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NASA TESS Observatory Will Hunt For Alien Life On "Super-Earth" Exoplanets
An anonymous reader writes "Kepler may be down, but now NASA has another planet-hunting tool in mind. The space agency is preparing the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) observatory in order to follow in Kepler's footsteps. NASA has been searching for alien planets for several years now. Learning about strange exoplanets such as enormous, hot 'Jupiters' and 'rogue planets' that actually cruise through space without a parent star certainly adds to the body of research concerning our universe. Yet what scientists are really interested in are the Earth-like planets that may hold the potential for life."
As a regular reader I ask you kindly, please do something about the vulgar AC that first post trolls this site. If you can't IP ban the troll then at least delete their posts. This is not reddit, please disrespect the "free speech" of vulgar trolls that add nothing to the conversation.
Are they're looking for life on planets not warmed by a star?
Or just hoping to find an alien Moonbase Alpha?
Extra-terrestrial life has been visiting the earth for 10's if not 100's of thousands of years. What do you think the ancient Hindu scrolls talk about?
In the fifties, there were thousands of reliable documented UFO sightings covered up by the US government with such ridiculous explanations as 'moonlight reflecting off of swamp gas'. Google up project blue book. We all know about the Roswell stories and there and hundreds of similar reliable situations throughout the last 50 years. Given that we know that extra-terrestrial life is and has been visiting the earth, what is with NASA still launching vessels into orbit to 'search' for extra-terrestrial beings?
It's a thinly veiled ruse to fool an unsuspecting public into believing that the US government's mis-information campaign is the truth.
Let's turn the tide and start a terrible wave of truth here. I've seen extra-terrestrial craft in the skies, how about you?
Take the red pill.
Every time Slashdot posts a story about the search for extraterrestrial life, at least a half-dozen scientifically illiterate people complain (often quite stridently) that NASA (or whoever) is too narrow-minded because they're only looking at signs of terrestrial-like (carbon-based, oxygen-metabolizing) life. And every comment of this sort gets at least another half-dozen replies, from people who actually know at least a little bit of science, explaining, very patiently, that we have no idea what other forms of life might look like, chemically speaking, no way of knowing if such life forms exist, and thus no way of detecting their presence. It's so predictable, and so inane. This is one of the most fascinating open questions in modern science, but these threads simply get clogged up by idiots upset that NASA hasn't considered their ill-informed speculation.
Anyone reminded of this scene?
The US military was working on a top secret airplane that was shaped like a flying saucer in the 1950s. Of course the military tried to cover that up.
I still like Stalin's fake 1947 UFO theory.
What if we find a planet that is just like Earth; and has a thriving ecosystem; but has much more gravity than Earth? We would need exoskeleton suits to walk around until we got used to it. But I guess we will find Earth 2.0 eventually that is just right. But even a planet like Venus could have life in the upper atmosphere. And there are theories that even Neutron stars harbour life under the surface. Life will always find a way. Not all aliens are humanoid with funny things on their foreheads.
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
TESS is a cheap substitute was what is really needed. Its not the real deal, earth like planet finder that is needed. It only looks at the same stars for 3 months. Which means it will only find "habitable zone" planets that orbit their stars 3 times in that 3 month period. i.e.. only red dwarf stars. The planets it finds will be tidally locked and subject to million of years of star flares (red dwarfs are typically flare stars). What we need is Nasa's dropped Terrestrial planet finder.
"And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this super-earth with envious eyes; and slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us."
1400 watts solar per square meter compared to about a half fwatt rom internal heat flow. However the core heat flow causes the magnetic dynamo and plate tectonics. Large planets like Jupiter the interal flow rivals the solar radiance Jupiter is still creating heat from grivitational shrinkage, but too small for fusion.
The proper term is "undocumented" planet!
Every time something points to life (ahem, bacteria life) on Mars, there's a group of scientists that start doing back flips to say it's natural crystal formations, complex chemical reactions, etc. So it's nice, but I figure even if they find a planet with obvious city lights and an atmosphere filled with methane and CFCs, it will just result in another wave of doubters saying it's caused by naturally occurring phenomenon.
So what's the reason for NASA even bothering? It's not just a way to raise public interest and funding? No, that's just cynical of me.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
The misdirection of searching for alien life elsewhere precludes the assumption that alien life isn't here on planet Earth. And to close this circle of logic, if alien life exists elsewhere, why wouldn't it also exist here as well?
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
http://youtu.be/YPjXxKpM4DM?t=7m20s
And to go to Pandora ... um I mean, to Alpha Centauri, in the 6 years of the movie? Can't be done. This guy (video below) has done his homework - even anti-matter explosions (if you could make that much anti-matter, and remember, it isn't free, it is just a storage and release mechanism for some other energy source here in our Solar System) even these explosions aren't going to do it, because his analysis shows that it isn't the weight of your fuel, it is the amount of energy you would have to liberate in the vicinity of your ship to reactively move it forward.
http://youtu.be/D6H1TxRGLUc
In short, it will either take generations in some sort of ship that we don't know how to build, or non-reaction technology, of which we don't have a theory. Not even the Alcubierre Drive. While all of its difficulties may in the future be solved, the point is, this drive violates multiple things we currently hold true which cause these problems:
1) 10^^64 kg of energy would be required to propel a small craft across the galaxy. This is greater than the mass of the entire visible universe. Even to the next star you are talking about multiple stellar masses of energy.
2) A paper by José Natário published in 2002 argued that it would be impossible for the ship to send signals to the front of the bubble, meaning that crew members could not control, steer or stop the ship.
3) A more recent paper makes use of quantum theory to argue that the Alcubierre drive at faster-than-light velocities is impossible, mostly because extremely high temperatures caused by Hawking radiation would destroy anything inside the bubble at superluminal velocities and lead to instability of the bubble itself.
(Above 3 points from the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive)
So, we aren't going anywhere fast, soon. We aren't even going anywhere slowly, soon. Eventually we will certainly send out probes designed to last hundreds of years to nearby stars, but no people. Eventually it will likely become possible to send generation ships, and then people may go, but many will not see the point - unless we change human psychology - which I suppose we will. But it doesn't seem likely that it will ever be colonization as we usually think of it. Eventually, there will be a race of humans (different species?) who live entirely in space and having developed the tech to live in the Oort cloud may just find themselves drifting out closer to Proxima and Alpha Centauri. Perhaps one day these people will just drift among the stars. But, by that time, if that is what they are doing, they won't feel the need to inhabit a star system.
And someday, of course, we may discover augmentations to our current understanding of the laws of Physics that will allow us to roam interstellar space like Captains Picard and Reynolds. But there is no reason to suspect that, just because we can dream of it, the Universe will accommodate those dreams.
But, if you really want all of this to have any possibility of happening - ever, then you should start in on solving all of the problems that face us now and drain our resources away from uplifting research and exploration. Drab and mundane as it is, as we deplete our resources we starve the future. As we degrade the planet we constrain future choices. As we over-populate we divert what we have just to feed and shelter the new masses. Each hour of American Idol or Monday Night Football diminishes our prospects just a little bit. If you want this future you will certainly have to make it.