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Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet

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Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet

#291

I got into the Wait Calculation[1] a few weeks back and made a Jupyter notebook out of it. At our current max speed (692,000 km/hr, stated max speed of Parker Space Probe), it would take about 173,000 years to get to that planet. We could instead choose to Wait and grow our tech. By picking a constant annual growth rate and then doing some calculus to find the minimum, we can calculate the shortest possible time it w…

That's a lot of hand-waving. Reminds me of Drake equation. Why not just admit we have no clue yet? Also the Parker Solar Probe speed is due to orbital mechanics of basically free-falling towards the sun and you'd have to do things very differently if you wanted to have that speed going out of the solar system.

Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a guy who lives in a finite world where energy comes mainly from fossil fue in a way or another, I do not assume that any constant progress in energy supply is something achievable.

As soon as you get fusion the game drastically changes. And fusion is only 30 years away.

Isn't it always 30 years away?

Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet

#293
post #9

What makes a planet an "alien" planet?

Yeah that was my first thought when reading the headline: "yet another habitable planet found" is getting old, now we need to mention it's "alien" (generally associated with green men, or more broadly, life not originating from earth; not with a planet) to get attention.

Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet

#294

I got into the Wait Calculation[1] a few weeks back and made a Jupyter notebook out of it. At our current max speed (692,000 km/hr, stated max speed of Parker Space Probe), it would take about 173,000 years to get to that planet. We could instead choose to Wait and grow our tech. By picking a constant annual growth rate and then doing some calculus to find the minimum, we can calculate the shortest possible time it w…

So our only hope to see a planet different from ours is that some advanced alien population comes to "see" us, with all the implications this has...

Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet

#295
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as you get fusion the game drastically changes. And fusion is only 30 years away.

Isn't it always 30 years away?

No. It's mostly a number of Euros away and we haven't been funding it very well.

Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet

#296
post #294

I got into the Wait Calculation[1] a few weeks back and made a Jupyter notebook out of it. At our current max speed (692,000 km/hr, stated max speed of Parker Space Probe), it would take about 173,000 years to get to that planet. We could instead choose to Wait and grow our tech. By picking a constant annual growth rate and then doing some calculus to find the minimum, we can calculate the shortest possible time it w…

So our only hope to see a planet different from ours is that some advanced alien population comes to "see" us, with all the implications this has...

History does not favour the civilization which is visited.

Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything in the Culture series by Iain M. Banks; The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey; The Commonwealth and Void trilogies by Peter F. Hamilton, and the Night’s Dawn trilogy also by Peter F. Hamilton; The Dune saga by Frank Herbert.

Hamilton’s The Reality Dysfunction was the stupidest book I’ve ever read and took hundreds of pages to expose itself. Are his others any more grounded (like your other suggestions)?

did you read the same book as me.. it was pretty awesome

Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have said, E=mv^2/2 only holds at very small fractions of the speed of light. I believe the equation you need is E=mc^2/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)-mv^2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy#Relativistic_ki...

Can you explain this further? It seems this is relevant more for something other than the Wait Calculation. The original Wait Calculation doesn't factor in mass at all. I'm having trouble understanding what this impacts. Is this more about relativistic time passage, like from the ship traveler versus the observer? Most scenarios I've explored - low velocity growth rate, nearby planets/stars - the Wait Calculation tel…

Honestly, I made that comment without fully thinking through how to implement my suggestion, and now I realize that I've stumped myself. However, let me explain what I meant anyway:

First of all, you're right that this won't really impact your answer at insignificant fractions of light speed. You mentioned that using the 4.72% growth rate, the equation tells you to wait until you've passed the speed of light, and I thought it might be interesting to more accurately model the energy required at relativistic speeds.

So the same way that you used the classical mechanics equation for kinetic energy, E=mv^2/2, ignoring mass and solving for v, to get v=sqrt(2E) and approximating to v=sqrt(E), I thought you could manipulate the relativistic equation similarly.

Now, having gotten a solution from WA, I'm starting to think that I overestimated the effect on accuracy that changing the equation would have. I want to approximate the solution by ignoring some terms or changing an nE to an E^2 or something, but I think that might negate any gain in accuracy.

So to answer your questions more directly, I was attempting to address the error you get when the calculation tells you to wait until you can travel above or near the speed of light, and I only included mass in my equation to try to communicate it to you more accurately, with the assumption that when actually using it you would ignore the mass.

Anyway, I hope I at least clarified my previous comment, even if it turned out not to be very useful! If anyone has a better understanding of how to better model relativistic speeds I'd love to hear their explanation.

Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet

#299
Reading about that led me to this article about a water world that was discovered:

‘A giant waterworld that is wet to its core has been spotted in orbit around a dim but not too distant star’

With oceans 9000 miles deep (15000 km). For context the Earth’s diameter is 7900 miles (12700 km).

The imagination really does boggle at the thought. I think science fiction is going to have a hard time keeping up with the incredible science fact we are observing in our lifetimes.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/dec/16/waterworld-p...

Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet

#300

I got into the Wait Calculation[1] a few weeks back and made a Jupyter notebook out of it. At our current max speed (692,000 km/hr, stated max speed of Parker Space Probe), it would take about 173,000 years to get to that planet. We could instead choose to Wait and grow our tech. By picking a constant annual growth rate and then doing some calculus to find the minimum, we can calculate the shortest possible time it w…

Progress in physics was much faster in the early 20th century when it wasn't so fascinated with deep space. Yes, you needed to observe eclipses to verify relativity, but that was a tool, not the end in itself. Cosmology involves distances that are so great that it seems like it's pouring a whole bunch of smart people's efforts down the drain in an ultimately futile waste of brain power that will never amount to anyth…

> Cosmology involves distances that are so great that it seems like it's pouring a whole bunch of smart people's efforts down the drain in an ultimately futile waste of brain power that will never amount to anything much at all.

I think it depends on what one wants to get out of the research. If the goal is a commercially realizable product on a shortish time horizon (say Many before me have used the example of relativity, which when proposed, seemed to have little practical value. But GPS wouldn't work without relativistic corrections. 100-120 years ago one could've made a similar statement about fundamental physics and work on relativity. But if we'd abandoned it because of a lack of immediate relevance then we wouldn't have workable GPS today. The benefits of fundamental research (in many areas, not just astrophysics) are often quite difficult to forecast.

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