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Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet

nationalgeographic.com

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

#361

Post by jtms »

dragonwriter wrote: post #142
stickfigure wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you put some money in an interest-bearing account you could at least buy a new home when you got back.

> If you put some money in an interest-bearing account you could at least buy a new home when you got back. If you do it in a country that doesn't allow you to be declared legally dead when you are out of contact for a couple centuries, and if the institutions involved don't collapse, and if the interest on the account outpaces inflation, sure. What percentage of the banks that were around 222 years ago have not fail…

As pointed out by other commenters: a non zero number have survived. A small investment made with many different institutions would substantially increase your chances of a massive return upon... return.

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

#362

Post by tyri_kai_psomi »

trianglem wrote: post #28
gist wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it sad at all? What would it do for you? It would be about as relevant as being able to communicate in some way with people in the past. Would be interesting and entertaining but a leap to imagine it would yield some kind of better quality of life in the current day.

I feel like the ideal of life existing on another planet would improve my quality of life. The additional potential would do wonders for my everyday narrative.

I feel like the idea of time travel, teleportation, and eternal youth would improve my quality of life as well, but they are just as likely at this point as living on another planet. I certainly don't let the fact that I won't ever have any of those things get me down.

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

#363

Post by lachlan-sneff »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #245
lachlan-sneff wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure, maybe future humans won't want to do that. The important takeaway is that they'll have the opportunity to do so if they wish. They could even clone them back on the other end and install the preexisting mind, basically teleportation.

You're assuming that we'll have a means to send data across Galaxy faster than the speed of light. If not then it'll take 111 years to upload your mind.

Nah, I was assuming it'd take 111 years to send the minds there. It's really not a very long time when we have digital immortality.

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

#364

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

rapind wrote: post #157
swarnie_ wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does raise a huge number of ethical issues. Do we have the right to interfere on a planet which may already have life?

Survival of the fittest. We launch our virus first... assuming they didn't already launch theirs, in which case it's mutual destruction.

> Survival of the fittest.

Right, which is why the only rational approach to life is to literally try your best to kill everyone that isn't you.

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

#365

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

not_a_cop75 wrote: post #151
chenning wrote: post #115

A very quick search suggests that earth will become uninhabitable somewhere between 500 million and 2 billion years from now. If we shot a probe to this life-friendly alien planet with some sort of primordial soup, even traveling at the speed of light it would take 4 billion earth years to get there. Do I have that right? Basically we'll never even come close to being around when it finally arrives, if it ever arrive…

It seems like it would be much easier to terraform the real estate around us than try to opt for something 100 light years away. Mars has a leaky atmosphere - sure it's a real fixer upper. But we have a better chance of fixing it, or even correcting the orbit of our planet so that in 500 million years it's still livable.

Christ, why even go to Mars? Even in the worst cases the damage we do to Earth will still leave it significantly more hospitable than Mars.

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

#366

Post by Can_Not »

mhluongo wrote: post #168
dragonwriter wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you put some money in an interest-bearing account you could at least buy a new home when you got back. If you do it in a country that doesn't allow you to be declared legally dead when you are out of contact for a couple centuries, and if the institutions involved don't collapse, and if the interest on the account outpaces inflation, sure. What percentage of the banks that were around 222 years ago have not fail…

Bitcoin! :)

What if they release Bitcoin 2.0 the year you leave?

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

#367

Post by tachyonbeam »

sgt wrote: post #360
tachyonbeam wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, and traveling near lightspeed is likely hardly possible. However, fusion will likely become a reality within our lifetimes, and if we can build fusion powered spaceships, we could likely reach a fraction of the speed of light, say, 0.2c. I don't think it's that crazy to think we could do that a few centuries from now. That still means it would take over 1000 years to reach that planet. Personally, I think that if…

Although it seems unlikely now, imagine if we could ever reach 0.9c or maybe even 99.9% of the speed of light. Perhaps not ships containing humans, but some kind of other tiny ship containing a replicator machine and DNA for humans. For 0.999c, it would only take around 71 days to reach Alpha Centauri from Earth (as seen from the ship). That's pretty mind boggling.

Besides the incredible amount of energy you would need for 0.999c, which is physically difficult (impossible?) to bring on a ship, there's other physical constraints that make this difficult, such as the fact that the vacuum is actually not that empty. The faster you go, the more you have small particles hitting your ship at near lightspeed, micrometeorites, etc.

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

#368

Post by bestest »

healsjnr1 wrote: post #321
tunesmith wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it assumes you start and end at whatever that maximum velocity is that we've been able to achieve. That'd be fun to add, though. I'm not really sure what human-safe acceleration is - people here assume it's in the 1g-3g range. (That seems like a lot to me though, particularly for a long period of time - I think anything more than a fraction of g would be wildly uncomfortable.)

1G would be great as it would remove any unexpected physiological impacts of living in zero or low gravity. Having said that, the distance and duration means that only a small portion of this journey would be under acceleration, the rest would be in zero g. Spending a century in zero g would probably have a bunch of strange side effects and almost certainly mean that the people alive when they arrived wouldn't be abl…

Not quite true. You'd spend half of the travel time under 1g accelerating, then the ship does a 180 degree flip in 0g, and then you spend another half of the travel time under 1g decelerating.

Edit: Of course, at constant 1g acceleration, at day number 354 we reach 1c. Don't know if we should start coasting before we reach 1c or just the hell with it and see what happens if we keep accelerating.

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

#369

Post by luxuryballs »

gmueckl wrote: post #327
luxuryballs wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also it just seems to be water, they’re obviously not 100% sure it’s not something else that’s reading as water.

How easy is it to have different mixtures of substances that lead to similar enough absorption apectra that they are indistinguishable with the available resolution and sensitivity?

There’s no reason I can see to assume we’ve discovered even 1% of the elements out there... we’re also just seeing a trace of something that was there hundreds of years ago right? We’ve never even gone out there to see if our assumption that only water cause this kind of reflected light is even correct.
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