NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth • Hacker News Board

Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

#81

Post by Retric » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 5:56 PM UTC

qrendel wrote: post #56

DuskStar wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently it has a diameter 60% larger than that of the Earth, and so if we assume it has the same density as the Earth it would have about 16m/s^2 gravity on the surface, and an orbital velocity of around 12km/s @ ~1000km (in comparison to the Earth, where a 1000km circular orbit is closer to 7km/s). This means that merely achieving orbit would be approximately as difficult as launching a probe on a Hohmann transfe…

To colonize or seed life you don't need to launch huge space vehicles with enough life support to maintain a breeding population, though. You can just launch some kind of self-replicating microbes capable of directing themselves into the forms of life you want to encourage over time. The precise ability to do this would depend on your current state of technology, but we're pretty close to developing full blown synthe…

This might work on a baron world, but any place with a developed ecosystem would likely see these things out competed very quickly do to the massive overhead of needing to survive in space for a long time.

Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

#82

Post by staunch » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 5:56 PM UTC

eastbayjake wrote: post #76

phantarch wrote: post #5

At 2 billion years older than Earth, I can't begin to imagine what kinds of things could possibly be living on this planet. Given, of course, that it's got the right ingredients for life to arise. What if it's suffered huge extinctions recently? What if there's a domineering species out to conquer the planet just like humans? What if there's a society there more sophisticated than us? It's a very exciting discovery.

It's jarring to think that if intelligent life were on Kepler 452-b and observing Earth, we're so far away that they would be seeing our "civilizations" in 615 AD: shrinking global population as the old Roman and Byzantine empires are overrun by barbarian hordes and Arab conquest, with some pockets of human progress in China. They would have no way of knowing that the descendants of those squabbling warlords just coo…

I hope they were recording the whole time and upload the videos to YouTube. I can't wait to watch Hannibal on the Pyrenees From Space.mp4

Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

#83

Post by tjr » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 5:58 PM UTC

maaku wrote: post #77

phantarch wrote: post #5

At 2 billion years older than Earth, I can't begin to imagine what kinds of things could possibly be living on this planet. Given, of course, that it's got the right ingredients for life to arise. What if it's suffered huge extinctions recently? What if there's a domineering species out to conquer the planet just like humans? What if there's a society there more sophisticated than us? It's a very exciting discovery.

If there was an intelligent life form, like humans, it would have expanded into the cosmos and colonized the entire galaxy within only a million years of developing technology. Since we don't see traces of them everywhere, we must presume they don't exist.

Perhaps government funding for their space exploration programs dried up, industry regulations interfered with commercial space exploration programs, and they all just gave up and shifted technology resources to making games for their mobile phones.

Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

#84

Post by thaumaturgy » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 5:58 PM UTC

qrendel wrote: post #24

phantarch wrote: post #5

At 2 billion years older than Earth, I can't begin to imagine what kinds of things could possibly be living on this planet. Given, of course, that it's got the right ingredients for life to arise. What if it's suffered huge extinctions recently? What if there's a domineering species out to conquer the planet just like humans? What if there's a society there more sophisticated than us? It's a very exciting discovery.

I propose it's unlikely that any technological civilizations more advanced than our own have existed on this planet in the past few billion years, otherwise some subgroup of their species would likely have seeded the local universe with life (it's only ~1400 lightyears away) and they would be here instead of us. Unless of course the panspermia hypothesis is correct and that is indeed where life on Earth came from.

It's fun to think about all of the things that could prevent a far more advanced civilization relatively nearby in the cosmos from making contact; it gives us a better perspective on how lucky or fragile our own development is and where we might be focusing on the wrong things.

Perhaps no civilization of any sort has ever developed there. Maybe conditions on the planet are inhospitable, perhaps evolution simply never went that way. I think people tend to assume that evolution naturally leads towards more intelligent creatures, but that's not true. Humans are a very very recent development on our planet, in geologic time scales, and our early existence was pretty improbable.

Perhaps civilizations have existed there, but never achieved technological advancement. There are still tribal civilizations on Earth that are using 50kya technology; there's no guarantee that a civilization must develop science and technology.

Perhaps it has had civilizations with similar technological advancements to our own, but they have been destroyed or set back by any of a number of things: extinction-level impact events (could easily happen to us), disease, warfare, or resource shortages. Maybe, for some reason, they never developed easy access to a high density fuel; imagine if humanity had tried to go directly from steam engines to nuclear or solar power because oil didn't exist or wasn't easy enough to find or its significance was never understood.

Perhaps they reached a level of technological advancement far, far superior to our own, but they never made an effort to explore the cosmos. The vast majority of people on Earth right now don't see any point to even exploring other worlds in our own solar system; that mindset could easily dominate for the rest of mankind's existence. Maybe we assume that there is some kind of shortcut around the speed of light and there isn't and, no matter advanced a civilization gets, there simply aren't enough volunteers for a 10,000-year journey to another tiny little planet that may or may not harbor life.

Perhaps all of these are wrong, but they simply visited Earth a million years ago and found it to be entirely uninteresting and haven't been back since. Maybe their civilization has even ceased to exist, and our civilizations will never ever cross paths because we missed eachother by a few minutes in geologic time.

I'm generally optimistic about the chances of advanced civilizations elsewhere in our galaxy, even relatively close by, and entirely pessimistic about our odds of ever being able to interact with those civilizations in any meaningful way.

Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

#85

Post by lukasm » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 5:58 PM UTC

maaku wrote: post #77

phantarch wrote: post #5

At 2 billion years older than Earth, I can't begin to imagine what kinds of things could possibly be living on this planet. Given, of course, that it's got the right ingredients for life to arise. What if it's suffered huge extinctions recently? What if there's a domineering species out to conquer the planet just like humans? What if there's a society there more sophisticated than us? It's a very exciting discovery.

If there was an intelligent life form, like humans, it would have expanded into the cosmos and colonized the entire galaxy within only a million years of developing technology. Since we don't see traces of them everywhere, we must presume they don't exist.

If there is a intelligent live form millions years ahead of us it's most likely AI that doesn't want to make the contact.

Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

#86

Post by Falcon9 » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 6:00 PM UTC

staunch wrote: post #82

eastbayjake wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's jarring to think that if intelligent life were on Kepler 452-b and observing Earth, we're so far away that they would be seeing our "civilizations" in 615 AD: shrinking global population as the old Roman and Byzantine empires are overrun by barbarian hordes and Arab conquest, with some pockets of human progress in China. They would have no way of knowing that the descendants of those squabbling warlords just coo…

I hope they were recording the whole time and upload the videos to YouTube. I can't wait to watch Hannibal on the Pyrenees From Space.mp4

My favorite thought is that they've sent probes millions of years ago and we could send a request to watch some HD surveillance of dinosaurs roaming the Earth. It'll just take ~3k years to receive the requested footage.

Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

#87

Post by justindz » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 6:02 PM UTC

eastbayjake wrote: post #76

phantarch wrote: post #5

At 2 billion years older than Earth, I can't begin to imagine what kinds of things could possibly be living on this planet. Given, of course, that it's got the right ingredients for life to arise. What if it's suffered huge extinctions recently? What if there's a domineering species out to conquer the planet just like humans? What if there's a society there more sophisticated than us? It's a very exciting discovery.

It's jarring to think that if intelligent life were on Kepler 452-b and observing Earth, we're so far away that they would be seeing our "civilizations" in 615 AD: shrinking global population as the old Roman and Byzantine empires are overrun by barbarian hordes and Arab conquest, with some pockets of human progress in China. They would have no way of knowing that the descendants of those squabbling warlords just coo…

One can perhaps take comfort in the fact that a civilization advanced enough to be aware of us would likely be aware of the fact that we were more advanced than what they could see at any given moment (or they had found a way to narrow the perception lag).

Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

#88

Post by qq66 » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 6:02 PM UTC

staunch wrote: post #82

eastbayjake wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's jarring to think that if intelligent life were on Kepler 452-b and observing Earth, we're so far away that they would be seeing our "civilizations" in 615 AD: shrinking global population as the old Roman and Byzantine empires are overrun by barbarian hordes and Arab conquest, with some pockets of human progress in China. They would have no way of knowing that the descendants of those squabbling warlords just coo…

I hope they were recording the whole time and upload the videos to YouTube. I can't wait to watch Hannibal on the Pyrenees From Space.mp4

You'll have to wait 6000 years to see it on YouTube: 1500 for them to hear about YouTube and 4500 for them to upload (assuming TCP)

Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

#89

Post by wmeredith » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 6:02 PM UTC

qrendel wrote: post #24

phantarch wrote: post #5

At 2 billion years older than Earth, I can't begin to imagine what kinds of things could possibly be living on this planet. Given, of course, that it's got the right ingredients for life to arise. What if it's suffered huge extinctions recently? What if there's a domineering species out to conquer the planet just like humans? What if there's a society there more sophisticated than us? It's a very exciting discovery.

I propose it's unlikely that any technological civilizations more advanced than our own have existed on this planet in the past few billion years, otherwise some subgroup of their species would likely have seeded the local universe with life (it's only ~1400 lightyears away) and they would be here instead of us. Unless of course the panspermia hypothesis is correct and that is indeed where life on Earth came from.

Maybe they are here and it IS us?

Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

#90

Post by lifeisstillgood » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 6:06 PM UTC

qrendel wrote: post #24

phantarch wrote: post #5

At 2 billion years older than Earth, I can't begin to imagine what kinds of things could possibly be living on this planet. Given, of course, that it's got the right ingredients for life to arise. What if it's suffered huge extinctions recently? What if there's a domineering species out to conquer the planet just like humans? What if there's a society there more sophisticated than us? It's a very exciting discovery.

I propose it's unlikely that any technological civilizations more advanced than our own have existed on this planet in the past few billion years, otherwise some subgroup of their species would likely have seeded the local universe with life (it's only ~1400 lightyears away) and they would be here instead of us. Unless of course the panspermia hypothesis is correct and that is indeed where life on Earth came from.

But they did seed the planet, but the stargate got buried and we forgot all about them, until just a few years ago when ... Oh wait, sorry !