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Two potentially life-friendly planets found orbiting a nearby star

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Re: Two potentially life-friendly planets found orbiting a nearby star

#171

Post by corodra »

onemoresoop wrote: post #153
corodra wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I'm not bashing you at all. You're absolutely correct. You bring up extremely important things to realize when discussing space travel. Especially long term missions. Political will being the reason why these missions haven't happened, as someone else mentioned, is total crap. It's just an easy excuse to not think of ACTUAL consequences and live in a scifi fantasy.

Yes I agree, we seem to be working on the wrong problems or get the priorities wrong. We keep on inventing newer technologies which come with newer problems while the ship is slowly but surely sinking. Sometimes I wonder what would it take for all of us to join a concerted effort to concentrate on the real problems we have. Technologies seem to veer into an escapist route, some way for us to run away from the problem…

I think this is exactly why there's an apocalypse fantasy/fetish. It's in our psyche that we're all focused on... well... dumb shit. A post-apocalypse lifestyle makes you focus on what I think we can all truly appreciate as important. There's a lot of interesting studies done on localized disasters where the idea of community actually erupts out of it. People working together and sharing, regardless of their "social status". It's all short lived until the outside world aid arrives and you still get a few bad actors in the mix (though it seems statistically, no where near as many as we think). Generally though, it takes hell on Earth for us to regain our "humanity".

Not trying to be edgy, but I think a lot of society problems stem from more and more globalization. When you're less than a drop in a gigantic pool of people, it's hard to feel like anything matters. Not saying the closed off, nationalism system is any better in the long term. It's just hard to determine a balance to the system. And with that lack of balance, we run away into the escapes you mentioned.

Sigh... well, I just ruined my day thinking about this crap again.

Re: Two potentially life-friendly planets found orbiting a nearby star

#172

Post by rainygold »

psychometry wrote: post #162
cjbprime wrote: post #155

The trilogy _Three Body Problem_ is a good read, and has something to say about this. :)

I had high hopes, but TBP is a terrible novel. It certainly has some fascinating ideas, but just as many ludicrous ones that are equally central to the plot. Not to mention Liu is absolutely terrible at anything relating to characters: dialogue, character development, etc.

Reading that someone else had this opinion of TBP is so valididating. The book receives much hype but the characters are weak and forgettable.

Re: Two potentially life-friendly planets found orbiting a nearby star

#173

Post by namarie »

stcredzero wrote: post #160
XorNot wrote: post #107

The note that it's an old star makes me worry though. If they're older then us, and habitable, were they inhabited? Our current era is a few hundred years of real, directed technological development. A few thousands years either side of that and who knows what we'd be looking at, but you imagine that - hopefully - the general progression of technology is forward. So if they were inhabited, what happened to them? Are…

The note that it's an old star makes me worry though. If they're older than us, and habitable, were they inhabited? Many dwarf stars have more solar flares than our sun, while their planets are closer. Teegarden's star is supposed to be very calm right now. I have no idea if that is likely to be true over most of the past 8 billion years. The amount of water they gather may be smaller, and their closer planets may no…

> Let's say the origin of life is a million to one filter, and the successful development of sentience is another million to one filter. Those are actually pretty high odds for those two events, and the combination of those two togehter is enough to make it likely we're alone in the Milky Way.

I mean, not really? Doesn't the Milky Way have ~100 billion stars?

Re: Two potentially life-friendly planets found orbiting a nearby star

#174

Post by akiselev »

soulofmischief wrote: post #165
joshuahedlund wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes 12 ly is amazingly close! > If we presume there's nothing special about our little corner of the universe, then the distance to the nearest potentially habitable planets gives us an estimate of how many habitable planets are out there I would put a slight caveat to this - I would argue we do know there's something "special" about our little corner of the galaxy , at least - we are in the continuously habitable zo…

Wouldn't each system's star do a decent job of pushing back extra-solar radiation? Up to a point, obviously, but it would seem that planetary background radiation levels aren't a direct function of solar density.

It's not the density of the star but the density of stars. Dense clusters like those found in the center of our galaxy create a lot of secondary effects like bigger stars pulling matter away from smaller stars (creating lots of background radiation and matter floating around) and then stars plow through those interstellar clouds, creating deadly bursts capable of cooking entire planets, stripping away their atmospheres, etc. In the center of the galaxy, these events happen so frequently that it's extremely unlikely life on any of the planets would survive long enough to evolve beyond simple single celled organisms.

Re: Two potentially life-friendly planets found orbiting a nearby star

#175

Post by jcranmer »

namarie wrote: post #173
stcredzero wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The note that it's an old star makes me worry though. If they're older than us, and habitable, were they inhabited? Many dwarf stars have more solar flares than our sun, while their planets are closer. Teegarden's star is supposed to be very calm right now. I have no idea if that is likely to be true over most of the past 8 billion years. The amount of water they gather may be smaller, and their closer planets may no…

> Let's say the origin of life is a million to one filter, and the successful development of sentience is another million to one filter. Those are actually pretty high odds for those two events, and the combination of those two togehter is enough to make it likely we're alone in the Milky Way. I mean, not really? Doesn't the Milky Way have ~100 billion stars?

(million: 1)^2 * 100 billion gives an estimate of ~0.1 stars in the Milky Way that host life.

Re: Two potentially life-friendly planets found orbiting a nearby star

#176

Post by sambeau »

"Seen here in an illustration"

This half-hearted attempt to say that the impressive-looking image of The Nearby Star was in fact an artist's impression of what a Red Dwarf might look like, made me laugh. Is it seen here? Or is it an illustration? I suspect someone changed the copy just before publishing

Re: Two potentially life-friendly planets found orbiting a nearby star

#177

Post by tim333 »

petercooper wrote: post #31
TeMPOraL wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And "just" 24 years over radio if there's anyone there to talk with ;).

I doubt I'm alone in this, but I do find it simultaneously amusing and depressing how mind bogglingly big the universe (or even the galaxy) is. It's clear that discovering entirely new levels of physics will be necessary to stand a chance of going anywhere.

Or entirely new levels of lifespan. Just upload yourself to the grid and boot up in a few million years.

Re: Two potentially life-friendly planets found orbiting a nearby star

#178

Post by soulofmischief »

akiselev wrote: post #174
soulofmischief wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't each system's star do a decent job of pushing back extra-solar radiation? Up to a point, obviously, but it would seem that planetary background radiation levels aren't a direct function of solar density.

It's not the density of the star but the density of stars. Dense clusters like those found in the center of our galaxy create a lot of secondary effects like bigger stars pulling matter away from smaller stars (creating lots of background radiation and matter floating around) and then stars plow through those interstellar clouds, creating deadly bursts capable of cooking entire planets, stripping away their atmospher…

I'm talking about the local solar density, not an individual star's density. Obviously that has little effect on the habitable zone of a planet.

My question was about the ability of a system's star's own radiation to ward off extra-solar radiation and what kind of limitations we are aware of.

Re: Two potentially life-friendly planets found orbiting a nearby star

#179

Post by [deleted] »

superpermutat0r wrote: post #145
Eupolemos wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think current technology makes no sense when talking about interstellar travel. I wonder how long it'd take, seen from the perspective of the ship, if we had an engine capable of delivering a constant 1g acceleration. That's the way we'll want to travel, after all.

constant 1g acceleration gets you to speed of light pretty quickly (around 1 year), so still around 12 years.

[deleted]

Re: Two potentially life-friendly planets found orbiting a nearby star

#180

Post by morsmodr »

burtonator wrote: post #137
petercooper wrote: post #20

"just 12 light-years away" I love the "just". I know it's nearby on galactic scales but it's practically about 450,000 Earth years away with current technology :-)

By way of comparison the entire 'human'species is about that age. += 250-500k years depending on how you measure. Honestly it's far far far better to focus on reaching superhuman intelligence and AGI and then just creating a Dyson sphere around our sun. At that point we can try to figure out FTL travel...

This! If you look at all the life on Earth, humans are the only ones to have maximized brain functionality and evolved to change their surroundings on a global scale. We should continue focusing on superhuman intelligence and AGI which will solve problems that we cannot simply right now due to our evolutionary limit at this point in time.
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