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There's an Earth-like Planet With an Atmosphere Just 39 Light-years Away (washingtonpost.com)
Artem Tashkinov quotes a report from Washington Post: There are a lot of good reasons to be captivated by the exoplanet GJ 1132b. Located in the constellation Vela, it's a mere 39 light-years from Earth -- just a hop, skip and a jump in galactic terms. It's similar to Earth in terms of size and mass, and it dances in a close-in orbit around its star, a dimly burning red dwarf. And, astronomers recently discovered, it has an atmosphere. The finding, published in the Astronomical Journal, is the first detection of an atmosphere around a terrestrial "Earth-like" planet orbiting a red dwarf star -- and it suggests there could be millions more. Although the researchers call the planet "Earth-like," the term is only applicable in its broadest sense. GJ 1132b is so close to its sun that it more likely resembles Venus than Earth. Astronomers estimate its average temperature to be about 700 degrees Fahrenheit, and that's without taking into account the potential greenhouse effect of its atmosphere. It is also probably tidally locked, meaning that gravity keeps one side of the planet constantly facing the star, while the other is cast in permanent shadow. GJ 1132b would not make a cozy home for life -- at least, not life as we know it.
We found a planet let's imply it can support life! But wait it's not really able to do that since the surface is hotter than hell. But it's really close to us and orbits a geriatric star.
Isn't that really cool guys?!?!
Guys?
crickets
Mars can be "terra formed".
It probably only takes 100 - 200 years to do so.
It is in our solar system.
It likely once had life.
or under the ocean, or under a desert, buried in Antarctica ... not in mine. Why should I live "under ground" on earth when I have a desert sky on Mars? I would love to see a sunrise or sunset on Mars ... underground in Antarctica: no chance.
In your eyes
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You don't have to invoke any sci-fi; instead just look at our own solar system. Mercury is tidally locked and has surface temperatures of 800F/430C on the day side, and -280F/-170C on the night side. Where do you think they got the idea from?
No way. Planetary astrobiology is a well-established science and basically Mars is not capable of supporting life. It has no atmosphere and more critically has no carbon cycle and never will have one because it has no tectonic activity.
No magnetosphere. Its terraformable. Your oxygen would float odd into space, and
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
One of the important things for evolution is cycles.
If you have a primitive lifeform ready-to-evolve, but the food that it uses to grow is too sparse to sustain a growing population, everybody dies. Game over.
If you have a primitive lifeform and the environment is just perfect for these lifeforms, they will explode to a uniform big soup of life, but as everybody lives, there is not really an incentive to evolve. Sure there might be competition, but the genes that are slightly better will not overpower the whole population. They might gain a bigger share than initially, but they will not take over the whole group.
For evolution to happen, the situation needs to be "plentiful" at some points in time, and scarce in others. This is what happens when you have a moon that runs around the planet every 30 days, inducing a tide every 12 hours, causing more and less light during the night in a 30 day cycle, a slightly tilted rotation of the planet. 24hour days, seasons. 11 year solar cycle.
This causes a large sample of individuals to arise during plentiful times. Then when things get really harsh, the better individuals survive and the others die off.
If you have a primitive lifeform and the environment is just perfect for these lifeforms, they will explode to a uniform big soup of life, but as everybody lives, there is not really an incentive to evolve
As the population grows, they'll exhaust the food supply, and the population will crash again. There are your cycles.
You don't have to invoke any sci-fi; instead just look at our own solar system. Mercury is tidally locked and has surface temperatures of 800F/430C on the day side, and -280F/-170C on the night side. Where do you think they got the idea from?
Mercury is not tidally locked to the Sun. Mercury's rotates exactly three times for every two times it revolves around the Sun.
The relevant question is "How fast would a Martian atmosphere dissipate?" If we could charge it up once and have it last a million years, that would be good enough to make practical use of the Martian surface.
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I think "earth like" should mean it has the potential to have life as we know it. It doesn't have to have life but there is enough there that we could terraform it and move in. This would include size, gravity, position in orbit as relative to star to harbor life, and liquid iron core with magnetic field. Actually having water on the surface would be a plus but not necessary. With a big enough oort cloud we could import water and even make a atmosphere.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
In theory, Mars could be terraformed. It practice, we just don't have the technology to do it yet.
I suspect we have the technology to establish a laboratory base there, but the effort and overhead required to just stay alive there would make accomplishing any actual research a side project. And it certainly wouldn't be self-sufficient. The soil is poisonous to any earth crops, the radiation levels are fatal and the atmosphere is so thin that the lack of air pressure would kill you even if it was breathable. True, establishing an artificial magnetic field would address the atmosphere issue, but again, we don't have sufficient technology to do that. We just aren't ready yet.
The more we learn about Mars, the less I'm convinced colonizing it would be practical, at least with our current state of technology. And I suspect there are a lot of things we don't know about ourselves, and about living in the Martian environment, that we're only going to find out the hard way. For example, we didn't know that we're dependent on certain kinds of bacteria living in our intestines to digest our food until fairly recently. What else are we dependent on that we're not yet aware of?
I support the effort, because you don't learn without trying, but I expect we're going to pay a high price for it. Both financially and in terms of lost lives.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.