Gliese 581d Confirmed as 'Habitable' Exoplanet 451
An anonymous reader writes "A rocky world orbiting a nearby star was confirmed (PDF) as the first planet outside our Solar System to meet key requirements for sustaining life." The "key requirement" was actually a Starbucks — astronomers were pretty surprised to find out that they like their coffee burnt on Gliese 581d too.
We've sent them a message already... (Score:5, Funny)
From TFA:
However, humanity has already tried to make contact with the new planet. During Australia's National Science Week in August 2009, Cosmos magazine partnered with the Australian government, NASA and the CSIRO to run a 13-day campaign to collect goodwill messages from the public to be sent to Gliese 581d.
The initiative, known as Hello From Earth, collected 26,000 messages, which were transmitted by NASA's Tidbinbilla facility. The signal is not due to arrive until January 2030.
At which time it will be returned because we failed to include sufficient postage.
Re:We've sent them a message already... (Score:5, Funny)
"Hello from Earth?" They should have called it "Hello World!"
Re:We've sent them a message already... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Second most dreadful insult. The greatest insult imaginable would be to say,"Would you like sugar in your tea?"
Re:We've sent them a message already... (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess I find it really odd that we would do that. First thing I would do is turn our Radio Telescopes to it and see if we can hear anything. Seems kind of rude to just start shouting at them. Of course if you think about it Humans have had a civilisation for well over 4000 years on Earth. Yes it was primitive but we have been reading and writing and smelting metals and creating art for more than 4000 years. We have only had radio for about 100 of those years and radio telescopes for around 50 years. There could be a civilisation on that planet equal to 1900 and we couldn't talk to them.
Re:We've sent them a message already... (Score:4, Funny)
"Seems kind of rude to just start shouting at them."
Not really, the scientists that though of it were from New Jersey.
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Not only that, these days we don't even send out that much. Quite a lot of data is inside of undersea cables now, and often digitized into very specific formats, ie not brute force broadcast in every direction. That planet could be in year 2011 and we couldn't talk to them.
Re:We've sent them a message already... (Score:5, Funny)
BLESSED GREETINGS
I AM KANU YAKUBU FROM THE PLANET GLIESE 581D. I AM CROWN PRINCE AND BENEFACTOR OF AN OIL COMPANY WORTH 4,100,000,000,000 (FOUR POINT ONE TRILLION) BITCOINS, WHICH I... etc.
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NO! NO! NO! (Score:4, Insightful)
I fear we may have only 40 years left before the invasion fleet (or planet busters) arrive.
Don't you people read any (bad?) science fiction? One solution to the "Fermi Paradox" is that there ARE aliens but they are definitely NOT friendly. Once they detect another civilization they move to wipe it out. In fact maybe they do so out of prudence thinking that if they don't, the new civilization will wipe THEM out! Sort of like an intergalactic version of the MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) policy that STILL underpins the basic relationship between the superpowers.
In fact the first civilization to think this way doesn't even need to be around anymore Just start making some self replicating probes and within a very short (geologically speaking) period of time the entire galaxy will be filled with automated systems capable of snuffing out a fledgling civilization (us). (This is the plot of Greg Bear's "The Forge of God"). So instead of telling everyone "We're here, we're here!", we should be as quiet as possible like a lamb all alone in the deep dark woods filled with wolves. I didn't mind the Arecibo transmission sent out in the 70s (and used as the plot device for the movie "Species") because it was aimed at one of the Magellanic clouds; hundreds of thousands of light years away. But Gliese 581? Cosmically speaking, that isn't just next door it's on our door mat!
So great an intellect as Stephen Hawkings has expressed his concern on this so it bears thinking about! Anyway, it's too late now so let's hope that if anyone's there it's E.T. or the Vulcans rather than Predators or Aliens!
Re:NO! NO! NO! (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you'd rather toil away for eons in fear, ignoring the doomed hope that we can someday explore and populate the cosmos because we'll be exterminated once we've been noticed.
I say: Let's scream our bloody heads off -- At worse, we were doomed anyway, fuck it. However, it's possible we had nothing to fear at all. At best our neighbors are just waiting for us to exhibit good will and adequate technology before they visit and help expand our race across the universe.
This is the plot of Julian May's Intervention & Metaconcert books of the Galactic Milieu Series [wikipedia.org]. Perhaps, it's best to let some species die of self immolation if they don't survive the trial by fire that is the discovery of atomic and/or quantum power. It may be better to wait until we are mentally mature rather than risk a pre-mature induction into the galactic society.
TL;DR: One solution to the "Fermi Paradox" is that the "aliens" are benevolent and mark primitive worlds as off limits; Would you trust us with a warp-drive?
P.S. Pussy. Whatever happened to Live free or Die? It's your fearful ilk that hamper progress and allow corrupt governments to control the masses by fear.
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"In fact the first civilization to think this way doesn't even need to be around anymore Just start making some self replicating probes and within a very short (geologically speaking) period of time the entire galaxy will be filled with automated systems capable of snuffing out a fledgling civilization (us). "
So, assuming other green mean people are doing that, it then makes sense to create self-replicating probes which exterminate self-replicating probes. And maybe you shouldn't exterminate other civiliza
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Once they detect another civilization they move to wipe it out.
For that to be a successful (and hence common) strategy, the benefit of destroying competing civilizations would have to be greater than the cost of destroying them.
Given the current state of known physics, the benefit of destroying another race looks to be small or zero (since the other race will be too far away to threaten your solar system anyway), and the cost of destroying the other race looks to be quite large (interstellar space travel being prohibitively expensive for any significant amount of mater
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More likely, you'll be dinner. Unfortunately for you nerds, dry aging in a cool dark cellar and marinated in mountain dew and cheetos is a popular way to prepare their meat on Gliese 581d.
Re:We've sent them a message already... (Score:4, Funny)
That's why I work at a cheetos factory. You don't eat the chef!
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Suggestion to Slashdot devs... give us regex-based comment filtering. I'm fairly sure any post matching /nigger/ or /GNAA/ or /\ ps0t\ / will never have any further contents I care to miss.
300,000 years to get there (Score:2)
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We could build a generation ship, most of the trip would be coasting anyway. If there are any asteroids or strays, we could harvest resources from them. If not, well, colonists will just have to go green and recycle...
Seriously, though, recycling is what this mission hinges on, in lieu of asteroid mining.
Re:300,000 years to get there (Score:4, Informative)
300,000 years would be longer than there have been anatomically modern humans on Earth. If we make it, by the time we get there, we'll be a whole new species.
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I'm not sure that I buy that. What's happened is that more adults make it to adulthood and reproduce, I'd be very much surprised if there's less evolution going on. It's more likely that it's just not noticeable due to not knowing where to look. Genetic mutations don't stop just because it's no longer necessary.
Silly rabbit... (Score:5, Insightful)
Evolution works with thousands and millions of years, and thousands of generations.
Not decades. And 50 years is barely enough for 2 generations.
Heck... Knock it down to the bare physical/physiological minimum (lower mark of the puberty age for girls) and even then it is only 5 generations.
Only FIVE generations. IF we accept the "eleven-year-old mother with two point five kids" option.
Rats reach five generations in about 11 months. That's 100 generations about every 18 years. Seen many rats evolve into another species during your life?
It would take about 2500 years for humans to reach even those 100 generations. And guess what? NOTHING WOULD CHANGE!
Oh... you might BREED a slightly different subset of the species in that time - but not evolve it.
Let it go for a generation or two and all those traits you tried so hard to breed out would rear their ugly head once again.
Oh and BTW... IQ has actually been going up over the last century or so. [wikipedia.org]
And most of it on the "dumber" side of the scale.
In the future, try not to give too much credit to "science" you pick up from Hollywood comedies.
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This is all, of couse, the inevitable consquence of "to each accoring to his need". Anyone who spends 5 minutes thinking about this realizes this: a class of people will, well, evolve, that have "appearing needy" as their core survival skill.
Hope things turn around for you!
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The desire to improve my life, and the willingness to observe how the choices of others worked out for them. Have you really ever lived in a poverty (by American standards) neighborhood? You'll see both hard-working people on their way up and not-even-trying people on their way down, and the difference is obvious and the contrast stark. There are very few people in America who are so trapped by poverty that they have no reasonable way out or avenue for self-improvement (mostly the traped are kids with a
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Maybe humans will adapt to space life / life on the spacecraft better in the 300000 years on the spacecraft
Re:300,000 years to get there (Score:4, Informative)
It's preposterous to state that human evolution is over. Here's a short list of evolutionary changes from just the last 10,000 years:
* Blue, green, and gray eye variants
* Ability to process lactose as adults
* Ability to process high-starch diets without developing diabetes (the prevalence of which is much lower in populations with older histories of farming)
* Wider variety of skin tones
* Differently shaped and sized teeth and skulls from the past
And those are just surface traits that are easy to see/detect in everyday life.
More info here: http://discovermagazine.com/2009/mar/09-they-dont-make-homo-sapiens-like-they-used-to [discovermagazine.com]
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Re:300,000 years to get there (Score:4, Insightful)
You are assuming without lack of new stimuli in the closed environment of a space craft that humans would still evolve
Right, because completely changing virtually every aspect of the environment by locking a small number of humans in a closed, artificially-maintained ecosystem for generations won't introduce any additional selective pressure of any kind whatsoever. And you're forgetting the role of sexual selection in driving evolution independently of external environmental change.
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It wouldn't make much difference. Time dilation due to relativistic effects is asymptotic at c, and only significant close to it. Even if you hit 50% of c, over the course of a 300,000 year journey, 300,000 years is still an accurate estimate. However it does not matter at all, because they are talking about 300,000 years to travel only 20 light years, or significantly less than 1% of c.
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Evolution may be a good thing ... (Score:3)
300,000 years would be longer than there have been anatomically modern humans on Earth. If we make it, by the time we get there, we'll be a whole new species.
That can work for the colonists. Consider a generational ship that slowly changes the onboard environment from something resembling earth to something resembling the destination over the trip. Gravity, temperature, chemical composition of atmosphere, etc. There would also need to be some mechanism to implement natural selection.
Of course this is most likely somewhat academic. When scientists use the word "habitable" they are generally referring to some place habitable by something other than humans, mayb
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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On the other hand, who would sanitize the phones?
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No, it's completely impossible, unless you've created a nuclear reactor that'll last that long? Remember we'd need energy from the sun; life rots planets, and plants use solar energy to produce sugar from CO2 + H2O. Without that energy input, the entire earth would find itself in a CO2 atmosphere, with not enough oxygen to sustain life. Other life would flourish, mostly sulfur-consuming bacteria using a thermal process in volcanic vents; surface life would die, and eventually the core of the earth will c
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Yes, and the best existing lasers can, if you're lucky, make one of those pulses in a day. Not to mention that you couldn't get a symmetric compression with 5 targets. You gotta go with one, and it has to be precisely located. Moving target? I don't think so. The laser is huge, the size of a building, tens of thousands of tons. It would have to be built in space, with actuators to move each piece of laser substrate to within microns, which means precise temperature control over the whole structure. A
indeed (Score:5, Funny)
Since it's within the Goldilocks zone, I'm guessing that the Starbucks serves oatmeal not too hot, and not too cold.
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I'm not traveling 20 light years to eat instant oatmeal when I've got a Jamba Juice up the road next door to Starbucks, so I can get my coffee and some good oats in one easy trip.
Goldilocks != "Habitable" (Score:3)
It's a pretty loose definition of "habitable" to include only "You probably won't burst immediately into flame or turn into an instant icecube upon stepping off the ship." Methinks it might also be good to include little things like "oxygen," "survivable air pressure," "water," "soil that can support some form of planet life," "enough atmosphere to protect against cosmic radiation," etc.
Re:Goldilocks != "Habitable" (Score:5, Informative)
You won't find oxygen in an atmosphere without life already on the planet. Oxygen is too reactive.
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first post (Score:3, Funny)
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No one alive stole it. No one alive was stolen from. Let it go.
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Every landowner alive today is in possession of stolen property. Except perhaps some Dutch and Venetians, who sort of made their own land.
"Let it go" sounds very wise and very... convenient. I don't think we should disregard our violent history, nor the injustices it caused, many of which persist today.
Re:first post (Score:4, Insightful)
Violence is the only basis for property and civilization. There's always someone who will take or destory everything you value, just for the fun of doing so, without the threat of violence to deter them. Those "native" Americans whose land we "stole"? Yeah, they took it from the less violent previous owners, for the most part. That's just how it works - man up, buttercup.
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> Violence is the only basis for property and civilization
Not really. Civilization is based on enterprise and commerce. The word "civilized" is virtually opposite to "violent."
> [native americans] took it from the ... previous owners
You'll see from my original post that I exempted some Dutch and Venetians, but no Native Americans.
Although it should be pointed out that Native Americans didn't claim to "own" the land, so at least they weren't hypocrites like us.
> That's just how it works
Tha
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Nowadays in America we generally exchange property without killing the previous occupants
If I threaten to kill you that's still violence, by most people's definition. That threat backs up every contract, every commercial transaction but the most simple. You only "own" property because the men who agree with you have more guns than those who don't - sure 99% of people wouldn't be a problem either way, but that other 1% is all is takes. If you look at those business in America that can't rely on government for contract enforcement, such as drug dealers, you'll see that overt violence is still
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It depends on what's meant by "let it go". If it means "don't forget it, learn from our mistakes but move on", that's good. If it means "let's continue to blame the distant descendants of those who did bad things", that's wrong.
Yes, there's been a lot of wrongs committed throughout history, but continually blaming the descendants of the wrongdoers is not productive. Even now, there's people who want "white people" to pay "black people" reparations for slavery, even though many white Americans don't have
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outer rim of goldilocks zone (Score:2)
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Sounds great for skiing!
Wow ... (Score:3)
Has it only been 16 years since we discovered the first exoplanet?
I remember before I graduated university, the astronomy geeks were excited about this as something that was being worked on and the concept of finding a planet by detecting transit in front of the star made my brain hurt.
Now we can tell all of this ... of course, if it would take 300,000 years to get there with current technology, it's still unimaginably far. Still, it's hard not to believe that if there's one that might be habitable "only" 20 light years away ... the universe must simply be teeming with life.
Re:Wow ... (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_d-gs0WoUw
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I almost got bored with that. I skipped ahead from the middle to close to the end, and saw the big green ring, so I had to go back and watch the missing parts.
It's really amazing. But I have to think, we don't watch inwards of our own path enough. If there are that many objects outward of our own orbit, from the sun, there should be quite a few more inward. I know, I know, the infinite expanse of space, versus the distance between our own star and our dinky little planet.
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Here is something that may interest you. This is a time-lapse video of asteroids discoveries.
That is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while.
Thanks.
Mod parent up (Score:2)
That video was amazing - what you don't know can certainly hurt you. Thanks for the, uh, "heads up".
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just over 20 years ago, the idea of discovering exoplanets was a joke.
Literally, within my life time, people where saying that there weren't any other planets, anywhere.
Avatar 2 (Score:3)
I call dibs on the tall blue chick with the hot body and prehensile tail. ...hmm..after reading the article, it seems that she'd probably be a short , squat woman with reddish tinged skin. ..oh well, I'd still hit it,
D
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I though Princess Leia was unobtanium.
Gliese 581d in the 'Goldilocks Zone' (Score:2)
"Gliese 581d orbits on the outer fringes of the star's 'Goldilocks zone', where it is not so hot that water boils away, nor so cold that water is perpetually frozen. Instead, the temperature is just right for water to exist in liquid form."
But then I also read:
"The denser air and thick clouds would keep the surface in a perpetual murky red twilight, and its large mass means that surface gravity would be around double that on Earth....A spaceship travelling close to light speed would
Re:Gliese 581d in the 'Goldilocks Zone' (Score:4, Informative)
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The importance of this isn't that we can now send a team to colonize it. The importance of this is that we now have actual evidence that there are other planets that are theoretically habitable (Gliese581d doesn't sound like a good vacation spot, but it sounds comparable to some parts of Siberia or Antartica). We just one of the lower bounds in the Drake Equation.
There have always been planets that were theoretically habitable. Actually habitable is a different story. Mars is theoretically habitable, actually habitable is yet to be proven. Gliese 581d "meets key requirements for sustaining life" That doesn't mean it could sustain our life. The only thing really stated is that it has the minimum things that would be required for some type of life to exist there.
Even on our own planet, there are many parts that are not habitable, at least for most creatures. The
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No, it confirms what was suspected, not known.
Well, NOW it's known.
And this is huge and exciting, I'm not sure why you are blase about finding a planet where life as we know it could exist.
Re:Gliese 581d in the 'Goldilocks Zone' (Score:4, Informative)
Well, NOW it's known.
Actually, now it is MODELED. Given that we have no direct experience with planets like this, none of the models can be directly verified, and the authors had to invent a new model just to reach their conclusion, I think it is poor scientific practice to say that is it "confirmed" to be habitable. Instead, it is confirmed that there is a possible path by which it could be habitable, but that just doesn't have the same zing to it, so instead we make wild assertions and let the sci-fi geeks salivate over what amounts to a plausible, but completely unproven, explanation for how things work. While we're at it, I have this model for how the universe was created. We have no way to verify it, but it is at least plausible. I guess we should just call it confirmed and shout down anyone who objects as unscientific.
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they seem to be saying 'potentially earth-like'. That's far and away from 'theoretical', unless I'm missing something...
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Re:Gliese 581d in the 'Goldilocks Zone' (Score:5, Insightful)
Sir,
We do not even have a self-sustaining colony on Antarctica, which is warmer than mars, and has unlimited air and water. Our colonies on Antarctica are nowhere near self-sustaining. Mars is colder than Antarctica, water is scarce, and there's NO oxygen and barely any atmosphere.
In other words, calling Mars "habitable" is like calling rocks "edible". The rocks might become edible if you ground them down to dust, added plants, and then ate the plants.
--PeterM
Re:Gliese 581d in the 'Goldilocks Zone' (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Gliese 581d in the 'Goldilocks Zone' (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you familiar with the Biosphere 2 experiment? They attempted to set up an enclosed self-sustaining environment...
...and ignored all the most important advice from their scientific advisors, particularly with regard to soil bacteria, instead doing what "felt right", which was directly responsible for the disastrous results.
Biosphere 2 was an experiment that asked the question, "Can humans who ignore facts and empirically established relationships between environmental factors but instead trust their intuition and feelings create a closed, stable, habitable environment."
The answer was... and I'm sure everyone here will be shocked by this... "No."
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Why would we need or want one on Antarctica?
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We can bring technology there to terraform the planet!
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It's a little early to count Mars out yet. It probably won't be habitable to, say, multicellular life, but one can conceive some sort of extremophiles that might be able to make it on, or below the surface of Mars.
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Let the Exploitation continue! (Score:2)
Then start Earth 2 on Gliese 581d.
It's the only way to be sure.
(We'd put all the telephone sanitizers on the 3rd ship, right?)
Habitable (Score:2)
Re:Habitable (Score:4, Interesting)
Given that there are very scientifically sound and obvious limitations on chemical processes involved in known or postulated life, that doesn't seem to outrageously presumptuous.
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In order for me to figure a planet suitable for me to live on, I would prefer something earth-like, as opposed to say, a bubbling cauldron of methan gas.
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Exactly. "Habitable" means I can live on it. Not some microbe or other life form.
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Well since we understand the chemistry of life we classify habitable as having the ability to support that Chemistry. Liquide water is the number one requirement. Since our planet is habitable then by sheer definition any other planet that is habitable will be more or less like earth. It would be illogical to classify a planet that is totally unlike earth as habitable.
Even if it turns out that a planet like Jupiter can support life it will then be kind of like Earth because like Earth it will be habitable.
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I love how our definition of "habitable" is "kind of like Earth."
That would be the generally accepted definition of habitable: capable of being lived in. There are many parts of this plant that are not habitable. Just because some type of life form might be able to live there, doesn't make it habitable. Those sulfur vents in the Pacific have life that has adapted to it, but is toxic to most creatures and definitely not habitable to human beings. The Antarctic is not considered habitable, even though we have people living there doing research, because those people can
depressing: first of a 1000 known planets (Score:4, Interesting)
Slashdotted (Score:2)
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I finally got in an after reading TFA, it doesn't seem like it's a place we'd want to inhabit @ 2 x earth's gravity. We're gonna have to start working out build up strength in our legs and lose some serious weight! Unless we get those exoskeletons working right!
Less radiation means less evolved life, right? (Score:2)
IANAScientist, but does that usually mean that genetic mutations, and most "big steps" in evolution, would be stunted?
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Models & Reality (Score:2)
B ship (Score:2)
So, when does the B ship leave?
Missionary (Score:3, Funny)
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there are no aesthetic qualities to discern in the flavor. its a bitter bean. in the rainbow of coffee flavors, its stilljusta bitterbean, and therefore without aesthetic attraction
maybe you can just admit you are a caffeine addict likeme, and your supposed aesthetic considerations are just a case of the emperor's new clothes
Or maybe you should admit that you don't like coffee, never have, but you started drinking it because you saw other people enjoying it and because you had no real taste for it, you guzzled it in such quantities that you became addicted to caffeine. You should probably switch to energy drinks; you will find the addition of sugar gives you more energy than caffeine alone. Meanwhile I will continue to enjoy my single cup of cappuccino of the day, lovingly handmade from my favorite coffee by me, just the way I
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like i said, emperor's new clothes
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I can easily say it all taste awful. I don't drink coffee because it taste like bile. Gussy it up with cream, sugar or anything you want and it still taste awful.
It doesn't bother me since I'm not a caffeine addict. Aside from what naturally appears in foods, I don't consume it at all.
oh i can perceive them (Score:2, Funny)
if you put a blueberry in a pile of shit i think it would change the flavor subtly, but it will still taste like shit
likewise, i have no doubt that bean type, soil, growing conditions, etc., changes the taste of the coffee bean... something that tastes bitter, and always tasted bitter, and always will taste bitter, as the overarching flavor, no matter what the subtleties
what i am saying is that it does not matter the subtleties when the overarching flavor always dominates. and since with coffee the overarch
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