New Exoplanet Is Best Yet Candidate For Supporting Life 288
First time accepted submitter uigrad_2000 writes "With all the new exoplanets discovered recently with Kepler, it seemed a sure thing that the first exoplanet in the habitable zone of a star would be found soon. The irony is that Kepler was not involved. GJ 667Cc is at least 4.5 times as massive as Earth, and lies in the habitable region of its host star, reports Scientific American. It was discovered by comparing public data from the ESO to recent observations from Hawaii and Chile. As opposed to the stars Kepler is watching, this is only 22 light-years away, making it even more interesting."
22 light years (Score:4, Insightful)
"this is only 22 light years away, making it even more interesting."
It's like a price on an estate: as remarkable as this is, it's only 55.3 million! Still unreachable :P
Re:22 light years (Score:5, Insightful)
Closer planets are much easier to observe than farther ones. We may not be able to go there in the foreseeable future, but being close means we can study it.
Re:22 light years (Score:5, Insightful)
Visiting this planet is perfectly feasible if the human race wants it.
I wouldn't say "perfectly" feasible. Visiting the moon is perfectly feasible. Visiting Mars is probably perfectly feasible. But 22LY is a >44Y round trip. I think instead of "perfectly feasible" I would say "probably possible".
Re:22 light years (Score:5, Insightful)
A 44 year round trip if you travel at the speed of light from start to finish.
That's a pretty big if.
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That only works if you have a propulsion system capable of accelerating you to near c in a matter of weeks/months/years and enough reaction mass to do so.
Re:22 light years (Score:4, Informative)
I read somewhere (I wish I could find it now) That if you were to accelerate at a constant 1G - The time dilation would allow you to visit the known visible universe within a human lifespan.(Well for the traveler anyway) - I really wish I could remember where this came from, I would really like to know if it was true or just something out of someone's ass.
Accelerating at 1g allows you to get just about anywhere in about 10-25 years (in your time frame).
100,000 LY (diameter of Milky Way) 11.8 years
2.6 million LY (nearest galaxy) 15.0 years
46.6 billion LY (radius of observable universe) 24.5 years.
Some important notes: First this would get you to these places travelling at near the speed of light. If you'd like to arrive stopped you'll have to roughly double the travel time, as half would be spent decelerating. Second, you could accelerate as long as you had a source of energy (and a functioning ship).
As for the claim you could visit the observable universe in a human lifespan, you couldn't reach all the points of it. But you certainly could reach the edge.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/rocket.html [ucr.edu]
Re:22 light years (Score:5, Interesting)
Well 44 years for those of us observing from Earth. Much less time for those of us making the journey (assuming they're traveling at the speed of light or close to it.) Still that is a huge if. Though radio contact with an intelligent and sufficiently technicially advanced species that close would be very possible.
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Note that humans don't survive arbitrarily high accelerations. So you'll need some time to get close to the speed of light, and the same time to decelerate on the other side. But then, when you arrive you'll be fried by the extremely blue-shifted radiation (with sufficiently high speed, even normal visible light will turn into hard gamma rays; now imagine what happens to existing gamma radiation and high energy cosmic radiation particles).
Indeed, one might ask for the maximal speed before you have to fear t
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I would not be so worried about Doppler shifted radiation. I would be more worried about the 3 foot tall super strong midgets who would live on a planet with 4.5x our gravity. They would undoubtedly be able to break a human man in half with little effort.
Re:22 light years (Score:5, Informative)
I would not be so worried about Doppler shifted radiation. I would be more worried about the 3 foot tall super strong midgets who would live on a planet with 4.5x our gravity. They would undoubtedly be able to break a human man in half with little effort.
Actually, the planet's radius is probably going to be quite a bit larger than our own, since (reportedly) there are fewer heavy metals in that system. If the radius is 2.1x Earth's radius with 4.5x the mass, the gravity would be the same as Earth.
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Maybe they're the ones that kill us with flying spiky balls, shrink us, and send us to work on their high gravity planet. [imdb.com]
There was even a sequel [imdb.com], and another [imdb.com], and another [imdb.com].
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For the passengers on board this theoretical spacecraft, practically no time would have passed at all during the journey. It's only for us suckers left behind that 44 years passes.
Re:22 light years (Score:4, Insightful)
Gee, what could go wrong with that?
First, the fact that the asteroids would be going at a much slower speed than your ship going at the speed of light. Instead of the asteroids clearing your path, you would eventually hit the asteroids.
Then, let's forget this tiny detail of E=mc^2 and how that influences the mass of a speeding object. Sure it's a negligible factor at our typical speeds but apply the Lorentz Factor [wikipedia.org] to a ship speeding close to the speed of light (let's say 90%) and the mass increases substantially (to 2.3 times the rest mass). Increase speed even more and mass keeps going up (to roughly 7 times, at 0.99c). Then, when you think a bit more about it, more than the 10 seconds it took you to read that forum you showed while completely missing the post of the guy that says basically what I just said, you start seeing what the problem is with keeping a constant 1G acceleration. It takes a lot of mass (read "fuel"), just to keep speeding up. Then, if you think a little bit harder, you may start understanding why they call the speed of light a "limit".
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Now if only we had a way to accelerate the ship constantly in that direction. .
It would actually solve all the zero-gravity problems in space, too. You’d just have to realize that the destination planet is down
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what is there from stopping us from reaching an appreciable fraction of the speed of light?
F = m[(vehicle) +m(fuel)]a. If only there was a way to get rid of the "m(fuel)" part of that equation... You can read fantasy books all you want - it takes energy to accelerate any object with mass, which means you need a source of energy. Unfortunately you need to bring this source of energy with you (if only to slow down on the other side), which means you have more mass, which means you need more energy, etc.
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What stops us is: 1) we have no way to produce sustained thrust anywhere near that high 2) even if we had a means, it would take something on the order of the entire power output of humanity to propel an interstellar craft at 1 G for that long, 4) to build and supply such a spacecraft would r
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Re:22 light years (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't see why a modest improvement in our current technology, say the technology we'll have in 200 years would not allow this trip to be quite feasible at 0.10C, for a roundtrip of around half a millennia. And that's only about twice as long as our current government has lasted, and our culture has been around longer. Our descendants could look forward to the trip report. And assuming biology continues to advance, it might just be our great grandchildren welcoming those who return.
Re:22 light years (Score:4, Interesting)
And assuming biology continues to advance, it might just be our great grandchildren welcoming those who return.
Well, if biology continues to advance then what's to say it wouldn't be ourselves welcoming those who return?
I understand that some people don't want to live that long, but my "retirement" plan involves savings for having my organs re-grown...
For over 20 years (since age 12), I've been developing a machine intelligence "agent" program that has learned my interests from my habits and alerts me to things I might like; Also it performs many other tasks for me -- like email filtering (I no longer see SPAM). My assistant is interested in Slashdot, cybernetics research, Civil Rights, and many other things because I am interested in them. It observes me throughout the day and night (thanks to IR), and can accurately deduce my mood, and current likely relevant interests from my behaviors: Eg: Just waking up, or my posture, or the way I hold my beverage (one drinks beer much differently than coffee) -- Actually, this is incorrect: having no deduction skills at all, its interests I'm alerted to are affected by its "mood" which is simply a direct result of my own physical state and activities -- uncannily similar to how we derive our own moods...
How far can we take this? We've discovered how to externally recognize decisions in our minds before we're aware of them, we're decoding human word recognition, and we'll be decoding remembered internal speech soon too. At such a point my agent will know my thoughts as instantly as I do -- My machine intelligence already knows my voice and other sounds, recognizes the words I say, and has been taught to read (its got better OCR when it comes to handwriting than I do sometimes). I am able to add new capabilities easily without retraining the whole network because it's a network of neural-networks, taking a page from the human brain & body, I "wire" specialized components together to create a whole.
The sad thing is that there's a better chance of myself or something very much like me living beyond the time spans you mention than our governments actually launching such a mission. It seems to me that the truly essential and ambitious goals in many areas of exploration will not involve state sponsorship.
Think of it this way, if the Dinosaurs had a sufficiently advanced space program they wouldn't be extinct right now...
( They achieved flight and rested on their laurels tempting fate with all the time in the world. )
Eventually my machine intelligence will be fully autonomous. Having its own physical state and activities it will be capable of creating its own "mood", able to affect and explore its own interests, and will be much more sturdy than our frail frames are -- Esp. when it comes to the harshness of space. The only problem is that if we launched such intelligences to distant interesting worlds, they may decide never to return. At least then our Human drive to create and explore won't be completely extincted by the asteroid that IS headed for us Right Now.
P.S. It's a misnomer to call machine intelligence "AI"; There's nothing "artificial" about its very real intelligence. Though not as smart as you are, its intelligence is as real as that of a fruit fly, rat, bird, cat, or ape. True, MI is artificial in that it was created by man, but you don't call clothes "artificial garments" if they include synthetic fibers... It's truly just an intelligent machine.
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I would say "absolutely, completely, utterly impossible with current technology." Come on. Just shooting a laser would take 22 years to hit it and if anyone were there they wouldn't even notice because we are just a speck in their sky too. Not to mention that if you ever got there, you're probably looking at 3G gravity at the surface. I'd go from 160 lbs to 480 lbs. How the hell are you supposed to be a conquistador when you weight 3 times as much as you are accustomed to after spending your entire life
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I would say "absolutely, completely, utterly impossible with current technology." Come on. Just shooting a laser would take 22 years to hit it and if anyone were there they wouldn't even notice because we are just a speck in their sky too. Not to mention that if you ever got there, you're probably looking at 3G gravity at the surface. I'd go from 160 lbs to 480 lbs. How the hell are you supposed to be a conquistador when you weight 3 times as much as you are accustomed to after spending your entire life weightless? Please.
An unmanned, multi-generational mission might be feasible. Maybe.
There's no info on the radius, but as long as it's greater than 2.1x Earth (I believe it's quite likely since they say heavy metals are scarce in that system), surface gravity will actually be less than Earth's.
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there could be water and fuel available almost the whole way.
If you stop and start. It takes LOT of energy and time to get up to speed -- or to slow down again -- to travel interstellar if you want to get there in less than a million years.
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there could be water and fuel available almost the whole way.
If you stop and start. It takes LOT of energy and time to get up to speed -- or to slow down again -- to travel interstellar if you want to get there in less than a million years.
While very true, here's something to consider: with iceballs going that far out, that's a lot of expansion room for any humans willing to live on iceballs (and makes it rather difficult to wipe out the species). Sure, getting there by colonial expansion could take millions of years, so what? Other than the fact that's a long time to figure out how to get there faster :)
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The problem with Alpha Centauri A is that it's part of a binary star system with Alpha Centauri B. Both of these stars are comparable in size to our sun. I am not certain, but I would assume that having two massive stars in a system would makes the temperatures and orbits of any planetary bodies extremely volatile.
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If you really want to feel bad, go figure out how many days work it is for Warren Buffett to buy that unreachable estate.
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22 light years is not all that far away, with nuclear propulsion you could get there in around 500 years. Not good for a weekend trip, but not really unreachable either.
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The GP was comparing the distance to the price of a luxury estate (55.3 million dollars/pounds/euro/etc). They were not saying it was 55.3 million anything in distance.
The universe mocks us (Score:5, Funny)
The universe mocks us.
Here's silver candy,
It doesn't make you fat.
It'll get you girls and all of that.
It only sells for a modest fee.
A quintillion dollars
Or exceeding C.
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Hello, it's 22 light years. It may take up to 22 years to get there, but you don't need to exceed c.
The biggest problem I see is that you fly away from Earth going close to c, you will never communicate with anyone back home.
Or to put that in another way: you will never get any new TV shows. You'd launch mid-season of American Idol and 20 years later you still won't know who won it.
Screw that.
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You're quite right that you don't need to exceed C. I decided to take the lazy way out [orionsarm.com] to analyze this problem. Please note, that site has a crappy interface. There are probably better relativistic trip calculators out there.
What's interesting is that you can subject both the earth and the ship to a fairly long wait time (we're both in it together) or you can give the ship a reasonably short wait time if you can get to 0.99c. The aforementioned lack of sync with Earth is still a problem of course. Sing
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The poetry is great! Your physics sucks. You neglect to address the amount of energy/mass it would take to accelerate someone to 0.99c. Hint: it's a fuckload.
Re:The universe mocks us (Score:5, Insightful)
May take up to 22 years?
It will guaranteed never take less than 22 years. Never mind that even getting close to c is a wild dream at this time.
But if you did manage to get close to the speed of light, the trip would take ~22 years from an earth point of view, but for the people on the ship/whatever, the trip will be quite short. If you actually hit c (never mind that it is physically impossible), the trip would be instantaneous from the point of view of the travelers.
A more realistic scenario, if we pour a lot of money into propulsion research, might be to fly away at 10% c. That would lead to a trip take takes 220 years in earth-time, or 198 years in ship-time. Not exactly an easy trip to plan.
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Thank you, MrZilla. Mod parent up.
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Don't underestimate the might of exponential growth. Accelerating at 1G for two years (ship time) gets you to over 95% of light speed. Five years (ship time) of constant acceleration at 1G gets you to over 99.99% of light speed. The real challenge is that it's a fire and forget mission: children born on earth at the time of the launch will have died of old age before the message that they arrived safely arrives back on earth.
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Star Trek aside, we have no way to influence the curvature of spacetime, and hence have no way of taking advantage of it for propulsion. More exotic possibilities like wormholes are theoretical oddballs that aren't (even on paper) suitable for transportation. Perhaps some new theory will point the way, but I wouldn't bank on it. I think that if we ever plan to get off this rock, we're goin
Re:The universe mocks us (Score:5, Funny)
You'd launch mid-season of American Idol and 20 years later you still won't know who won it.
I already do that. Am I an astronaut?
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Hello, it's 22 light years. It may take up to 22 years to get there, but you don't need to exceed c.
You'll need to exceed it, or change the "up to" to "more than"
The biggest problem I see is that you fly away from Earth going close to c, you will never communicate with anyone back home.
Or to put that in another way: you will never get any new TV shows. You'd launch mid-season of American Idol and 20 years later you still won't know who won it.
Screw that.
I've never watched American Idol for more than a minute. I'll go, you stay here and stay current with what's important.
The Great Almost (Score:2)
It's like flying cars: somebody's always building yet another Great Almost that gets on the cover of some publication to tease us, then runs away and hides in Flawland.
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Just thought you should know.
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Why does that signature keep getting replies like this (you are not the first I've seen say exactly the same thing about it)? Isn't it obvious it's making a grammatical joke/troll?
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What if we go there? (Score:2)
What if we go there? 4.5 G?
It woukld take some excersise and quite a few generation in low gravity space before we reach that high gravity Earth2...
Just one of many practical issues.
(No, I don't think we'll ever reach it; 22 light years)
Re:What if we go there? (Score:4, Informative)
What if we go there? 4.5 G?
Probably less. TFA quote:
The discovery of a planet around GJ 667C came as a surprise to the astronomers, because the entire star system has a different chemical makeup than our sun. The system has much lower abundances of heavy elements (elements heavier than hydrogen and helium), such as iron, carbon and silicon.
Good news: the density/mass of the planet may be less, thus a lower gravitation.
The bad news: the lack of carbon (which, BTW, is not that heavy) would make the planet unable to sustain life as we know it.
Other than that, with around 20-something days/year of leave entitlement, living there should be nice, because:
It takes roughly 28 days to make one orbital lap around its parent star
"The planet is around one star in a triple-star system," Vogt explained. "The other stars are pretty far away, but they would look pretty nice in the sky."
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"Located 22 light years from us, the best known candidate for supporting life is 4.5 times the mass of Earth, although that's probably wrong, and the chemical composition of the system does not support life as we know it."
That about right?
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Other than that, with around 20-something days/year of leave entitlement, living there should be nice, because:
I'm sorry to be the one who has to tell you this, but the entire duration of the trip will be counted against your current and future vacation time. Plus, you'll have to pay for your own travel expenses. Welcome to the new world order.
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surface gravity based on the same density as Earth ...
Goshh... I just quoted TFA saying that the abundance of heavy elements is much lower, therefore one could expect a lower density.
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Re:What if we go there? (Score:5, Insightful)
(No, I don't think we'll ever reach it; 22 light years)
We already HAVE reached it... in a sense. We've been broadcasting radio and television signals for all of recorded history (electronically recorded history, that is). Maybe they are mourning the death of The Skipper from Gilligan's Island (Alan Hale Jr.) who passed away 22 years ago. Maybe they're stunned by the loss of the shuttle Challenger, or dismayed by Chernobyl, or the Exxon Valdez. Maybe they're rocking out to Madonna and Michael "Mr Glove" Jackson. Perhaps they have had a Star Wars marathon, and are hoping beyond hope that George Lucas will make those long anticipated prequel movies. Too bad there's no way we can warn them.
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You paint a dark picture my friend,
For if what you say is true, the first thing we will do once we make first contact is to sue thier planet from under thier feet!
How dare those pirating alien scum view our IP without a license!
Re:What if we go there? (Score:5, Funny)
Because they aren't stupid enough to broadcast their position to the more dangerous gangs in the galaxy.
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If they could receive our signals, why aren't we receiving theirs?
Because by now they've received broadcasts of the original Star Trek series and don't want William Shatner to find them.
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Assuming average density the same as Earth, take a cure root of 4.5 to determine the approximate radius (compared to Earth). Then gravity is M/r^2 which (since we assumed M = r^3) simplifies to r.
Digging out the calculator, 1.651G.
(Jupiter is substantially less dense than Earth, that's why it doesn't work for Jupiter.)
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Assuming average density the same as Earth ...
The planet's solar system has much lower abundances of heavy elements [slashdot.org] and therefore will probably not have the same density as Earth.
If we can find them... (Score:3)
Re:If we can find them... (Score:5, Insightful)
We have a 75 light year radius sphere of expanding radio signals. If anyone is out there listening, we are the kid knocking over bookshelves in the library of the universe.
Re:If we can find them... (Score:5, Interesting)
Serious question though: What size antenna would some(thing) need to hear our radio signals at a distance of 22ly?
I seem to recall from reading somewhere (Physics of Star Trek?) about this. The gist is that this is a non-trivial problem, requiring an antenna unfathomably wide to catch such a weak signal.
Maybe there's an occasional super neat hack, like galaxy/gravitational lensing. But there's no aiming that.
Anyway, maybe we'll catch someone knowledgable about this... Chime in!
Re:If we can find them... (Score:5, Interesting)
According to this [vectorsite.net]:
Project Phoenix, under the direction of Dr. Jill Tarter, who had worked on MOP when she was at NASA, was a continuation of the Targeted Search program, studying 710 Sunlike stars within 150 light-years of the Earth. Phoenix used the 64-meter Parkes radio telescope in Australia, the 43-meter telescope at Green Banks, and the Arecibo dish, searching 70 million channels across a bandwidth of 1,800 MHz. The search was said to be capable of picking up any transmitter about as powerful as an airport radar within 200 light-years. Phoenix was completed in March 2004, with negative results.
It gets better if you assume we have a dedicated facility on both ends, two Arecibo radio telescopes (305m each) should be able to communicate halfway to the center of the galaxy. But if you're taking about a low-power radio broadcast, then that would take a huge, huge antenna. Then again, they've done some crazy things with arrays of antennas, so who knows. Certainly we're not so silent that we can't get noticed.
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If I'm not mistaken, airport radars are just about the most powerful transmissions we create, so they'd be the easiest to detect.
And setting up an antenna is the easy part. How are you going to decode the transmissions by an alien civilization?
Re:If we can find them... (Score:5, Interesting)
And setting up an antenna is the easy part. How are you going to decode the transmissions by an alien civilization?
2x beep ...and start over.
3x beep
5x beep
7x beep
11x beep
13x beep
17x beep
19x beep
*pause*
5x beep
*pause*
7x beep
*pause*
35x beep/no beep
*pause*
This should be a fairly straight forward way of encoding a pictogram, though it's unclear if they'll interpret 5 and 7 as the horizontal and vertical or opposite. Replace 5, 7 and 5*7 with arbitrary large primes to make detailed pictures. From there you can start sending maps of the galaxy, periodic table with illustration of the elements, everything we'd have in common. Show math with illustrations like you'd do to a preschooler, here's 2+3 = 5 with boxes of 2, 3 and 5 items. Once they understand our number system, show them distances they too probably know like size of galaxy, size of hydrogen atom etc.
Text and language, yes you'd get to that eventually. Send them them the alphabet then start over again, naming everything like the milky way, the sun, earth, all the elements and so on. For that matter, just teach them like you would a young child, the is s table and chair and book and flower and bird and whatnot. Illustration and text. Somehow I don't see this as a problem, put a US and Japanese kid in the same room and they'll find a way to communicate even though they got no words in common. Hell, we teach sign language to monkeys. How hard can it be to get a conversation going?
No base problem (Score:3)
Does that communication system work if they use anything other than base 10 math?
Base won't be a problem, no more than today, when computer count in base 2, most people count in base 10, ans some people count using weird combination (mixed base 20 celtic influence, mixed base 5 with roman, base 12, base 60 in summeria, etc...)
A prime number is a prime number, no matter what crazy writing system you use to write it down. Base systems are just that, encoding ways used to write down abstract number.
To go back to the parent exemple:
base will only start to play a role when we send graphical
Re:If we can find them... (Score:4, Informative)
ETs "finding" us has never been far-fetched. Assume we're not the first sentient species to evolve, most species evolve technologically in a similar way, we're not by some bad luck in an incredibly underpopulated galaxy, etc. These are all reasonable assumptions.
However, it's the contacting us and/or visiting us that is a lot harder to fetch.
I'm certainly not an expert, but my understanding is that to listen to our own spacecraft at the edge of our solar system (Voyager) requires a giant dish here. Granted, Voyager is a pretty weak transmitter, but it's also a very close one and one we built and understand. A giant transmitter 22LY away...could the signal reach us? Further away? I don't know. So likewise, what about our signals (which are pretty weak at this point, even when we try) to them? My understanding is that it's more about the signal decay over vast distances than about sophistication in listening equipment. Identifying Earth as a high-likelihood life-sustaining planet by some ETs - sure. Listening in on us or contacting us...much tougher.
ETs visiting us requires a jump from physics we speculate about to science fiction. At this point, faster than light travel may, for all we know, be forever impossible.
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At 22 lightyears, you don't NEED to go faster than light to reach it. Just somewhere close-ish to light-speed will do. So turning physicis on its head is not a requirement. What you do need is a really big jump in technology. ;) But that's still a lot more feesible than changing reality as Einstein penned it up.
Before setting off however you would want to make real sure that it's worth it, and the place actually inhabitable. The 4.5 x gravity will likely be the least of your concerns. And it'll take
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It better hope it doesn't eat you on the spot. The odds of our biologies not being cross-poisonous are low.
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Well, the seeing the evidence on this planet - of millions if not billions of species there is only one capable manipulating radio waves.
I would say that your argument based on equating the ability to manipulate radio waves with intelligence is pretty weak. I'm still waiting for signs of intelligent life here on Earth.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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...All the sudden the thought of ET's finding us isn't so far fetched.
I personally wouldn't jump to that conclusion. Considering the sheer volume of stars just in our galaxy even 10000 exoplanets would be an astronomically small figure besides those we're yet to discover.
But just discovering an exoplanet doesn't simply mean "finding life". Who knows one of the planets we've already seen might have some form of life on it. ET's (assuming they're anything like us) may "find" our planet but have no idea whats on it.
All of that also assumes that ET's are behaving something like
Re:If we can find them... (Score:4, Funny)
The good news is that if they are looking for oil, we've almost used all of it up, so conquering our planet won't do them much good. :-)
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Just like everything else in life timing is everything.
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we can now identify "earth like" planets
For sufficiently small values of "like"
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planet in the Koprulu Sector (Score:2)
"It's basically glowing cinders, or a well-lit charcoal," Vogt said. "We know about a lot of these, but they're thousands of degrees and not places where you could live."
Yeah, except for the Zerg. That planet is called Char.
Volcan? Vulcan? (Score:2)
A rocky planet 4.5 times the mass of Earth would probably be quite volcanic because it has yet to "cool down" inside, and because more gravitational pressure would be cooking the core hotter.
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Maybe it's thrice as old as ours.
only 22 (Score:2)
Ha ha 22 lightyears, or 208,131,625,000,000 kilometers
Lame (Score:2)
Weather on this planet would be pretty crazy, if it has an atmosphere at all, and life? I doubt it. Any life on this planet would have no day/night cycle, which seems kind of important for life as we know it.
And that's why I'm really getting tired of all thes
We should send a probe. (Score:2)
Even if the probe takes 200 years to return, it will be a mjor acomplishment for the human race, and it would provide extremely important scientific data.
Now that I mention it, how come there are no plans to send probes to nearby solar systems? for example, Alpha Centauri is just 4 light years away. If we send a probe now, and the probe could get to up 10% of light speed, in 40 years it will reach that solar system and in 80 years it will be back on Earth.
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If we send a probe now, and the probe could get to up 10% of light speed, in 40 years it will reach that solar system and in 80 years it will be back on Earth.
You do realise that the fuel requirements of sending a probe to Mars and back have prevented that from happening so far, let alone sending a probe a bazillion times further? If we do ever send a probe to Alpha Centauri, then I'd strongly suspect that it wouldn't be slowing down when it got there, let alone coming home again. A flyby is probably the best we can hope to expect, and even then, you'll be talking centuries to get there, in all probability. 0.1 C isn't exactly a trivial velocity to achieve.
Science UR failing it (Score:3)
I don't know what's worse, his grasp of statistics, or... no, wait, that's about as bad as it gets.
Please tell me that Vogt is some kind of PR Scientician, not an actual, real, bona fide astronomer.
Re: (Score:2)
5575 cubic lightyears (Score:2)
Civilization level, if any, must be low (Score:2)
The system has much lower abu The aliens over there have prolly gone back to sleeping in trees and dragging their knuckles on the ground, as they saw that inventing computers was going to be impossible.
Re:not really (Score:4, Insightful)
Your argument doesn't exclude plants, trees, fungus, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
And so your claim is that you'd categorize them as life? Seems legit.
Re: (Score:2)
As got pointed out in other threads, 4.5x earth mass is only about 60% extra G to deal with. I weigh 60% more than I did as a teenager (sadly) and still manage to get out of bed in the morning (most days ... I'm getting up there in age).
Re: (Score:2)
4.5 times the Earth's mass only means a 4.5 G at the surface if this planet is the same size as the Earth (in other words, a lot more dense). If this planet is the same or less density, the gravitational pull at the surface will be less than 4.5G.
Re: (Score:2)
2.3 times heavier is a lot though.
Re: (Score:3)
It's ironic in that no one knows what that word means, and the folks over at Kepler are driving themselves into a frenzy trying to find an earth analogue. They apparently missed one quite nearby.
Re: (Score:2)
gee didnt see that coming ... say something about our infallible space program on Slashdot and instantly get modded down, your more predictable than the space plane people, IE decades of the same ass bullshit, that never leaves the ground
Re: (Score:2)
That's not why you're getting modded down. You're getting modded down for being obnoxious.