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NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
231–240 of 307 posts
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
It would go faster if they loaded a bunch of usb sticks in a station wagon and shot the wagon across space.
Only if they can average 0.25c, which seems unlikely :)
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's been some nifty work done on the practicality of electrodynamic tethers and using them to turn a starship against the galactic magnetic field. You won't get sci-fi ship maneuverability out of this, but it's useful for course corrections without having to carry or expend reaction mass. As far as onboard power sources go, fission seems perfectly cromulent. You just have to protect those radiators.
I can only find one source on using tethers in interstellar travel: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/2005021... . To quote the article, for energy production: > Since the tether current is 1,333 amps, ne = 3 X 10‘‘ m-3 and the ship’s velocity is 900 km/sec, the effective electron-collector radius is approximately 3 13 km. This appears to have a toroidal-field ramscoop as a prerequisite. For thrust…
I got that from a Robert Forward nonfiction book. The craft he described didn't have ramscoops, but were lightsail craft.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Here's another scenario: they could have colonized other worlds, but had no interest in setting foot on every last planet. Perhaps their culture is insular, and they are either apathetic to (or forbidden from) contacting us. It's not hard to imagine that we would be unable to detect them, either.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a dig at anyone, especially not the Arabs who basically preserved philosophy and mathematics while Europe entered the Dark Ages. My point was simply that Kepler 452b-ians observing Earth would be seeing lots of war and destruction even though we're currently peacefully collaborating among mankind to discover and explore planets.
> observing Earth would be seeing lots of war and destruction even though we're currently peacefully collaborating among mankind to discover and explore planets. If they were observing us today, they'd still see plenty of war and destruction. It just so happens that a fraction of the worlds population lives under "peaceful" conditions. That's not universally true.
Most of the worlds population lives under peaceful conditions these days.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#236At 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…
>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.
Err, the Byzantine empire was still going strong for 6 centuries after that (and still existed, but not in a good shape, for 8).
It never got overrun by "barbarian hordes", but it did have a run in with thieving "supposedely christian horders" on their way to the Crusades in the 12th century, and was finally overrun by the muslim Ottoman empire in the 14th century.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an unfounded presumption. It's like, nobody has considered that advanced life might not even feel a need to live on planets at all. It's expensive to get resources from, and there's a near limitless supply of easy to get smaller debris. Additionally, the difference a 2 billion year head start could make is hard to imagine. One thing that's not hard to imagine is that they don't live in meat bodies for most of…
We have sensitive telescopes. If there was life out there, we would have noticed. You would have astronomy conferences filled with people trying to figure out what all these weird spectra objects are, or trying to decipher all these structured radio observations.
> We have sensitive telescopes. If there was life out there, we would have noticed.
I'm sorry, but that's way off.
Our current telescopes can't even see the majority of the exoplanets in our galaxy; we are made aware of their existence by observing the behavior of their host star (wobbling/dimming). Unless something is extremely close, unfathomably enormous, or emitting/reflecting large amounts of electromagnetic radiation (light, radio, etc.) that isn't bent/filtered/reduced to noise, then we are completely unaware of it.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what's the current fraction of stars that have habitable zone planets? (i.e. how many stars were surveyed?) That would get us an estimate of how many of those 259 might contain Earth-like planets: we use the fraction of orbital those planets that Kepler detects to estimate the total fraction of planets per star, and multiply that by 259.
From a paper on the Kepler project[1]: "Kepler has observed over 156,000 stars simultaneously and near continuously to search for planets that periodically pass in front of their host star (transit)" From the article: "The confirmation of Kepler-452b brings the total number of confirmed planets to 1,030." — and I have verified that this refers specifically to planets confirmed by Kepler, not just planets in total. Fr…
Yup, but as others said it might be better since Kepler doesn't detect all orbital planes. So it would be 0.0066 * 1/(fraction of orbital planes) -- but this boost is probably less than an order of magnitude? So still probably no luck for planets reachable within a lifetime eh :P
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At least 25% of it will be over IPv6! We probably will need IPv10 to connect all the dots in the sky!
Actually no! Estimates I found are of around 10^23 stars in the universe. There are over 10^38 IPv6 addresses, so even if there were tens of inhabitable worlds per star and billions or even trillions of addresses per world, we'd have enough! (Although it is possible that stars number is a significant underestimate.)
IPv6 only has space for 10^19 networks, so you would need to heavily chop up /64s if you wanted to number the universe.
But IP is not designed for high-latency networks, so this only really matters if FTL communication is invented.