Matt_dk writes "Does a twin Earth exist somewhere in our galaxy? Astronomers are getting closer and closer to finding an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit. NASA's Kepler spacecraft just launched to find such worlds. Once the search succeeds, the next questions driving research will be: Is that planet habitable? Does it have an Earth-like atmosphere? Answering those questions will not be easy. 'We'll have to be really lucky to decipher an Earth-like planet's atmosphere during a transit event so that we can tell it is Earth-like,' said Kaltenegger. 'We will need to add up many transits to do so — hundreds of them, even for stars as close as 20 light-years away.'" The abstract of their paper offers a link to the complete paper as a 17-page PDF; here is a short description from 2007 of the same researchers' work, outlining the type of spectral signature that an Earth-like atmosphere would be expected to show.
that it will take hundreds of years to tell if they are truly Earth-like. And that is complete nonsense.
Once we find a sufficient collection of candidate planets using this instrument, we can devise a different device/experiment to narrow down whether they are Earth-like. That should take maybe a few years to ten years.
That is more-or-less the pattern we have been following, and it has been successful so far. I see no reason to change.
"...and it has been successful so far. I see no reason to change."
Has it? Can we really be sure that the current method is accurate in ruling out earth-like and non-earth-like?
I'm not really disagreeing with you, just not so sure that it's 100% accurate (which is ideal, but not exactly realistic). To me this sounds like they are intentionally thwarting the idea, so the public will go "well shit, guess we're trapped here for 300 more years" kinda thing.
Current method seems fine, applied to the new equipment. Keep searching, monitor the ones we already assume are earth-like, and when we figure out a way to do something about it (wormholes, etc) we pick the best candidate at that time, and go for it, if that fails, or if it takes longer than the time to build/induce/etc the next method of travel/communication, we head for the second candidate, etc... this "new" method seem to suppose that we won't be able to do anything about it for 200 more years, so we have the time to piss around with hundreds of tests, when we should probably assume it'l be possible next year, kinda like "Year of Linux on the Desktop", may never happen, but why can't it happen next year? Just because you may not succeed, doesn't mean you should't try.
I was 10 when I watched Armstrong land on the moon, every kid was into space and I had read "grown up books" in the library with pictures of water canals on Mars and rainforests on Venus. Since then astronomy has been fully digitised and we have mapped most of the EM spectrum [nasa.gov]. I'm not saying it won't continue to improve (especially in the area of corrective optics) but I think it will be slower now that the spectrum land rush is coming to an end and digitization is well and trully complete.
From what I can tell in a brief skim, it really does pose a fundamental limit given current technology. The problem is that with the largest mirror we can imagine getting up into space, and with the highest sensitivity sensors, the signal-to-noise ratio is still too low to get a usable measurement without taking hundreds of measurements.
They plan to detect the chemicals in the atmosphere by measuring the absorption bands in the starlight as some of it passes through the atmosphere. This is presumably going to be a lot more sensitive than trying to detect the light from the planet directly, since you have a lot more photons to carry the information. The signal to noise ratio in this case is really limited by the unfortunate fact that light energy is discretized and you can't make finer measurements than a single photon. Thus a large mirror with a high-quantum efficiency (95%) sensor, is really the best you can do.
The only hope to improve this is to either get bigger mirrors, which really depends on improving space access and is unlikely to give order of magnitude improvements, or to implement an as yet unrealized method that is able to get more information. If it were a problem of angular resolution there are plenty of interesting tricks you could use to improve it. Unfortunately I can't think of anything better, and it doesn't seem anyone else has yet either. Of course, that doesn't mean no one will... but its not as simple as just designing the next mission.
Actually... random 3:30 am idea... if you did something in thermal-IR, and measured the absorption of the blackbody emissions of the planet by the atmosphere you might be able to get something working. The intensity would be a lot lower than looking at the stars light, but the dimming due to absorption would be much larger percentage-wise... although it would take some heavy math to show if it would actually give you a better SNR. Of course, there are plenty of holes here: among other things, my knowledge of atmospheric chemistry and absorption is very limited, and this would all depend on being able to resolve the star separate from the planet, and would thus rely on some complicated interferometric methods....... and you'd have to block out the star light to be able to get the planet light as anything more than noise... and probably the number of photons in thermal IR from a planet are too low to be able to even see it on its own... but maybe I'm wrong and it could work, or something else can.
Just because it's hard doesn't mean that we shall give up trying.
This field is still a very young field, and the methods used to find planets will be more and more refined over time.
But it's also important to not count out stellar systems that may not look like they are going to contain earth-like planets. Even a negative answer is an answer giving usable data in this case.
Earth is the only speck of dust in the universe where we are certain that there is life. If it's intelligent enough to prosper in the lo
IAAP (I am an astro-physicist) and while I would love to agree with you, I cannot. The problem is not that we do not know how to get a quick measurement the problem is that is would take huge sums of money as well as very significant technological improvements.
Science is being limited much more by funding and physical constraints. Current ground based telescopes are operating very near the quantum limit and space based observatories are expensive to the point of making them infeasible.
All in all I think that pointing a few telescopes at a given object for long periods of time for a total cost far exceeding that of building a better solution is the path that is being (and will continue to be) pushed on the scientific community. The prices tags for what we want to know are so large and budgets tend to be sabotaged by political agendas as to make it appear that we are incapable of doing science for a reasonable price.
If they're at a similar point in the evolution of intelligence, that's kinda scary in a way. Maybe they've already made the jump to a pervasive machine intelligence; that would probably be less distressing.
There is no logical reason to assume similar development, barring further evidence. That could be a good or bad thing.
But your second sentence... wow! Where do you get off making an assumption like that? First, if they have anything like "a pervasive machine intelligence", then their technical development would be VASTLY beyond ours. We are not even remotely close to anything like that.
Second, even if they did, how in the world do you conclude that would be "les
You probably meant your reply in jest (understandably so, considering the stigma of underdeveloped social skills that Slashdotters are famously afflicted with), but I'll reply anyhow:).
I love people. I'm what you might call a highly social nerd, someone who really enjoys the company of others in a variety of social contexts. Yeah, I also enjoy sequestering myself in my home office and writing code for a couple of days at a time, but there comes a point where human contact is critical for me. I have frie
First, if they have anything like "a pervasive machine intelligence", then their technical development would be VASTLY beyond ours. We are not even remotely close to anything like that.
In my view, I have good reason to believe we're much closer to that than most people would like to accept. Many reasons, actually. It's probably a normal side effect of human vanity that we take comfort in our present position at the top of the intelligence curve, but I think it's an inescapable fact that future historians (in whatever form they might take) will describe humanity as a species that was destined to outdo itself. To me, what occurs after that will be the most interesting chapter in the history
I'm fairly certain that the little green men, ticked off after years of being depicted as scrawny, bug-eyed, space-faring bobbleheads, will just come in rayguns blazing, but the machines, prizing efficiency and precision above our human failings, would probably arrive and play muzak with a pre-recorded voiceover telling us that our death is important, and would we please wait.
Is being blasted into your component molecules by unimaginably powerful energy beams really more distressing than being put on hold?
Why anyone would think that an advanced machine intelligence would need to compete with human beings for resources is beyond me. After all, if you're essentially dealing with the mind of God on Earth, I'm fairly certain that such an entity would tend toward an exponentially increasing rate of efficiency per computing unit. This implies exponentially diminishing reliance upon external energy inputs. It also puts the human race in an interesting position: one has to wonder if this will be the tipping point wh
Back in the 1960's Captain Kirk couldn't swing a dead cat around his head without hitting a "Class 'M'" planet every week. Can't NASA lure him back out of retirement?
Bullets hurt people because of human blood circulation (loss of blood) and the size of our organs (heh). If robots were built differently or little green men evolved differently, bullets would most likely be ineffective. There is no reason that there is only one wire connecting processor to leg and opening one loop should not hurt the other parts of the circuit. Also, there is almost no reason why the processor needs to be 15 cm big, or the leg motor has to take up the whole length of the leg. There is
Not at all sure why you find machine intelligences less scaring than biological ones. Both can chew up resources very quickly.
To put it simply, the more advanced a system becomes, the less resources it tends to require per cycle of computation (not the best way of putting it, but hey, I've had a few beers). Now, there comes a point in the acceleration of intelligence where virtually everything in sight has some sort of information processing capacity associated with it, and everything's linked in a pretty mesh-like way. That's where things get interesting: the convergence of increasing efficiency in computation, with a simultaneou
I'll add to my previous (admittedly malformed) post that I don't believe any reasonably advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence would exist in a biologically-based form; it's really a terribly inefficient means of maintaining an intelligent population. Carbon may have been the basis for life on this planet, but I assure you it won't be the last word in intelligence. What choices humanity makes with respect to convergence with something larger (i.e. more pervasive) remain to be seen, probably in the next dec
IANA Astronomer, but perhaps it may be prudent to start looking at the more obvious candidates in terms of how conducive they are to human habitation and evaluate them in terms of what it'll take to make that possible. If an alternate habitat for humans is a moderately serious concern, why bother looking at worlds whose characteristics are under heavy risk of changing by the time we get there? Have we even found a better candidate that one of Jupiter's moons or Mars?
I don't think the idea is to find a new place for us to live. Obviously, our ability to take advantage of such a planet is incredibly limited.
Rather, its to understand what the possibilities for life outside our planet are. Putting it in simplest terms, its working to get experimental data for some of the coefficients in the Drake equation.
As it stands, we're never ever going to get there.
For interstellar colonization you need either:
1. Artificial wombs and frozen sperm/eggs
2. Colossal generation ship (impractical and very depressing way to travel)
3. Cryogenic storage of humans
3. Self-reproducing sentient robots (humanity wouldn't be spread, but intelligent life would).
And the ability for humanity to spend ass loads of money on something which they certainly won't see a return on in their lifetimes.
4. Human lifespan expanded to over 1,000 years. Frankly, this is easier and more likely to do than #2 or #3.
5. Many many set of short hops. Alpha Centauri is 4 light years away. An antimatter powered ship can reach 0.1 C. It only takes 40 years to get there. That is one generation, not multiple ones.
6. FTL travel. Sorry, but no I don't fall for the "we don't know how to do it, so it must be impossible" stupidity that prevented people from trying
0.1 C as a peak velocity does not equal 40 years travel time to go 4 light years. Can you figure out why?
Short hops would be a pretty stupid way to travel for the same reason.
Additionally, antimatter is not a feasible fuel source given the immense cost, and the output (getting momentum out of hard gammas), and the storage difficulties. I'd like a source that shows antimatter can be contained using less energy then can actually be extracted from it - it's not clear tha
'We'll have to be really lucky to decipher an Earth-like planet's atmosphere during a transit event so that we can tell it is Earth-like,' said Kaltenegger.
Governer Kaltenegger continued.... "It is not until this time that we can begin the search for Sarah Connor."
Let's just assume for a moment that a 2nd Earth was discovered with life an all. Would this be a turning point for actually dropping vast amounts of money in R&D for interstellar travel? Iâ(TM)m talking about developing some really exotic technologies ranging from point-to-point FTL travel to wormhole-like jump drives.
If the laws of physics permits, such a discovery might be what provides the justification for investors and government agencies alike.
I think if someone had a solid path to go down for developing FTL travel they would have no trouble finding funding. In fact I think that would have the effect of encouraging more missions like Kepler, so we would have good places to go once we got it working.
I'd venture a guess (I'm not involved in anything similar to that kind of physics) that the kind of results that would lead to a radical new form of propulsion wouldn't come from a heavy focus of funding, but rather continued support of seemingly impr
There's an important distinction between it being hard to find an earthlike planet, and there not being an earthlike planet to find at all.
Our mechanisms for finding planets are all in wobbles in the wavelengths from the light of stars. And because of that, we tend to only see the big wobbles, because small wobbles tend to get lost in the noise.
It would be nice if we could shine a flashlight and get a real look out there, but in most cases, we'd never see what we shone light upon in our lifetimes.
The universe is a HUGE freakin place, filled mostly with stuff we can't get a good clear look at yet.
Entire worlds like ours are are both all we know, but at the same time, are too small for us to even notice in the grandness just outside our atmospheric window.
Finding a "twin" earth, no matter the distance (assuming if we can see it, we can get to it at some point in the future) is possible _the_ most important thing for the continuation of the human race.
As for being harder than "we" thought, to me at least (IANAA) it seems pretty damn hard to me. Even if we find a planet that could have human life, would it have life on it? Would that life be toxic to us? etc...
A "twin" earth finding us, no matter the distance (assuming if they can see us they can get to us at some point in the future) is possibly _the_ most important thing for the continuation of whatever intelligent species lives there.
We don't have the technology for any type of hibernation space travel now, which is why I think its so important to follow these types of research. Even if it takes 100000 years to travel to a new planet, that's pittance compared to what it took for current level sentient life to develop on Earth.
Of course, it will only be possible to tell if it was Earth-like X number of years ago. Since
there are only a few stars within 100 light years, X will usually be more than 100. In the meantime,
there could have been a planet killing asteroid, or an advanced civilization could have nuked
itself. So, we can only really find "twin Earths" from the past. We'll never actually know what
it's like until we go there...
...actually, even that's not true, in the sense that "we" means everybody on Earth.
Only the travelers will know it's true. Earthlings will have to wait for the return trip
or signal, to tell them that it *was* true. Even then, for most stars it would be your
great-great-great.... children receiving the signal.
Bottom line? The Universe's speed limit sucks. Where's the fuzzbuster?
According to theories of what the earth's atmosphere was like before life flourished, the atmosphere was full of CO2 and nitrogen. There was no oxygen. According to our understanding of the earth 4 billion yrs ago, the earth would be a VERY different place today if there were no life here because oxygen is a byproduct of photosynthetic life.
I theorize that the moment we find a planet like ours, we will have found life on another planet.
I am always annoyed with the popular press phrases things like this. If we find an Earth-like planet orbiting some distant star somewhere, it will not be Earth's "twin". It will be a planet similar in some respects to Earth. Similar in some respects; different in others. There is no "twin" relationship, and the intelligent inhabitants of that planet, if any, may be rather annoyed by our arrogance.
Speaking of intelligence inhabitants, it would be wonderful if we could detect such, but very unlikely, unless those inhabitants also happens to be at a technological development similar to ours, where they are leaking radio signals all over the place. Good candidates for SETI to focus its search. Maybe even the SETI@HOME crowd can put actuators on that satellite dishes to focus on said planet...
The real killer here is that even if we did find a so-called "twin Earth", we wouldn't be able to do a whole lot about it. Sending a probe there would take thousands of years. Maybe we could do a massive interferometer in space to study the planet in more detail. Forget the manned mission fantasy so many have. We have yet to put a man out past the orbit of the Moon and we're going to travel to a distant star many light-years from Earth?
The physics of Interstellar Travel is daunting, to put it mildly. When I was a kid diddling around with the Special Relativity equations, I was all elated until I realized the ENERGY required to make time dilation a useful thing -- for the travelers, anyway -- is way beyond anything we humans are likely to be able to do now and in the future -- if ever. And all those dreams I had as a young boy of going to the stars died.
Later, I got into the whole Wormhole stuff, and read some of the stuff Kip Throne and others wrote, and got depressed again. Wormholes -- if they even exist -- is far more daunting in terms of energy requirement than even lightspeed travel, by many, many orders of magnitude!!!!!!
Well, wonderful if we can find. But then we'll be more frustrated when we all have to face the realities of physics. Science Fiction lost a lot of its appeal for me because most of it turned out to be simple fantasy, impossible to achieve. My ignorance as a kid is gone.
Meanwhile, we have made tremendous strides in Science and Technology since my teen years, the stuff of Science Fiction 30 years ago. We do live in a marvelous age. It's just that Interstellar Travel will not be a part of it.:-(
How the heck do they know their "closer and closer"?
Someone not drunk (or less frunk) enlighten me.
Your confusion over homonyms belies a good point. They don't know; they theorize that such things are out there and have built a craft to test this. The article (and summary) strike me as a bit optimistic about the inevitability.
Of course, research is sold to underwriters like business proposals. Funding would be hard to get if the researchers said "Geeze, I dunno. Earthlike planets? Mmmmayyybe. Let's go look! We'll need, eh, how about half a million - Dude! Hey! Hawking! Stop jonesing that telescope and p
Solution: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm guessing you've never heard of the probability drive.
Re:Solution: (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, please. This was superseded by the Bistro drive years ago! It gets rid of all that mucking about with improbability. Much safer.
Parent
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Said the joker to the thief.
(Unfortunately, neither seems able to provide much help on FTL travel.)
In effect, what they are saying, is (Score:5, Interesting)
Once we find a sufficient collection of candidate planets using this instrument, we can devise a different device/experiment to narrow down whether they are Earth-like. That should take maybe a few years to ten years.
That is more-or-less the pattern we have been following, and it has been successful so far. I see no reason to change.
Clarification (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In effect, what they are saying, is (Score:5, Insightful)
"...and it has been successful so far. I see no reason to change."
Has it? Can we really be sure that the current method is accurate in ruling out earth-like and non-earth-like?
I'm not really disagreeing with you, just not so sure that it's 100% accurate (which is ideal, but not exactly realistic). To me this sounds like they are intentionally thwarting the idea, so the public will go "well shit, guess we're trapped here for 300 more years" kinda thing.
Current method seems fine, applied to the new equipment. Keep searching, monitor the ones we already assume are earth-like, and when we figure out a way to do something about it (wormholes, etc) we pick the best candidate at that time, and go for it, if that fails, or if it takes longer than the time to build/induce/etc the next method of travel/communication, we head for the second candidate, etc... this "new" method seem to suppose that we won't be able to do anything about it for 200 more years, so we have the time to piss around with hundreds of tests, when we should probably assume it'l be possible next year, kinda like "Year of Linux on the Desktop", may never happen, but why can't it happen next year? Just because you may not succeed, doesn't mean you should't try.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The long term
Re:In effect, what they are saying, is (Score:4, Interesting)
From what I can tell in a brief skim, it really does pose a fundamental limit given current technology. The problem is that with the largest mirror we can imagine getting up into space, and with the highest sensitivity sensors, the signal-to-noise ratio is still too low to get a usable measurement without taking hundreds of measurements.
They plan to detect the chemicals in the atmosphere by measuring the absorption bands in the starlight as some of it passes through the atmosphere. This is presumably going to be a lot more sensitive than trying to detect the light from the planet directly, since you have a lot more photons to carry the information. The signal to noise ratio in this case is really limited by the unfortunate fact that light energy is discretized and you can't make finer measurements than a single photon. Thus a large mirror with a high-quantum efficiency (95%) sensor, is really the best you can do.
The only hope to improve this is to either get bigger mirrors, which really depends on improving space access and is unlikely to give order of magnitude improvements, or to implement an as yet unrealized method that is able to get more information. If it were a problem of angular resolution there are plenty of interesting tricks you could use to improve it. Unfortunately I can't think of anything better, and it doesn't seem anyone else has yet either. Of course, that doesn't mean no one will... but its not as simple as just designing the next mission.
Actually... random 3:30 am idea... if you did something in thermal-IR, and measured the absorption of the blackbody emissions of the planet by the atmosphere you might be able to get something working. The intensity would be a lot lower than looking at the stars light, but the dimming due to absorption would be much larger percentage-wise... although it would take some heavy math to show if it would actually give you a better SNR. Of course, there are plenty of holes here: among other things, my knowledge of atmospheric chemistry and absorption is very limited, and this would all depend on being able to resolve the star separate from the planet, and would thus rely on some complicated interferometric methods....... and you'd have to block out the star light to be able to get the planet light as anything more than noise... and probably the number of photons in thermal IR from a planet are too low to be able to even see it on its own... but maybe I'm wrong and it could work, or something else can.
Parent
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I don't know if this is valid but, what about 10 devices doing the same job?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Just because it's hard doesn't mean that we shall give up trying.
This field is still a very young field, and the methods used to find planets will be more and more refined over time.
But it's also important to not count out stellar systems that may not look like they are going to contain earth-like planets. Even a negative answer is an answer giving usable data in this case.
Earth is the only speck of dust in the universe where we are certain that there is life. If it's intelligent enough to prosper in the lo
Re:In effect, what they are saying, is (Score:5, Insightful)
Science is being limited much more by funding and physical constraints. Current ground based telescopes are operating very near the quantum limit and space based observatories are expensive to the point of making them infeasible.
All in all I think that pointing a few telescopes at a given object for long periods of time for a total cost far exceeding that of building a better solution is the path that is being (and will continue to be) pushed on the scientific community. The prices tags for what we want to know are so large and budgets tend to be sabotaged by political agendas as to make it appear that we are incapable of doing science for a reasonable price.
Parent
As much as I'd love to find another Earth... (Score:3, Funny)
Wow! (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no logical reason to assume similar development, barring further evidence. That could be a good or bad thing.
But your second sentence... wow! Where do you get off making an assumption like that? First, if they have anything like "a pervasive machine intelligence", then their technical development would be VASTLY beyond ours. We are not even remotely close to anything like that.
Second, even if they did, how in the world do you conclude that would be "les
Simple explanation (Score:3, Funny)
Second, even if they did, how in the world do you conclude that would be "less distressing"??
This is Slashdot, and you're wondering how someone decided that a machine would be easier to deal with than a living creature. Hmm...
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I love people. I'm what you might call a highly social nerd, someone who really enjoys the company of others in a variety of social contexts. Yeah, I also enjoy sequestering myself in my home office and writing code for a couple of days at a time, but there comes a point where human contact is critical for me. I have frie
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
First, if they have anything like "a pervasive machine intelligence", then their technical development would be VASTLY beyond ours. We are not even remotely close to anything like that.
In my view, I have good reason to believe we're much closer to that than most people would like to accept. Many reasons, actually. It's probably a normal side effect of human vanity that we take comfort in our present position at the top of the intelligence curve, but I think it's an inescapable fact that future historians (in whatever form they might take) will describe humanity as a species that was destined to outdo itself. To me, what occurs after that will be the most interesting chapter in the history
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Interesting)
Second, even if they did, how in the world do you conclude that would be "less distressing"?? One does not follow from the other.
Well, duh. If they have advanced AI, they probably have internet as well. Which means we can view alien porn while we're being wiped out.
Parent
Re:As much as I'd love to find another Earth... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm fairly certain that the little green men, ticked off after years of being depicted as scrawny, bug-eyed, space-faring bobbleheads, will just come in rayguns blazing, but the machines, prizing efficiency and precision above our human failings, would probably arrive and play muzak with a pre-recorded voiceover telling us that our death is important, and would we please wait.
Is being blasted into your component molecules by unimaginably powerful energy beams really more distressing than being put on hold?
Parent
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Little green men? (Score:2)
... the little green men...
Back in the 1960's Captain Kirk couldn't swing a dead cat around his head without hitting a "Class 'M'" planet every week. Can't NASA lure him back out of retirement?
. . . and his little green men were always platinum blond chicks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:STGameTrisk.jpg [wikipedia.org]
I nominate "Shahna" as the official Slashdot mascot, because she is wears a tinfoil bikini . . . and she wields a giant can-opener.
Now, where is my "rogue" source code? Does a giant can-opener do more damage than a two-handed
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. . . and his little green men were always platinum blond chicks
Maybe not men*, but some were definitely green [wikipedia.org].
*At least that we know of. I always had questions about why the young, naive Chekov was the navigator...
Bullets vs. Energy beams (Score:3, Interesting)
Bullets hurt people because of human blood circulation (loss of blood) and the size of our organs (heh). If robots were built differently or little green men evolved differently, bullets would most likely be ineffective. There is no reason that there is only one wire connecting processor to leg and opening one loop should not hurt the other parts of the circuit. Also, there is almost no reason why the processor needs to be 15 cm big, or the leg motor has to take up the whole length of the leg. There is
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Not at all sure why you find machine intelligences less scaring than biological ones. Both can chew up resources very quickly.
To put it simply, the more advanced a system becomes, the less resources it tends to require per cycle of computation (not the best way of putting it, but hey, I've had a few beers). Now, there comes a point in the acceleration of intelligence where virtually everything in sight has some sort of information processing capacity associated with it, and everything's linked in a pretty mesh-like way. That's where things get interesting: the convergence of increasing efficiency in computation, with a simultaneou
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Wrong Approach? (Score:3, Interesting)
IANA Astronomer, but perhaps it may be prudent to start looking at the more obvious candidates in terms of how conducive they are to human habitation and evaluate them in terms of what it'll take to make that possible. If an alternate habitat for humans is a moderately serious concern, why bother looking at worlds whose characteristics are under heavy risk of changing by the time we get there? Have we even found a better candidate that one of Jupiter's moons or Mars?
Cheers!
Re:Wrong Approach? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think the idea is to find a new place for us to live. Obviously, our ability to take advantage of such a planet is incredibly limited.
Rather, its to understand what the possibilities for life outside our planet are. Putting it in simplest terms, its working to get experimental data for some of the coefficients in the Drake equation.
Parent
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As it stands, we're never ever going to get there.
For interstellar colonization you need either: 1. Artificial wombs and frozen sperm/eggs 2. Colossal generation ship (impractical and very depressing way to travel) 3. Cryogenic storage of humans 3. Self-reproducing sentient robots (humanity wouldn't be spread, but intelligent life would).
And the ability for humanity to spend ass loads of money on something which they certainly won't see a return on in their lifetimes.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You left out the answers of:
4. Human lifespan expanded to over 1,000 years. Frankly, this is easier and more likely to do than #2 or #3.
5. Many many set of short hops. Alpha Centauri is 4 light years away. An antimatter powered ship can reach 0.1 C. It only takes 40 years to get there. That is one generation, not multiple ones.
6. FTL travel. Sorry, but no I don't fall for the "we don't know how to do it, so it must be impossible" stupidity that prevented people from trying
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I'm afraid I call stupidity on you, sir.
0.1 C as a peak velocity does not equal 40 years travel time to go 4 light years. Can you figure out why?
Short hops would be a pretty stupid way to travel for the same reason.
Additionally, antimatter is not a feasible fuel source given the immense cost, and the output (getting momentum out of hard gammas), and the storage difficulties. I'd like a source that shows antimatter can be contained using less energy then can actually be extracted from it - it's not clear tha
I need your clothes, your boots and your planet (Score:2)
'We'll have to be really lucky to decipher an Earth-like planet's atmosphere during a transit event so that we can tell it is Earth-like,' said Kaltenegger.
Governer Kaltenegger continued.... "It is not until this time that we can begin the search for Sarah Connor."
Space race across the divide (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's just assume for a moment that a 2nd Earth was discovered with life an all. Would this be a turning point for actually dropping vast amounts of money in R&D for interstellar travel? Iâ(TM)m talking about developing some really exotic technologies ranging from point-to-point FTL travel to wormhole-like jump drives.
If the laws of physics permits, such a discovery might be what provides the justification for investors and government agencies alike.
Re: (Score:2)
I think if someone had a solid path to go down for developing FTL travel they would have no trouble finding funding. In fact I think that would have the effect of encouraging more missions like Kepler, so we would have good places to go once we got it working.
I'd venture a guess (I'm not involved in anything similar to that kind of physics) that the kind of results that would lead to a radical new form of propulsion wouldn't come from a heavy focus of funding, but rather continued support of seemingly impr
Re: (Score:2)
yaha another planet to poop on ...
Important distinction: (Score:4, Interesting)
There's an important distinction between it being hard to find an earthlike planet, and there not being an earthlike planet to find at all.
Our mechanisms for finding planets are all in wobbles in the wavelengths from the light of stars. And because of that, we tend to only see the big wobbles, because small wobbles tend to get lost in the noise.
It would be nice if we could shine a flashlight and get a real look out there, but in most cases, we'd never see what we shone light upon in our lifetimes.
The universe is a HUGE freakin place, filled mostly with stuff we can't get a good clear look at yet.
Entire worlds like ours are are both all we know, but at the same time, are too small for us to even notice in the grandness just outside our atmospheric window.
Ryan Fenton
Twin Earth (Score:2)
Once the search succeeds, the next questions driving research will be: Is that planet habitable? Does it have an Earth-like atmosphere?
Also, will they mean the same thing by "water," even if their oceans are filled with XYZ?
</putnam>
NASA needs to latch onto this. (Score:3, Insightful)
Finding a "twin" earth, no matter the distance (assuming if we can see it, we can get to it at some point in the future) is possible _the_ most important thing for the continuation of the human race.
As for being harder than "we" thought, to me at least (IANAA) it seems pretty damn hard to me. Even if we find a planet that could have human life, would it have life on it? Would that life be toxic to us? etc...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
FTFY.
Re:NASA needs to latch onto this. (Score:4, Insightful)
We don't have the technology for any type of hibernation space travel now, which is why I think its so important to follow these types of research. Even if it takes 100000 years to travel to a new planet, that's pittance compared to what it took for current level sentient life to develop on Earth.
Parent
Time difference (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, it will only be possible to tell if it was Earth-like X number of years ago. Since there are only a few stars within 100 light years, X will usually be more than 100. In the meantime, there could have been a planet killing asteroid, or an advanced civilization could have nuked itself. So, we can only really find "twin Earths" from the past. We'll never actually know what it's like until we go there...
...actually, even that's not true, in the sense that "we" means everybody on Earth. Only the travelers will know it's true. Earthlings will have to wait for the return trip or signal, to tell them that it *was* true. Even then, for most stars it would be your great-great-great.... children receiving the signal.
Bottom line? The Universe's speed limit sucks. Where's the fuzzbuster?
Re:Time difference (Score:5, Informative)
In the range of 20lyrs there are about 100 stars, in the range of 250lyrs about 260000.
See: http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/ [atlasoftheuniverse.com]
angel'o'sphere
Parent
Just call it an M-class planet already (Score:2, Informative)
We'll find one eventually (Score:3, Insightful)
And then what? invade it? (Score:2)
Dump all the excessive population of this planet to the new one?
Maybe send the Chinese there? :-)
I hope the planets we find don't have gold or oil though...
Life... (Score:3, Insightful)
Twin Earths? (Score:3, Insightful)
Speaking of intelligence inhabitants, it would be wonderful if we could detect such, but very unlikely, unless those inhabitants also happens to be at a technological development similar to ours, where they are leaking radio signals all over the place. Good candidates for SETI to focus its search. Maybe even the SETI@HOME crowd can put actuators on that satellite dishes to focus on said planet...
The real killer here is that even if we did find a so-called "twin Earth", we wouldn't be able to do a whole lot about it. Sending a probe there would take thousands of years. Maybe we could do a massive interferometer in space to study the planet in more detail. Forget the manned mission fantasy so many have. We have yet to put a man out past the orbit of the Moon and we're going to travel to a distant star many light-years from Earth?
The physics of Interstellar Travel is daunting, to put it mildly. When I was a kid diddling around with the Special Relativity equations, I was all elated until I realized the ENERGY required to make time dilation a useful thing -- for the travelers, anyway -- is way beyond anything we humans are likely to be able to do now and in the future -- if ever. And all those dreams I had as a young boy of going to the stars died.
Later, I got into the whole Wormhole stuff, and read some of the stuff Kip Throne and others wrote, and got depressed again. Wormholes -- if they even exist -- is far more daunting in terms of energy requirement than even lightspeed travel, by many, many orders of magnitude!!!!!!
Well, wonderful if we can find. But then we'll be more frustrated when we all have to face the realities of physics. Science Fiction lost a lot of its appeal for me because most of it turned out to be simple fantasy, impossible to achieve. My ignorance as a kid is gone.
Meanwhile, we have made tremendous strides in Science and Technology since my teen years, the stuff of Science Fiction 30 years ago. We do live in a marvelous age. It's just that Interstellar Travel will not be a part of it. :-(
Re: (Score:2)
How the heck do they know their "closer and closer"?
Someone not drunk (or less frunk) enlighten me.
Your confusion over homonyms belies a good point. They don't know; they theorize that such things are out there and have built a craft to test this. The article (and summary) strike me as a bit optimistic about the inevitability.
Of course, research is sold to underwriters like business proposals. Funding would be hard to get if the researchers said "Geeze, I dunno. Earthlike planets? Mmmmayyybe. Let's go look! We'll need, eh, how about half a million - Dude! Hey! Hawking! Stop jonesing that telescope and p
Re: (Score:2)
built a craft to test this.
Gyah, what am I smoking? Of course I meant "devised a methodology to test this".
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uhhhhh are you sure you know what a twink is, cuz.....
LOL (Score:2)
LOL! ****, you're right. I didn't... I looked it up. I had thought it was for skinny persons in general... Oh my! ****!