have imagined, and actually forms a giant lens around the solar system which means all those planets are really just a stones throw away.
  Or I'll do even better. Even if light speed is constant what if distance or time isn't? Or perhaps all the time wasted on earth somehow is transferred cross space to the aliens so they can use it as a Time Credit(Think Carbon credits but for time)
  And even if it did take them 22milion years to come here, wouldn't it be worth it just to stick a probe up someones ass?
  Thanks I feel a lot better now.
  
  --
  If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
3. Re:If we can find them... by afabbro · 2012-02-02 17:58 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  ETs "finding" us has never been far-fetched. Assume we're not the first sentient species to evolve, most species evolve technologically in a similar way, we're not by some bad luck in an incredibly underpopulated galaxy, etc. These are all reasonable assumptions.
  However, it's the contacting us and/or visiting us that is a lot harder to fetch.
  I'm certainly not an expert, but my understanding is that to listen to our own spacecraft at the edge of our solar system (Voyager) requires a giant dish here. Granted, Voyager is a pretty weak transmitter, but it's also a very close one and one we built and understand. A giant transmitter 22LY away...could the signal reach us? Further away? I don't know. So likewise, what about our signals (which are pretty weak at this point, even when we try) to them? My understanding is that it's more about the signal decay over vast distances than about sophistication in listening equipment. Identifying Earth as a high-likelihood life-sustaining planet by some ETs - sure. Listening in on us or contacting us...much tougher.
  ETs visiting us requires a jump from physics we speculate about to science fiction. At this point, faster than light travel may, for all we know, be forever impossible.
  
  --
  Advice: on VPS providers
4. Re:If we can find them... by Belial6 · 2012-02-02 18:26 · Score: 1
  
  Given the number of people I saw put firecrackers in frogs, tape on cat's feet, and other shenanigans when I was a kid, the idea that an alien might want to prob an animal is not that far fetched.
5. Re:If we can find them... by hantms · 2012-02-02 18:26 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  At 22 lightyears, you don't NEED to go faster than light to reach it. Just somewhere close-ish to light-speed will do. So turning physicis on its head is not a requirement. What you do need is a really big jump in technology. ;) But that's still a lot more feesible than changing reality as Einstein penned it up.
  Before setting off however you would want to make real sure that it's worth it, and the place actually inhabitable. The 4.5 x gravity will likely be the least of your concerns. And it'll take some dedication; you will be spending your life (and your kid's life) in space.
  Then you land, you find something that looks half-way intelligent, say 'Take me to your leader" and hope it doesn't eat you on the spot.
  So all things considered, I can see why aliens don't bother coming here.
6. Re:If we can find them... by pjr.cc · 2012-02-02 18:49 · Score: 2
  
  ...All the sudden the thought of ET's finding us isn't so far fetched.
  I personally wouldn't jump to that conclusion. Considering the sheer volume of stars just in our galaxy even 10000 exoplanets would be an astronomically small figure besides those we're yet to discover.
  But just discovering an exoplanet doesn't simply mean "finding life". Who knows one of the planets we've already seen might have some form of life on it. ET's (assuming they're anything like us) may "find" our planet but have no idea whats on it.
  All of that also assumes that ET's are behaving something like us. What I mean is that we're trying to find a planet capable of harbouring life based on what we know of life (i.e. our eco system) and hence we're throwing out planets that dont fall into what we believe is a "habbitable location" for life. Without any evidence to the contrary, ET's would probably do something similar. The problem with that is that if life involved in completely different ways (completely alien to us) in locations we wouldn't suspect capable of being fertile are they going to miss us like we're likely to miss them? Are they even interested in finding life on other planets throughout the universe?
  Then again, lets say ET's in some solar system were plausibly capable of developing in some way that meant planets like mercury or pluto were "habbitable" for them (unlikely by our reckoning) chances are they'd be so different that once they started looking for life on other planets they'd look for completely different things. for eg, we might look for a planet that gives off a spectrum suggesting it has water or co2/o2/n2 composition in its atmosphere where they might look for something completely different.
  But assuming they are similar to us and do look for something similar (and chance upon our planet), how are they going to know we're here? The huge amount of radio EM radiation we give off? Well, we've only been doing that for less then 100 years - consider how far that actually reaches (moving at the speed of light) within our own milky way (around 100,000 light years across) - 100 years doesnt go very far really. According to this little calc (http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980123d.html) that would cover around 15000 stars. 15000 of around 200,000,000,000 stars... Doesn't really cover much.
  Im not saying its far fetched as such cause you'll never know what an ET is capable of until you meet one and they explain it to you - but, if they're like us (aside from praying they dont have big guns and are looking for oil) finding "us" has reasonably low odd's.
7. Re:If we can find them... by LordLucless · 2012-02-02 19:09 · Score: 1
  
  we can now identify "earth like" planets
  For sufficiently small values of "like"
  
  --
  Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
8. Re:If we can find them... by Surt · 2012-02-02 19:19 · Score: 2
  
  It better hope it doesn't eat you on the spot. The odds of our biologies not being cross-poisonous are low.
  
  --
  "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
9. Re:If we can find them... by Surt · 2012-02-02 19:24 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  The good news is that if they are looking for oil, we've almost used all of it up, so conquering our planet won't do them much good. :-)
  
  --
  "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
10. Re:If we can find them... by segwonk · 2012-02-02 20:20 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Serious question though: What size antenna would some(thing) need to hear our radio signals at a distance of 22ly?
  
  I seem to recall from reading somewhere (Physics of Star Trek?) about this. The gist is that this is a non-trivial problem, requiring an antenna unfathomably wide to catch such a weak signal.
  
  Maybe there's an occasional super neat hack, like galaxy/gravitational lensing. But there's no aiming that.
  
  Anyway, maybe we'll catch someone knowledgable about this... Chime in!
  
  --
  - ------ Go 'til ya know.
11. Re:If we can find them... by Kjella · 2012-02-02 21:19 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  According to this:
  
  Project Phoenix, under the direction of Dr. Jill Tarter, who had worked on MOP when she was at NASA, was a continuation of the Targeted Search program, studying 710 Sunlike stars within 150 light-years of the Earth. Phoenix used the 64-meter Parkes radio telescope in Australia, the 43-meter telescope at Green Banks, and the Arecibo dish, searching 70 million channels across a bandwidth of 1,800 MHz. The search was said to be capable of picking up any transmitter about as powerful as an airport radar within 200 light-years. Phoenix was completed in March 2004, with negative results.
  It gets better if you assume we have a dedicated facility on both ends, two Arecibo radio telescopes (305m each) should be able to communicate halfway to the center of the galaxy. But if you're taking about a low-power radio broadcast, then that would take a huge, huge antenna. Then again, they've done some crazy things with arrays of antennas, so who knows. Certainly we're not so silent that we can't get noticed.
  
  --
  Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
12. Re:If we can find them... by hackertourist · 2012-02-02 22:25 · Score: 2
  
  If I'm not mistaken, airport radars are just about the most powerful transmissions we create, so they'd be the easiest to detect.
  And setting up an antenna is the easy part. How are you going to decode the transmissions by an alien civilization?
13. Re:If we can find them... by Dunbal · 2012-02-02 23:14 · Score: 1
  
  Well, the seeing the evidence on this planet - of millions if not billions of species there is only one capable manipulating radio waves.
  
  I would say that your argument based on equating the ability to manipulate radio waves with intelligence is pretty weak. I'm still waiting for signs of intelligent life here on Earth.
  
  --
  Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
14. Re:If we can find them... by Dunbal · 2012-02-02 23:15 · Score: 1
  
  "You Earthlings have burned the Sacred Oil Goddess we buried on your planet millions of years ago! Now you must die!"
  
  --
  Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
15. Re:If we can find them... by Kjella · 2012-02-02 23:51 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  And setting up an antenna is the easy part. How are you going to decode the transmissions by an alien civilization?
  2x beep
  3x beep
  5x beep
  7x beep
  11x beep
  13x beep
  17x beep
  19x beep
  *pause*
  5x beep
  *pause*
  7x beep
  *pause*
  35x beep/no beep
  *pause* ...and start over.
  This should be a fairly straight forward way of encoding a pictogram, though it's unclear if they'll interpret 5 and 7 as the horizontal and vertical or opposite. Replace 5, 7 and 5*7 with arbitrary large primes to make detailed pictures. From there you can start sending maps of the galaxy, periodic table with illustration of the elements, everything we'd have in common. Show math with illustrations like you'd do to a preschooler, here's 2+3 = 5 with boxes of 2, 3 and 5 items. Once they understand our number system, show them distances they too probably know like size of galaxy, size of hydrogen atom etc.
  Text and language, yes you'd get to that eventually. Send them them the alphabet then start over again, naming everything like the milky way, the sun, earth, all the elements and so on. For that matter, just teach them like you would a young child, the is s table and chair and book and flower and bird and whatnot. Illustration and text. Somehow I don't see this as a problem, put a US and Japanese kid in the same room and they'll find a way to communicate even though they got no words in common. Hell, we teach sign language to monkeys. How hard can it be to get a conversation going?
  
  --
  Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
16. Re:If we can find them... by WrongSizeGlass · 2012-02-03 00:36 · Score: 2
  
  Keep in mind that we're assuming any "ET's" out there are on par with our technology. What if they're just like us, except around 100 years behind us technologically. They won't be listening to the skies. They'll be watching a silent movie about A Trip to the Moon.
  
  Just like everything else in life timing is everything.
17. Re:If we can find them... by houghi · 2012-02-03 00:56 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  To quote Carl Sagan
  
  I am fully aware of the whole quote:
  I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.
  The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.
  Also: it is a quote and as such a reflection how _I_ feel, not what Sagan thought of the matter. Just wanted to clearify that before people start ranting
  
  --
  Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
18. Re:If we can find them... by Hentes · 2012-02-03 02:01 · Score: 1
  
  If there really is so many of them than ET would be looking for a needle in a haystack.
19. Re:If we can find them... by Muad'Dave · 2012-02-03 02:11 · Score: 1
  
  Civilian airport radars aren't really that powerful, although they have fairly high ERP due to their high gain, narrow beamwidth antennas. Weather radars are more powerful.
  If you want high power and wide beamwidth, look to the Air Force Space Surveillance Radar, OTH-B radars, or some of these beasts.
  Narrow beamwidth signals from Arecibo are mind-numbingly powerful as far as ERP goes.
  
  The telescope has three radar transmitters, with effective isotropic radiated powers of 20 TW at 2380 MHz, 2.5 TW (pulse peak) at 430 MHz, and 300 MW at 47 MHz.
  That's 20 Terawatts ERP - holy Christmas! I once calculated the RF exposure exclusion zone for that radar - it extends beyond low Earth orbit.
  
  --
  Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
20. Re:If we can find them... by Jason+Levine · 2012-02-03 02:32 · Score: 1
  
  And setting up an antenna is the easy part. How are you going to decode the transmissions by an alien civilization?
  That was always the part that I thought would be the biggest hurdle to detecting whether a signal came from intelligent alien life. Even assuming that we had our antennas pointed in the right direction at the right time, the alien signals would be in a completely alien language, encoded using a completely alien algorithm, and possibly even compressed using an alien compression routine. If I were to present you with twenty files, nineteen of which were gibberish and one of which was real, would you be able to tell the real signal even if I didn't tell you which compression routine was used, which encoding schema was used, and which language the audio was in in the first place?
  
  --
  My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
21. Re:If we can find them... by Jason+Levine · 2012-02-03 02:34 · Score: 1
  
  Us: "Ha! We burned all the oil so now our planet is worthless to you."
  Aliens, grinning evilly with all three of their mouths: "Oh well. I guess we'll have to use our organic carbon extraction devices instead. Know of any life forms that use carbon that we can toss into it?"
  
  --
  My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
22. Re:If we can find them... by afabbro · 2012-02-03 03:57 · Score: 1
  
  At 22 lightyears, you don't NEED to go faster than light to reach it. Just somewhere close-ish to light-speed will do.
  The transit time itself is probably the easiest part. It's the living in a closed confined space with everything you need for 44+ years that's the trick.
  
  --
  Advice: on VPS providers
23. Re:If we can find them... by ediron2 · 2012-02-03 06:00 · Score: 1
  
  I hate to troll you on this, but how exactly do you envision using galaxy/gravitational lensing while keeping the distance the signal travels to 22 light years?
24. Re:If we can find them... by ediron2 · 2012-02-03 06:37 · Score: 1
  
  Occams razor. As far as a 'turing' test for alien signals, it's pretty much a game of 'explainable by nature/astrophysics thusly'. Nearly every pulsar or periodic signal heard so far has plausible explanations. The few that don't, get catalogued and studied like the Rosetta or cryptanalytic puzzles or anything else incomprehensible/interesting. I remember a (wikipedia?) article on the subject a few years ago, but haven't a clue where to look for it now.
  Here are wikip-articles on examples where we've composed the message (and reasoning behind the components): The Arecibo message by SETI, the Pioneer Plaque by NASA and then go on to SETI, the Voyager record/disc, and others. You say 'hello' by doing something that has a pattern that defies nature... that stands out. Then you start into yammering technically advanced but communicationally-simple concepts, in the hope that even a fraction of them will be semi-correctly guessed. If you give guidance via patterns, and the other side is looking for patterns, it'll work out better than cryptanalysis (where one side is HIDING information).
  As for compression routines, both compression and cryptography maximize entropy (the seemingly randomness of signal) A compression algorithm thinks "If there's a pattern, use it for better compression!" which is the opposite of how a greeting intended for strangers will be written. If you want to make that bet with 20 uncompressed bitstreams, you'll be surprised at how evident the signal is. You'll know it's THERE, even if you can't convince yourself what it means or if it was human in origin. It's then up to intelligence (ours or theirs) and tools for looking for meaning in the patterns.
25. Re:If we can find them... by Surt · 2012-02-03 06:46 · Score: 1
  
  Wikipedia disagrees.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves
  Claims current oil recovery techniques are recovering up to 60% of the oil in place, and that factoring in the other 40%, there is
  1,324 (reserves) * 1.4 = 1.853 T barrels remaining.
  That's in the ballpark of 100 years of oil remaining, assuming the burn rate doesn't go up.
  
  --
  "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
26. Re:If we can find them... by segwonk · 2012-02-03 07:07 · Score: 1
  
  Not a troll at all, and of course you're right. It was late last night & I didn't think that one through.
  
  --
  - ------ Go 'til ya know.
27. Re:If we can find them... by Mythran · 2012-02-03 07:50 · Score: 1
  
  Or a few atom wide specific needle in a stack of almost completely identical needles using only a magnifying glass and a cup of "joe" to keep him going. I hope they have an ET version of Starbucks up there. That's also assuming that there are males of their species...otherwise replace "him" with "her" or "it".
28. Re:If we can find them... by thesandtiger · 2012-02-03 08:06 · Score: 1
  
  Nah, the base they use doesn't matter:
  If I have some apples, were I to count them, the base I use would be meaningless - saying 15 or 0F or 00001111 or 17 depending on the base I use wouldn't change the number of them that I have.
  Similarly, a prime number in any whole-number base is a prime number when translated to any other whole number base. 2 (or 10 in binary) is still only divisible by 1 and itself, regardless of being in decimal or base 2 or base 12, 16, 8, 3, whatever.
  I'm adding the caveat of "whole number" to the bases because I really don't know if it's possible to construct some kind of strange fraction-base math (which just seems like it would still essentially be an offshoot of a whole-number base, but I dunno if that's absolutely correct)
  Anyway, because primes are primes are primes, the reason for using them would be because receiving a long sequence of them would almost certainly have to be an artificial source, and it would definitely get the attention of any species with math and an interest in meeting other species.
  
  --
  Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
29. Re:If we can find them... by WillDraven · 2012-02-03 12:14 · Score: 1
  
  Unless we both evolved from the same food yeast the former masters of the galaxy were farming on our planets!
  Yes, I've been reading entirely too much Niven lately.
  
  --
  This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
30. Re:If we can find them... by Esion+Modnar · 2012-02-03 12:21 · Score: 1
  
  Probably because we only got 2 words of mention in that library, one them being "mostly."
  
  --
  
  They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
planet in the Koprulu Sector by simoncpu+was+here · 2012-02-02 17:42 · Score: 1

"It's basically glowing cinders, or a well-lit charcoal," Vogt said. "We know about a lot of these, but they're thousands of degrees and not places where you could live."
Yeah, except for the Zerg. That planet is called Char.
What are we waiting for?!?!?!? by Lucky_Pierre · 2012-02-02 18:09 · Score: 1

Let's go!!!!

--
"Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost." ~ V.I. Lenin
not really by slashmydots · 2012-02-02 18:09 · Score: 1

It takes a certain amount of energy to move a certain amount of mass a certain distance and gravity determines that pretty significantly. I don't think 4.5x Earth's mass would result in gravity levels that are compatible with life just based on how much energy it would have to consume to move. But who knows, maybe they're magical fusion-powered space unicorns.
1. Re:not really by niftydude · 2012-02-02 18:24 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Life doesn't have to be mobile or sentient.
  
  Your argument doesn't exclude plants, trees, fungus, etc.
  
  --
  You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
2. Re:not really by sehlat · 2012-02-02 18:31 · Score: 1
  
  Life doesn't have to be mobile or sentient.
  But it should be at least one of the above. I offer most of the current crop of Presidential candidates as exemplars of mobility.
3. Re:not really by Surt · 2012-02-02 19:25 · Score: 1
  
  And so your claim is that you'd categorize them as life? Seems legit.
  
  --
  "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
4. Re:not really by Surt · 2012-02-02 19:45 · Score: 1
  
  As got pointed out in other threads, 4.5x earth mass is only about 60% extra G to deal with. I weigh 60% more than I did as a teenager (sadly) and still manage to get out of bed in the morning (most days ... I'm getting up there in age).
  
  --
  "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
5. Re:not really by Albert+Sandberg · 2012-02-02 20:19 · Score: 1
  
  2.3 times heavier is a lot though.
6. Re:not really by Alioth · 2012-02-02 22:59 · Score: 1
  
  4.5 times the Earth's mass only means a 4.5 G at the surface if this planet is the same size as the Earth (in other words, a lot more dense). If this planet is the same or less density, the gravitational pull at the surface will be less than 4.5G.
  
  --
  Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
7. Re:not really by Surt · 2012-02-03 09:02 · Score: 1
  
  Stop insulting flora!
  
  --
  "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Re:Time for a Probe'in by lord3nd3r · 2012-02-02 18:10 · Score: 1

Cartman already has one, see if he will let you borrow it.

--
g0t b33r?
Re:summary fail by Surt · 2012-02-02 19:27 · Score: 2

It's ironic in that no one knows what that word means, and the folks over at Kepler are driving themselves into a frenzy trying to find an earth analogue. They apparently missed one quite nearby.

--
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
The Great Almost by Tablizer · 2012-02-02 19:40 · Score: 1

It's like flying cars: somebody's always building yet another Great Almost that gets on the cover of some publication to tease us, then runs away and hides in Flawland.

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Table-ized A.I.
Volcan? Vulcan? by Tablizer · 2012-02-02 19:44 · Score: 2

A rocky planet 4.5 times the mass of Earth would probably be quite volcanic because it has yet to "cool down" inside, and because more gravitational pressure would be cooking the core hotter.

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Table-ized A.I.
1. Re:Volcan? Vulcan? by aglider · 2012-02-02 21:36 · Score: 1
  
  Maybe it's thrice as old as ours.
  
  --
  Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
2. Re:Volcan? Vulcan? by Tablizer · 2012-02-03 06:09 · Score: 1
  
  Okay, but that would also imply it has a smaller sun, since one our size wouldn't be around long enough.
  A smaller sun also means it's probably tidally locked with the sun, facing only one side, limiting the habitable zone. It's not a show-stopper, but certainly makes it less Earth-like.
  It could have a thick atmosphere to compensate for non-rotation, but it would probably be of a very different composition than what we are used to.
  
  --
  Table-ized A.I.
3. Re:Volcan? Vulcan? by Maritz · 2012-02-04 09:17 · Score: 1
  
  I noted that the article did not mention this, but with an orbital period of 28 days it does seem likely to be tidally locked. If it is covered in deep oceans you could reasonably expect that a lot of the excess heat on the day side would make its way around to the night side, but yeah it's way less 'earth like'. For me Kepler 22b still seems the outstanding candidate in that regard with it's 22ish degrees C temperature.
  
  --
  I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
only 22 by sgt101 · 2012-02-02 19:51 · Score: 1

Ha ha 22 lightyears, or 208,131,625,000,000 kilometers

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--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
Lame by Jarnin · 2012-02-02 20:56 · Score: 2

It orbits the star in 28 days. That means it's probably tidally locked. One side of the planet would be boiling, the other side would be freezing. The only habitable area on the planet would be yet another habitable zone near the planets terminator.
Weather on this planet would be pretty crazy, if it has an atmosphere at all, and life? I doubt it. Any life on this planet would have no day/night cycle, which seems kind of important for life as we know it.

And that's why I'm really getting tired of all these sensationalist "We found another Earth-like planet" headlines. Mr. Guillem Anglada-Escude of the Carnegie Institution for Science is being very disingenuous claiming that this is the "Holy Grail of exoplanet research". It could be, but without knowing more about it it's just as likely that it's as dead as Mercury or the Moon. Except bigger.
1. Re:Lame by jcgam69 · 2012-02-03 03:55 · Score: 1
  
  I agree that these stories are sensationalized, but I don't think they're lame at all. It's great to see excitement in the national media about science results. Would you prefer more Kardashian headlines?
question by zorspace · 2012-02-02 21:43 · Score: 1

Who can say a precise data source like hahaped?
Re:summary fail by Osgeld · 2012-02-02 21:43 · Score: 1

gee didnt see that coming ... say something about our infallible space program on Slashdot and instantly get modded down, your more predictable than the space plane people, IE decades of the same ass bullshit, that never leaves the ground
We should send a probe. by master_p · 2012-02-02 21:46 · Score: 1

Even if the probe takes 200 years to return, it will be a mjor acomplishment for the human race, and it would provide extremely important scientific data.
Now that I mention it, how come there are no plans to send probes to nearby solar systems? for example, Alpha Centauri is just 4 light years away. If we send a probe now, and the probe could get to up 10% of light speed, in 40 years it will reach that solar system and in 80 years it will be back on Earth.
1. Re:We should send a probe. by FTWinston · 2012-02-02 22:53 · Score: 1
  
  If we send a probe now, and the probe could get to up 10% of light speed, in 40 years it will reach that solar system and in 80 years it will be back on Earth.
  You do realise that the fuel requirements of sending a probe to Mars and back have prevented that from happening so far, let alone sending a probe a bazillion times further? If we do ever send a probe to Alpha Centauri, then I'd strongly suspect that it wouldn't be slowing down when it got there, let alone coming home again. A flyby is probably the best we can hope to expect, and even then, you'll be talking centuries to get there, in all probability. 0.1 C isn't exactly a trivial velocity to achieve.
2. Re:We should send a probe. by master_p · 2012-02-03 03:05 · Score: 1
  
  The probe doesn't need to land: it can carry a smaller probe, which is the one to land. The smaller probe would transmit pictures and data to the mother probe from the surface, and when the mother probe is filled up, it can return home, or closer to home. Once it gets close, it can transmit the data.
  The fuel requirements are not that big. It's mostly about acceleration/deceleration. Multiple launches with fuel tanks could carry enough fuel for this probe, and then assembled in space. Once assembled, the probe's engines can be fired and the trip can begin.
  Various other methods can be combined to push the probe into the appropriate direction.
3. Re:We should send a probe. by iggymanz · 2012-02-03 03:25 · Score: 1
  
  we can't send a probe to 10% light speed now. if we perfect fusion power we could do that, or EM wave focusing by technologies that don't exist yet.
Better targets for SETI by abelb · 2012-02-02 21:49 · Score: 1

For the last couple of decades SETI has been searching the sky methodically looking for any interesting signals around the 1.420 gigahertz range which is the "precession frequency of neutral hydrogen". SETI will now be able to point their radio telescopes at places we already know are interesting and check them on a much wider range of frequencies. I may be hopeful but I can't help feeling it's an exciting time to be alive.
Science UR failing it by Rogerborg · 2012-02-02 22:21 · Score: 2

"Statistics tell us we shouldn't have found something this quickly this soon unless there's a lot of them out there," [Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz] said. "This tells us there must be an awful lot of these planets out there."
I don't know what's worse, his grasp of statistics, or... no, wait, that's about as bad as it gets.
Please tell me that Vogt is some kind of PR Scientician, not an actual, real, bona fide astronomer.

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If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
1. Re:Science UR failing it by FTWinston · 2012-02-02 22:55 · Score: 1
  
  I think its more a question of what probability you'd accept "must" as an appropriate synonym for. 0.999? 0.99999999999?
2. Re:Science UR failing it by caywen · 2012-02-03 04:40 · Score: 1
  
  Is it that bad? Isn't the argument that the things we find in our immediate neighborhood are more likely to be commonplace than rare?
3. Re:Science UR failing it by thesandtiger · 2012-02-03 07:16 · Score: 1
  
  Well, since you're complaining about someone being imprecise in their speech, I want to call you on the carpet yourself. You said:
  "I don't know what's worse, his grasp of statistics, or... no, wait, that's about as bad as it gets."
  In fact, if you look at the entire scope of human activity and behaviors, I'm pretty sure you would find "says 'must' when in reality he should have said 'almost certainly'" to be WAY down there on the list of "bad things" to the point where it's essentially irrelevant in the whole good/bad scheme of things.
  In fact, I daresay your hyperbolic complaint and dismissal of the man for saying something that was only slightly off and basically comparing him to Hitler (you did, after all, say "that's about as bad as it gets" and most people would say the Nazi regime was pretty much about as bad as it gets also!) is, in actuality, much, much worse than Vogt's trivial offense.
  
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  Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Re:summary fail by Narishma · 2012-02-02 22:32 · Score: 1

That's not why you're getting modded down. You're getting modded down for being obnoxious.

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Mada mada dane.
5575 cubic lightyears by vikingpower · 2012-02-02 22:40 · Score: 1

and only 100 stars ? One star, on average, per 55 cubic lightyears ? That is 2..37 lightyears on average between two neighbouring stars... That says something about the challenges awaiting interstellar travel.

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Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Civilization level, if any, must be low by vikingpower · 2012-02-02 22:43 · Score: 1

TFA:

The system has much lower abu The aliens over there have prolly gone back to sleeping in trees and dragging their knuckles on the ground, as they saw that inventing computers was going to be impossible.

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Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I'm surprised by eternaldoctorwho · 2012-02-03 02:04 · Score: 1

that noone has yet commented on the fact this newly discovered planet has three suns. Can you imagine a world where a true nightfall is fairly rare?
1. Re:I'm surprised by gewalker · 2012-02-03 03:59 · Score: 1
  
  Try "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov -- The short story version. The novel was not any better -- the movie was dreadful.
  Nightfall and Other Short Stories
Just to elaborate on why it's a big if by Moraelin · 2012-02-03 02:17 · Score: 1

Just to elaborate on why it's such a big if.
1 gram of matter travelling at 0.75c packs about 4.6 x 10^13 J of energy, or the equivalent of a 11 kiloton bomb. By comparison the "little boy" bomb used at Hiroshima was 15 kiloton. (At 0.9c it becomes 29 kilotons, and for 0.99c it's 132 kilotons, while 0.999c it's 454 kilotons.)
So even forgetting chemical rockets, if you took enough uranium to get about 15 kilotons of energy out of it, and accelerated a single gram of matter with it, and had an efficiency of about 73% for the whole thing (i.e., not just blow a nuke under that gram of matter, but somehow focused it so about three quarters of the energy go into pushing that gram), then you'd get a gram of matter moving at 0.75c. One gram.
Note that this already means pretty much some kind of cannon setup. If you put all that uranium and stuff in a rocket, then you accelerate the whole rocket, not just that gram of matter, and end up with a _much_ lower speed.
The energy necessary to do that for even a modest spacecraft weighing 50 tons -- barely more than the combined command module and lunar lander of the Apolo 11 mission -- is left as an exercise to the reader. Remember though that for a round trip you need to accelerate AND decelerate once in one direction, and then accelerate AND decelerate once more in the other direction. So multiply by 4.
And again, that was under the assumption that we have some kind of Mass Effect style accelerator at both ends, so the spacecraft doesn't have to carry and accelerate/decelerate its own fuel and engines and whatnot. If you actually do need to haul your own uranium and engines, which at least the first mission would, then things get even more ridiculous.
So even with nuclear engines (this kind of talks are like a honeypot for the kind of SF-fetishist who heard something vague about Orion rockets or engines with water and uranium salts, and thinks they're kinda like a warp drive and make everything magically possible), the energy budget necessary for even a modest mission at 0.75c is immense. Mind bogglingly immense.
Sorry, folks, it's just not going to happen in your lifetimes. Sorry to be the one to piss on the parade of every fellow nerd who grew up with Star Wars fantasies, but there simply is no feasible way to just get to it and pack someone on a 44 year trip.

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A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
1. Re:Just to elaborate on why it's a big if by squidflakes · 2012-02-03 05:40 · Score: 1
  
  Yep, if we're going to go the bangarang balls-to-the-wall lets get there inside of a human life-time (Guess what kids! Pack a couple of books because you're about to be stuck in the backseat for the longest road trip EVER! Better fill up at the Stuckey's on I-15 because the next rest stop is several billion trillion miles) way, we're going to break ourselves, use obscene amounts of energy, and do nothing that an unmanned probe couldn't do. Sure, the telemetry would take a while to get back to us, but space is for the patient.
  As an alternate, why not just sail there? The accelerations are much much lower, but nothing in our current catalog of space technology beats solar sails for specific impulse. Yes, the materials technology for something on a huge scale isn't quite there, but we have working solar sails on satellites that are doing both main propulsion (The IKAROS probe, on its way to Venus) and course adjustment (many, even the voyager probes used solar pressure as a fuel saving alternative). The energy to drive the sails already exists in both locations, Sol for us and GJ667C on the destination side.
  Even better, an electric or magnetic (or hybrid) sail. Instead of using only photon pressure and being constrained by a piece of material, an electromagnetic sail can be created by spooling out some wire and applying an electric field. This would make the whole mess much more feasible, as we've already got the technology to provide the needed amounts of electric power, and the materials technology for all the components. We even have flight tested versions.
  Still, this is all pipe-dreaming. We can stay in orbital space for years, comfortably close to all of the food, water, oxygen, and spare parts that we'd need, but a few steps further out and even a minor problem becomes a crisis.
2. Re:Just to elaborate on why it's a big if by Jarik+C-Bol · 2012-02-03 10:16 · Score: 1
  
  Read a book called Roacheworld by Robert L. Forward. It'll be right up your ally.
  
  --
  I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Current Estimate by DarthVain · 2012-02-03 03:22 · Score: 1

In ALL of human history we have only sent a few probes into the beyond. Of those, only a few have ever made it out of our solar system, and that was 30+ years ago.
If we use this as a base line of current capability, Voyager 1 is traveling about 17,000 m/s. It can go 4.2 light years in about 73,600 earth years. Factoring that this new planet is 22 light years away, at our current proven technology, it would take us approximately 385, 524 earth years for use to send a probe to this new planet. Of course this is to smash into the planet at 17,000 m/s, so some additional time for deceleration would be required. Also once it got there, assuming that it has a power source strong enough to beam a light message back somehow, that would take an additional 22 years on top of all that. I have no idea how long the delay would be with radio, certainly a very long time anyway.
So yeah, a pretty big IF. I find it more likely we will all have killed ourselves by then, or evolved into some sort of thing that no longer remotely resembles what we currently are, so it may be hard to determine if this would even interest us anymore.
1. Re:Current Estimate by squidflakes · 2012-02-03 05:41 · Score: 1
  
  The delay with radio is the exact same delay as with light or any other electromagnetic wave.
Awesome! by inhuman_4 · 2012-02-03 03:27 · Score: 1

There seems to be a fair bit of skepticism about reaching this place because at 22ly it is way to far. But what about a probe? Probes can be much less massive, can be designed to operate for long periods of time, don't need to maintain contact. Also I don't see the need to stop in the system to collected data. Just whizzing through with some high powered instruments should be sufficient.
1. Re:Awesome! by Gavagai80 · 2012-02-03 05:32 · Score: 1
  
  Easier to collect data without a probe. Telescopes are improving faster than rockets, you don't have to get closer to learn more. A probe flying past the planet will probably learn less than eventual direct imaging from back home.
  
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  This space intentionally left blank
2. Re:Awesome! by e_hu_man · 2012-02-03 07:47 · Score: 2
  
  i don't really know enough about rockets or telescopes to pass judgement on what you've said. however, there are numerous probes exploring our solar system (voyagers, cassini, etc). from what i understand, no level of ground-based observation could obtain the data they're collecting.
  
  i'm not sure how we maintain a space mission that will last over a hundred years (which is what tfa says it would take to get pictures back) or how you deal with command and control with a 44-yr lag, never mind all the other stuff people have posted about. but, i imagine a probe would provide valuable scientific information that couldn't be obtained any other way.
radio SETI not the way: Optical SETI for the win. by iggymanz · 2012-02-03 03:34 · Score: 1

Radio SETI will find nothing, that's not the logical way for aliens to transmit, and the "water hole" argument is contrived. There are a multitude of other such RF frequencies with compelling arguments that are in other bands....the answer is to use none of them. Funny here on Earth it took decades for scientists to realize that a pulsed high power laser with current technology would far outshine a star for the brief nanoseconds it is shining. Thus you only need proper wide-spectrum photomultiplier tubes to cover the whole visible spectrum and then some! A transmitter would just repeatedly target a large number of stars.
There are several optical SETI endeavors going on right now
I, for one... by chinton · 2012-02-03 04:37 · Score: 1

Welcome our new GJ667Ccian overlords.
Historical Documents... Re:What if we go there? by Fubari · 2012-02-03 05:18 · Score: 1

I loved Galaxy Quest
[Trying to explain TV to the Thermians] Gwen DeMarco: They're not ALL "historical documents." Surely, you don't think Gilligan's Island is a... [All the Thermians moan in despair] Mathesar: Those poor people.
No base problem by DrYak · 2012-02-03 06:06 · Score: 2

Does that communication system work if they use anything other than base 10 math?
Base won't be a problem, no more than today, when computer count in base 2, most people count in base 10, ans some people count using weird combination (mixed base 20 celtic influence, mixed base 5 with roman, base 12, base 60 in summeria, etc...)
A prime number is a prime number, no matter what crazy writing system you use to write it down. Base systems are just that, encoding ways used to write down abstract number.
To go back to the parent exemple:
base will only start to play a role when we send graphical representation of equation, as in written down in picture form.
once we send "5 + 7 = 12", not as a bip sequence, but as a nice bip-encoded picture. In addition to learning the strange symbols we use to write number, the alien will notice that for some crazy reason, we start to use 2 symbols for anything bigger than a number of 9.
If they count in base 20, they'll probably reply something along the line of "5 + 7 = B", with "5", "7", "B", "+" and "=" replaced with their own local way to represent the concepts, ordered in their preferred way to order their symbols (prefix notation? opposite endianness? etc).
That's why math is regularily proposed as a "first common language", a numbre is always the same numbre, no matter what crazy writting system you use to write it down.

Just curious, because it seems like the only reason we use base 10 is because we have 10 figures (and toes).
Some civilisations have used 20, because that's the total number of fingers+toes.
Some civilisations have used 5, because that's the number of finger on 1 hand.
Some civilisations have used 12, because that's the number of phallanx (finger bones) on the 4 long fingers, and because it is nicely divided by 3 and 4.
Some civilisations have used 60, because it's pretty much easy to divide by quite an impressive number of divisor.
Our civilisations use 2 for computers, because a simple representation between "signal" and "no signal" is the easiest to implement. ...
But you just need to convert value from one system to the other. The maths behind remain the same.

--
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
1. Re:No base problem by VanessaE · 2012-02-03 18:10 · Score: 1
  
  Our civilisations use 2 for computers, because a simple representation between "signal" and "no signal" is the easiest to implement.
  This isn't quite right. In any kind of storage, the values are explicitly two signal values, not "signal" and "no signal". In a communication link between two components, the two states are usually Ground and +V, or a positive and a negative voltage (as in RS232). Add to that some communication links which use Tri-State logic, wherein a third, high impedance state (usually denoted "floating" or "Hi-Z") is used to indicate "no signal". Such buses use this third state to allow multiple components to share a common conductor.
Re:summary fail by Osgeld · 2012-02-03 06:19 · Score: 1

no I am obnoxious on many threads and most of the times get modded up, again say something about nasa and all the fucking space geeks get their feelings hurt, its pathetic really that so many still have this gndn dream that we continue to burn piles of cash on for no real good reason
Round trip? by Slutticus · 2012-02-03 06:23 · Score: 1

Who said anything about a round trip? This would be a one way ticket, multiple generations born on a ship.
Re:summary fail by thesandtiger · 2012-02-03 07:21 · Score: 1

You are very angry about things that you don't seem particularly up on or interested in. There are many decaffinated brands that taste just as good as the real thing, you know.

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Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Re:summary fail by Osgeld · 2012-02-03 07:40 · Score: 1

I dont drink coffee, it makes me twitchy, and yes I get angry about using my tax money to fund other peoples unfeasible dreams. You want space go privately do it and leave me and my pockets out of it
Re:Whatever happened to Mars? by spauldo · 2012-02-03 11:29 · Score: 1

Screw Mars. Learn to build sustainable life on the Moon, and the solar system is your oyster.
Mars is far away. The Moon is close. Neither has a breathable atmosphere. There's no economic reason for going to Mars - you wouldn't be able to send anything back. The moon, once you have a functioning colony there, could be a source of raw materials and manufactured goods. Things like iron beams are cheap on Earth, but it's expensive as hell to launch them. Refine and smelt the iron on the moon, and you can launch it with an oversized gauss gun.
Build your spacecraft in orbit. Build space stations where you have room to fart, and the walls are thick enough to repel radiation. Advance AI and robotics to the point where dangerous manual labor can be handled by the machines. Then, and only then, build a colony on Mars.
It's that or the space elevator. Either way, before you go colonizing Mars, you need some way of getting the supplies to build such a colony into orbit without bankrupting the world, and we need to learn to create a controlled ecosystem to live in. Colonizing the moon is one way of doing that.

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Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Re:summary fail by thesandtiger · 2012-02-03 16:23 · Score: 1

Fucking basic science, such a waste of taxpayer money!

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Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.