Another Earth?
- Thread starter Jack Lynt
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Awesome stuff! They also found a few moons orbiting exoplanets that could be habitable, so they may have found Endor too! And this is just in our tiny corner of our one galaxy....
Sense of scale for a moment: this planet is 600 light years away. Our galaxy is estimated between 100,000 and 120,000 light years across, and the disc is 1,000 light years thick. Put another way: picture a 12" pizza that is 1/10th of an inch thick (crappy floppy new york style). This planet is closer to us than the pizza is thick. Oh, and there are more pizzas on the tables nearby....
And, yes, by habitable, we mean habitable by us. There's certainly no need to limit life in the galaxy to carbon based oxygen breathers, but we're looking for something we can relate to rather than hyperintelligent shades of the color blue.
Sense of scale for a moment: this planet is 600 light years away. Our galaxy is estimated between 100,000 and 120,000 light years across, and the disc is 1,000 light years thick. Put another way: picture a 12" pizza that is 1/10th of an inch thick (crappy floppy new york style). This planet is closer to us than the pizza is thick. Oh, and there are more pizzas on the tables nearby....
And, yes, by habitable, we mean habitable by us. There's certainly no need to limit life in the galaxy to carbon based oxygen breathers, but we're looking for something we can relate to rather than hyperintelligent shades of the color blue.
Oh, addendum:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/06/seti_checks_out_kepler_habitable_exoplanets/
To summarize, the US Military wants to restart SETI to track satellites. In giving them money to restart, SETI can resume scanning for alien transmissions. Only now they have an idea of where to point the thing.
Bear in mind that we've only been generating radio noise since the late 1800s. If there is life on this planet, and if they developed at the same time that we did, odds are we won't hear any broadcasts in our lifetime, or the next couple hundred years. But if they just HAPPEN to be a little bit older than us, we could theoretically listen to them develop their own tech.
...around the same time as we get hit with FTL torpedoes for spying on them!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/06/seti_checks_out_kepler_habitable_exoplanets/
To summarize, the US Military wants to restart SETI to track satellites. In giving them money to restart, SETI can resume scanning for alien transmissions. Only now they have an idea of where to point the thing.
Bear in mind that we've only been generating radio noise since the late 1800s. If there is life on this planet, and if they developed at the same time that we did, odds are we won't hear any broadcasts in our lifetime, or the next couple hundred years. But if they just HAPPEN to be a little bit older than us, we could theoretically listen to them develop their own tech.
...around the same time as we get hit with FTL torpedoes for spying on them!
Endor!
So cool.Or, for that matter...how about Pandora?
That may be the awesomest simile I've heard to illustrate that sort of stuff.
"...hyperintelligent shades of the color blue."
Cool article: I don't recall those other articles explaining how it was largely(?) the Airforce that helped to get SETI going again.
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Kepler 22b is making big news.
Red this on yahoo a few days ago, it's pretty intense! All we need now is a spacecraft that can travel that far quickly. Maybe take some notes from Wall-E.
We also need spacecraft that would shield our delicate bodies from cosmic rays and the like, I have read that we cannot handle long periods in our current spacecrafts without suffering serious effects from stuff penetrating the hulls of the craft.
Radiation in space is a big, big problem, but one that I think could be overcome. Now that a trip to Mars is being expressed in months rather than years, I think we'd be fine for exploring our solar system a bit more, but would need to be sorted if we wanted to build a moonbase, or terraform mars (part of what makes Earth safe is the magnetic field).
More cool space news/food for thought:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/news/mer20111207.html
Mars? Once wet? That's a yes!
More cool space news/food for thought:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/news/mer20111207.html
Mars? Once wet? That's a yes!
Newshour Segment
No doubt! According to the report above, it would take the fastest contemporary rocketship (the space shuttle?) 25 million years to get there! Ouch. But, maybe faster space ships like ones powered by plasma engines and carrying multi-generation trips?
If only they could invent something like Star Trek's shields, for one thing. Sadly, I don't think anyone should get too optimistic about terraforming and that sort of thing unless they figure out how to create magnetic field shields. What use will it be to them if they figure out how to terraform planets like they do in Aliens, but don't also figure out how to create magnetic fields to protect the atmospheres they create? Look, I've heard from how many documentaries about the Earth and about Astronomy and etc that it's the Earth's magnetic field that allows its atmosphere to continue to exist. The magnetic field is created by the Earth's molten and spinning iron core. Now, how the hell are you going to reproduce that on a dead planet or planetoid that does not have a molten, spinning iron core? How would you even approximate it on a small scale for a part of such a planet? Although, I've heard that one idea is that people could live underground on the Moon or Mars or wherever. Would that effectively block the cosmic rays and such? What about space stations?
No doubt! According to the report above, it would take the fastest contemporary rocketship (the space shuttle?) 25 million years to get there! Ouch. But, maybe faster space ships like ones powered by plasma engines and carrying multi-generation trips?
If only they could invent something like Star Trek's shields, for one thing. Sadly, I don't think anyone should get too optimistic about terraforming and that sort of thing unless they figure out how to create magnetic field shields. What use will it be to them if they figure out how to terraform planets like they do in Aliens, but don't also figure out how to create magnetic fields to protect the atmospheres they create? Look, I've heard from how many documentaries about the Earth and about Astronomy and etc that it's the Earth's magnetic field that allows its atmosphere to continue to exist. The magnetic field is created by the Earth's molten and spinning iron core. Now, how the hell are you going to reproduce that on a dead planet or planetoid that does not have a molten, spinning iron core? How would you even approximate it on a small scale for a part of such a planet? Although, I've heard that one idea is that people could live underground on the Moon or Mars or wherever. Would that effectively block the cosmic rays and such? What about space stations?
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This is the key right here. If we could a) seed a planet/moon/asteroid/etc's core with sufficient iron (depending on composition of the core, maybe some fusion/fission/alchemy would do the trick) and then b) heat it to a molton state, physics would probably take care of most of the rest. Seed the surface with the elements we need, give it some time (decades on the low end, I would imagine) and there's your terraforming! Of course, if Firefly has taught us anything, that's not without individual unexpected problems.
If we extend that idea to long range spaceships (we're definitely in sci-fi territory now), you could conceivably create a ship with a small bubble of atmosphere around it, maintained by the magnetic field. Breathing suits would not be necessary to do surface repairs (though it'd still be damn cold!) and with a large enough magnetic-core ship, that might take care of gravity issues. Much safer going out to clean the vents if you aren't going to float away.
Merging some more theoritical science and getting WAY FURTHER into sci-fi, if we confirm and get our hands on the Higgs boson (which is what gives particles mass) we could conceptually control the mass of an object, boosting it in space to give the ship more gravity. Perhaps the core (let's call it a stabilization core) could be made super-dense, almost to the level of a black hole. After all, if we get to the point where we can manipulate elementary particles, containing a black hole should be a piece of cake!
As a tangent from a tangent from a tangent, I hate the nickname "the god particle". It doesn't describe what a Higgs boson is, implies an overstatement of importance and just pisses off fundies. Oddly enough, in the book the nickname came from, the physicist who wrote it wanted to call it "the goddamn particle" because it is so elusive. The publisher nixed it, made it more controversial and created the furvor of ignorance we find in pop culture these days.
Anyway, lots of stuff to work out before we can check out other planets, but plenty of inspiration for some fun sci-fi!
Oh, Firelfly dealt with that? I never really watched Firefly. Very cool.
Magnetic-core ship? Wicked. Now those are some very cool ideas I really like.
Yes, fun inspiration!
Digging up this thread (or maybe just taking a long slow cryo-sleep spaceship to get here), we've found a closer one!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/02/exoplanet_in_goldilocks_zone/
22 light years away. That pizza analogy I used? It's now a piece of paper. For a 12" galaxy-pizza, this planet is 0.0022 inches away (the average thickness of 20# copy paper is around 0.003
. So relatively close as to really call it a neighbor!
Of course, we can't travel near the speed of light yet, nor build a ship that could cart people for 22 years, but in sci-fi terms, that's easily conceivable. Hell, at half the speed of light, you're looking at 44 year trek. Tell me you couldn't find people to man that, doubly so if you consider a sustainable super-ship; people live, give birth and die on board. Gene Wolfe wrote some good books on such a ship (and another of my favorite books which I could mention, but that's the big twist at the end, which I wouldn't want to give away).
Currently our speed record is the Galileo probe (which studied, then crashed into Jupiter at about 106,900 mph, or 0.00016 the speed of light). The fastest we've managed to get something to travel, and we did that by crashing it. Long way to go in that department.
But we're working on it: also in this morning's news on the Reg:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/03/spacex_tests_superdraco/
SpaceX, the world's biggest private rocket company, has developed a new safety/low-gravity landing engine. The tests say it works the way they wanted it to. If they could get there, this could land one of their Dragon capsules (love the name, by the by) on Mars.
This stuff greatly excites me
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/02/exoplanet_in_goldilocks_zone/
22 light years away. That pizza analogy I used? It's now a piece of paper. For a 12" galaxy-pizza, this planet is 0.0022 inches away (the average thickness of 20# copy paper is around 0.003
. So relatively close as to really call it a neighbor! Of course, we can't travel near the speed of light yet, nor build a ship that could cart people for 22 years, but in sci-fi terms, that's easily conceivable. Hell, at half the speed of light, you're looking at 44 year trek. Tell me you couldn't find people to man that, doubly so if you consider a sustainable super-ship; people live, give birth and die on board. Gene Wolfe wrote some good books on such a ship (and another of my favorite books which I could mention, but that's the big twist at the end, which I wouldn't want to give away).
Currently our speed record is the Galileo probe (which studied, then crashed into Jupiter at about 106,900 mph, or 0.00016 the speed of light). The fastest we've managed to get something to travel, and we did that by crashing it. Long way to go in that department.
But we're working on it: also in this morning's news on the Reg:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/03/spacex_tests_superdraco/
SpaceX, the world's biggest private rocket company, has developed a new safety/low-gravity landing engine. The tests say it works the way they wanted it to. If they could get there, this could land one of their Dragon capsules (love the name, by the by) on Mars.
This stuff greatly excites me
When I had lunch at NASA a few years ago with an astronaut, he said another big concern with long space travel is bone cartiledge falls apart in the absence of gravity. Spaceships of the future will need artificial gravity for Human passengers. Robtos are ideal astronauts for the time being because they are built more durable for long space travel.
It's not bone cartilage. You lose your bone density. And unfortunately our time on the space station has shown that no amount of exercise, high impact or not, will stop the body from doing this. You must have to have 1G of gravity.
On the other note. 22 freakin' light years away?! Holy crap that's close. Soooo cool.
Anyone else check out the Niel DeGrasse Tyson Nova doc about long-term space travel? It had some interesting segments
On the other note. 22 freakin' light years away?! Holy crap that's close. Soooo cool.
Anyone else check out the Niel DeGrasse Tyson Nova doc about long-term space travel? It had some interesting segments
That's exciting stuff!This stuff greatly excites me
On the other note. 22 freakin' light years away?! Holy crap that's close. Soooo cool.
Anyone else check out the Niel DeGrasse Tyson Nova doc about long-term space travel? It had some interesting segments
Yes! That's great stuff.
Nova: Space & Flight Videos
Check out the "Can We Make it to Mars?" espisode. It's a great episode about humans and space travel.
And this is really exciting too.
The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT)
Listen to (or read) this NPR report.
Want To Make A Giant Telescope Mirror? Here's How
And this is the one I first heard on the radio. It's a bit more personable and fun, perhaps, as well as shorter but with less information.
Mega Mirror To Power Massive New Telescope
What's really exciting is that they expect to be able to actually see other planets going around other stars. But, best case scenario, it will be 2020 at the soonest.
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I read an awesome book where there were missions from earth to the nearest inhabitable star and back and the problem was that at light speed, time approaches zero for the mass, so when the people traveled to and from it, the earth had aged something like 400 years by the time they came back. Interesting concept.
While you guys are pondering pizzas, neutrinos, warp drives, quantum propulsion, folding space or surfing a wormhole to go faster than lightspeed, I saw this thread and thought it was about the movie, ANOTHER EARTH.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8hEwMMDtFY
It's at Redbox and I'm waiting to be in the right mood to see it.
I do believe that faster than lightspeed is theoretically possible, no not with the Event Horizon's "black hole to hell generator" (pictured above), but based on that old theory if you are on a craft (or train) travelling at the speed of light, you exceed it by travelling from the back to the front. Imagine several ships in one using multi-launch rails in zero gravity to get faster and faster, until it's finally a little ship escaping the final stage. I know, it's impractical. You would need to start with ship as big as the one from PANDORUM. (I really like that movie, because of the dual twist ending.)
Maybe the key is unlocking the dimensional doors of Dr. Kaku's multi-verse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8hEwMMDtFY
It's at Redbox and I'm waiting to be in the right mood to see it.
I do believe that faster than lightspeed is theoretically possible, no not with the Event Horizon's "black hole to hell generator" (pictured above), but based on that old theory if you are on a craft (or train) travelling at the speed of light, you exceed it by travelling from the back to the front. Imagine several ships in one using multi-launch rails in zero gravity to get faster and faster, until it's finally a little ship escaping the final stage. I know, it's impractical. You would need to start with ship as big as the one from PANDORUM. (I really like that movie, because of the dual twist ending.)
Maybe the key is unlocking the dimensional doors of Dr. Kaku's multi-verse.
I knew there might be a little bit o' cheeky obfuscation when I titled the thread, but I thought it was appropriate enough. There's an interesting review of Another Earth on The Clapper Bored. Sorry, guys, I don't see which writer gets credit for that review.
I love the pictures you posted, Scoopicman. I like that you included the one from Contact. You know, I still remember what a breathtaking experience it was the wormhole sequence in that film, seeing it for the first time and on the big screen.
=)
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This might be dumb for me to post. I'm sorry, folks, but this comment will not endear me to you.
We will never travel to any "Earth-like" planet. For that matter, we will never travel to any planet outside our Solar System.
We'd better learn to live in the one we've got.
Kepler-22b, a planet that might be habitable, is only 600 light-years away. Sweet. So, it'll take 600 years to get there, traveling at the speed of light!
Common-knowledge tells you that there is zero-gravity in space. That's not true. What do you think keeps planets spinning around stars? Ditto that logic for galaxies. Space has relatively really-low gravity, when compared to that on Earth. But if you start travelling at 671 million miles per hour, yeah, you're gonna feel some gravity. Forget your spaceship. There's no chance in hell the human body would survive that kind of G-force.
Then there's the issue of space-debris. Forget larger objects, like meteors and what not. Space-dust, tiny-little-specs of dust would tear the shit out of any hull in any spaceship. Unless you've got a supply of unobtainium, you can't construct a vessel capable of traveling at the speed of light.
Unless you've invented a force-field that is completely impervious to any impacts, and you've invented anti-gravity, to counteract the extreme G-force created by travelling at the speed of light. Plus, this anti-gravity would have to be perfectly-timed to adjust to the ever-changing directions in which the gravity is being pulled from, depending on which part of our galaxy you're traveling through, at the speed of light!
This stuff makes for great movies. But it'll never happen in real life.
In my opinion! Let the beatings commence. Be gentle.
We will never travel to any "Earth-like" planet. For that matter, we will never travel to any planet outside our Solar System.
We'd better learn to live in the one we've got.
Kepler-22b, a planet that might be habitable, is only 600 light-years away. Sweet. So, it'll take 600 years to get there, traveling at the speed of light!
Common-knowledge tells you that there is zero-gravity in space. That's not true. What do you think keeps planets spinning around stars? Ditto that logic for galaxies. Space has relatively really-low gravity, when compared to that on Earth. But if you start travelling at 671 million miles per hour, yeah, you're gonna feel some gravity. Forget your spaceship. There's no chance in hell the human body would survive that kind of G-force.
Then there's the issue of space-debris. Forget larger objects, like meteors and what not. Space-dust, tiny-little-specs of dust would tear the shit out of any hull in any spaceship. Unless you've got a supply of unobtainium, you can't construct a vessel capable of traveling at the speed of light.
Unless you've invented a force-field that is completely impervious to any impacts, and you've invented anti-gravity, to counteract the extreme G-force created by travelling at the speed of light. Plus, this anti-gravity would have to be perfectly-timed to adjust to the ever-changing directions in which the gravity is being pulled from, depending on which part of our galaxy you're traveling through, at the speed of light!
This stuff makes for great movies. But it'll never happen in real life.
In my opinion! Let the beatings commence. Be gentle.
I can't recall the name of the book, ROC, but I recall reading it too. If memory serves, it was the inspiration for my favorite Queen song ('39) which deals with relativity and space travel. Also, the books past Ender's Game deal with that a lot...essentially, Ender sees galactic history unfold by rarely leaving his spaceship. Cool stuff!
And Cracker, I do agree with you to a degree. In our lifetimes, we'll be lucky if we actually get to Mars. But long term? I dunno. Again, the new one they found is 22 light years away. Still a LONG FRICKING DISTANCE, but much closer than the 600 we had seen at the start of this thread. And it's been proven that planets are MUCH more common than we had previously assumed.
The more important issue for us, in the here and now, is observation. Take the telescope they're building in the links that richy posted. 22 light years is damn close when you look at it in galactic terms. Also bear in mind we can see other galaxies right now, and they are VERY far away. What we don't yet know is how common life is in the galaxy (we haven't found any others yet). A planet 600 light years away would be tough to observe and/or communicate with if we found life. Presuming that it developed on the same timeline as here on earth, looking at it today we would see the 1400s. Not a lot of observable-from-space tech going on, let alone if we did find intelligent life, it'd take 1200 years to send and receive a light morse code message, for example.
Now, if we looked at the closer planet today, we would see 1990. Not only could there be more observable tech, but a message could take 44 years, round trip. A long time, to be sure, but certainly short enough to communicate. THAT'S where the real excitement is. What are the odds of finding intelligent life? Well, we have no idea. We're only beginning to see these other planets; it could be 1 in a million, it could be 1 in 5. We won't know until we start looking, and now we've proved that there are things to look at, and are working out how to go about doing that.
About space travel, I agree with you. There's tons of problems that need to be worked out, and we're barely scratching the surface right now. Today, space travel is expensive and not practical in the least. But compare tech today to the tech of 100 years ago. Compare travel today to travel 100 years ago. You can say lots of negative things about humanity, all of them true, but one thing you can't say is that we're technologically stagnant. We're constantly expanding and things we take for granted today couldn't even be conceived of 50 years ago.
You have identified a lot of the problems inherent with space travel, which is the first step to developing ideas to compensate for that. I agree that will not happen in our lifetime. However, you can't say it's "impossible" until we're done developing tech and we know everything there is to know. Hell, we hardly know a fraction of what there is to know! Skepticism and honest evaluation of current tech/understanding is good. But only Sith deal in absolutes (except that one. That one is fine for a Jedi. But if I hear any more absolutes out of you, Skywalker, then it'll be straight to your room with no supper!)
Bottom line: I love discussions like this, and no beatings for any perspective or opinion
And Cracker, I do agree with you to a degree. In our lifetimes, we'll be lucky if we actually get to Mars. But long term? I dunno. Again, the new one they found is 22 light years away. Still a LONG FRICKING DISTANCE, but much closer than the 600 we had seen at the start of this thread. And it's been proven that planets are MUCH more common than we had previously assumed.
The more important issue for us, in the here and now, is observation. Take the telescope they're building in the links that richy posted. 22 light years is damn close when you look at it in galactic terms. Also bear in mind we can see other galaxies right now, and they are VERY far away. What we don't yet know is how common life is in the galaxy (we haven't found any others yet). A planet 600 light years away would be tough to observe and/or communicate with if we found life. Presuming that it developed on the same timeline as here on earth, looking at it today we would see the 1400s. Not a lot of observable-from-space tech going on, let alone if we did find intelligent life, it'd take 1200 years to send and receive a light morse code message, for example.
Now, if we looked at the closer planet today, we would see 1990. Not only could there be more observable tech, but a message could take 44 years, round trip. A long time, to be sure, but certainly short enough to communicate. THAT'S where the real excitement is. What are the odds of finding intelligent life? Well, we have no idea. We're only beginning to see these other planets; it could be 1 in a million, it could be 1 in 5. We won't know until we start looking, and now we've proved that there are things to look at, and are working out how to go about doing that.
About space travel, I agree with you. There's tons of problems that need to be worked out, and we're barely scratching the surface right now. Today, space travel is expensive and not practical in the least. But compare tech today to the tech of 100 years ago. Compare travel today to travel 100 years ago. You can say lots of negative things about humanity, all of them true, but one thing you can't say is that we're technologically stagnant. We're constantly expanding and things we take for granted today couldn't even be conceived of 50 years ago.
You have identified a lot of the problems inherent with space travel, which is the first step to developing ideas to compensate for that. I agree that will not happen in our lifetime. However, you can't say it's "impossible" until we're done developing tech and we know everything there is to know. Hell, we hardly know a fraction of what there is to know! Skepticism and honest evaluation of current tech/understanding is good. But only Sith deal in absolutes (except that one. That one is fine for a Jedi. But if I hear any more absolutes out of you, Skywalker, then it'll be straight to your room with no supper!)
Bottom line: I love discussions like this, and no beatings for any perspective or opinion