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NASA to announce 'intriguing planetary system' discovery on Thursday

nasa.gov

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Re: NASA to announce 'intriguing planetary system' discovery on Thursday

#31

Post by pierre_M »

anigbrowl wrote: post #12
myth_drannon wrote: post #6

I'm quoting a person who works on that project: "They discovered a huge number of Earth-like planets. The new count is vastly outnumbers previous estimations even over the gas giants due to imperfect technology." The remaining conclusions are up to you, even if they are not going to be voiced at the conference....

The reason I found it interesting was that the news about 'hundreds' of Earth-like planets (using a very ballpark description of 'Earth-like,' of course) filtered out back in June in the usual fairly low-key fashion. This announcement refers to a 'new discovery about an intriguing planetary system' - in other ones, just one solar system out of the hundreds of possible candidates. Maybe it's nothing more than extreme…

If there's one they find "particularly intriguing" I'm guessing it's a rocky planet within the habitable (ie liquid water) zone.

It would have to be a relatively cool star, since it would have to be orbiting more than once per Earth year if they'd had time to observe it.

One more guess: they've observed something with moons. The Kepler instrument should, I think, be capable of resolving an Earth-sized moon orbiting a gas giant, once you've watched it go round enough times.

Re: NASA to announce 'intriguing planetary system' discovery on Thursday

#34

Post by njharman »

0x44 wrote: post #26
sprout wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you have the resources to get from here to a Mars-like planet, turning it into a habitable world should be trivial, so Mars is Earth-like enough for colonization purposes at least.

That doesn't seem to hold up empirically. We have the resources to get from here to a Mars-like planet (namely, Mars), yet we don't have the ability to trivially turn uninhabitable areas of our own planet into earth-like enough places for human colonization.

>trivially turn uninhabitable areas of our own planet into earth-like enough places for human colonization.

What?

They're called "houses". See also, desert irrigation, slash/burn farming, terrace farming, and Lapplanders & Inuit peoples.

Edit: But yes, parent's comment that Mars is trivially terraformed is as bonkers as your post.

Re: NASA to announce 'intriguing planetary system' discovery on Thursday

#35

Post by sprout »

njharman wrote: post #34
0x44 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't seem to hold up empirically. We have the resources to get from here to a Mars-like planet (namely, Mars), yet we don't have the ability to trivially turn uninhabitable areas of our own planet into earth-like enough places for human colonization.

>trivially turn uninhabitable areas of our own planet into earth-like enough places for human colonization. What? They're called "houses". See also, desert irrigation, slash/burn farming, terrace farming, and Lapplanders & Inuit peoples. Edit: But yes, parent's comment that Mars is trivially terraformed is as bonkers as your post.

I thought it was clear from my post when I said "Mars-like" that excluded Mars. (Since the subject of debate is extrasolar planets.)

And I was speaking in reference to traveling to that planet, which is virtually impossible with current technology.

And to expand a little more, I would say a generation ship of some sort would be required to get even to Alpha Centauri, so creating a self-sustaining ecosystem from whole cloth is a prerequisite for traveling to extrasolar planets.

Now, you could make an argument that some magic FTL technology will appear, but I still think that terraforming is a trivial problem by comparison.

Re: NASA to announce 'intriguing planetary system' discovery on Thursday

#36

Post by 0x44 »

njharman wrote: post #34
0x44 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't seem to hold up empirically. We have the resources to get from here to a Mars-like planet (namely, Mars), yet we don't have the ability to trivially turn uninhabitable areas of our own planet into earth-like enough places for human colonization.

>trivially turn uninhabitable areas of our own planet into earth-like enough places for human colonization. What? They're called "houses". See also, desert irrigation, slash/burn farming, terrace farming, and Lapplanders & Inuit peoples. Edit: But yes, parent's comment that Mars is trivially terraformed is as bonkers as your post.

Houses aren't terraformed colonies, and they're definitely not closed cycle. Anything we would set up on Mars (or a Mars-like planet) would necessarily have to be, because the planet lacks a human friendly biosphere and volatiles with which we could support them. We can't terraform the Sahara into something 200 people could live in for any extended period of time.

Re: NASA to announce 'intriguing planetary system' discovery on Thursday

#37

Post by mdisraeli »

0x44 wrote: post #36
njharman wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>trivially turn uninhabitable areas of our own planet into earth-like enough places for human colonization. What? They're called "houses". See also, desert irrigation, slash/burn farming, terrace farming, and Lapplanders & Inuit peoples. Edit: But yes, parent's comment that Mars is trivially terraformed is as bonkers as your post.

Houses aren't terraformed colonies, and they're definitely not closed cycle. Anything we would set up on Mars (or a Mars-like planet) would necessarily have to be, because the planet lacks a human friendly biosphere and volatiles with which we could support them. We can't terraform the Sahara into something 200 people could live in for any extended period of time.

Teraforming an entire planet would, in many respects, be simpler than safely teraforming just the Sahara and nothing else at the same time.

We don't even need to make Mars better than the Sahara. The primary objective would be to raise the pressure to that at which a pressure suit wouldn't be needed, and the temperature such that that too would meet what we currently can handle on earth. Once we've got that, the rest would be fairly straightforward (I'd argue that atmospheric manipulation is harder than getting life to colonise the regolith).

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