NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
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Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
#2Kepler has certainly made a lot of discoveries. It should be fairly clear to us now that planetary systems are pretty common and, by extension, sentience must (by sheer odds) be out there too.
But I have to wonder how many assumptions go into this so-called "habitable zone". Doesn't it greatly depend on the atmospheric composition? With a different atmosphere, couldn't Venus be habitable (actually it might be in our Sun's habitable zone)? If Mars were larger, couldn't it support the kind of atmosphere that would allow liquid water.
Particularly if such planets were geologically active.
Even if all this stacks up, at 600 light years away, like pretty much any other star system, this planet is across a gulf I'm not sure we'll ever cross, which is a somewhat depressing thought.
Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
#3The idea of a 'habitable' planet is a cool one, but how relevant is it? Do we really expect that climate is going to be a concern by the time we are colonizing planets 600 light years away?
Now that I think about it, I guess it could be that they are looking for life on other planets and figure that alien life that is recognizable to us will likely be on planets in this zone. I looked at Kepler's mission and they don't really specify why they are looking:
"The Kepler Mission, NASA Discovery mission #10, is specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone→ and determine the fraction of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy that might have such planets."
Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
#4Kepler has certainly made a lot of discoveries. It should be fairly clear to us now that planetary systems are pretty common and, by extension, sentience must (by sheer odds) be out there too. But I have to wonder how many assumptions go into this so-called "habitable zone". Doesn't it greatly depend on the atmospheric composition? With a different atmosphere, couldn't Venus be habitable (actually it might be in our…
If you look at the diagram for the habitable zone in our own solar system you can see that Nasa would class both Mars and Venus as habitable planets. They already place pretty generous bounds around the habitable zone.
Given the very real possibility that there could have been (still is?) life on mars that makes a lot of sense. (Nasa just sent Curiosity on its way to Mars and one of its main goals is to look for signs of life.)
Still, the only life we currently know of is here on earth. There could be life on Europa, maybe even some other weird places in the solar system but it’s certainly sensible to start with what we know.
Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
#5The idea of a 'habitable' planet is a cool one, but how relevant is it? Do we really expect that climate is going to be a concern by the time we are colonizing planets 600 light years away? Now that I think about it, I guess it could be that they are looking for life on other planets and figure that alien life that is recognizable to us will likely be on planets in this zone. I looked at Kepler's mission and they don…
Well, one of the reasons to look is certainly to figure out what kinds of solar systems are typical. Are all solar systems like our solar system? What are the differences? How common are rocky planets? Its mission is to give us a more detailed picture of the solar systems out there.
It’s about knowledge, not whether or not that knowledge is actually useful.
Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
#6Kepler has certainly made a lot of discoveries. It should be fairly clear to us now that planetary systems are pretty common and, by extension, sentience must (by sheer odds) be out there too. But I have to wonder how many assumptions go into this so-called "habitable zone". Doesn't it greatly depend on the atmospheric composition? With a different atmosphere, couldn't Venus be habitable (actually it might be in our…
>sentience must (by sheer odds) be out there too.
Why? Sentience just happens to be an evolutionary trait that was beneficial to us, like wings on a bird.
There millions of species animals on our planet, and only a handful of them are sentient.
We have a bit of a cognitive bias towards thinking that sentient life is something that evolution would work towards, but that isn't really how evolution works.
Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
#7Kepler has certainly made a lot of discoveries. It should be fairly clear to us now that planetary systems are pretty common and, by extension, sentience must (by sheer odds) be out there too. But I have to wonder how many assumptions go into this so-called "habitable zone". Doesn't it greatly depend on the atmospheric composition? With a different atmosphere, couldn't Venus be habitable (actually it might be in our…
>sentience must (by sheer odds) be out there too. Why? Sentience just happens to be an evolutionary trait that was beneficial to us, like wings on a bird. There millions of species animals on our planet, and only a handful of them are sentient. We have a bit of a cognitive bias towards thinking that sentient life is something that evolution would work towards, but that isn't really how evolution works.
It's not anthropocentric to assume that sentience will appear elsewhere in the universe, given the sheer number of opportunities for evolution to solve similar problems in similar ways. I expect sentience to exist in other species for the same reason that birds, bats and flying squirrels have convergent adaptations.
Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
#8Kepler has certainly made a lot of discoveries. It should be fairly clear to us now that planetary systems are pretty common and, by extension, sentience must (by sheer odds) be out there too. But I have to wonder how many assumptions go into this so-called "habitable zone". Doesn't it greatly depend on the atmospheric composition? With a different atmosphere, couldn't Venus be habitable (actually it might be in our…
>sentience must (by sheer odds) be out there too. Why? Sentience just happens to be an evolutionary trait that was beneficial to us, like wings on a bird. There millions of species animals on our planet, and only a handful of them are sentient. We have a bit of a cognitive bias towards thinking that sentient life is something that evolution would work towards, but that isn't really how evolution works.
Well I mean it runs kind of counter to your argument that there is not just one, but multiple sentient species on the planet.
It also didn't take very long in cosmological terms for humans to go from sentient to supercomputers, either.
Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
#9Kepler has certainly made a lot of discoveries. It should be fairly clear to us now that planetary systems are pretty common and, by extension, sentience must (by sheer odds) be out there too. But I have to wonder how many assumptions go into this so-called "habitable zone". Doesn't it greatly depend on the atmospheric composition? With a different atmosphere, couldn't Venus be habitable (actually it might be in our…
>sentience must (by sheer odds) be out there too. Why? Sentience just happens to be an evolutionary trait that was beneficial to us, like wings on a bird. There millions of species animals on our planet, and only a handful of them are sentient. We have a bit of a cognitive bias towards thinking that sentient life is something that evolution would work towards, but that isn't really how evolution works.
> that isn't really how evolution works.
Taking this a step further, finding intelligent life out there is simply impossible. The reason our intelligence is unique to only humans on our planet is largely because we defined intelligence as traits that only we possess. We defined it based on our own nature. Finding life out there that would be socially compatible with us is ridiculously unlikely. That life would have had to spring up in an evolutionary environment identical to ours and that's so unlikely that it might as well be impossible.
Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
#10Kepler has certainly made a lot of discoveries. It should be fairly clear to us now that planetary systems are pretty common and, by extension, sentience must (by sheer odds) be out there too. But I have to wonder how many assumptions go into this so-called "habitable zone". Doesn't it greatly depend on the atmospheric composition? With a different atmosphere, couldn't Venus be habitable (actually it might be in our…
If you look at the diagram for the habitable zone in our own solar system you can see that Nasa would class both Mars and Venus as habitable planets. They already place pretty generous bounds around the habitable zone. Given the very real possibility that there could have been (still is?) life on mars that makes a lot of sense. (Nasa just sent Curiosity on its way to Mars and one of its main goals is to look for sign…
Both Venus and Mars have good odds of having had liquid water oceans in the past. From what I understand, Venus would possibly be habitable today if it had a carbon cycle and planetary magnetic field to prevent the runaway greenhouse effect.