591–600 of 754 posts
My favourite part of the press release: > The planets also are very close to each other. If a person was standing on one of the planet’s surface, they could gaze up and potentially see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear larger than the moon in Earth's sky. > In contrast to our sun, the TRAPPIST-1 star – classified as an ultra-cool dwarf – is so cool that liquid water cou…
My favourite part of the press release: > The planets also are very close to each other. If a person was standing on one of the planet’s surface, they could gaze up and potentially see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear larger than the moon in Earth's sky. > In contrast to our sun, the TRAPPIST-1 star – classified as an ultra-cool dwarf – is so cool that liquid water cou…
> The planets also are very close to each other. If a person was standing on one of the planet’s surface, they could gaze up and potentially see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear larger than the moon in Earth's sky. this reminds me of one my favorite films ever. it is just four minutes long http://www.erikwernquist.com/wanderers/
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There's no other conceivable extinction event that could occur "a couple years out". If you're talking climate change, then I agree that's a major problem, but on the order of at least decades.
> There's no other conceivable extinction event that could occur "a couple years out". Life on earth could end in the next five minutes. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLykC1VN7NY
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Corrections aside, it is an interesting observation that Firefly is less outlandish with this discovery (not a criticism, Firefly is optimized for fun, not scientific plausibility). Still, assuming light speed travel, Firefly's inhabited planets are still a heck of a lot closer, since the crew doesn't seem to noticeably age between the half dozen or so star systems that they visit, and don't appear to have any kind o…
> Still, assuming light speed travel, Firefly's inhabited planets are still a heck of a lot closer, since the crew doesn't seem to noticeably age between the half dozen or so star systems that they visit, and don't appear to have any kind of tech to reversibly[1] halt their metabolisms. Closer than what? This system is significantly smaller than Firefly's. Or do you mean closer than this system is to Earth? Don't wor…
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Fascinating! Would vira or bacteria beable to survive travelling from Earth to Mars in or on a rock or vice versa?
Short answer: almost certainly yes, although i presume this is an improbable event.
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That's not depressing. It gives us a moral imperative to transplant Earth-origin life onto every somewhat concentrated mass that we can reach. Then we can wait a few billion years, and the universe will likely have generated a superior successor species which can then re-seed over everything we had previously tilled, and then some. And they'll all be rubber-forehead aliens to one another, because they'll be billionth…
Who is to say we aren't already transplants just looking to reconnect with our cousins?
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Uh, "1-2 trillion" IS "trillions". I'm not sure how you can make that out to be misleading. Stating "trillions" in lieu of "tens of trillions" or "hundreds of billions" might be misleading, but this is not.
It seems the rest of HN disagrees with me, but when I hear "trillions" I think in plurality of trillions, a handful maybe, but afaik these things don't really live past 2 trillion years
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There's no other conceivable extinction event that could occur "a couple years out". If you're talking climate change, then I agree that's a major problem, but on the order of at least decades.
Plus climate change would have to get pretty incredibly bad for, say, Mars to start looking easier to live on than Earth. That's the problem with colonization as an Earth back-up—even Antarctica and the Sahara Desert are more livable than any other body in the Solar System, by a long shot. Another Snowball Earth or a heavily desertified Earth would still be preferable to Mars. Throw in a fair amount of radiation, eve…