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NASA's Planet Hunter Spots Record 1,284 New Planets, 9 In A Habitable Zone (networkworld.com)
coondoggie quotes a report from Network World: NASA's planet hunting space telescope Kepler added a record 1,284 confirmed planets to its already impressive discoveries of extraterrestrial worlds. [This batch of planets is the largest single account of new planets since Kepler launched in 2009 and more than doubles the number of confirmed planets realized by the space telescope so far to more than 2,300.] The discoveries were a result of an automated technique implemented in a publicly available custom software package called Vespa, which lets scientists analyze thousands of signals Kepler has identified to determine which are most likely to be caused by planets and which are caused by non-planetary objects such as stars. "Vespa computed the reliability values for over 7,000 signals identified in the latest Kepler catalog which identified 4,302 potential planets and verified the 1,284 planets with 99% certainty," said the Princeton researchers that developed Vespa. NASA said, based on their size, nearly 550 of the validated planets could be rocky like Earth. Nine of which orbit in their sun's habitable zone.
Why do the editors (I assume) keep putting stuff in [ ]s?
You don't need to identify every change you might have made to a submission (if that's what's happening). That kind of editing is supposed to be seamless. Highlighting it just leaves readers wondering if they're missing some significance.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you? Twenty years ago we didn't even know that exoplanets exist and now we find more and more of them. Since when has record breaking research in astronomy been a waste of taxpayer dollars? What kind of ignorant wouldn't want to know in what kind of universe we live?
Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you?
The answer might be in the first two words of your reply.
Kim Stanley Robinson's recent novel Aurora is skeptical of the idea that generational starships would work. KSR is best known for his Mars trilogy of two decades ago, which was a vision of terraforming that was criticized for being too optimistic. In the years since, he has delved into the science of ecosystems and come to believe that "life is a planetary thing", an ecology can only be maintained over the long term at a planetary scale, and at the small scale of a generation starship, it would quickly break down.
Thus Aurora has the inhabitants of the ship freaking out at the increasing amount of salt dumped into their plant production as time goes by, the loss of certain vital nutrients, and so forth. And while you might think that the crew only has to survive the couple of centuries of the journey until they arrive at their destination, the novel has a twist that shows how settling another inhabitable planet might not necessarily possible. Whether this book is an example of a sadly pessimistic or merely realistic trend in science-fiction is up to you.
While generation ships make for some compelling science fiction, the reality is that we have yet to be able to build a sustainable closed biosphere on Earth where we have a ton of advantages like gravity, sunlight, a magnetic field to protect from radiation, no concerns about explosive decompression and a distinct lack of large chunks of rock and ice floating around. Until we understand our own biology and ecosystem more fully, a generation ship wouldn't be a few dozen astronauts dying out of some larger number. Every single one would die.
I read it and I didn't enjoy it. Actually, I gave up part way through, something I very rarely do, because I found it that bad.
One of the problems is that it's supposedly hard sci-fi, but the problem is it's written by someone who doesn't know the science. As a result while some other aspects were plausible, other aspects were not and were downright annoying.
For example, there was lots of noodling about the halting problem , but he clearly has no idea what the halting problem actually is. He seems to have latched on to is as merely "something hard". I think at one point he even equates path finding with the halting problem, probably via the route "path finding = travelling salesman problem", "travelling salesman problem = hard", "halting problem = hard", therefore "path finding = halting problem".
I also didn't find the "protien fragments" (peptides?) terribly plausible. The planet seemed to be covered with vast amounts of these incredibly pathogenic things which had no apparent source, no apparent activity until humans turned up, almost undetectably small (i.e. simple), and yet vastly more powerful than the human immune system which has evolved under continuous attack from all sorts of such things and worse. I mean we deal with peptides, proteins and etc all the time, and there's nothing comparable here to what's described in the book.
Double also, why didn't these also eat plants?
Triple also, if they were so paranoid (they were, hence the expossure suits), then why didn't they send down some mice first? I don't remember them doing that.
I did quite like how it slowly became clear that the book was from the point of view of the ship's AI, but that wasn't enough to save it especially as it wasn't plausible hard sci-fi with relation to the AI. So the suspension of disbelief broken, I started finding the characters annoying and unsympathetic then I stopped caring.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Our love of and emphasis on militarism and warfare is essentially what will prevent our species from progressing to the medium term future in a stable manner. So it's worth noting. It's also highly likely to be what ends civilization (roughly 1% or so risk of nuclear war per year).
Having said that, I'm not keen to start building 'generation ships' just yet. You've gotta walk before you can run. And we ain't even crawling.
But without wanting to be too doom and gloom - we aren't going to the stars. This isn't the species you're looking for. lol
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Yet another example of why AC posts are more trouble than they are worth.
Honestly I would like to see a change to the AC post. You have to log in and you have to take the karma hit but you can hide your name.
Yes it would not protect anyone from a government court order but how often does that happen on slashdot.
Of course others will disagree but they can if they wish.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
No, the models SUGGESTED they existed. Actual proof of the existence of exoplanets was only confirmed relatively recently, and most have been discovered after 2004. . (1988 was the first confirmation, the "official" list is at the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia)
One thing to keep in mind - according to many charts Mars and Venus are in our own star's habitable zone. Neither seem to have life. Even Earth seems like it would have a much hard time at it if not for some specific factors (ie, a large moon to stabilize the rotational axis - a rare feature for a rocky planet).
If we're batting only 1 out of 3 planets in the habitable zone of our own star actually having life, I wouldn't hold out too much hope of there being life on any of these planets just because its in the habitable zone. My guess (and really that's all we can do until we get a larger sample size of planets having life vs not) is that a very tiny percentage of these planets even in the habitable zones actually harbor life.
That said - even if there was only life in the universe at a rate of one inhabited planet per galaxy, the universe as a whole would still have billions of inhabited planets - it's just that there'd be virtually zero chance that life from one would ever be aware of or affected by life on another.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
"We did know they exist, we just haven't observed any."
In science, you can't assume that anything exists until you can observe it. And the assumption that astronomers and astrophysicists made before Beta Pictoris was that planetary formation was a rare occurrence. And planetary formation in a binary or multiple-star system was thought to be impossible.