I'm a bit surprised at how many people are saying "It's only 20 lightyears away! Awesome!"
You know, 20 light years is a whole fucking lot.
You know, 20 light years is a whole fucking lot.
Earth like planet found. Your reactions?
- Thread starter Baron Von Evil Satan
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okay first thought, are we gonna survive as a race long enough to be able to actually develop the means to get there quickly?
second thought once we get there if there's intelligent life its gonna boil down to; if we fuck up, we're most likely screwed. if we take it the right way and with proper diplomacy, the life on that planet will have the tech to withstand that heat and cold which we would then steal adapt and make use to inhabit the rest of the planet.
third thought, all depends on our tech when we reach this planet.
plus, the names not very imaginative, just imagine your kids saying "i'm off to goldilocks for a holiday!" sounds like their going to see a prostitute or some extremely loose whore
second thought once we get there if there's intelligent life its gonna boil down to; if we fuck up, we're most likely screwed. if we take it the right way and with proper diplomacy, the life on that planet will have the tech to withstand that heat and cold which we would then steal adapt and make use to inhabit the rest of the planet.
third thought, all depends on our tech when we reach this planet.
plus, the names not very imaginative, just imagine your kids saying "i'm off to goldilocks for a holiday!" sounds like their going to see a prostitute or some extremely loose whore
So anyone remember Mars Direct? Essentially a cheap program to colonize mars (put people there, create atmosphere, settle) over a period of a few hundred to a thousand years. It was turned down by everything with the power to make it happen. I doubt we will have much interaction (or more knowledge as a common limitation of technology) coming from this thing anytime soon.
Now if we want to compare the living conditions, yes there is a small amount of work that goes into colonizing mars but it at least has ~a 24 hour day. This means that it will have acceptable temperatures when settled. However the article says that this new planet rotates so slowly that one side is constantly 160 degrees while the other is 25 degrees, leaving little room in the middle to be considered inhabitable.
However the main reason I bring up mars is because of the original problem scientist thought we faced going there. Travel. Originally scientist proposed that a craft would have to launch into space, and then create a station there, that could launch another craft capable of making it to mars and back. This concern is due to weight limitations on modern spacecrafts not being high enough to carry the fuel for a full trip(and launching from space doesn't require much fuel obviously). This was solved in Mars Direct with the idea that the fuels components could be gathered on mars by an unmanned spacecraft(hydrogen, carbon, oxygen all exist on mars). Then a second craft actually carrying humans would launch and by the time they got there the first craft has created 95% of the fuel required(the other 5% can not be created there so the second craft must carry it). So you see even to get somewhere a few light minutes away takes extreme scientific creativity and that is why I feel learning any more about a body 20someodd light-years away will not happen during my lifetime.
Now if we want to compare the living conditions, yes there is a small amount of work that goes into colonizing mars but it at least has ~a 24 hour day. This means that it will have acceptable temperatures when settled. However the article says that this new planet rotates so slowly that one side is constantly 160 degrees while the other is 25 degrees, leaving little room in the middle to be considered inhabitable.
However the main reason I bring up mars is because of the original problem scientist thought we faced going there. Travel. Originally scientist proposed that a craft would have to launch into space, and then create a station there, that could launch another craft capable of making it to mars and back. This concern is due to weight limitations on modern spacecrafts not being high enough to carry the fuel for a full trip(and launching from space doesn't require much fuel obviously). This was solved in Mars Direct with the idea that the fuels components could be gathered on mars by an unmanned spacecraft(hydrogen, carbon, oxygen all exist on mars). Then a second craft actually carrying humans would launch and by the time they got there the first craft has created 95% of the fuel required(the other 5% can not be created there so the second craft must carry it). So you see even to get somewhere a few light minutes away takes extreme scientific creativity and that is why I feel learning any more about a body 20someodd light-years away will not happen during my lifetime.
yeah this, plus how would you like to be getting baked out in that 160 degree weather? fuckkkkk thatt.Good morning blues said:
i mean this is amazing and all. but until we can warp speed and control black holes..etc... then im not getting my hopes up for anything special.
Oh great, If we would be able to travel at the speed of light and store enough fuel, we could hear if there was anything interesting there in 40 years...anyone up for cryogenically freezing themselves for a few hundred years?
Nope, you can accelerate something to several trillion times the speed of light, if you are the really boring sort of scientist who can work meticulously. Now actually reaching the speed of light...hm, that would break the universe (literally). Anyway, acceleration=!velocitySaltyk said:
But hey, there's always time dilation to help in our exploratory endeavors. Say you manage to build a spaceship that can travel at 75% the speed of light (makes the math easy), then it would take ~25 years to get there. However, only ~16.5 years would pass onboard, thanks to special relativity. This effect increases the faster you go, so it is theoretically possible to make the entire journey in a day, while only a bit more than 20 years pass on earth. So yeah, space exploration isn't impossible, despite what old and useless tossers like Steven Weinberg say.
Thats awesome, really is
If true that it is in a "habitable zone" who knows what type of life could develop given its differences to earth.
"It is about three times the mass of Earth, slightly larger in width and much closer to its star ? 14 million miles away versus 93 million"
Its larger and hotter, given adaptation to enviroment any dominant species to evolve would have to adapt to more intense heat.
"It's so close to its version of the sun that it orbits every 37 days."
So in Gliese 581g years(name of planet if didnt read whole article) I am 226 years old, pretty sweet.
"And it doesn't rotate much, so one side is almost always bright, the other dark."
Now this part could be REALLY cool. Pitch black anyone?? The side that is always dark could have life forms evolving much like bats, almost blind but perhaps to be dominant on this side of planet become fierce predators. On the light side evolves a life form more resistant to intense heat. Can almost see their cautionary tales now "Dont go to the dark side of the planet, dangerous creatures dwell there"
Lol
If true that it is in a "habitable zone" who knows what type of life could develop given its differences to earth.
"It is about three times the mass of Earth, slightly larger in width and much closer to its star ? 14 million miles away versus 93 million"
Its larger and hotter, given adaptation to enviroment any dominant species to evolve would have to adapt to more intense heat.
"It's so close to its version of the sun that it orbits every 37 days."
So in Gliese 581g years(name of planet if didnt read whole article) I am 226 years old, pretty sweet.
"And it doesn't rotate much, so one side is almost always bright, the other dark."
Now this part could be REALLY cool. Pitch black anyone?? The side that is always dark could have life forms evolving much like bats, almost blind but perhaps to be dominant on this side of planet become fierce predators. On the light side evolves a life form more resistant to intense heat. Can almost see their cautionary tales now "Dont go to the dark side of the planet, dangerous creatures dwell there"
Lol
Okay so who wants to name the planet Escapist/Reach with me, bring a bunch of guns, colonize it and make the video game industry the most imporantant and do away with extremists of any kind, also if there is intelligent life just remember something:
We're humans, when we find something we call dibs and even if other people we're there first we just kill on enslave them then call dibs.
I would laugh if the next revelation is: Extremist Religious Aliens discovered around Goldilocks
We're humans, when we find something we call dibs and even if other people we're there first we just kill on enslave them then call dibs.
I would laugh if the next revelation is: Extremist Religious Aliens discovered around Goldilocks
Old news, we are never going to reach it. Let's be honest. To make that trip the entire planet would need to pool resources, and that will just never happen.
Well yeah, it's an impossible distance to overcome, but on the scale of the universe it's a stone's throw.Hubilub said:
Also the fact that there's an earth-like planet so close (on a large scale) to us means that there's probably billions of "earths" out there.
Of course we will never be able to travel there, Voyager 2 has only traveled a distance of approximately 1 light day in its 33 years in space, but in terms of the implications this discovery has on our idea concerning the probability of intelligent life besides us in the universe, I'd say it's fair to call "only" 20 light years awesome.
