Slashdot Mirror
New Exoplanet Is Best Yet Candidate For Supporting Life
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."
"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
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"?
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.
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
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.
(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!
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.
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.
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.)
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
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
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.
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
And setting up an antenna is the easy part. How are you going to decode the transmissions by an alien civilization?
2x beep ...and start over.
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*
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
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.