Astronomers Find An Earth-Size World Just 11 Light Years Away (arstechnica.com)

Astronomers have discovered a planet 35 percent more massive than Earth in orbit around a red dwarf star just 11 light years from the Sun. "The planet, Ross 128 b, likely exists at the edge of the small, relatively faint star's habitable zone even though it is 20 times closer to its star than the Earth is to the Sun," reports Ars Technica. "The study in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics finds the best estimate for its surface temperature is between -60 degrees Celsius and 20 degrees Celsius." From the report: This is not the closest Earth-size world that could potentially harbor liquid water on its surface -- that title is held by Proxima Centauri b, which is less than 4.3 light years away from Earth and located in the star system closest to the Sun. Even so, due to a variety of factors, Ross 128 b is tied for fourth on a list of potentially most habitable exoplanets, with an Earth Similarity Index value of 0.86. In the new research, astronomers discuss another reason to believe that life might be more likely to exist on Ross 128 b. That's because its parent star, Ross 128, is a relatively quiet red dwarf star, producing fewer stellar flares than most other, similar-sized stars such as Proxima Centauri. Such flares may well sterilize any life that might develop on such a world.

Comments

May as well be a billion miles away

[Anonymous Coward]

Too far.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[OrangeTide]

If there was technologically advanced civilization there you could send them a message and get a response in your lifetime. Seems pretty close to me.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[hcs_$reboot]

If there was technologically advanced civilization there you could send them a message and get a response in your lifetime

But if they're really advanced, they might never reply to our message.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Anonymous Coward]

Or come and take our planet. Of course, if they're more advanced than us, they know about us already and are likely on their way.

It has always amazed me that scientists believe it's a good idea to broadcast our presence. We have zero reason to expect a warm welcome.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Anonymous Coward]

Googling around, it seems like even relatively close exoplanets would have to build massive antennas for this. Their first hint that our planet is interesting is more likely to be the presence of oxygen, which is more easily detected from the spectrum.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Opportunist]

Oxygen may be easy to detect, but we have found oxygen also on other planets. And even though it is very rare that there is an abundance of oxygen, even enough to have some left over after everything that could react with it (which is, well, pretty much everything) has, it's far from impossible and as far as I know it's also not easy to determine whether that oxygen is elementary or part of some oxide compound.

But there is one molecule that exists on our planet and only on our planet, and we have not found a single one anywhere else: Chlorophyll. Which is also the foundation of multicellular life on our planet, and since we only know life on this one, it is basically (if we ignore a few methane breathing bacteria) the foundation of any form of higher life.

And it can also be rather easily detected, chlorophyll absorbs light in two rather narrowly defined bands. You find a planet with oxygen that absorbs heavily in the 680-700nm wavelength range? Time to align your large listening dishes!

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Opportunist]

Considering that the laws of life, no matter what form that life takes, are universal, I cannot help but agree. If there is even remotely any kind of competition for resources on a planet, a more advanced, more aggressive species will displace others, and it is likely that the one that prevails is one that is aggressive, xenophobic, competitive and ruthless, at least towards those that don't belong to their own species.

Considering that we barely manage to leave this planet, and even that only for rather brief moments, and that we live on a pretty decent planet compared to what else we have found so far in the galaxy, maybe we shouldn't tell announce it to others that might be technologically advanced enough to consider our planet a really lovely place for a Summer residence, and all they have to do is just getting rid of the vermin first.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Hal_Porter]

It's the Carl Sagan "all sufficiently advanced civilisations must also be benign" view.

Oddly enough Mars Attacks lampoons this very effectively. E.g.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...

Professor Donald Kessler: We know they're extremely advanced technologically, which suggests - very rightfully so - that they're peaceful. An advanced civilization, by definition, is not barbaric.

Which is basically a bit of equivocation - technological prowess and being civilised aren't the same thing. As Orwell observed

http://orwell.ru/library/revie...

The early Bolsheviks may have been angels or demons, according as one chooses to regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible men. They were not introducing a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the Saints, which like the English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened by witchcraft trials. The same misconception reappears in an inverted form in Wells's attitude to the Nazis. Hitler is all the war-lords and witch-doctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with common sense does not really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked forward to as a civilising influence but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that fact. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age.

I.e. technological advancement doesn't necessarily make a society less barbaric - the Nazis and Commies used then modern technology to exterminate groups their leaders had decided to scapegoat and invade neighbouring countries in order to incorporate them into their horrid system.

And of course Rome was technologically or at least logistically advanced but would seem far from civilised if you were one of the 'barbarian' tribes in conquered.

The Conquistadors were much more technologically advanced than the indigenous population of the Americas but they were far from benign.

The aliens in 'Mars Attacks' aren't benign and Kessler ends up with a nasty fate. In fact the aliens are actually 'alien' in the original sense of the word - what they do seems highly malicious but it's very hard from a human point of view why they went to so much trouble to do it. Just like from an indigenous American point of view it would be hard to see why Cortes was willing to travel and unimaginable distance to collect gold and force people to follow Catholicism a religion they'd probably be completely unable to understand.

I.e. the notion that technological advancement makes a civilisation benign or rational is naive.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Anonymous Coward]

Too far.

A billion miles is only around 1,5 light hours. About the distance between the Sun and Saturn.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Anonymous Coward]

May as well be a billion miles away

Wouldn't that be great!!!

Seeing as a light year is about 5.8 trillion miles, or about 9.5 trillion km, and this one is 11 light years away, I can't help but agree with you that it may as well be 5 orders of magnitude closer to us than it is.

Pluto is about 5 billion miles away from the Earth, so only a billion miles would put it between Pluto and Jupiters orbit around our Sun.

A billion miles is actually reachable to us, at least with probes.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[jellomizer]

I would go on a limb and say it is 65 trillion miles away.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[burtosis]

Not true at all. If thier physiology is similar enough to ours, I'd expect a very warm welcome. Very warm indeed, with some extra salt and spices and perhaps a tanker or two of BBQ sauce, though purists say good human tastes best on its own.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[jellomizer]

You are assuming that the culture had followed the same technology progression we have.
Lets assume there is a civilization that is on par with us.
However there was emphasis 2 hundred years ago, on glass production vs metal. So other then radio communication they may have an optical communication infrastructure. With a massive fiber-optic infrastructure, and laser based transmitters to cross areas where a wired connection may not be practical. They may be just a generation into radio communication, technology. where they will be sending binary data, and not thinking about all the stuff needed to send voice, and haven't figured out how to narrow the bandwidth to AM/FM bands. So our radio communication will just reach blind ears, with perhaps why a few bits in their test experiment is getting lost.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[burtosis]

There is only one thing on earth not found elsewhere in our own solar system or on any other object in the visible universe - our form of life. It's because three billion years of life has created billions of unique living things that contain a treasure trove of information and technology. Aliens would have good reason to send at least a probe as extracting this information completely would be far and away the most valuable resource. Further, humans are intelligent and it may be in the aliens best interests to exterminate all of them before they spread and start competing for basic resources.

Re: May as well be a billion miles away

[I'm New Around Here]

They even banded together and made a movie to support their point a few years back.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[SharpFang]

With space being 13bln years old, and us being 11 light years away, and humanity being maybe 200 years into industrial revolution (and at most 300 years from being able to send something there), what, in your opinion, is the chance they have developed just enough to be able to detect us but not enough to have blown past Earth completely ignoring its life as too primitive to be of any interest?

Pick a ~500 year long window they'd need to get from beginnings of ability to listen in to space waves, until being able to explore all near exoplanets. Place it on any point of the 13bln years long time axis. What's the chance it overlaps our 500 year window?

It's the Fermi Paradox - the chance for any space-faring civilization to be roughly as primitive as us, at the same time, is minimal. Universe is extremely old, and any civilization that would have been comparable at one point, should be advanced past any human recognition by now. So either life is that rare, intelligent life is that rare, or there's some awful trap that destroys every civilization once it advances sufficiently to discover it. Certainly the likehood of races advanced similarly as humans, anywhere near, is next to zero.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Anonymous Coward]

You're assuming Chlorophyll will optimize (adapt /evolve) to the same adsorbtion spectrum at a star with a different EM frequency output. I don't think that is a safe assumption...

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[I'm New Around Here]

All except for the two subspecies homo sapiens lawyeruous and homo sapiens politicalis. They tend to taste as if they are full of shit, which they are, but the taste lingers even after a thorough cleaning.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[nine-times]

If there is even remotely any kind of competition for resources on a planet, a more advanced, more aggressive species will displace others, and it is likely that the one that prevails is one that is aggressive, xenophobic, competitive and ruthless, at least towards those that don't belong to their own species.

On the other hand, for a species to reach the level of interplanetary travel, there's a good argument that they'd need to be very good at communication and cooperation. Isolated animals don't develop technology. Cultures do. What's more, a lot of the need for competition of resources comes from those resources being limited. If a species became advanced enough to randomly go roaming the universe picking fights and conquering planets, it's not clear that they'd bother, since they could likely go find another planet that didn't require conquering.

Of course, we're both just speculating. We have no idea what form life might be taking elsewhere in the universe.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Maritz]

A billion miles? It's 6.466e+13 miles. A lot more than a fucking billion. Saturn is roughly a billion miles from the sun.

Every extrasolar planet ever seen is 'too far' you mong. Distance is fucking relative.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Maritz]

There are no resources on our planet that would not be available much closer to them. Yawn, boring

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Maritz]

It's 'pretty decent' for us, because we are adapted to these conditions. Life from another planet would probably find Earth to be at least partially uninhabitable. They are very unlikely to be able to breath out mix of atmospheric gases.

Detecting our signals would be very, very difficult and would require a gigantic receiver. Don't see it happening tbh.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Maritz]

It has always amazed me that morons like you believe that a more advanced civilization needs for us to broadcast our presence in order for them to find us.

Any civilization that is a threat to us will know that we're here without our help. If we do find an intelligent exoplanet civilization in the local neighborhood (let's say, within 5000 ly), we'll likely know about them well before we're technologically able to leave our own solar system.

You're petty easily amazed. So how exactly do they find us then? Telepathy? The Yellow fucking Pages?

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Maritz]

You could argue that life on earth was 'primitive' (e.g. the literal meaning of the word, being similar to ancestors) up until maybe 600 million years ago or so. The explosion of multicellular life after the Cambrian resulted in life that is definitely not primitive.

Any advanced civilisation worth its salt would be extremely interested in Earth's biosphere.

My own opinion is that if advanced civilisations are up there, they are very far away indeed. Probably not even in our galaxy. And maybe we should be thankful for that.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[DontBeAMoran]

Maybe there is a way to calculate the adsorbtion spectrum of plants given an EM frequency output of a star? Even a rough estimate could be enough.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Opportunist]

While true, all "higher" plant life relies on two forms of chlorophyll that have roughly identical wavelength maxima (680 and 700nm IIRC).

If you're searching for "any kind of life", we'd have to take into account that there are actually obligate and facultative anaerobic lifeforms that breathe methane, sulfur or even stranger stuff. But they never evolved to multicellular life. And I guess if we want to look for someone to answer a call, we will probably have to assume that whatever life this may be will have to have evolved WAY past this stage.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Green Mountain Bot]

... it is likely that the one that prevails is one that is aggressive, xenophobic, competitive and ruthless, at least towards those that don't belong to their own species.

It seems equally - or more - likely that an agressive, xenophobic, competitive, and ruthless life form would destroy itself before it could travel between the stars, or keep itself in a state of near-constant war that would make interstellar ambitions a perceived waste of resources. The kind of individual who would lead such a civilization would almost certainly have to be so concerned with maintaining their power and privilege that it seems unlikely they would ever become technologically advanced enough to be a threat to other planets.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Green Mountain Bot]

Rome is actually a fantastic counter example. They were, from day one of the Roman Kingdom to the fall of the Roman Empire, a highly competitive, ruthless, aggressive civilization. They conquered a lot of territory and people, but they hit a limit where it was impossible for their civilization to expand any further because of those traits. Competition meant that leaders were more concerned with watching their backs than governing. Ruthlessness meant that conquered territory was rarely well integrated, and frequently revolting. Aggression meant that they kept trying to expand, even when they would have been far better served in the long run by consolidating. Eventually, the center could not hold, and their civilization disintegrated.

So, yeah, Rome was pretty successful. But that success had hard limits. I don't see how such limits would not also be in place when talking about intergalactic civilization.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Hal_Porter]

So, yeah, Rome was pretty successful. But that success had hard limits. I don't see how such limits would not also be in place when talking about intergalactic civilization.

Rome had to control contiguous territory and keep it pacified, something which was made hard by the fact that most of the population were slaves who wanted to see the whole system burn.

There's no reason why you couldn't have a 'plague of locusts' type civilisation like in Independence Day that arrives, strips a planet bare and then moves on. The Visitors in the original version of V were like this - in the novelisation some of the fifth columnists mention that they personally got medals for peaceful contact with civilisations that the Visitors later completely eradicated.

Or look at the Masters in the Tripods trilogy. In a straight up fight with human technology they would lose so they used brain control to conquer Earth and attach Caps to humans. The Capped humans had their technology regressed to medieval levels. The Masters' long term plan was to xenoform the atmosphere to something they could breath and exterminate most or all life in the process.

With the Independence Day aliens being a plague of locusts was just the way things worked - a bit like if you asked a human why they think it's OK to kill animals and eat meat. The Visitors used to be peaceful explorers but a more militant totalitarian faction took over and demand conquest. The Masters were almost completely alien so it's hard to know what their motives were - perhaps they thought they were doing humans a favour by stopping war and turning the whole planet into a bucolic Constable painting, or they feared humans as a potential future threat and decided to strike first.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Immerman]

>we have found oxygen also on other planets

Really? In the atmosphere? Where? From what I can find, Mercury is the only other planet known to have (relatively) high concentrations of oxygen in it's atmosphere - and at a trillion times thinner than Earth's it doesn't have an atmosphere so much as vaporized surface that hasn't yet been blown away by the solar wind.

An oxygen rich atmosphere is generally considered a beacon for the existence of life simply because gaseous oxygen is extremely volatile, and rapidly reacts with pretty much anything else to form other compounds. It there's molecular oxygen present in significant quantities, it's because some process is actively creating it faster than it can react, probably for billions of years, and life is the leading candidate. (After the evolution of photosynthesis on Earth, it took about 2 billion years of planet-wide oxidation before large amounts of oxygen began building up in he atmosphere.)

Chlorophyll is no good, because it's only one (not terribly efficient) molecule capable of doing the job, among a near-infinite number of candidates - any photosynthesizing organism that isn't descended from Earth cyanobacteria will almost certainly be using a different molecule, with different absorption bands. (A quick search also suggests it's functioning and/or synthesis is dependent on amino acids - and since other life would likely be based on a different selection of amino acids, it would necessarily evolve a different photomolecule).

Of course, while the presence of molecular oxygen is a good indicator of possible life, it's also quite possible that life evolved elsewhere *without* involving oxygen, or even photosynthesis at all, in which case we need a more subtle marker. One candidate is looking for light polarization caused by an imbalance in molecular chirality - life is the leading known source of molecules with a preferred handedness, and simulations suggest that even if life started out in both right- and left-handed flavors, one of them would inevitably gain the upper hand, if only by chance, and rapidly overwhelm the other, as they saturated the environment with wrong-handed molecules that the losers couldn't use.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Hal_Porter]

The natives were basically stone age. They didn't have the wheel, iron or even bronze weapons.

The Conquistadors were thousands of years more advanced - they had wheels, iron, firearms, and ships that could sail around the world.

It's not impossible that humans would be make interstellar journeys in a couple of thousand years. In fact they could do it much sooner if they needed to - something like a Super Orion could used as a generation ship now if we needed to get a breeding population of humans off Earth quickly to avoid some sort of disaster.

I'm guessing if we found stone age aliens on the planet we were evacuating to, they'd fare about as well as the Native Americans did if they tried to stop the humans setting up a colony.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Immerman]

Of course we could wonder what anaerobic life might have evolved into without having to compete with faster-living oxygen-fueled life.

Using atmospheric oxygen as a beacon is more a matter of looking for what is easy to find - it's easy to spot, and is a promising indicator of life since it's volatile enough to react almost immediately. Other, more broad-spectrum indicators are liable to require much more subtle techniques to spot. Such as looking for imbalances in molecular chirality, as life is (one of?) the only known naturally occurring chemical reactions that strongly prefers one "handedness" of molecule over the other, and there's reason to believe that would be a common feature of any life with a chemistry even remotely resembling ours. We might even be able to detect the resulting imbalanced light polarization from here, if we could separate it from other sources of polarization noise.

Of course if life is even more alien, perhaps non-organic, or even non-chemical (crystaline? plasma? mechanical?) in nature, then we're probably not going to spot it unless it decides to say "Hi". At least not until we have telescopes powerful enough (or probes close enough) to see it more directly. A gravitational telescope using the sun as its lens probably couldn't resolve individuals on even the closest planets, but might reveal unusual seasonal variations or large-scale structures suggestive of life.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Immerman]

Heck, if we had evidence of a habitable planet that close, I'd be willing to bet we'd already have colonists there. The biggest thing holding back our space program has been the lack of a sufficiently lucrative return on investment.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Green Mountain Bot]

The only reason to go after an inhabitable planet is if you intend to inhabit it. If all you're concerned with is stripping it for parts, there are far more uninhabited planets out there available for stripping. And because they're so much more plentiful, they also tend to be much, much closer.

All of your examples are science fiction stories. Stories need to have protagonists and antagonists. Nature does not.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[mugnyte]

Are mushrooms alive?

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[OrangeTide]

Lucy was beemed out there 65 years ago.

That's right, if at first you don't succeed: give up and quit trying.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[OrangeTide]

And they may have had radio for 500 years and radio is used primarily for children to do simple astronomy projects. You don't know, you can only guess at what is on the other end. But what is certain is you will never get a response if you never send a message.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Hal_Porter]

You're assuming the aliens are rational and think the way we do. The Masters are completely alien and their real motives are ambiguous, the Martians in Mars Attacks are just dicks. And the Visitors are space Nazis who like the eat intelligent life they've subjugated.

And, like I say, there are plenty of examples of human civilisations going on a conquering spree of their less advanced neighbours for reasons that weren't really rational from the perspective of the whole civilisation.

E.g. the British Empire was a net drain on national resources. On the other hand the people who ended up doing the conquering made a fortune out of it, and the invented a justification of national glory and bringing civilisation to the barbarians to keep the people back home supportive.

Same with the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of South America. The people doing it were doing it to get rich. And they invented a spurious justification of bringing the world of God to the natives to keep the state subsidies flowing.

Looked at at the national level it didn't make any sense. And in fact Adam Smith argued the UK should give up Empire because it was a net drain on UK resources.

http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/docu...

The rulers of Great Britain have, for more than a century past, amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic. This empire, however, has hitherto existed in imagination only. It has hitherto been, not an empire, but the project of an empire; not a gold mine, but the project of a gold mine; a project which has cost, which continues to cost, and which, if pursued in the same way as it has been hitherto, is likely to cost, immense expense, without being likely to bring any profit; for the effects of the monopoly of the colony trade, it has been shown, are, to the great body of the people, mere loss instead of profit. It is surely now time that our rulers should either realise this golden dream, in which they have been indulging themselves, perhaps, as well as the people; or, that they should awake from it themselves, and endeavour to awaken the people. If the project cannot be completed, it ought to be given up. If any of thee provinces of the British empire cannot be made to contribute towards the support of the whole empire, it is surely time that Great Britain should free herself from the expense of defending those provinces in time of war, and of supporting any part of their civil or military establishments in time of peace, and endeavour to accommodate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity of her circumstances.

No one listened and it all carried on for a century or more before collapsing because the UK couldn't afford it. I.e. he was right.

Or look at (presumably) your country, the US. Invading Iraq and then was wholly irrational in retrospect. It cost a fortune and didn't produce the stable democracy promised or even any good loot. In fact it destabilised the whole region and enabled Islamist forces like ISIS to take over. It also cost a lot of money.

If human foreign policy is largely irrational and has been for most of recorded history, why should alien foreign policy be any different?

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Hognoxious]

Except they've already mined a lot of the minerals, and identified the location of most of the rest.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[gnick]

That's right, if at first you don't succeed: give up and quit trying.

Or do the same thing again and expect a different response. Either/or.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[SharpFang]

Personally, I believe even observable universe is too small. There are some elements of abiogenesis that are ludicrously improbable - compound probabilistic properties (like nucleotides arranging themselves into chains that make sense) have this nasty habit of rapidly exploding into numbers much higher than "iterative" stuff like the count of nucleotides in primordial ocean times count of earth-like planets in the observable universe.

Still, with the universe (entire, not just observable) being infinite, even these numbers are tiny - life is bound to happen *somewhere* - and us hunting for it within several parsecs is just our resistance to accept the concept that chances like 1 in 10^1,000,000 are still equivalent to certainty if you have *infinite* tries.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Green Mountain Bot]

You're assuming the aliens are rational and think the way we do.

No, I'm making the pretty rational argument that rational thought is a prerequisite to become a starfaring species. I have no doubt that a certain percentage of alien life is predatory and irrational. I DO doubt that that life would be able to achieve the advanced technology necessary to make it off their planet.

And, like I say, there are plenty of examples of human civilisations going on a conquering spree of their less advanced neighbours for reasons that weren't really rational from the perspective of the whole civilisation.

None of who had to find a way to achieve escape velocity, near-light propulsion, long-term life support, psychological techniques for dealing with long term space travel, or any of a number of other things necessary for interstellar travel in order to go on their conquering sprees.

E.g. the British Empire was a net drain on national resources.

Another reason why, if it comes down to exploiting resources, it makes so much more sense to go after nearby uninhabited planets rather than to find the needle in a haystack that a planet capable of supporting life.

On the other hand the people who ended up doing the conquering made a fortune out of it, and the invented a justification of national glory and bringing civilisation to the barbarians to keep the people back home supportive.

Same with the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of South America. The people doing it were doing it to get rich.

If they're looking to get rich on exploitation of natural resources, there is literally nothing on, or in, Earth that wouldn't be much cheaper and more plentifully much closer to harvest or produce wherever these hypothetical aliens are.

And in fact Adam Smith argued the UK should give up Empire because it was a net drain on UK resources. ... No one listened and it all carried on for a century or more before collapsing because the UK couldn't afford it.

Even so, they lost the empire, and saw its folly before we briefly put a man on the moon. Once again, I submit that this is a prerequisite to becoming a starfaring species. As you point out, it was a net drain on resources. If a species can develop the needed technology to make it from inhabitable planet to inhabitable planet, they've developed the accounting theory, financial metrics, and economic understanding necessary to realize the folly of such a course of action.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Green Mountain Bot]

I think you're forgetting how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big space is. And just how many planets there are out there. If a civilization has mined out all of those planets, their technology is so advanced that they probably already know we're here.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[I'm New Around Here]

Oh, you've tried them too, eh?

Re: May as well be a billion miles away

[javaman235]

Interesting point. Really, you need to look for *anything* low entropy, anything where the improbable has become probable through natural selection and reproduction: polarization, chemical, boulders balanced on hills, etc. Anything weird.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[BoogieChile]

You mean, like, somewhere around Saturn, which we've sent four probes to so far, one of which actually landed on Titan?

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[angel'o'sphere]

There are plenty of other options for plant life with equivalents to chlorophyll: https://www.livescience.com/13...
Also we usually can only detect light spectrums of the atmosphere, not of the flora on ground.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Hal_Porter]

Even so, they lost the empire, and saw its folly before we briefly put a man on the moon. Once again, I submit that this is a prerequisite to becoming a starfaring species. As you point out, it was a net drain on resources. If a species can develop the needed technology to make it from inhabitable planet to inhabitable planet, they've developed the accounting theory, financial metrics, and economic understanding necessary to realize the folly of such a course of action.

Well the British needed to develop all those by the time they had an empire, and it didn't make them give it up. Sure it collapsed eventually but as Orwell pointed out 'societies based on slavery have persisted for such period as four thousand of years'

http://orwell.ru/library/essay...

Consider for instance the re-institution of slavery. Who could have imagined twenty years ago that slavery would return to Europe? Well, slavery has been restored under our noses. The forced-labour camps all over Europe and North Africa where Poles, Russians, Jews and political prisoners of every race toil at road-making or swamp-draining for their bare rations, are simple chattle slavery. The most one can say is that the buying and selling of slaves by individuals is not yet permitted. In other ways - the breaking-up of families, for instance - the conditions are probably worse than they were on the American cotton plantations. There is no reason for thinking that this state of affairs will change while any totalitarian domination endures. We don't grasp its full implications, because in our mystical way we feel that a regime founded on slavery must collapse. But it is worth comparing the duration of the slave empires of antiquity with that of any modern state. Civilizations founded on slavery have lasted for such periods as four thousand years.

It seems like you have an irrational faith that intelligent aliens would be benign and rational, whereas I've come up with plenty of examples of human civilisations that could master science and technology but weren't benign or rational. As Orwell puts it 'in our mystical way we[people living in a liberal democracy] feel that a regime founded on slavery must collapse'.

It's like I always suspected of Sagan - he was an atheist and his faith that hyper advanced aliens would be benign and would come to save us had given him something to believe in which was the Christian omniscient, omnipotent and benign God in all but name. Well I suppose aliens aren't omnipresent either, otherwise they'd have come to technorapture us already.

Of course as a real atheist I suppose I'm much more comfortable with the notion that aliens, no matter how advanced, are just animals like us. They fought their way to the top of the evolutionary tree on their planet by being smarter and probably more ruthless than the competition - humans may well have wiped out their hominid competitors like Neanderthals. And just like us they may produce rational individuals who can work in STEM or accounting. but as a society they're prey to all sorts of irrational notions like the glory of empire, personality cults or the need to spread the One True Faith at the point of a sword. Or a laser pistol.

And people in STEM are just as prey to irrational ideas outside work as anyone else in my experience. They mode switch from thinking rationally at work to thinking irrationally about everything outside.

Look at Wernher von Braun building the predecessors to US space launch rockets at Peenemunde with slave labour whipped into action by SS guards. Or Albert Speer who was similarly rational at economics but equally culpable in turning a blind eye to slavery and genocide by the regime he was trying desperately to save.

Now I'm sure you'll say 'well the Nazis lost'. They did, but there's no physical law that says nasty regimes must lose. As Orwell pointed out, every regime was nasty for most of hum

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Opportunist]

The point is that there is NO place in the known universe that contains chlorophyll. We find iodine and manganese, and the Miller-Urey experiment showed that even very complex organic compounds are far from impossible without life under certain external conditions.

The only place so far where we have found chlorophyll also happens to be the place where we know life exists.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Opportunist]

Yes. And like nearly all life directly or indirectly dependent on plants, which in turn depend on chlorophyll to synthesize sugar with solar power. What's the point of the question?

Re: May as well be a billion miles away

[MerlTurkin]

One light year is 6 Trillion miles. So....

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Hognoxious]

"They" = the natives, that's to say us.

Now excuse me, I have to pop to the Chemist's.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[Green Mountain Bot]

Even so, they lost the empire, and saw its folly before we briefly put a man on the moon. Once again, I submit that this is a prerequisite to becoming a starfaring species. As you point out, it was a net drain on resources. If a species can develop the needed technology to make it from inhabitable planet to inhabitable planet, they've developed the accounting theory, financial metrics, and economic understanding necessary to realize the folly of such a course of action.

Well the British needed to develop all those by the time they had an empire, and it didn't make them give it up. Sure it collapsed eventually but as Orwell pointed out 'societies based on slavery have persisted for such period as four thousand of years'

http://orwell.ru/library/essay...

The British Empire had the accounting theory, financial metrics and economic understanding necessary to become a starfaring species before they had an Empire? Seems like a bit of a stretch, given that we haven't figured out that stuff in the US, even after sending men to the moon and probes beyond the solar system.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[OrangeTide]

Or do the same thing again and expect a different response. Either/or.

Is it doing the same thing? It's a sending a different message, at a different time, to a different location.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[gnick]

Is it doing the same thing?

No. I didn't mean to imply that it was, but I can certainly see how it came across that way. I was just giving a general alternative to "...if at first you don't succeed: give up and quit trying.".

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[luis_a_espinal]

You're assuming Chlorophyll will optimize (adapt /evolve) to the same adsorbtion spectrum at a star with a different EM frequency output. I don't think that is a safe assumption...

Perhaps we can calibrate our assumptions to expect a certain type of photosynthetic absorption as a function of a start's EM frequency output. I don't think people are expecting to find evidence of "green" photosynthesis around a red dwarf, for example.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[micahraleigh]

Science is less about protecting humanity from its worst instincts and more about inflaming contrived goals and enforcing our destruction.

Re:May as well be a billion miles away

[micahraleigh]

By "far and away" you fail to disguise your opinion here.

That's like the court of Ferdinand and Isabella sending a delegation to the Americas to determine the Indians advanced technology.

They weren't fools. They were after bigger things.

Just 11 light years away

[hcs_$reboot]

We might reach this new world in just 200,000 years, great!

Re: Just 11 light years away

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily the case. If you read carefully, Ross 128 is extremely stable red dwarf. It has a tiny fraction of Sun's mass and, due to it's stability, low radiation.

Re:Just 11 light years away

[PolygamousRanchKid]

We might reach this new world in just 200,000 years, great!

Right now, the current President of the USA is talking about building a wall to keep folks out.

I'm thinking, that the next candidate for the President of the USA, Mark Zuckerburg, has plans to build Wormholes.

This one would be just around the corner.

So we could stop by there for a Panzarotti and a Cheesteak for lunch.

Re: Just 11 light years away

[athmanb]

That's really only an effect if you travel at 0.5c or faster. As it is we'd struggle only reaching something like 0.001c.

Re: Just 11 light years away

[K. S. Kyosuke]

And therefore it's also likely to have tidal-locked planets.

Re: Just 11 light years away

[110010001000]

The fastest man made object ever went 0.000134205c. It would take 81,000 years to get there.

Re:Just 11 light years away

[Baron_Yam]

Our best tech - with the theoretical worked out and needing only the relatively minor engineering effort to assemble it - could hit 0.5c and get us there in a 220 years. If we allow for some credible and fairly certain tech improvement, we can double the speed and halve that time. In both cases, adding 11 years for a signal to get back to Earth.

However, I'm of the opinion that anything we can't reach within the working lifetime of a human isn't something we're terribly likely to put any effort into reaching. Whoever creates the probe wants to be around to see the results... so we really need to find something within 4 light years of Earth, and there's nothing in that radius that's similar enough to the Solar system to have anything 'Earth-like' in the way the average person means it.

Re:Just 11 light years away

[TuringTest]

A 4-light-years-away planet system is an awesome test bed for interstellar probes, though.

Re: Just 11 light years away

[I'm New Around Here]

Just do what Kirk and Spock did - slingshot around the sun.

Re:Just 11 light years away

[Baron_Yam]

>A 4-light-years-away planet system is an awesome test bed for interstellar probes

We're not ready yet. Despite the success of the Voyager probes, there is a world of difference between throwing a more-or-less dead probe into the void, and building a device that will still be working and able to navigate after decades in interstellar space.

And multiple delicate instruments would have to be functional, with an onboard computer that is completely autonomous (an 8 year round-trip comms delay means any degree of tele-operation is almost completely pointless). And if your comm laser doesn't have enough juice or isn't aimed with incredible precision... your data never makes it home.

Still, yeah... it's nice to have something 'close by' for when we really are ready to try. And maybe by then we'll be able to break even 0.1c.

Re:Just 11 light years away

[Maritz]

There's at least one planet and a dust belt around proxima centauri, which is literally the closest star to us. That'd probably be a good initial target. Probably won't happen, because we're a pathetic excuse for an advanced species and are too busy cutting bits of our genitals off.

Re: Just 11 light years away

[jabuzz]

Nope nuclear pulse propulsion achieves more like ~0.1c

Re:Just 11 light years away

[Green Mountain Bot]

I assume you meant 0.5 percent of c, not 0.5c, because I don't know of any human tech so far that can hit 0.5c, and I know for a fact that we can't achieve double that with any credible technological improvements on the horizon, unless Einstein is suddenly and completely unexpectedly proven wrong.

Re:Just 11 light years away

[Baron_Yam]

Damn. I keep doing that. Decimal places...

I actually meant 0.05c, which is what would be expected out of an Orion nuclear pulse drive.

0.1c should be achievable with a fusion drive that doesn't require any incredible new scientific discoveries.

>unless Einstein is suddenly and completely unexpectedly proven wrong

I want my personal warp drive so badly, but I'm betting Einstein was right. :)

Re:Just 11 light years away

[Green Mountain Bot]

You and me, both, brother. You and me both.

Re: Just 11 light years away

[Immerman]

A tidally locked planet would have some very interesting energy gradients for life to harvest - winds and ocean currents would likely be extremely strong, driven by intense thermal mixing. Provided the atmosphere doesn't freeze out on the dark side of course.

It also potentially widens the habitability zone, since the light and dark sides will be "comfortable" at very different distances, while the "twilight zone" would offer temptingly steep energy gradients regardless. Whether life could arise there is a question, but if it did, it could almost certainly evolve to survive there.

So the real questions are: could life have arisen before tidal locking, or if not, would tidal locking prevent it from doing so? Keeping in mind that early (proto) life would likely be concentrated around undersea volcanic vents, far from the influence of the diurnal cycle, but would likely require a steady supply of fresh amino acids raining down from above.

Re: Just 11 light years away

[Immerman]

Okay. Now it took 81,000 years, plus a few months for a slingshot that can't impart any net momentum (you can slingshot around planets for a boost because you're stealing momentum from them, the sun is already your reference point)

Honestly that bit always struck me as ridiculous - even at light speed you basically need a black hole to get a sttep enough gravitational gradient to get any major deflection in your path, much less be able to pull off a slingshot maneuver. At warp 9 you could fly straight through the galactic core and barely get a speed boost. Must be something to do with the interactions of the subspace aether-matrix and kranzemetric folds of the warp field...

Re: Just 11 light years away

[Immerman]

Hypothetically of course. Assuming you could build a recoil plate that would survive millions of atomic bombs going off at point-blank range, while avoiding killing your passengers with either the radiation or acceleration.

Re:Just 11 light years away

[Immerman]

I assume you mean 0.05c and the 220 years is the correct part. Still impressive - can you offer a link, a name, something to start my investigation?

I know of a few theoretical technologies that might pull it off after a *massive* R&D effort, but nothing offhand that only requires "minor" engineering effort. (even if minor means what, less than 10x the man-hours invested in the technology so far? 100?)

Re:Just 11 light years away

[Baron_Yam]

Nuclear Pulse Propulsion - the original Orion - can achieve 0.05c. No new technology required, just the will to put a large portion of the economy into moving a lot of mass into space.

More or less you build a big-ass spaceship (that's a metric big-ass, too!) into orbit, mount an ablative shield on the front and a big pusher plate on the back... and then toss the occasional nuclear bomb out behind you and ride the resulting explosions. It's a very 'blunt instrument' approach to moving at high velocities. The math was done a long time ago - as were some practical scale tests using chemical explosives and a model.

The problem, of course, is that even 0.05c isn't all that fast when you're traveling between stars, and people get nervous when you say you want to put hundreds of nuclear bombs into orbit. Or spend the next few years' GDP on building a huge ship that you're never going to see again.

Re:Just 11 light years away

[Baron_Yam]

It seems it'd be easier to integrate Facebook with government databases and use it in place of birth, death, and marriage certificates, land registration, drivers' licenses, public school diplomas, maybe even health records (you can trust those privacy settings, we swear!).

Think of all the cost savings!

Re:Just 11 light years away

[Immerman]

I hadn't realized the Orion had even that much speed potential.

Re:Just 11 light years away

[RockDoctor]

0.1c should be achievable with a fusion drive that doesn't require any incredible new scientific discoveries.

A fusion power plant would provide far larger amounts of energy to a spacecraft (at the expense of considerably increasing size and mass). It would do nothing about providing propulsion. For that we've got a choice of throwing reaction mass out the back (or sides) of the vessel - the rocket principle and it's reaction mass problem - or throwing photons out the back (sides) to achieve the same transfer of momentum.

The only non-reaction drive around is the putative NASA EM-cavity drive, and the physics of that are definitely not sure while the engineering is tiny forces in large mechanisms, and a long way from convincing.

Re:Just 11 light years away

[Baron_Yam]

1) Fusion rockets are a thing. You don't worry about complete magnetic confinement in a very specific way, and the result is that you get a particle stream that provides thrust.

2) " the putative NASA EM-cavity drive, and the physics of that are definitely not sure"? It's pure fantasy.

So, basically you've ignorantly discounted an actual thing while promoting something that isn't a thing. You're not ready to take part in this discussion quite yet.

Re:Just 11 light years away

[RespekMyAthorati]

However, I'm of the opinion that anything we can't reach within the working lifetime of a human isn't something we're terribly likely to put any effort into reaching.

Unless we develop some kind of hibernation, which is tricky but by no means impossible.

Re:Just 11 light years away

[RockDoctor]

1) Fusion rockets are a thing. You don't worry about complete magnetic confinement in a very specific way, and the result is that you get a particle stream that provides thrust.

So it's a completely regular rocket, although having a fusion power source, not hampsters in a cage. Meh. You still have to provide reaction mass of some sort - in this case, refined hydrogen/ deuterium/ tritium mix - which gets thrown out of the back end of the spacecraft and in the process produces momentum forwards. A rocket. You'll need to provide it with reaction mass all the time, which you then throw away. Newton's third law, pure and simple.

On a long mission, your main resource consumed will be the reaction mass. If you can make the drive run on the crew's shit, or ice from a comet nucleus you pick up en route, then you make that mass serve double duty, but you still have to accelerate it with your payload, then throw it away backwards.

You can get the efficiency of use of your reaction mass higher by increasing the exhaust velocity. But that's capped at c. Which also applies to throwing photons out the back of your rocket, but they have the advantage of being created at use, and you don't need to accelerate a shipload of photons alongside your payload.

[Fusion rockets] an actual thing

When did someone make a fusion reactor and fly it to demonstrate it's drive efficiency? Got a DOI for the engineering report on the flight?

But it's coming our way!

[Anonymous Coward]

In 79000 years, Ross 128 will be the closest star to the solar system. That's the most exciting part and somehow not included in the sunmary...

Re:But it's coming our way!

[Maritz]

It's a bit early to get excited about it.

Illegal Aliens

[Anonymous Coward]

We are building a wall at the edge of the solar system - and we'll make the aliens pay!

Send them an IM

[wolfheart111]

Invite them to facebook. :)

Re:Send them an IM

[K. S. Kyosuke]

IM = interstellar message? (But how do we know that they actually have a face?)

Re:Send them an IM

[fph il quozientatore]

Good point -- It's a great way to hinder their scientific development and make sure they are never going to be a threat for humanity.

Re:Hasn't this story been covered already?

[Henning Rogge]

That said, "only 11 lightyears away" is worth a good chuckle.

Hey, the Ross 128 spaceport is only two hyperspace jumps away from Earth when you lift off for the first time.

Yeah, good old time... has it already been 24 years?

Will it be tidally locked?

[beanfeast]

The paper gives the planet's orbital period as 9.9 days. I don't know the maths, but I assume the closer a small body is to a large one the quicker it becomes tidally locked . What impact would tidal locking have on the habitability of the planet?

Re:Will it be tidally locked?

[Spy Handler]

It will be tidally locked. That doesn't mean it can't support life, though.

Imagine if earth was tidally locked to the sun. Will there be life? Sure. But maybe not on the dark side, and maybe the area in direct perpetual sunlight will be a hot desert. However near the edges of the terminator should be pretty habitable. Maybe a "ribbon" world.

Re:Will it be tidally locked?

[Anonymous Coward]

Habitable with mach speed winds moving air between the hot and cold sides.

Re:Will it be tidally locked?

[Spy Handler]

bro do u even Asimov?

Re:Will it be tidally locked?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mercury is tidally locked to the sun, and has no wind.

No, it's not:

Mercury is gravitationally locked with the Sun in a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance,[15] and rotates in a way that is unique in the Solar System. As seen relative to the fixed stars, it rotates on its axis exactly three times for every two revolutions it makes around the Sun.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)

Re:Will it be tidally locked?

[Maritz]

Well (1) it isn't actually tidally locked, and (2) it doesn't have an atmosphere to speak of, so what would the 'wind' be made of?

Re:Will it be tidally locked?

[RockDoctor]

What impact would tidal locking have on the habitability of the planet?

Good question. To which, nobody knows the answer. Discussions about the question have been tossing from the world of science fiction to atmospheric physics and beyond for decades, with on average neutral results. Nobody knows, still.

Solar Flares?

[SpaceCracker]

Ha, Tardigrades eat 6 of those before breakfast.

It's cold outside

[ChrisMaple]

There's no kind of atmosphere.

Re:It's cold outside

[Maritz]

I'm all alone....

Thats more like it

[wolfheart111]

I doubt our nearest neighbour would harbour any significant life.... shit just dont work that way, dont you agree.

Re:Thats more like it

[Maritz]

I agree. I would be very surprised if the observable universe contained no advanced life, and probably roughly as surprised if any advanced life was found elsewhere in our galaxy.

Just damn!

[reboot246]

You found us!

Ross 128 has a high X-ray luminosity

[StupendousMan]

The authors of the paper use measurements of the host star's optical spectrum to infer that it doesn't produce a lot of UV emission, and note that it doesn't have frequent optical flares. That's good news for the habitability of the planet around it, as they point out.

However, they apparently did not note that Ross 128 is a relatively strong X-ray source, as measurements by the ROSAT X-ray satellite show. A colleague of mine worked out the X-ray luminosity of the host star, and it turns out to be not unlike that of the Sun, or even larger. That means that the X-ray flux striking the planet -- which is very close to this host star -- is likely high enough to remove the atmosphere of the planet. No atmosphere means not so interesting a planet, alas.

Re:Hasn't this story been covered already?

[lorinc]

If you think this is not new, you should wait for the dup coming tomorrow!

Obligatory...

[TuringTest]

Seedship.

There are also native mobile versions of this space exploration game.

Re: Why can't we move planets?

[Anonymous Coward]

The kinetic energy of a planet in orbit is humongous, about 2.7x10^33 Joules. If you wanted to change that kinetic energy by 1%, and you had access to all the solar energy hitting the Earth, 3.2x10^20 J/h (89,000 TW), it would take nearly 10^12 h, over 100 million years. And that's without figuring out what to use for reaction Mass. Nope. Terraforming has to be a whole lot easier.

Re:we know earth is flat

[Maritz]

I looked it up, but it just says you're a dickhead.

Re:Why can't we move planets?

[Maritz]

I reckon for the foreseeable future we can file 'change planetary orbits' under 'non-trivial problems'.

Re:No thanks.

[ledow]

Hey, look at it this way.

We'd be good entertainment. They'll have a good laugh if nothing else.

More resources in the asteroid belt than on Earth

[huckamania]

It would be like flying to Europe for a Big Mac and passing about 15,000 McDonalds on the way.

To travel long distances in space you have to really not need anything. If you did need something, you won't last long. So we are probably talking about a post-scarcity society. To them gold, diamonds, jewels will be trifles. To space faring civilizations, "Money is a sign of poverty".

Re:Hasn't this story been covered already?

[Immerman]

Well, we certainly won't be sending humans there any time soon, but we could get a pretty good look at it if we ever decided to build a serious space telescope, and it's potentially within range of a multi-century insterstellar probe if we ever decide to build one.

11 light years away is practically in our backyard astronomically speaking - there's only 12 known stars within 10 light years of Earth.

FYI....

[MerlTurkin]

One light year is 6 Trillion miles.

I'm outta here

[whitroth]

Now I know where to point my ship, time to buy the hull build and install my engines with FTL, and I'm *gone*.

You can keep Trumpolini & co.

Re: Why can't we move planets?

[luis_a_espinal]

The kinetic energy of a planet in orbit is humongous, about 2.7x10^33 Joules. If you wanted to change that kinetic energy by 1%, and you had access to all the solar energy hitting the Earth, 3.2x10^20 J/h (89,000 TW), it would take nearly 10^12 h, over 100 million years. And that's without figuring out what to use for reaction Mass. Nope. Terraforming has to be a whole lot easier.

That or we buy a planet mover from the Outsiders. http://larryniven.wikia.com/wi...

Re: Why can't we move planets?

[RockDoctor]

Terraforming has to be a whole lot easier.

In terms of cubic metres of environment per gigajoule of investment, living inside rotating space stations (or lunar stations) will be ridiculously more efficient - and many millennia quicker to achieve - than terraforming anything. Even assuming that sufficient materials for your terraforming project exist in your planetary system, which is not subject to any sort of guarantee.