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Odds Favor Discovery of Earth-Like Exoplanet in 2013
Earth-like exoplanets have gotten a lot of attention in the last few years; it's exciting to think that there's life — or even just life-sustaining conditions — on planets other than Earth, whether near by (on Mars) or much farther away (orbiting Vega). Projects like NASA's Kepler, and the ground-based HARPS, attempt to spot planets outside our solar system of all kinds. These exoplanet discoveries have been ramping up lately, and so has sorting of the discovered planets by size and other characteristics; the odds are looking good, say astronomers quoted by Space.com, that an Earth-like planet will be found this year. Abel Mendez runs the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, and UC Berkeley astromer Geoff Marcy looks for planets as part of the Kepler team; they explain in the article why they think 2013 is an auspicious one for planet hunters.
since we can see farther and clearer than ever before, it's kinda likely that if there's a habitable world out there, we're more likely than ever to find it.
Meanwhile, in other news, farmers announce that if it's not to dry, not to wet, and just the right temperatures, they could harvest bumper crops this year.
Please stand by while we compile a more complete list of inane almost predictions.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
OTOH, ya' never know. Some theory that's still relegated to the sci-fi class might get proven doable, warping space-time and "riding the wave" looks to be possible. Or,aliens could land and gift faster than life travel to us (if we prove 'worthy' of it, or we could beat 'em up and take it from them!).
Today we have 'impossible' Star Trek tech in our pockets. And amazing tech is coming down the pike in our near future. But to say "it's never gonna' happen", IMO, is a rather short sighted opinion, not unlike past pessimists who couldn't see past their own closed off reality.
Sure they'll find one. But being the correct distance from a given star doesn't really make it earth-like. Seriously, Mars qualifies as earth-like but it doesn't seem to have life even though the planet next to it does.
When I was a kid, walking on the moon was 'impossible', never going to happen.
Now as an adult, walking on the moon is 'impossible', never going to happen again.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
What do the evens favor?
rewriting history since 2109
an entire *flying* car
Going to the moon was never impossible in any living person's childhood. The moon isn't really that far away. as soon as the first plane took off they started making plans to go to the moon. The nearest star is so far away that nobody has any idea how we would realistically travel there in the foreseeable future. we still haven't advanced much far beyond where we were in the 60s and 70s. Sure we've advanced the technologies a little, but we aren't getting.to the next solar system on any of the existing technologies no matter he much we refine them.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Human civilization is only a few thousand years old, and we have a few million to sort stuff out (barring any major disasters). We may never need warp drive to explore the universe, developing generation ships or becoming immortal cyborgs so the travel time is not an issue.
"Today we have 'impossible' Star Trek tech in our pockets. "
We have a fairly believable simulation of star trek in our pockets. But communicators didn't need any infrastructure to span thousands of miles, even through solid rock. We've got a long way to go before that happens.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
When I was a kid, walking on the moon was 'impossible', never going to happen.
Now as an adult, walking on the moon is 'impossible', never going to happen again.
We should. The moon would be an ideal 'jumping off point' to Mars. Seal up some of it's pre-existing caves, now you have large living/storage areas. Convert existing ice for air/power. Low gravity = less fuel needed to launch trips to Mars. Mine out ores from asteroids that have already impacted, build space station from them. Serious space exploration would prove to be a world unifying effort, then maybe us humans can end our hatred, killing each other over resources and imaginary borders. I remain an eternal optimist. :)
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You can't have everything, where would you put it? - George Carlin
From what I understand of the process, astronomers measure the drop in light as a planet passes between a star and us to determine its size and distance from said star. So what happens in the case of an Earth like planet with an advanced civilization, or perhaps if there is a lot of volcanic activity? Wouldn't that alter the expected result, and screw up their calculations?
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
When I was a kid, walking on the moon was 'impossible', never going to happen.
Now as an adult, walking on the moon is 'impossible', never going to happen again.
Ya, sucks Michael Jackson died.
Be seeing you...
Getting to other stars isn't actually terribly difficult, as far as we can currently tell. Only getting there quickly presents a problem. Build a large, self-sufficient "space station"/world-ship, accelerate it to say 0.1% of light speed (only about 20x faster than Voyager 1), and then wait for a few thousand years until it reaches it's destination. Sure, accelerating it with current technology gets really expensive really quickly, and it'll be the distant descendents of the original crew who reach the destination, but the only real difficulty is creating a long-term viable self-contained ecosystem. And considering that the one serious attempt we've made, Biosphere 2, was actually remarkably successful for a first attempt, we could probably have that problem licked within a few decades if we really wanted to. All we'd need is some sufficiently motivating reason to do so, which is where the real problem lies.
Quite similar to getting to the moon actually - basic rocketry technology has been around for almost a thousand years, but it wasn't until we got into a technological pissing contest (aka The Cold War) with Russia that we actually got off the planet and eventually to the Moon. We've never returned because, well, why would we? There's nothing there worth the expense of the trip, and until we reach a point where its tactical or strategic value is worth the expense it's only the dreamers and visionaries that appreciate its value, and sadly they don't control near enough wealth to make it happen.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
But the real question is what their IPv6 address range is. We need to know now since packets will take so long.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Not really - the atmosphere is an incredibly thin skin around a rocky planet and it's composition can only be detected by the use of *extremely* sensitive instruments. Imagine passing a pea in front of a street light several miles away - it'll be *far* easier to detect the shadow of the pea than the condition of its skin.
And actually that's a rather obsolete method for detecting planets - you can only detect those whose orbital plane happens to intersect the Earth - a tiny percentage since the alignment is more or less random. More modern techniques detect planets via the wobble they introduce in the motion of their parent star - for example our sun actually orbits a point lying about 1/2 to 2 solar radii away from its center - the barycenter (center of mass) of our solar system, which constantly changes as the massive outer planets move through their orbits. Our own planet introduces a much smaller (since we're far closer and less massive) but higher frequency (since our year is much, much shorter) wobble as well. By detecting similar wobbles in other stars we can make a good estimate about the masses and distances of its planets, and the planet doesn't have to pass directly between its star and us to be detected, allowing us to detect far more planets.
Analyzing atmospheric composition is more challenging, and I believe current techniques are limited to planets that pass directly between us and their star - essentially a planet with no atmosphere will dim the light slightly as it blocks a tiny percentage of it, an atmosphere will also introduce a *very* tiny spectral shift since some of the starlight that reaches us will have passed through the planet's atmosphere and been partially absorbed based on it's chemical composition. Theoretically a similar technique could be used for out-of-plane planets by analyzing reflected light, but our current instruments aren't nearly sensitive enough to distinguish between the miniscule amount of light reflected from a planet and the raging inferno of its star. Even if we could, it would likely be extremely difficult to distinguish between the spectrum shift introduced by the atmosphere and the shift introduced from surface reflection.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I'm unsure why "going there" is so typically the response to news like this. Galileo (16th century) kicked off a method to simply COUNT the planets in our system. By the 20th century, science had methods to determine what COMPRISED those countable objects. Since my childhood, the age and dimension of the universe has ONLY been extended. Given our advancement through WAR, imagine beings beyond such waste and what empirical method grants... Keep Watching the Skies, because it's a sure bet they're Watching You! Moreover (doesn't everyone love to say 'moreover'?), the 20th century SUCKED at describing LIFE. Early biologists used to capitalize the damn concept. Louise B. Young countered this hubris by capitlizating the term 'Form' in her book, The Unfinished Universe, 1986. The pretense of 'sustainable conditions' didn't predict ocean floor smokers. Our understanding of bacteria (the 'third' world) is inane and we've attempted to communicate with dolphins by holding them in what is essentially an echo-chamber. I love the book and movies of Solaris, and I've just told you why. Can we "go" there. Really? What makes you think it would be allowed?
Would were! Should is! Could be! And live a hundred times three.
Getting to other stars isn't that hard; with modern technology we can probably do it in a half-century or so, maybe more. The problem is that this is too long for humans, with our short lifespans; the solution is simple: cryogenics. If you freeze the crew for most of the trip, then they won't age significantly during the voyage. The only problem after that is that hundreds of years will have passed when the crew returns to Earth (if they return at all), but if you pick people without any significant family ties this shouldn't be a big problem. For instance, if there were such a mission being set up, and the odds for success were good (and the cryo technology really worked that well, so I wouldn't age during the voyage), I'd probably be happy to join the mission as long as my wife came with me. I don't have any other family that I care much about who'll be around that much longer anyway, so I won't be missing much. I'm sure there's plenty of other people just like me out there in today's Western culture.
Our communicators may not have the range that Star Trek communicators did, but they have far more functions than just talking like a walkie-talkie: full-color touchscreens, text messaging (so the other party doesn't have to drop what they're doing to engage you in conversation), internet browsing, looking up various information (I have a weather application on mine I use a lot to see the forecast and current temperature), voice mail, playing music, watching videos, playing games, turn-by-turn navigation, etc. ST communicators couldn't do any of those things, they were just walkie-talkies that could supposedly communicate over long distances and through rocks, and perhaps help the ship establish your location. The only thing our smartphones are missing out of that is a radio channel as effective as "subspace".
Several techniques have been used, but e.g. Kepler is relying on observing repeated dimming. Considering the massive-throughput approach of Kepler, you can hardly say that it represents an outdated method.
You do not need a warp drive or propellantless drive or whatever if all you want is to get to Alpha Centauri or Tau Ceti.
Nuclear pulse propulsion or anti-matter catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion is good enough. The problem is it takes a really long time to get there e.g. 100 years to Alpha Centauri. You have to spend time accelerating then you need to decelerate once you reach the target. However you could have waystations along the way to make each leg of the trip shorter: e.g. the Oort cloud is a spherical shell of icy bodies supposedly nearly a light year away from the Sun. The destination may have a similar cloud of its own. There may even be a rogue planet, brown dwarf or some other large mass en route.
Once a viable destination exists it is only a matter of time before a probe is sent. It will be a challenge to make it have the necessary longevity but it is certainly not impossible. If the probe detects anything worthwhile there I am pretty certain someone will find a way to get there even with current technology.
What I think is so cool about these discoveries is, in the words of astronomer Steve Vogt, "the emerging view that virtually every star has planets". Think about this for a while. Look at all the stars in the sky, and imagine every single one of them having a planetary system. Suddenly it doesn't seem to much of a stretch thinking some of them might be habitable, or even harbour some kind of life.
In my eyes this fact, if it gets confirmed by subsequent studies, is the biggest discovery about the universe since the theory of relativity. When I grew up I was taught there were 9 planets in orbit around the sun, and the existence of (or at least abundance of) exoplanets where largely speculative, with the first observations just being confirmed during the 90's. When my kids grow up they'll be taught there are thousands of exoplanets in our very vicinity and millions in the galaxy. And there are free-floating bodies as well, rouge planets that are not gravitationally bound to a star! How cool isn't that? To top it all, we will soon have instruments sensitive enough to measure the very spectrum of an exoplanet atmosphere and look for biosignatures. If it finds free oxygen and methane, that's a very strong indication of life as we know it. (Since oxygen is highly reactive, it tends to show up in compounds such as carbon or silicon dioxide. Biologic activity is one possible supply of free oxygen.) The search for extra-terrestrial life, long belonging to the realm of science fiction, has turned to a serious and highly active field of research in just a few years.
Or,aliens could land and gift faster than life travel to us (if we prove 'worthy' of it, or we could beat 'em up and take it from them!).
I'm not sure if I even want faster than life travel. Sounds a bit sketchy to me.
Yeah, I re-read my post a couple hours later and said, "Doh!" to myself. Never post until the first cup of coffee fully kicks in. :-/
I think you're missing the point. We will get there quicker in a simulated universe. This concept isn't so far fetched and one that we are just beginning to explore thanks to the technology that we do have. (hint CGI). Even if we could travel at the speed of light - we shouldn't. The craft would get obliterated. And the energy required to power the "energy shields" - would it not be to much to fathom that the energy required to deflect billions of particles would be far greater than the energy required to even propel the craft?
Sorry to break the bad news to you, but everything else is science fiction theory, with little or no practical hypothesis to consider.
Hanging onto the idea that "Aliens" will come down and give us their tech is ridiculous - there is no evidence of off world intelligent alien life either. However, believe what you want to believe. The idea that IF we are visited by "other" intelligences as manifestations of beings from the outer simulation is far more intriguing, but not for the faint of heart, as it gives rise to the probability that "all this" is a simulated experiment - but the same applies to their reality aswell. Recursive simulated realities, where each is an enhanced and/or modification of the parent simulation (and so on).
Everything else is becoming even *less* probable (light speed, warp drive, wormholes, aliens) and practical than what we can *make* *possible* in a simulated enviroment.
Are our imaginations for what *might* be possible to much for our current *reality* to accommodate? If true, can we improve it?
You know, I had my bags all packed and everything!.So the more we learn about space the more we see how isolated we are, huh. Great. :(
Still doesn't mean it won't happen, something out of left field, like inter-dimensional doors. (No, I haven't just been watching a Doctor Who marathon), and there may be up to nine dimensions, all existing in the same space.
And it is interesting that statues made thousands of years ago depict people wearing what looks like spacesuit helmets. Long before Star Trek, so what was the inspiration for that? Weird.
We're just starting out with exploring beyond our spaceship Earth, just baby steps (for us) getting taken now. It'd be interesting to come back in a thousand years and see how far we got. Until then, enjoy the ride...
And it is interesting that statues made thousands of years ago depict people wearing what looks like spacesuit helmets. Long before Star Trek, so what was the inspiration for that? Weird.
So, out of all the different millions of riffs on a theme of stylised human depicted by thousands of human cultures across the millennia, what are the chances that one later culture would look back at the work of an earlier culture and see something familiar (perhaps mystical) in the depiction?
(the answer is: somewhat less improbable than visitations by a humanoid alien species who are advanced enough to cross space-time, but still wear 1960s-era Earth spacesuits.)
If really can come true, it will have exciting things. Find the use of the planet, it will reduce the pressure of the earth.
Maybe they were into 'retro'?
Not to mention FTL "subspace" communications... our real devices are limited by the speed of light, obstacles (the relative position of the Enterprise versus on-planet communicators never seemed to be an issue... your body can drop a cellphone signal by 10-20dB), as well as our lack of Star Trek's advanced power sources -- anything capable of powering a tiny Phaser-1 wouldn't be hard pressed to deliver on much more range and battery life in a smartphone/communicator. Sure, the pocket device evolved in dozens of ways not imagined by Roddenberry and crew... that's how things happen in the real world.
-Dave Haynie
Eh, I'd say it's good odds we will have humans back on the moon inside 30 years, even if it is a staggering waste of resources to send people there. My bet is one of the emerging superpowers does it to prove they can, much like we did, but I'd also bet they'd try to one-up us (well, actually much more than one-up) by throwing up tons of supplies first so that their teams can spend a much longer time there.
Much better than focusing on human rated flights (which won't be significantly less expensive until we can make humans more robust) would be what we're doing now - relatively (compared to human rated flights) inexpensive robots going there. As robotics tech and AI gets better we'll be able to do a lot more for less expense than we do now. Couple that with private industry and hobbiests getting much more involved - SpaceEx, the space mapping (then mining) consortium, cubesats ($10,000 USD per cubesat, putting it well in the reach of small groups!) and it's a pretty good bet that Earth/Moon/Mars is going to get really busy fairly quickly.
For longer range stuff - thinking Voyager here - for the same money we spent back then we can have MULTIPLE probes that are vastly more capable and, with the propulsion systems coming on line that provide lower but constant thrust, much faster than those previous efforts.
The initial justification for sending humans into space - other than just "because it's there" - was because we did not have remotely the same kind of automation capabilities that we do now, and what we can do now will be massively eclipsed by what we have in 10-20 years from now. I don't mind it if we don't send people back to the moon if it means we'll be focusing space resources on something that, at least in practical terms, was nothing but an EXTREMELY expensive parlor trick.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
You want to "seal up some if it's caves"??
It's = it is.
Learn this.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...