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Astronomers To Announce Discovery of a Nearby 'Earth-Like' Planet (seeker.com)
astroengine quotes a report from Seeker:
Scientists are preparing to unveil a new planet in our galactic neighborhood which is "believed to be Earth-like" and orbits its star at a distance that could favor life, German weekly Der Spiegel reported Friday. The exoplanet orbits a well-investigated star called Proxima Centauri, part of the Alpha Centauri star system, the magazine said, quoting anonymous sources.
"The still nameless planet is believed to be Earth-like and orbits at a distance to Proxima Centauri that could allow it to have liquid water on its surface -- an important requirement for the emergence of life," said the magazine.
It's orbiting our sun's nearest neighboring star -- just 4.25 light years away -- meaning it could someday be considered for the world's first interstellar mission.
"The still nameless planet is believed to be Earth-like and orbits at a distance to Proxima Centauri that could allow it to have liquid water on its surface -- an important requirement for the emergence of life," said the magazine.
It's orbiting our sun's nearest neighboring star -- just 4.25 light years away -- meaning it could someday be considered for the world's first interstellar mission.
"meaning it could someday be considered for the world's first interstellar mission."
This is the longest timescale for 'someday' ever. Not going to happen in the lifetime of any descendent we can imagine.
If there was anyone on that planet, we could talk to them for sure. But no visiting is going to happen before humans cease to be creatures we recognise as the same as us.
Proxima Centauri is a flare star. Good luck with it being Earth-like.
ours or theirs?
Minimally we need to start seriously looking at a robotic probe.What is the time line for something that does a flyby? Can we get a probe up to 10%c or are we looking at even 1%c as too hard? 50 years is pretty cool. 500 or more years would be taking the risk that two things happen, one civilization falls enough that we forget we sent it. Or that in the next 500 years we easily build way faster probes.
Also with 50 years and we find something worth visiting, and now can think about sending people. 500 and we are back to science fiction.
Minimally, this justifies building one huge honking telescope to get a good look at this planet.
Physics disagrees.
http://www.space.com/32546-interstellar-spaceflight-stephen-hawking-project-starshot.html
Minimally, this justifies building one huge honking telescope to get a good look at this planet.
Didn't you read the article? They were able to take a pretty detailed picture already.
#DeleteChrome
The fastest probe we ever has built goes 0.023%. It is doubtful we will even get to 1%, ever.
I like the "to announce" part. Like, if they haven't announced it, why are you reporting on it? Maybe there's a reason they haven't actually announced it yet! Perhaps the data is tentative and admits of another explanation, which, on further review, will prove to be true. Perhaps it's simply one guy's wild-ass guess based on incomplete data.
Maybe, just maybe, there's a reason he's not making any comment? Like, they want to avoid making false statements in public and embarrassing themselves? Quite unlike certain (most?) Internet "news" sites which are perfectly happy both to make false statements and to embarrass themselves? "Who cares? Just give us those clicks!"
Anyway, this is pretty cool if confirmed, but at this point, I'm treating it with all the seriousness it deserves, which is approximately zero.
Orbiting Sun's nearest neighbor.. doesn't get much more nearby than that. Were you hoping it was hiding in our own goldilocks zone right next to Earth?
I am so relieved that all those colonization spaceships I've sent to Alpha Centauri, over many years of playing Civilization, will have somewhere to land!
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Seems to me I once read that early last century someone said words to the effect of "what's the point of airplanes? Not like they'll ever be able to fly nonstop across the Pacific or anything".
Oddly, your comment reminded me of that....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
"No, what AC was pointing out was that a mere 100 years ago, people made sweeping statements like "no one in our lifetime will ever fly". We were flying in commercial jet airliners less than 30 years later, and landing on the moon another 20 after that."
What?
100 years ago was 1916. Man first flew in a ballon in 1783.
Gliders? Otto Lilienthal was well know in the 1890s
Airplanes The Wright Brothers first flew was Dec 17, 1903. By 1916 hundreds of different aircraft had already flown including some pretty large aircraft.
"We were flying in commercial jet airliners less than 30 years later,"
The first jet commercial airliner the Comet did not enter service until 1952 which is well over 30 years later.
"The idea that there's 0 chance that any of us will see an interplanetary or interstellar mission is crazy."
I think you are right about interplanetary flight. I hope that we will see that in a life time. Manned Interstellar fight is where you are very much off. The difference in scale between going to Mars vs going to a star system is HUGE. Maybe we will see some supper shocking tech like an unexpected breakthrough in FTL flight.
But the odds are massively in favor of none of us today living to see a manned interstellar mission. Un manned we may live to see one launched but I doubt that we will see it arrive.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That would require Intrepid-class starships for the really useful and good holodecks, so that's quite some time into the future.
Actually, holodecks in Intrepid-class starships are notoriously unreliable and liable to tricky failure modes like "the safeguards have somehow been shut off" and "everyone in the simulation is now alive and they all want to kill me".
Enigma
I would refute this.
The laws of physics are not 'made' by men - at least not in the sense of 'made up', it's based on what nature tells us it is. If nature had shown us something else, our physical laws would be something else as well. If you want to argue that our knowledge is not perfect, I'll grant you that. In fact, this has been known to science for quite some while.
But what most lay people do not seem to understand, is that, while our current laws aren't perfect, they're astonishingly accurate nevertheless and *anything new* (aka, new physics) would NOT contradict what we already observed for the last 400 years. Any new physics, thus, would not go *against* our current physics, but would merely improve upon it, specifically in extreme situations (like in the singularity of a black hole), where our current laws break down.
It would NOT suddenly allow for CoM and CoE to be broken, like the EM device would. Because if a microwave-oven would be able to brake CoM, we would *ALREADY HAVE OBSERVED* the consequences of such a thing. A microwave hardly is an extreme situation where our laws break down, after all. And if that's all that it takes to break CoM and CoE, we would already have seen the consequences in the universe around us. This is because IF the CoM principle could be violated (and by mere resonance of microwaves, no less), it would mean that fundamental laws vary depending on localisation. This in turn would mean, the speed of light varies, the strong nuclear force would change, etc., and thus whole swats of matter would spontaneously disintegrate into atomic and subatomic particles and exotic matter, and flood the universe . This, however, we have not observed, not even once, for the last 400 years. Hence, the extreme unlikelihood of such a claim.
As said, any new laws would still need to adhere to all previous predictions and observations. Since we never observed any of the consequences of such a thing, it is EXTREMELY unlikely to be true. About as unlikely as that we'll discover tooth-fairy magic holds the universe in check.
That's why I think people thinking a microwave-oven (which the EM device basically is) is going to get us to the stars, are, indeed, extremely funny. :-)
Well, sometimes they're pretty annoying too, granted. That's because they're fanatical in their ignorance, and are not prone to any arguments whatsoever. So after a while it gets tiring.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
In cosmic terms, I think "nearby" is fair. However, I always snicker a bit when planets get described as "earthlike" just because of their mass and distance from their star. We have counterexamples right in our own system. A distant astronomer using the same logic, upon discovering Venus would have declared its surface "Earthlike" and start going on about how it probably has oceans perfect for discovering life.
A body being "earthlike" requires a lot more than a similar mass and proper solar distance. Heck, do we even know that it's rocky? Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf - would it actually have blown away most of the volatiles during its formation like our sun did? Or by contrast maybe it's volatile-devoid. Earth was whalloped with volatile-containing rock during the Late Heavy Bombardment thanks to Jupiter. Does Proxima Centauri contain a Jupiter? Probably not. Also: my understanding of the habitable zone of red dwarfs is that they leave their surfaces too irradiated for LAWKI. Now, one could say, "well, it'd be in subsurface water". But you can make that argument for half a dozen bodies in our own solar system without requiring a 4+ light year journey.
No, she's fine. My associate is vomiting for a totally unrelated reason.
James P. Hogan's comments from: https://web.archive.org/web/20...
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An Earth set well into the next century is going through one of its periodical crises politically, and it looks as if this time they might really press the button for the Big One. If it happens, the only chance for our species to survive would be by preserving a sliver of itself elsewhere, which in practical terms means another star, since nothing closer is readily habitable. There isn't time to organize a manned expedition of such scope from scratch. However, a robot exploratory vessel is under construction to make the first crossing to the Centauri system, and it with a crash program it would be possible to modify the designs to carry sets of human genetic data coded electronically. Additionally, a complement of incubator/nanny/tutor robots can be included, able to convert the electronic data back into chemistry and raise/educate the ensuing offspring while others prepare surface habitats and supporting infrastructure, when a habitable world is discovered. By the time we meet the "Chironians," their culture is into its fifth generation.
In the meantime, Earth went through a dodgy period, but managed in the end to muddle through. The fun begins when a generation ship housing a population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, armed military force to compel. But what happens when these methods encounter a population that has never been conditioned to respond?
The book has an interesting corollary. Around about the mid eighties, I received a letter notifying me that the story had been serialized in an underground Polish s.f. magazine. They hadn't exactly "stolen" it, the publishers explained, but had credited zlotys to an account in my name there, so if I ever decided to take a holiday in Poland the expenses would be covered (there was no exchange mechanism with Western currencies at that time). Then the story started surfacing in other countries of Eastern Europe, by all accounts to an enthusiastic reception. What they liked there, apparently, was the updated "Ghandiesque" formula on how bring down an oppressive regime when it's got all the guns. And a couple of years later, they were all doing it!
So I claim the credit. Forget all the tales you hear about the contradictions of Marxist economics, truth getting past the Iron Curtain via satellites and the Internet, Reagan's Star Wars program, and so on.
In 1989, after communist rule and the Wall came tumbling down, the annual European s.f. convention was held at Krakow in southern Poland, and I was invited as one of the Western guests. On the way home, I spent a few days in Warsaw and at last was able to meet the people who had published that original magazine. "Well, fine," I told them. "Finally, I can draw out all that money that you stashed away for me back in '85. One of the remarked-too hastily--that "It was worth something when we put it in the bank." (There had been two years of ruinous inflation following the outgoing regime's policy of sabotaging everything in order to be able to prove that the new ideas wouldn't work.) I said, resignedly, "Okay. How much are we talking about?" The one with a calculator tapped away for a few seconds, looked embarrassed, and announced, "Eight dollars and forty-three cents." So after the U.S. had spent trillions on its B-52s, Trident submarines, NSA, CIA, and the rest--all of it.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.