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Earth-like planet spotted orbiting Sun’s closest star

nature.com

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Re: Earth-like planet spotted orbiting Sun’s closest star

#181

Post by monkeywork »

ethbr0 wrote: post #154
oceanplexian wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Musk is just plain wrong when he thinks there is any urgency to Mars exploration (or it's just vicarious arguments because rockets are cool). Mars might not be sustainable in our lifetime but in a century or two? I think it's within the realm of possibility. As for the urgency, the last two years has demonstrated the exact opposite to me. Modern civilization is a hop, skip, and a jump away from instability and disa…

> The reason we didn't use [Nuclear Fission] to prevent Climate Change is 90% political, not technical Eh. The physics and proliferation risk are pretty intertwined. Who's to say we would have been better off with greater historical nuclear weapon proliferation risk but lower climate risk? We know the path we chose, limited global use of fission power, mostly avoided nuclear weapons proliferation, and did avoid nucle…

>We know the path we chose, limited global use of fission power, mostly avoided nuclear weapons proliferation, and did avoid nuclear exchanges. So it's provably a successful (or probably successful) path.

Only if you value the lack of nuclear exchanges over the impacts of climate change. Which one of the two is more likely to cause a mass extinction type issue on the planet, one puts the control in the hands of people and the other the forces of nature.

Re: Earth-like planet spotted orbiting Sun’s closest star

#182

Post by Tepix »

uwuemu wrote: post #33
NeoTar wrote: post #15

Another point for anyone considering whether we should send a space-probe there... The current fastest man-man object is the Helios 2 space-probe, reaching something like 25 000 kilometres per hour. Proxima Centauri is 1.3020 parsecs away from Earth. So, just diving one by the other, we'd looking at something like 18 000 years as a rough order of magnitude for sending something from Earth to Proxima Centauri. You'd b…

A probe based on nuclear pulse propulsion could do it in around 50 years, with today's technology. It's not that we can't do it fast (within one average human lifespan), it's that the project would be very expensive and something like Nasa has a relatively tight budget. I mean we, as humanity, have to have an eccentric billionaire start a Martian fire (SpaceX Starship) under our lazy asses to even start to think abou…

We do in fact have another billionaire, Yuri Millner, to push humanity towards the goal of reaching other stars with his "Breakthrough Starshot" initiative.

Re: Earth-like planet spotted orbiting Sun’s closest star

#183

Post by Tepix »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #180
ethbr0 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going to {the Middle East, Europe / Asia, Australia, the New World, interior South America, the North American West) seems pretty useless to me at this time. It’s a super hostile environment and we don’t have the technology yet to have a self sustaining base there. Give it a few decades and progress in {insert technology} will make a base much easier. There is plenty of work to be done on {current place}. We have to…

This is absolutely, objectively, incorrect. You might as well argue that you can build a self-sustaining base on Antarctica. Of course you can't, because Antarctica can't support life. No amount of shouting into a bullhorn about adventure will change that. It might be possible with an absolutely epic effort to airlift soil, nuclear reactors, nuclear and other fuels, machinery for every eventually (including chip fabs…

If we really wanted to, i don't see why we couldn't establish a self-sustaining base in Antarctica. Of course, it's forbidden.

Re: Earth-like planet spotted orbiting Sun’s closest star

#184

Post by s1artibartfast »

rbanffy wrote: post #103
samatman wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope! If you obtain the full speed of light then a) you're not made of baryons anymore so congratulations on that and b) no time passes whatsoever between your being emitted in some tight laser beam on planet A, and being transcribed on planet B, from your perspective. None. Photons don't experience time, they are time.

Not exactly. For you to think you are traveling 20x faster than light, your friends that stayed at home would have to see you traveling at 0.99995c. For 233x faster than light, that's a lot of 9's in that number.

There is no faster than light, I can't parse this statement.

Re: Earth-like planet spotted orbiting Sun’s closest star

#186

Post by spookthesunset »

samatman wrote: post #97
politician wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is hopeful negativism. - They don't need fusion. A StarShip can deposit hundreds of solar panels and put them on the ground. No, dust isn't an issue because they'll bring a roomba. No, this isn't a joke, NASA martian probes' solar panels were cleaned by a light Martian breeze. - They will be able to become self-sufficient rapidly. They're not going to send 1M tons of cargo to Mars without a deployment plan. Spac…

Mars has dust storms which last months or years, it has no ionosphere, and that dust contains enough perchlorates to poison anything we could eat, including us. Ok, that sentence went somewhere odd at the end but, it's true. A large asteroid has only one of these problems, by virtue of not coming with any atmosphere, ionic or otherwise. I kinda hope Elon is bluffing and actually plans to head to the Belt. I've pencil…

The Martian dust storms are pretty tame. Nothing like portrayed in the movies. The atmosphere is 1% of what it is here on earth.

So while it is a “storm” it isn’t like a tropical force hurricane or anything. More like a very minor annoyance that deposits a bit more Martian dust on your stuff over time.

Re: Earth-like planet spotted orbiting Sun’s closest star

#187

Post by ethbr0 »

monkeywork wrote: post #181
ethbr0 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason we didn't use [Nuclear Fission] to prevent Climate Change is 90% political, not technical Eh. The physics and proliferation risk are pretty intertwined. Who's to say we would have been better off with greater historical nuclear weapon proliferation risk but lower climate risk? We know the path we chose, limited global use of fission power, mostly avoided nuclear weapons proliferation, and did avoid nucle…

>We know the path we chose, limited global use of fission power, mostly avoided nuclear weapons proliferation, and did avoid nuclear exchanges. So it's provably a successful (or probably successful) path. Only if you value the lack of nuclear exchanges over the impacts of climate change. Which one of the two is more likely to cause a mass extinction type issue on the planet, one puts the control in the hands of peopl…

I'd say I do. Climate change is colossal in problem magnitude, but temporally slow and distributed in impact. Nuclear weapons are terrifying fast and centralized in impact.

Unfortunately, our civilization is also mostly centralized. Cities, ports, highly productive land : total land area.

If you're talking persistent radioactive effects for a decade+, it doesn't take many to severely cripple the world.

As an example, a 100kt weapon (or smaller dirty) could knock a port out of action. Now look at a list of ports [0] and imagine what would happen if one or more of them dropped off the global trade grid for multiple years.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_po...

Re: Earth-like planet spotted orbiting Sun’s closest star

#188

Post by spookthesunset »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #35
NeoTar wrote: post #15

Another point for anyone considering whether we should send a space-probe there... The current fastest man-man object is the Helios 2 space-probe, reaching something like 25 000 kilometres per hour. Proxima Centauri is 1.3020 parsecs away from Earth. So, just diving one by the other, we'd looking at something like 18 000 years as a rough order of magnitude for sending something from Earth to Proxima Centauri. You'd b…

>something like 18 000 years this is why we don't see any signs of life out there. there really isn't any point in trying to venture beyond your home. universe is just too big even at the speed of light when you start venturing beyond your local group.

That is assuming that the speed of light truly is the end-all-be-all. It is quite possible there are other ways of travel that we’ve yet to discover. I have no idea what they’d be but humans have really only been doing this space / astronomy thing for a few hundred years at most.

We have barely scratched the surface of what is truly going on out there. It would be incredibly “human centric” to think our current understanding of the universe is “it”, in my opinion.

Re: Earth-like planet spotted orbiting Sun’s closest star

#189

Post by throw1234651234 »

NeoTar wrote: post #15

Another point for anyone considering whether we should send a space-probe there... The current fastest man-man object is the Helios 2 space-probe, reaching something like 25 000 kilometres per hour. Proxima Centauri is 1.3020 parsecs away from Earth. So, just diving one by the other, we'd looking at something like 18 000 years as a rough order of magnitude for sending something from Earth to Proxima Centauri. You'd b…

The other problem with sending a space probe is that the devs will have to actually deliver the Proxima Centauri mod on time and on budget, which, let's be honest, probably isn't going to happen for another few years. Think about it, you have to skin the whole planet, make sure the AI isn't weird, make sure it doesn't conflict with the existing storyline or retcon all the earth NPC memories. It's a HUGE project. Right now we just literally return a light curve from the function when someone looks at it.

And even if we could get the adversial networks to model all this garbage, etc it needs to line up with the plan of the rest of the Universe from the franchise and the managers can't even decide whether the photon is going to be a wave or a particle. Jeez. Vaporware like HL2.

Re: Earth-like planet spotted orbiting Sun’s closest star

#190

Post by s1artibartfast »

rmbyrro wrote: post #42
Udo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it enjoyable to think about the technologies that might just be in the cards further into the future. If we ever figure out light-weight fusion drives, we could build light hugger space ships that accelerate to a decent fraction of the speed of light. At 1g acceleration it takes about one year to get to 0.9c, which would make the Proxima system accessible with a travel time of about 6 years. Or 8 years at 0.5g…

This is exciting stuff indeed. Imagine a year-4,000 spaceship reaching Centauri before another spaceship dispatched 1,000 years before it? For the cynical or pessimists: I'm not optimistic about humanity reaching year-4,000, I'm just possibilistic about it (as in the philosophical meaning [1]). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actualism#:~:text=possibilism,...

I can't imagine humanity not making it to 4000. There are very few true existential threats.
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