Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

skyatnightmagazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 365 posts

Re: “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

#211

Post by halgir »

ta8645 wrote: post #18
seanhunter wrote: post #6

Firstly that is completely badass science. The idea that you can use observations to detect the chemical composition of an exoplanet millions of kilometres away is an absolute triumph of the work of thousands of people over hundreds of years. Really amazing and deeply humbling to me. Secondly, my prior was always that life existed outside of earth. It just seems so unlikely that we are somehow that special. If life d…

If life is very common in the universe, then that is probably bad news for us. It means that civilizations should exist that are millions of years more technologically advanced than us; and should be leaving telltale signatures across the sky that we'd likely have detected by now. And the absence of those signs would be relatively strong evidence that life, while common, isn't long-lived. Suggesting that our demise t…

Someone has to be the first. Granted, us being first is extremely unlikely. But the same is true for whoever it ends up having been.

Re: “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

#212

Post by bradleykingz »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #151
ivan_gammel wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earth may become uninhabitable in 1By due to increasing brightness of the sun. In 3-4B years it will be too hot for liquid water on the surface.

Earth is on course to become uninhabitable for human civilisation its current form within a century, with an associated mass extinction. Even if all industrial activity stopped tomorrow there's now enough CO2 in the system to guarantee a succession of uncomfortable and expensive droughts, floods, storms, and wildfires for thousands of years. If it doesn't they will become more and more extreme very quickly. If ocean…

Indeed.

Maybe once day, aliens will drop by and discover what remains of humanity. And stories will be told of how, when the time came, our species decided to bury its head in the sand and hope the problem would go away. Or maybe that we attempted to create god to come rescue us.

Life imitates art. We refused to listen to the scientists.

Re: “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

#213

Post by generic92034 »

mkl wrote: post #182
cmsj wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dark Forest depends on the presumption that interstellar travel is worth engaging in (ie it's possible to do faster than light), and that spectacularly devastating weapons are possible. So far we have no reason to believe that either of those assumptions is smart.

Faster than light travel isn't needed (and IIRC doesn't occur in the series the dark forest name comes from). Spectacularly devastating weapons are definitely possible - redirect an asteroid into an inhabited planet and you're likely to kill most of its inhabitants; redirect enough and you can kill almost everything. That's not even getting into things like antimatter, gamma rays, etc. The dark forest hypothesis does…

> and IIRC doesn't occur in the series the dark forest name comes from

The Trisolarians developed FTL travel while they were on the way to Earth, IIRC.

Re: “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

#214

Post by londons_explore »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #154
mr_mitm wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling it simply an engineering issue is not properly conveying the ridiculousness of such a journey. For a small space ship of 1000 tons, this would take ten thousand times the current yearly energy consumption of mankind. So we'd need to figure out how to generate the energy and then store it on a space ship before even thinking about the engineering. And that's ignoring the mass of the fuel. The classical rocket…

Seriously, most if not all of humanity's issue is our current energy wall. I truly wish we can invest more in energy as compared to AI because I truly believe that most AI agents are roughly the same and now are benchmark maxxing and even google's gemini is really really cool. Maybe now training it even further has less reward for the cost? I truly wish energy could be a solved issue. I think clean energy can be grea…

I don't think there will ever be a time when energy is a 'solved' problem.

The more energy you have access to, the more uses you'll find for energy, and therefore the more energy you'll want to have access to.

Re: “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

#215

Post by moefh »

perihelions wrote: post #146
weberer wrote: post #5

Here's the primary source https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adc1c8 They possibly detected dimethyl sulfide, which is only known to be produced by living organisms.

I'm not convinced about the methods. It looks a lot like p-hacking to me: they have a highly specific hypothesis drawn from a large universe—that dozen or so molecules (§3.1) in their infrared spectrum model they're fitting experimental data against. I don't buy the way they created that hypothesis. The put a handful of highly specific biosignature gases into it, things that were proposed by exobiology theory papers.…

So if I understand correctly, this[1] is what they did?

[1] https://xkcd.com/882/

Re: “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

#216

Post by rabf »

t8sr wrote: post #98
tjpnz wrote: post #87

How far off are we from being able to image an exoplanet?

Directly imaging an exoplanet has been done about 20 times (maybe more, by now). If you're asking how far are we from resolving an exoplanet to more than a single point of light, the answer is we will never be able to do that from this distance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens

Re: “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

#217

Post by dmurray »

IsTom wrote: post #88
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 500 million years, hopefully humans (or whatever humans have become at that point) will be able to modify the Earth's atmosphere to deal with the increased luminosity of the Sun.

We might be lucky enough to do that, but it could have easily taken intelligence another 500M years to evolve on another planet. First animal fossils are something like 700M years old, so it took 2-3G years to just any animals.

The problem is that there are just so many planets. Sure, another planet could be 500My slower, but with a billion planets, some of them should be 500My faster instead.

It's possible we are absolutely one-in-a-billion uniquely lucky - after all, someone has to be the first and the luckiest. But every year we find indications that our planet is completely typical.

Re: “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

#218

Post by OhioMan2943 »

BirAdam wrote: post #191
farmdve wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly it is still only a stop-gap measure. The sun is for all intents and purposes, dying a slow death.

Yeah, but if humans exist by the time the sun fails us, they wouldn’t really be the same species as us, and they’d hopefully have progressed to the point that they could escape the Earth.

You're saying we wont maintain tradition and our "humanity"?. I like to be a little more optimistic and believe in us as a species transferring values until the end.

Re: “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

#219

Post by 986aignan »

dash2 wrote: post #188
vivzkestrel wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no matter how advanced the civilization is, proxima centauri will always be 42 trillion kms away. Our civilization in current stage is not even close to 0.1% the speed of light but lets say your advanced civilization goes at 99% the speed of light, still doesnt change the fact they need 4.25 years approx to reach earth. Still doesnt change the fact that unless they have a 1 billion km wide telscope, they cannot relia…

> Still doesnt change the fact that unless they have a 1 billion km wide telscope, they cannot reliably tell if earth has life or not. How come we’re making progress on this without a 1bn km telescope?

And even that notwithstanding, they could use a solar foci telescope. It's kind of a pain to orient, but it /does/ give you extreme magnification.

Re: “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

#220

Post by FrustratedMonky »

iinnPP wrote: post #195
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every field of study, subject, or problem, or even business cases, -- all have different ranges. Why does this one in-particular sound like they don't know what they are talking about? It would be just as accurate for me to say in the range of responses, yours kind of sounds like an anti-science bot. Typical of that type of thinking.

The difference between .5B years and 1.5B (BILLION) years is pretty staggering in a conversation basically focused around the last couple thousand years. Definitely room for the comment. Your anti-science bot comment however, is very anti-science.

Really? With the age of a star, that is too wide a range for you to accept? To pinpoint something like this. What if I were to say, "really it's 1.3435 Billion on a Tuesday".

Of course, calling someone anti-anti-science. The new 'right'. Using science arguments against science. Yes. Your comment is typical, just spam fud. "look at this huge range, see, scientist don't know what they are doing"

Post reply on HN