91–100 of 142 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you get the rover there? It would take thousands of years. Or maybe millions of years? With the current tech
Orion drives can get up to some respectable fraction of the speed of light. Just need a billion or so 1-kiloton nukes. No biggy. No worries about sneaking up on them and startling them either.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.10...
Suppose a planet like this had non intelligent megafauna life. How could we detect this?
One way is to build bigger telescopes and hope its not too cloudy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08421
...and an excellent video on the topic:
120 light years away. Time to get the ufo tech out already.
is Faster Than Light travel even possible? I'm asking in a serious way. I have always read that its impossible, at least within our current knowledge. the only semi-plausible theory I've ever heard is that Blackholes might one day yield some way of traveling quickly across the universe but nobody has shown anything substantiated around that or anything else.
Very unpleasant planet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
is Faster Than Light travel even possible? I'm asking in a serious way. I have always read that its impossible, at least within our current knowledge. the only semi-plausible theory I've ever heard is that Blackholes might one day yield some way of traveling quickly across the universe but nobody has shown anything substantiated around that or anything else.
There's no realistically plausible solution I've ever heard of, that is, ones that don't require millions of years of setup and entire stars worth of energy production. But that's with our current understanding of physics. While our current models seem nearly perfect and therefore nearly complete, there was a time they thought that about Newtonian physics. Perhaps some detail we need to understand dark matter or dark…
I’m not sure this is the case. Basically every physicist I’ve met thinks we’re in for another general relativity and that a unified theory will be a lot different than the multitude of theories we have now
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it’s based on last universal common ancestor estimates(LUCA) and supported by (lack of) fossil record. I thought the Cambrian Explosion's fossil record was pretty sizeable - in fact, it's named after the place where the fossil layer was first discovered. I didn't know it was related to a common ancestor. Are you thinking of something else or am I missing something major?
Yes but we’re talking about before the Cambrian
>>> Complex animal life took 3.5 bn years to emerge on Earth,
>> How certain are we it took that long (the first time)?
> Not certain at all, it’s based on last universal common ancestor estimates(LUCA) and supported by (lack of) fossil record.
Do you mean, there's little evidence of pre-Cambrian absence? Absence of evidence is some evidence of absence, in this case.
But how does LUCA fit into this question?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what life looks like on a planet which is over 8 times more massive than the Earth. Do animals have spines at all on a planet with almost 8g gravity? Does life even get to evolve into complex systems like animals under this much gravity? How about plants? Do they grow up or spread out instead? If one day we get a visitor from this planet, they'll jump on our planet the same way human astronauts jumped on the…
The gravity question is one I've pondered myself as a thought exercise. There's been discussions on how far up a plant can draw water as the defining limit to how tall a tree could grow. Some discussions as well on how tall an animal could grow based on how high blood could be pumped up. Which is a direction different from the structural support and sizes that I find interesting.
In Nick Lane's Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World, he talks about the importance of both methane and carbon dioxide and how they exist at the extremes of a complex metabolic oxidation-reduction cycle. Methane stores a lot of chemical energy in its C-H bonds which can be burned directly, or metabolized through repeat oxidation events to ultimately form CO2, which plants utilize with the help of the sun to form m…
I wonder what life looks like on a planet which is over 8 times more massive than the Earth. Do animals have spines at all on a planet with almost 8g gravity? Does life even get to evolve into complex systems like animals under this much gravity? How about plants? Do they grow up or spread out instead? If one day we get a visitor from this planet, they'll jump on our planet the same way human astronauts jumped on the…
Assuming life develops in an ocean, like we did, organisms in water are essentially weightless, regardless of the g force.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's also crazy is if we did send a rover over there to hunt for life, and they found it, we'd have to wait 125 years to hear the result. We all sit around knowing to listen to the skies sometime in October of 2185 to hear if the rover found life within the first month of its landing. If we ever send a team to live there, we'd hear broadcasts of their lives from 125 years prior. A real portal in time - so cool.
How do you get the rover there? It would take thousands of years. Or maybe millions of years? With the current tech