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An extrasolar world covered in water?

nouvelles.umontreal.ca

81–90 of 150 posts

Re: An extrasolar world covered in water?

#81
post #2

It's around 100 light years away from Earth for anyone interested.

Programming machines to make the trip and then seeding with human life seems to be the best answer to distance.

For what reason would we want people physically close to this thing?

Re: An extrasolar world covered in water?

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"merely a planet", it's sad that the thing that gives everything life and beauty and wonder can be so easily dismissed nowadays...

Only planet with Life. I sometimes wish people ponder on that for some time. Maybe they will have a new found respect for this planet like I did. Took me a while but when I fully grasped the concept of Life few years back and read and saw all the life less rocks in our solar system it changed the way I look at things. Still amazes me when I think about it.

Only planet with life based on what? We haven't been to other planets.

Re: An extrasolar world covered in water?

#83
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you can sometimes do that (I've lucid dreamed quite a few times before and it's pretty wild), but it's nowhere near 100% reliable. you can get pretty good with practice, but even then it's not a scientific test. It's more of a process of reasoning and gut checking. The human mind can fill in an incredible amount of detail when needed. In one lucid dream I was playing a song on the guitar that I had (as far as I k…

> it's not a scientific test. Isn't every subjective experience, almost by definition, unable to be tested scientifically? We can objectively measure someone's brain activity during sleep, but we can't really measure their subjective experience. Implying that everything made up of subjective experience (like consciousness) can't be measured. Which also implies it can't be proven by scientific means. So in response to…

Yes, exactly, that's the point I'm getting at. We experience "life" through our senses, and our senses can be fooled. Even measuring brain activity requires a subjective level of "trust" that we're seeing a real machine that's taking real measurements, rather than a simulation of a machine. We can look for glitches in the matrix, but absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

It's wildly impractical to live your life like that, but at the end of the day we just don't know and probably can't know.

Re: An extrasolar world covered in water?

#87
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earth is not an exoplanet, it is merely a planet.

"merely a planet", it's sad that the thing that gives everything life and beauty and wonder can be so easily dismissed nowadays...

You can't be serious. By definition exoplanets are planets outside our solar system.

If you want to be romantic about it, feel free to consider the hunt for exoplanets a challenge to confirm that there is no planet equal to Earth.

Re: An extrasolar world covered in water?

#88
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earth is not an exoplanet, it is merely a planet.

"merely a planet", it's sad that the thing that gives everything life and beauty and wonder can be so easily dismissed nowadays...

You're either misreading every comment intentionally, or really dense.

Re: An extrasolar world covered in water?

#89
post #3

Based on those observations, the exoplanet appears to be about 70% larger than Earth with just five times its mass. That means it’s less dense than Earth Seems like a rather large leap to go from that to "it's a water world", at least in these days where we get a "this new exoplanet may be covered in water!" headline every few months.

1.7^3= 4.913. So even if 1.7x large just means radius, if it has 5x the mass that would still make it MORE dense than earth right?

I guess that "about" is doing a lot of work here. Like maybe it's 1.74^3.

Re: An extrasolar world covered in water?

#90
That’s fascinating.

> As soon as we can, we will book time on Webb to observe this strange and wonderful world.

How does that work? Is there a hotline you call to book time? Is it free or paid? How is the instrument not booked solid for the next few years?

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