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Analysis of Spacecraft Data Reveals Most Earth-like Planet To Date
sciencehabit writes: Scientists analyzing data from NASA's Kepler satellite have boosted the tally of known or suspected planets beyond our solar system to more than 4000, they reported at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Most are inhospitable — too big, too hot, or too cold for any conceivable life form. But another team seeking to verify Kepler candidates announced they had identified eight new potentially habitable planets, including some close to Earth in size and situation. Unpoetically named 5737.01, one candidate has an orbital period of 331 days and is 30% larger than Earth, Mullally says. That’s good news, because scientists here reported yesterday that planets more than 1.6 times the mass of Earth are unlikely to be dense rocky worlds like ours — assumed to be the only plausible habitats for life.
I'm not seeing the good news. If it has a similar density to Earth, it will have a mass about 1.3^3 ~= 2.2 times the mass of Earth.
It used to be said that Venus was an 'Earth-like' planet
They have all the chemical ingredients, saturn and jupiter both have water clouds containing droplets of water and since we don't know how life actually got going it could well be possible for it to start in a gas giant and at least sustain bacteria or virus sized lifeforms. Even in earths clouds there are bacteria floating about as we've discovered in the last decade or so.
Analysis of Spacecraft Data Reveals Second Most Earth-like Planet To Date
FTFY.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Problem is that with current knowledge and technology we would NEVER be able to get out of our solar system alive, much less actually make it to the nearest star. We *might* be able to send probes, but we are talking about missions that will have to last multiple decades on internal power supplies and whatever fuel they start with. There is no way that humans would survive the trip on any craft we could hope to construct in our lifetimes.
The exploration of "space" we do will be limited to our solar system by physics and our biology and without some kind of break though in getting things moving faster than light, it is within this solar system we and our offspring will all die.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Before we can "invest in technology" we need to have some theoretical basis for said technology to work. Our current understanding of physics provides no plausible mechanism for a living human to travel to these planets. Unless there is a fatal flaw in relativity, it is possible (if not probable) that practical interstellar travel is essentially impossible.
-The presidential election will be decided by one vote... on the supreme court.
The margin of victory was more than one vote and the outcome of the election was decided on the day the governor of Florida certified the election results the first time. The appeal to the Supreme court was pointless as it had no power to reverse the decision of the electoral college nor change the vote of the Florida delegates. Gore lost on every front, the initial count (the legal one) AND the following three recounts. The supreme court ruling was just icing on the cake of his defeat. Get over it.
-There will be a nuclear terrorist attack on New York, perpetrated by Israel, the Bush administration, and the Pentagon, with obvious evidence right out in the open, and nobody will question it.
If you are referring to 9/11, there was and is zero evidence of a "nuclear" attack and just about the same amount that Israel had anything to do with it. Somebody is pretty fond of their tin foil hat to really believe this line of thought.
-The attack will be used as bait and switch to wage a $3 trillion war against a country which didn't even have anything to do with the patsies, let alone the actual attack.
Now you are just off into La La land.... Most of the rest of your claims are in a similar ilk.
I hope the doctor has prescribed the proper medications and that you keep taking them like you should...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Blame religion.
It is perfectly possible to build a generation ship to reach for the stars and colonize planets thousands of years of travel away.
Just not in the way that we think of generation ships...
Cryo-sleep is how science fiction solves this problem, but the only known state of human that can survive cryogenic freezing is the human embryo. a crew of around 6 females, and 40,000 frozen embryos, a new generation of females is implanted via ivf and then born through live birth every 25-30 years.
Long story short, spreading humanity out across the stars with our current technology would require massive shifts in how humanity sees morality.
Building a colony on mars, populated with people who have free will, and not risking the wrath of the religious right, sure... that's easier.
Before we can "invest in technology" we need to have some theoretical basis for said technology to work. Our current understanding of physics provides no plausible mechanism for a living human to travel to these planets. Unless there is a fatal flaw in relativity, it is possible (if not probable) that practical interstellar travel is essentially impossible.
Totally agree, but you are attacking the SyFi culture where it's just expected that Captain Kirk can just order up "warp 8". Einstein pretty much condemned us and our offspring to die with the confines of the Solar System and the chances he was wrong do seem pretty remote so far.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Not even close to being able to work. Radiation is sure to kill all living things on any space ship short of the size of a small planet, likely before you could get such a massive object out of the solar system.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Quit pointing out cool planets. I wanna GO there!
Like dating the head cheerleader, never going to happen dude..
Physics and Biology pretty much tell us that every human alive and all their offspring will die, here in THIS solar system. No exceptions..
Keep dreaming though..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Even a generation ship like you describe poses technical problems that may very well be insurmountable.
One issue is small particles in space (micrometeorites). While the space station may have managed to avoid catastrophic impacts over a decade, the probability of a major impact on a ship traveling for centuries at even a very small fraction of the speed of light hitting *something* in space becomes extremely high. At those speeds, a golf ball size object would slice through any known material like a hot knife through butter and could easily breach every single pressurized chamber on the ship. You would need some sort of powered force field- a technology that does not exist and has no known theoretical basis for its existence.
Another issue is food and biology. Previous attempts and creating a small closed ecosystem (biosphere) were miserable failures. It may very well be that there is a minimum size for such an ecosystem to be sustainable- a size that may not be feasible for a spacecraft.
A third issue is propulsion and power. The generation ship proposes relatively slow travel as a solution to the tyranny of the rocket equation. But even the generation ship must provide power for centuries. Even using nuclear fuel, the amount of fuel required to power the spacecraft essentially indefinitely would become extreme. Plus, getting the spacecraft up to even a very low cruising speed (by interstellar standards) of .01c would require a huge amount of any known type of fuel, and an equal amount of fuel to slow to a speed that it could orbit the new planet. What happens if it turns out the destination planet is not actually habitable? There would be no fuel left to choose an alternate destination. At that point, the generation ship offers no advantage over a colony on the moon.
A final concern is one of need. Interstellar travel proponents often use the argument that the Earth may one day become too small to support the human population and/or uninhabitable, requiring a new planet. But until the sun starts to begin its decay in billions of years, it's difficult to imagine a scenario where interstellar travel is more feasible than simply fixing earth. Human population size will likely decline as birth control becomes ubiquitous (the developed world already has a birthrate below replacement). Any civilization with the technology to create a closed ecosystem with an indefinite lifespan for a generation ship could just as easily create such an ecosystem on earth or bio engineer a solution to what ever disaster has befallen earth.
Adding to my comment above: a generation ship consisting of six individuals supervising embryos in perpetuity ignores the entropy associated with human psychology. A certain percentage of the population are psychopaths. What happens when one of the six decides a few generations down the line decides to murder the other 5? Perhaps that can be avoided with careful genetic engineering, but even that ignores the foibles of human psychology. Is it really realistic to expect someone to live with 5 other humans for an entire lifetime cooped up in a tin can with no hope for an escape from the monotony of maintaining the ship? All it takes is for one generation to fail to fulfill their duties and the ship is toast. You could have the ship all robotized and only embryos, but it's unclear whether it's possible to rear a healthy adult from a child who has never had adult human contact.
Most are inhospitable — too big, too hot, or too cold for any conceivable life form.
Whoever wrote this has obviously never read any science fiction. ;-) The term "conceivable" covers a very wide range of planets (and various environments not based on planets) in which intelligent creatures might evolve.
Some years back, I read Robert Forward's Camelot at 30K novel, about a human expedition to an inhabited Pluto-like planet out in the Oort Cloud; the title references the mean temperature of that world. Part of the story was a quite imaginative method that the world's inhabitants used to colonize other large rocks fbig enough to have useful gravity and far enough from any star that their sort of life was possible. That turns out to be most of the galaxy, of course.
Going back even further, to 1957, we find Sir Fred Hoyle's novel about a dense cloud of gas (similar to what's called a Bok Globule) approaches our Solar System, and instead of passing through, settles into a small, dark ring around the sun. As the catastrophic effects on Earth settle down, scientists discover that the cloud itself is an intelligent creature that just stopped by for a meal of photons and assorted small molecules emitted by the sun. It is, of course, surprised to find itself being contacted by intelligent creatures living in such an unlike spot as a planet, since you'd expect true intelligence to evolve only in the rich clouds of interstellar space.
I'm sure that many readers of this forum can list many other literary works that depict life in environments not the least bit like ours. Anyone who can only conceive of life on a planet similar to ours is seriously lacking in imagination. But there are thousands of writers who aren't so mentally crippled, and millions of readers to read their work. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Also, when sending probes beyond our solar system, it will get harder and harder to keep in contact with them, especially if you want to have a reasonable bandwidth to send a bunch of pictures.
Blame religion. It is perfectly possible to build a generation ship
The people of the generation ship will probably start a new religion before they get there. Or more likely, they'll start several religions and then fight each other over them.
Why can't they report this stuff using the standard classifications of planets? /me ducks
A few 10s of meters of water would block the vast majority of cosmic rays. While there are higher energy ones that would penetrate that, they also penetrate Earth's atmosphere (or create a shower, which actually allows more of it to interact with people on Earth than a single high energy particle would). You could block a lot of that with ~100 m of rock.
Neither of those are anywhere near impossible to construct a spacecraft with, and the need for a generational ship to be self sufficent would give you a much larger lower bound on size. It is definitely impractical financially in the foreseeable future. But if driving by some cultural reason to do so, a large nation/civilization could work to building such things on a human timescale. The issue isn't that it is physically impossible, but that there might never be a large enough group of people interested in doing so. As technology progresses, the needed size of such a group will shrink, but so might the desire to leave the solar system.
It's practically impossible to stop by physical material if all of the energy of that 10 tons is concentrated into a impact zone the size of a golf ball. Just like your skin won't be pierced when it is hit by a 10lb hammer, but a 10lb katana swung at the same speed will cut you in half. The micrometeorite research done to date is examining impacts occurring at a tiny fraction of the speed envisioned here. At the very least, protecting from such impacts would require an exponential increase in the mass of the space ship- further exacerbating the tyranny of the rocket equation.
None of them are entirely satisfactory: either the climate isn't quite right in the later part of the afternoon, or the day is half an hour too long, or the sea is exactly the wrong shade of pink.
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You know why they call her the "head" cheerleader, right? Know what I mean? Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.
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I'm confused how religion is to blame here? It seems, financial cost, will power, and a host of more basic/physical restrictions prevent this.
The post is certainly ironic given the first sentence...I'll give him that.
Gas giants usually occur outside the "Goldilocks" zone. So those moons would be ice cold. Ignoring that. You have a object that is not always being hit by the sun, as the moon would be going through the planet's shadow. And then, you have that moons tend to be tidally locked to the planet.
Humanity is doomed because we will never get past the human rights/religious obligation thing when attempting a large-scale rescue of the human race. Removing free will from the generations of host females, and treating tens of thousands of embryos as volatile memory for the human genome will never get past the religious views that tie up significant portions of the capital both political and physical that would be required to spread the human race to other planets. Hell today, in fertility treatment, gender selection is "controversial"... Embryo disposal is "controversial"... This is that times a million.
Where exactly should such a radiation come from? Oh, the sun? That is easy shielded. Beyond Mars orbit there is not much to fear anymore anyway.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Cosmic Radiation comes from LOTS of things out there and it's not just the rate of exposure that's the problem here, but the *duration* of the exposure during the trip.
The nearest planet in the "goldilocks zone" is something like 1,000 light years away. The nearest neighbor star something like 10 light years. If we could get something going at say 50% of C, that means we have a 20+ year round trip to the nearest star or a 2,000+ year round trip to the nearest possible habitable planet and back.
The background cosmic radiation exposure rate might be less than we see in LEO or on the Moon, but it's still there. Living though 20 years of constant exposure just isn't a viable option, not to mention that 20 years of weightlessness would be a SERIOUS health issue. Even a year is difficult with today's technology. Doing 2,000 years of all this is a sure way to sterilize any practical conveyance we could build of any and all kinds of life that might find it's way onboard.
No, we and our offspring die here, in this Solar system.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Outside of our solar system is no serious radiation.
The closest solar system is 4 light years away, not 10.
The closest potential earth like planet is 13 light years away, not 1000.
Letting a potential interstellar craft spin to create artificial 'gravity' is likely a very simple thing.
However I agree that it is unlikely that a human ever sets his feet on a planet outside of our solar system.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Who needs to travel? Long distance communication is more than enough to reshape our views of ourselves, our worlds, and to exchange technologies worth untold trillions. Identify enough habitable planets in the sky, monitor and send transmissions, and eventually after trying many thousands you may find a civilization that's listening.
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I don't agree that radiation outside the Solar System is low enough to allow us to travel there for extended periods without significant shielding. Even electronics would require hardening and shielding to survive for the time required.
The stories I've been reading today put the nearest habitable planet outside our solar system at 1,100 light years away. Maybe there is something closer, but that's not what I understand these articles are discussing.
Travel at 1/2 the speed of light would be a minor miracle, even in interstellar space so the travel times I've put out are likely still optimistic, even if I'm a bit off on my knowledge gaps of how far things really are up there.
But in the end, we are not leaving this solar system and although we may visit other planets here, I seriously doubt we will establish any kind of ongoing presence on them.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Try if you want too, but at a 2000 year round trip for a radio signal, you won't be around to monitor for the reply.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Where did you get 1000 light years from? The actual distance seems to be 1833.4 light years. So a round trip time of 3666.8 years.
And yes that is a long time indeed. Long enough that if you transmitted a message in a natural language you would almost certainly need a very cunning linguist to understand the message you originally sent let alone the reply.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Problem is that with current knowledge and technology we would NEVER be able to get out of our solar system alive
Orion
I realize that isn't technically current technology, but we could probalby figure out how to use 1950s tech if we wanted to.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Before we can "invest in technology" we need to have some theoretical basis for said technology to work.
We do. Nuclear pulse propulsion can get us up to nearly 10% the speed of light. Alpha Centauri in less than 50 years. Within the lifespan of an 18 year old astronaut even. It might take 200 years to actually build the enormous nuclear pulse ship and cost trillions, but we have the tech. We just don't have the money. Or if we do we would rather spend it on something more practical like killing a lot of other humans.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
>The nearest planet in the "goldilocks zone" is something like 1,000 light years away.
Huh? Which planet would that be? What ever happened to Gliese 581c? Did it disappear while I wasn't looking.
The Gliese 581 system is only 20 light years away and could be reachable by a human constructed interstellar ship driven by nuclear pulsed 1950s tech (Orion) in something like 200 - 250 years. A long time, but doable either for a generation ship or for a probe.
Of course I'd set aside another 200-250 years to get the enormous craft built at a lagrange point station.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
One issue is small particles in space (micrometeorites). While the space station may have managed to avoid catastrophic impacts over a decade, the probability of a major impact on a ship traveling for centuries at even a very small fraction of the speed of light hitting *something* in space becomes extremely high.
Citation needed. Outside of star systems I think the chances are more like fat and slim.
At those speeds, a golf ball size object
The chances of hitting a golf ball sized meteorite in the vast emptiness of interstellar space is infinitesimal. The point remains however. It just wouldn't be anything nearly that big. It would be a matter of deflecting tiny particles at around 0.1c. Not an easy task, but certainly doable. Perhaps whatever is used for radiation shielding (lead lined water tanks perhaps) would have enough mass to deflect such small particles. I believe that most of the particles would just be hydrogen atoms. There isn't a lot of matter out there.
You would need some sort of powered force field- a technology that does not exist and has no known theoretical basis for its existence.
That is ridiculous. You don't need imaginary tech. You just need some deflection mass. A large steel plate pushed in front of your ship would probably do the trick.
Another issue is food and biology. Previous attempts and creating a small closed ecosystem (biosphere) were miserable failures.
And of course any task for which there are failed attempts is impossible. We'll figure out the closed ecosystem thing. We'll have plenty of time to do so while we build our enormous spaceship filled with nuclear bombs at a lagrange point.
But even the generation ship must provide power for centuries.
I assume you are talking about maintaining electrcial power for hundreds of years. This is easily done with RTGs.
A final concern is one of need.
The need is the curiosity of any intelligent species. Our need to explore the universe. That is the only need required.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Before we can "invest in technology" we need to have some theoretical basis for said technology to work. Our current understanding of physics provides no plausible mechanism for a living human to travel to these planets. Unless there is a fatal flaw in relativity, it is possible (if not probable) that practical interstellar travel is essentially impossible.
Well, there is plenty of technology to invest in that would head us down that road that would be useful to our current endeavors. We still need the technology and engineering to build a long term space habitat for things like a manned mission to Mars. Given Apollo level funding, drive, and political will, we are still probably 30 years out from having such. Then there's mining and manufacturing in space to worry about. That will continue past the probably 50 years in getting things up and running in a useful manner. There's easily a century of full time work before we even need to worry about things like not having a warp drive.
It might get out to Alpha Centauri (provided a whole host of technologies required for a spacecraft to travel 50 years are invented and perfected).... which is not where these "goldilocks" planets are. Nuclear pulse won't get us the 100+ light years needed to get to the planets under discussion.
The stories I've been reading today put the nearest habitable planet outside our solar system at 1,100 light years away. Maybe there is something closer, but that's not what I understand these articles are discussing.
/. story is about :D ?
So you did not even read the linked article this
http://io9.com/the-closest-kno...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Radiation always comes from suns, so if you are far enough away you get no radiation except the occasionally gamma burst.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
But those things aren't controversial simply from a "religious" perspective. You're implicating a general shift in morality here, religion itself has little to do with that when you consider the universal nature of those morals.