Two potentially life-friendly planets found orbiting a nearby star

Post by koheripbal » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

inetknght wrote: post #150

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…

> Are they exactly at our level of development? If so, then at just 12ly away, we could converse with them within (many of) our lifetimes.

Post by airstrike » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #148

airstrike wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And if we are going to build an underground colony....then why not start with one here on Earth? Because if an asteroid hits Earth or if the world superpowers decide to go full nuclear, the underground colony in Mars will survive (unless superpowers decide to nuke that from here as well...)

I'd argue that a colony at the bottom of our own ocean would survive literally any event of any magnitude, maybe except for a direct asteroid strike. In terms of survivability of the human race, that's a better project to start with - and of course then move on to other planets, but underwater/underground colonies would give us lots of insights into living in such environments permanently.

Post by hughes » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

sambeau wrote: post #176

"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

Post by hesk » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 6:17 PM UTC

CWuestefeld wrote: post #192

I saw a study recently, unfortunately I can't locate it now. It discussed the possibility of there having been past civilizations on Earth, hundreds of millions or even billions of years ago. The conclusion was that this can't be entirely ruled out. It noted how few actual fossil remains we have for what we know of dinosaurs, and that there's a lot of space left in those gaps for all the evidence to have been destroy…

Post by bencollier49 » Tue, Jun 18, 2019, 6:20 PM UTC

titzer wrote: post #87

Evidlo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because then it would be a double planet.

It depends on how big the "main" planet is, I guess. But I think we are running into definitional issues here, and it gets technical very fast. First, IAU does not recognize the term "double planet". Second, a body which is large enough to reach hydrostatic equilibrium (i.e. a sphere) but has not yet cleared its orbit is technically not a planet. So I don't know where this leaves us. A Jupiter-sized planet with an Ea…