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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

#321

Post by rbanffy »

HWR_14 wrote: post #122
psd1 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, worse, the young will never get any power because the old will not relinquish control. Then you have the "surfeit of princes" problem. This isn't just grand political power: imagine being unable to progress in your career because geriatrics above you aren't retiring. That's just one possible secondary effect. We could enumerate many others.

Oh yes. That's a very clear concern. I'm reacting to the "people who decline will he like antivaxers" comment. But it seems far more likely people will be priced out as opposed to voluntarily refuse treatment.

They’ll sneer at the masses without eternal youth anyway.

Unless, of course, living a thousand years brings some wisdom with it.

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

#322

Post by rbanffy »

natechols wrote: post #138
rbanffy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more or less the plot of a story by Brazilian science fiction writer Roberto Luiz Calife.

And the story "Far Centaurus" by A.E. Van Vogt.

Will have to look that one up.

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

#323

Post by rbanffy »

roveo wrote: post #130
virgildotcodes wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any chance you could link to some stuff that's making you so optimistic about rejuvenation on that timeline?

Look up the stuff David Sinclair is doing with his team. They are already rejuvenating and regrowing severed optic nerves with Yamanaka factors in mice and are preparing to start human trials. It's not rock-solid that this is going to happen for the whole body soon, but some truly breakthrough things are happening right now in this field, nothing like the previous decades.

That doesn’t solve the issue that the passengers will need to live on the ship for a thousand years, even if their relatives will be on Earth for twice as long.

Even a very big ship can be boring after a sufficiently long time.

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

#324

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

ethbr0 wrote: post #229
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody ever believed that America is a super-hostile environment.

Roanoke, Ajacan, Fort Caroline, Sable Island, Charlesfort, Pensacola, San Miguel de Gualdape, Charlesbourg-Royal, France-Roy, Pensacola?

False equivalence, of course.

The fact that random groups people from the Old World decided to start colonies without any prior experience or preparation precisely shows that they didn't consider America to be "super-hostile".

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

#325

Post by pharke »

AitchEmArsey wrote: post #243
pharke wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> soil Both aquaponics and aeroponics provide ways to grow plants without soil. Breeding insects or algae may provide nutrition with very small amounts of mass needing to be transported. > nuclear reactors Yes, these are a necessity but we've sent one to Antarctica before and we could send a more modern one to Mars. > nuclear and other fuels The good thing about nuclear fuel is that you need a very small amount of it…

"We go to the moon not because it is easy, but because if we don't then some commie bastards will get there first." I am all for exploration and science for the sake of science, but any talk of colonies is just wasted breath at this stage. We need to first explore how to live within our means on earth.

I'm of the opposite opinion. I think we need to spread out as soon as possible because it's not clear we can ever completely future proof our civilization here. There are simply too many things that can go wrong, many of which are not within our control. Take the pandemic for example, if it had been 10x worse it could have collapsed our current global civilization. There's no way of preventing it from spreading to every corner of the Earth without also destroying civilization as we know it. Same goes for asteroid impacts, super volcanos (consider Tonga a warning), tsunamis, solar flares, CMEs. Then there are the man-made disasters that we may or may not be able to keep under control such as war, terrorism, religious fanaticism, industrial accidents, pollution or even just apathy and hedonism.

I'm not saying we should ignore all the other things in favour of escaping to space. The Earth is the largest volume of habitable space that we have right now but it is also the only one and that's the problem. We should be building other habitats in parallel with solving our current problems. We need a literal backup plan in case things go seriously wrong.

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

#326

Post by BMc2020 »

BeefWellington wrote: post #89
T-A wrote: post #56

There seems to be some confusion about the meaning of "within the habitable zone". From the paper (Introduction and Conclusions, respectively) [1]: The habitability conditions of Proxima b, which orbits within the HZ of the star, have been extensively studied (e.g. Barnes et al. 2017; Ribas et al. 2016; Turbet et al. 2016; Meadows & Barnes 2018). On the other hand, the candidate Proxima d orbits much closer to the st…

There's also the consideration of the host star to take into account. I dislike the term "Earth-like" in these publications because it conjures images of a strange alien world able to support (human) life. Even assuming there were life capable of withstanding the constant flares from the host star, I suspect it would have to look very different in color and likely composition to the plant life here due to needing to…

Yes, "Earth-like" caught my attention too because red dwarfs are flare stars. I wanted to check my facts before commenting which led me down the rabbit hole of the history of Proximas flare activity, which is quite interesting.

Fun fact: Go outside on a clear night, and you can see 5-10,000 stars. There are 8 times that many red dwarfs in your field of view, and none of them are visible to the naked eye. But in 2016 Proxima was for a few minutes.

In March 2016 we saw a superflare: Proxima briefly became nearly a factor of 100 brighter, reaching a brightness just visible to the naked eye from dark sites.

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

#327

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 »

spookthesunset wrote: post #188
5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 under…

I think you would need a kind of power that would have obvious hallmarks, like literally rewriting the rules that underlie the universe. But's that just my cynical perspective.

I guess that's why arthur c clarke said sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I just think that kind of magic would be visible to us. Or maybe it is, but we just can't tell.

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

#328

Post by s1artibartfast »

ncmncm wrote: post #317
s1artibartfast wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>While US gov't put in $billions. There is a difference between buying something and putting in money. If I buy a cheeseburger, I can't say I "put in" $5 to McDonalds and should have some ownership. If I pay my contract plumber to fix my toilet, I don't own their business either. I think you will be hard-pressed to find any substantial examples where the US gov wasn't buying something from SpaceX.

McDonald's won't go bankrupt if you elect not to get the large fries. SpaceX would have gone bankrupt several times if NASA hadn't kicked in at a crucial moment.

So they deserve equity for being a critical customer? I still don't follow the logic.

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

#329

Post by denton-scratch »

mortehu wrote: post #40
denton-scratch wrote: post #16

"Earth-like planet"? It orbits the star every 5 days; it's a quarter of the earth's mass. It's also a tenth the distance from its star that Mercury is from the Sun. It's earth-like only in that its temperature is consistent with there being liquid water.

"Earth-like" just means terrestrial, as opposed to jovian. It means it has a rocky surface.

Thanks - I didn't know it was a technical term.

So even if the thing's tidelocked, and has no atmosphere because stellar flare-ups, it still counts as earth-like. TIL.

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

#330

Post by prox »

ahonhn wrote: post #319
prox wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good place to learn how to reverse entropy.

Just read Asimov's "The Last Question" yesterday and then this discussion pops up today on HN :-)

Fantastic read isn’t it!

Loving the Foundation series sofar as well on AppleTV, but the books are great ofcourse.

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