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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

#181

Post by anyfoo »

gist wrote: post #19
Miner49er wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I suppose I'm using a bit of hyperbole. Maybe I should say sad. And don't worry, I won't think about it very long.

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 don't know, what does learning any fact about the universe that is not directly applicable to my life do for me? Aside from potential side-effects (it's not uncommon that knowledge-seeking about one thing yields seemingly unrelated applications)... if you have never experienced the joy and satisfaction from learning and understanding something new, I can tell you, you're missing out.

So, while not knowing and learning about civilizations beyond Earth certainly does not negatively affect my life very much, I still assert that life would suddenly get much more interesting if we did. There is a reason why Alien Sci-Fi is very, very popular...

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

#182

Post by anyfoo »

0xffff2 wrote: post #159
carrozo wrote: post #153

So tired of hearing about “habitable” planets that would take millennia to get to. Call me when the space elevator has been commissioned.

If it makes you feel any better, virtually all of them are uninhabitable to humans. The excitement comes from the idea that they could be locations of alien life that we would easily recognize. In other words, we need better communications tools, not better space travel.

Or even just better observation tools, that would be amazing already. Sadly, at the scales we are talking here, even "just" getting those tools seems very improbable, at least...

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

#183

Post by anyfoo »

typeformer wrote: post #25

I say let's go. Now, whether you believe it or not, it is a fact that the US government has acquired alien technology and yet continues to keep it hidden by being stuck in a cold war mindset of, "well, we can't let the Chinese or Russians get their hands on this". That is the ultimate expression of narrow thinking, especially when there is a whole universe out there! Bring on the downvotes but history will vindicate…

You think any sizable group of people would be able to keep any secret, not even talking about such a juicy one, for any significant amount of time?

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

#184

Post by anyfoo »

typeformer wrote: post #137
brlewis wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK let me see if I understand the chain of inference here. The government has been studying UFOs for 7 decades ==> The government has learned something ==> The government has acquired alien technology I'm mostly with you on that first arrow, but you lost me on the 2nd.

I believe the last 2 points because I don't believe that credible military personnel with long and distinguished careers, would tarnish their reputations terribly for no apparent gain, especially near the end of their lives. Check out Philip J Corso or Robert Salas, but there are , many, many others who have blown the whistle including Walter Haut the public affairs officer during the Roswell crash (and recovery). ht…

I don't know, certain end of life seems to be the perfect opportunity to publish all that fantastic evidence that would mark the most important distinguishable moment for humanity as a whole so far.

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

#185

Post by ant6n »

mabbo wrote: post #178
manicdee wrote: post #134

Some caveats per Marina Koren https://twitter.com/marinakoren/status/1171873631808438273 1. This planet probably doesn’t have a solid surface 2. Being in the “habitable zone” doesn’t mean a planet is habitable 3. The detection is of water molecules, chances are the water only exists as vapour in the atmosphere of this small gas giant. 4. If you ask 10 astronomers about this you will get 11 opinions

Years ago as a second year computer science student, I mentioned to a grad student I knew how disappointed I was about a certain algorithm. "It's O(n), but the constant is enormous! There's no point unless you have billions of elements"! She said to me "Yeah sure, but who cares? What it really tells us it's that it's possible to do this in linear time at all . That might not have been true, and now we know we might f…

We already knew it's possible to have a planet in the habitable zone with water (and life, incidentally).

Whether it's common is still unclear, given that so far there's a big bias towards detecting large exoplanets that are close to the host star.

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

#186

Post by Thrymr »

vonmoltke wrote: post #163
isostatic wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

accelerating at 1G to the mid point, then decelerating at 1g, will mean you’ll get there in about 15.8 ship years, or 115 earth years. Spend twice as long on boats though (32 years) and you can do about 10,000 light years.

A constant acceleration of 1g would cause the ship to hit c in about one ship year.

The ship will never hit c.

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

#187

Post by tejtm »

nothis wrote: post #173
transreal wrote: post #2

With a planet this large, visiting it would be a one way trip due to the "The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation" [0]. I'm looking forward to the day we start finding exo-planets that are closer to Earth in size and which could potentially have space-faring races (and which we could leave if we were ever to visit them). [0] - https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/exped...

> I'm looking forward to the day we start finding exo-planets that are closer to Earth in size and which could potentially have space-faring races (and which we could leave if we were ever to visit them). I just realized I have no real concept of how many stars there even are within, say, a 100 light year radius of our sun (I guess that's a more realistic thing to find out than the number of planets). A quick search…

It might cheer you up to to think we have yet to prove there is a star with no planets.

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

#188

Post by [deleted] »

isostatic wrote: post #144
mrkstu wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that orthogonal to interplanetary travel though? If you go straight up far enough you’ll be out of Earth’s gravity well. You’ll still need acceleration to escape the solar gravity well, but you’ll never need horizontal acceleration necessary for Earth orbit.

You want to accelerate lower down in the gravity well, however not too low due to atmosphere losses. It’s more efficient that way. Launching from stationary altitude doesn’t save much at all

[deleted]

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

#189

Post by carrozo »

0xffff2 wrote: post #159
carrozo wrote: post #153

So tired of hearing about “habitable” planets that would take millennia to get to. Call me when the space elevator has been commissioned.

If it makes you feel any better, virtually all of them are uninhabitable to humans. The excitement comes from the idea that they could be locations of alien life that we would easily recognize. In other words, we need better communications tools, not better space travel.

Imagine if we could somehow have optical closeups of these planets and all we found were trillions of dinosaurs incapable of all but crow-like tool-making. We’d be so buzzed and bummed at the same time.

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

#190

Post by tracker1 »

Swizec wrote: post #22
ajconway wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theoretically, you can. At 0.99c 111 light years take about 15 years of ship time to travel.

So you can survive the trip but even if you come back home, it’s not home anymore? Imagine leaving 222 years ago and coming back now ...

I'd like a pint of mead and a stout woman! /s
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