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NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star

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Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star

#91

Post by ericd »

maratd wrote: post #60
cryptoz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I think of intelligent alien life, I think along the lines of Klingons, not alien dolphins. Are we going to find alien dolphins? Absolutely. Klingons? Nope. Why are you so sure that this is impossible, still? Aside from FTL travel, in what way are humans fundamentally different from Kingons? We both have space travel, some sentience, a taste for weapons, etc. You think this happened only once in the entire (sa…

> Why are you so sure that this is impossible, still? Aside from FTL travel, in what way are humans fundamentally different from Kingons? You don't understand my argument. We (and our intelligence) are the unique product of our evolutionary environment. There is no tendency in evolution towards intelligence. There are far many more organisms on this planet in far greater numbers than us that don't even have a brain,…

>There is no tendency in evolution towards intelligence.

What? An obvious ability to learn is found in lots of animals, and in the cases where the benefit outweighs the additional caloric requirements, the evolutionary tendency is towards intelligence. Of course it's not the only one, but it's a pretty big trump card natural selection-wise when it reaches a sufficient level, as humans have clearly demonstrated.

Millions of years are a dime a dozen in the time scales of the universe, and parallelize that across more than trillions of planets. I think your intuition is way off here.

Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star

#92

Post by narag »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #58
mindstab wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sentience must (by sheer odds) be out there too. ... and your solution to the Fermi paradox is?

Time. What are the odds of there being more than one intelligence in the same galactic neighborhood? Looking at our own planet, which is a biodiversity paradise, there's only one strongly sentient, intelligent, tool-using critter - us. Why aren't we surrounded by other tool users trying to communicate with us? Why aren't we chatting with dolphins, working with cephalopods, and commuting to work with chimpanzees? Hell…

A variation: maybe we're just the first ones in the neighborhood. Maybe life needs elements only present in third generation stars. Earth could be an instance of extremely accelerated evolution because some favorable traits and we are at least some millions of years ahead of the rest.

Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star

#93

Post by [deleted] »

ceejayoz wrote: post #90
officemonkey wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the long run, our sun will age, and could expand to a red giant phase where our planet would become uninhabitable. Scientists believe this will happen in billions of years, but it could happen tomorrow.

> Scientists believe this will happen in billions of years, but it could happen tomorrow. I'm pretty sure that statement flies in the face of astrophysics.

[deleted]

Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star

#94

Post by officemonkey »

ceejayoz wrote: post #90
officemonkey wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the long run, our sun will age, and could expand to a red giant phase where our planet would become uninhabitable. Scientists believe this will happen in billions of years, but it could happen tomorrow.

> Scientists believe this will happen in billions of years, but it could happen tomorrow. I'm pretty sure that statement flies in the face of astrophysics.

I'm a defensive pessimist: prepare for the worst, hope for the best.

Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star

#95

Post by wahnfrieden »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #72
electromagnetic wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually given that dogs score better than chimps, wolves and human infants in tests of social cognition would lend credence to the fact that humans are actually inadvertently creating sentience. Similarly dogs are the only non-primate species to look at the right side of a persons face to gauge their emotion and state, but unlike primates and humans, they don't do this with other species or dogs. Evidence points to…

Having lived with the "best friends" of humans (cats and dogs) for many years, I am no longer sure what "sentience" is because I find the difference between us and them in everything to be a matter of degree. We're _better_ at being 'sentient' than they are, but I can't find anything that we do that they don't. I'm serious here. You totally hit the nail on the head when you talk about anger and empathy. They can lear…

Just be careful not to project your own humanity onto your pets, if you want to see them more objectively. Radiolab had a great episode on "animal minds" that went into some of the biases dog owners have about their pets. In a sense, we're actually disrespecting other animals by judging them on a scale of "how humanlike is their behavior" and too easily discounting the things that make them unique and unlike us.

Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star

#96

Post by beambot »

mirkules wrote: post #33
jjcm wrote: post #19

What's the gravity on the surface? It's 2.4 times the size of earth, is the density the same? If so, that amount of gravity may very well make it uninhabitable.

Humans can withstand much more than 2.4Gs although the time is exponentially and inversely proportional (for example, 3Gs is a space shuttle launch for a number of minutes, 10Gs is the maximum force allowed during space capsule landing, but only for a few seconds). Therefore, I wouldn't say "uninhabitable," but probably less friendly (and not immediately lethal) to humans. Also, different animals have different thres…

That's curious... I would have thought a land-dwelling mouse would have more G-force tolerance than a whale living in neutral buoyancy oceans. Are you using that as an illustrative example (eg. mice and elephants), or does that still hold for mice and whales?

Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star

#97

Post by colanderman »

jerfelix wrote: post #48
maratd wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that isn't really how evolution works. Taking this a step further, finding intelligent life out there is simply impossible. The reason our intelligence is unique to only humans on our planet is largely because we defined intelligence as traits that only we possess. We defined it based on our own nature. Finding life out there that would be socially compatible with us is ridiculously unlikely. That life would have h…

> we defined intelligence as traits that only we possess There's also an article on HN right now about Dolphins proving to be intelligent beings [1]. It says: Our research has provided an answer to an age-old question highlighted by Dr Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute, ‘Are we alone?’ We can now unequivocally answer, ‘no.’ SETI’s search for non-human intelligence in outer spacehas been found right here on earth in t…

I laughed to think that HUMAN'S analysis of whether a dolphin is intelligent is whether WE can understand their language.

Using that logic, it seems my dog is more intelligent than me: He can understand some of my language as well as his own, whereas I can only understand my own.

I agree with your sentiment but your logic is backward. Substitute dog for dolphin in your first sentence:

[a] HUMAN'S analysis of whether a dog is intelligent is whether WE can understand their language.

Since you cannot (by your own admission) understand your dog's language, by the logic of that statement, the dog would not be intelligent.

Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star

#98

Post by daemin »

moe wrote: post #89
maratd wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are you so sure that this is impossible, still? Aside from FTL travel, in what way are humans fundamentally different from Kingons? You don't understand my argument. We (and our intelligence) are the unique product of our evolutionary environment. There is no tendency in evolution towards intelligence. There are far many more organisms on this planet in far greater numbers than us that don't even have a brain,…

astronomically unlikely Interesting choice of words. So while we're talking in astronomical terms: How big is the universe? How many earth-like planets does it contain? Are there other universes? Until we can answer at least one of these questions I would refrain from calling anything in this context "astronomically unlikely".

I think that in the whole universe there is intelligent life out there like ours (not in body but in mind/thought). However due to the time/distance scales that are required to interact with them, it might as well not exist, since we'd require a huge amount of luck to ever interact with them.

Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star

#99

Post by portentint »

When do we leave? Oh, yeah... WE DON'T HAVE A MANNED SPACE PROGRAM ANY MORE. Grrrrrrr.

Yes, I know it's impossibly far away. I just find it harder to get excited about this these days. And yes, I know that's not totally rational.

But yeah, what cletus said. Depressing.

Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star

#100

Post by splitrocket »

mindstab wrote: post #55
cletus wrote: post #2

Kepler has certainly made a lot of discoveries. It should be fairly clear to us now that planetary systems are pretty common and, by extension, sentience must (by sheer odds) be out there too. But I have to wonder how many assumptions go into this so-called "habitable zone". Doesn't it greatly depend on the atmospheric composition? With a different atmosphere, couldn't Venus be habitable (actually it might be in our…

> sentience must (by sheer odds) be out there too. ... and your solution to the Fermi paradox is?

Pervasive encryption/compression of electromagnetic communication across an extremely wide spectrum and truly badass video games can explain why we haven't been visited and why we can't watch their TV channels.
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