Astronomers To Announce Discovery of a Nearby 'Earth-Like' Planet (seeker.com) 347
astroengine quotes a report from Seeker:
Scientists are preparing to unveil a new planet in our galactic neighborhood which is "believed to be Earth-like" and orbits its star at a distance that could favor life, German weekly Der Spiegel reported Friday. The exoplanet orbits a well-investigated star called Proxima Centauri, part of the Alpha Centauri star system, the magazine said, quoting anonymous sources.
"The still nameless planet is believed to be Earth-like and orbits at a distance to Proxima Centauri that could allow it to have liquid water on its surface -- an important requirement for the emergence of life," said the magazine.
It's orbiting our sun's nearest neighboring star -- just 4.25 light years away -- meaning it could someday be considered for the world's first interstellar mission.
"The still nameless planet is believed to be Earth-like and orbits at a distance to Proxima Centauri that could allow it to have liquid water on its surface -- an important requirement for the emergence of life," said the magazine.
It's orbiting our sun's nearest neighboring star -- just 4.25 light years away -- meaning it could someday be considered for the world's first interstellar mission.
interstellar mission (Score:2, Informative)
"meaning it could someday be considered for the world's first interstellar mission."
This is the longest timescale for 'someday' ever. Not going to happen in the lifetime of any descendent we can imagine.
If there was anyone on that planet, we could talk to them for sure. But no visiting is going to happen before humans cease to be creatures we recognise as the same as us.
Re: interstellar mission (Score:5, Insightful)
Also it's insane to think that humans could ever fly like birds in the sky, that the horseless buggy could ever outpace a solid 8-steed-wagon, or that the demons causing polio will ever be driven out by the power of Christ.
You fucking moron.
Re: interstellar mission (Score:2)
I believe your heart is in the right place, but you won't help this challenging endeavor by calling names your fellow human travelers.
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beard (Score:2)
Beard? Says who? I think that has more to do with Michelangelo (and more recently, Monte Python).
BTW, have you never heard of the barber paradox? The barber who shaves every man who doesn't shave himself. Got is quite able to be that barber, whether He shaves himself or not.
Re: interstellar mission (Score:5, Insightful)
No, what AC was pointing out was that a mere 100 years ago, people made sweeping statements like "no one in our lifetime will ever fly". We were flying in commercial jet airliners less than 30 years later, and landing on the moon another 20 after that. The pace of advancement in the last 100 years has been enormous, and shows no real signs of slowing down. The idea that there's 0 chance that any of us will see an interplanetary or interstellar mission is crazy.
Umm no.... (Score:5, Insightful)
"No, what AC was pointing out was that a mere 100 years ago, people made sweeping statements like "no one in our lifetime will ever fly". We were flying in commercial jet airliners less than 30 years later, and landing on the moon another 20 after that."
What?
100 years ago was 1916. Man first flew in a ballon in 1783.
Gliders? Otto Lilienthal was well know in the 1890s
Airplanes The Wright Brothers first flew was Dec 17, 1903. By 1916 hundreds of different aircraft had already flown including some pretty large aircraft.
"We were flying in commercial jet airliners less than 30 years later,"
The first jet commercial airliner the Comet did not enter service until 1952 which is well over 30 years later.
"The idea that there's 0 chance that any of us will see an interplanetary or interstellar mission is crazy."
I think you are right about interplanetary flight. I hope that we will see that in a life time. Manned Interstellar fight is where you are very much off. The difference in scale between going to Mars vs going to a star system is HUGE. Maybe we will see some supper shocking tech like an unexpected breakthrough in FTL flight.
But the odds are massively in favor of none of us today living to see a manned interstellar mission. Un manned we may live to see one launched but I doubt that we will see it arrive.
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If anybody ever needed my sig, it's this one.
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Gee this is Slashdot AKA News for Nerds. I see a huge difference between the state of the art in aviation in 1916 vs 1903.
"Anyhow, the gist of his post was that technological development goes blistering fast, and you can't really say something is impossible."
Yes you actually can say something is impossible we have limits based on the physical universe.
Let's go with the dumb metaphor of the original post.
Aviation and rockets where basically unrelated tech for a good while. Let's take a look at aviation again
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Hope, faith and dreams may be of importance to the mental state of an individual, but it has no place in science, though - at least, not in the actual implementation, methodology and results of it.
In fact; hope, faith and dreams are often in the way of reaching a scientific conclusion.
And it's not with hope and faith that we managed to save millions with modern medicines, but by the fruits of science. We saved more lives in the past 300 years with science, than in the 3000 years before that with 'faith'.
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I would refute this.
The laws of physics are not 'made' by men - at least not in the sense of 'made up', it's based on what nature tells us it is. If nature had shown us something else, our physical laws would be something else as well. If you want to argue that our knowledge is not perfect, I'll grant you that. In fact, this has been known to science for quite some while.
But what most lay people do not seem to understand, is that, while our current laws aren't perfect, they're astonishingly accurate neverth
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We can not even reach .01c yet. 4 light years == 400 years. I just do not see me getting to be that old.
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No, what AC was pointing out was that a mere 100 years ago, people made sweeping statements like "no one in our lifetime will ever fly"
That would have been a silly thing to say 100 years ago considering hot air balloons had already existed for over 100 years and Zeppelins were being used to cross oceans.
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Sorry to break this to you but solving interstellar travel will be orders of magnitude more difficult than every problem that man has ever overcome combined. Your mind is too pathetic to even imagine the scales involved.
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a solar sail with a number of cubesats as the payload.
with a lightweight payload, a solar sail could reach a significant fraction of the speed of light, letting a spacecraft make the journey to proximal centauri in six to eight years, within the lifespan of a robot probe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail
CubeSats are small and light enough for several to be packed into a solar sail payload. the individual sats can be configured for separate tasks like imaging, field measurements, etc. perhaps with som
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Re: interstellar mission (Score:4, Funny)
If only the solar sail spacecraft had some means of propulsion that could help it slow down at it's destination.
Re: interstellar mission (Score:4, Informative)
For the velocities in question (say > 10% of light speed) the sail would need to be accelerated using lasers -- sunlight isn't bright enough for a large enough proportion of the journey to be useful.
For the same reason it would not get enough thrust from Proxima's light to brake to a stop (or slow down much as all) especially as Proxima is a dim red dwarf.
It might be possible to do better with a magsail, but probably better to focus on recording as much data as possible during a fly-through and then transmitting it back to Earth over the succeeding years, much along the lines of New Horizons at Pluto. With a little cunning the sail can probably serve as the main antenna.
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This civilization has seen our I Love Lucy broadcasts, and is planning war.
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Actually they would probably not be offended by I Love Lucie. If they any of the reality TV shows we are doomed.
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I have it on good authority that they're coming to rescue the crew of the Minnow.
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The technology to send a probe to Proxima Centauri within a couple of decades more or less exists now. It only requires the will to do it.
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Or we could wait 25,000 years or so for it to get closer, and that would shave *years* off the trip :-)
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This is the longest timescale for 'someday' ever. Not going to happen in the lifetime of any descendent we can imagine.
Joke's on you, some of us plan to cure aging in the next several decades. Or at least give it a good try.
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They didn't say *manned* mission. There exists a possibility of an unmanned probe. It could take its time getting there and back. The people who launched it wouldn't live to see it return, but there would be all kinds of cool data to be had from it while it went. Like Voyager today.
Re:interstellar mission (Score:5, Informative)
Making an anti-matter powered rocket is doable with current technology
Uhm, no. That would require:
- an antimatter rocket engine
- antimatter containment
- antimatter
None of those is "current technology". We can create beams of antimatter (particles, not even atoms), but with terrible efficiency.
Of these, we can only trap a few dozens at a time, and not for very long. Once they escape containment, they disappear in a "puff" of gamma rays.
If we could contain more antimatter, it would probably be used to build more powerful bombs first, so I'm kinda hoping it won't be in the near future.
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Although I think you will find that we can indeed produce antimatter in very small quantities, I still enjoyed your comment. Anything that reminds me of the awesomeness that is Red Dwarf always makes me smile.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Certainly the most underrated sci-fi comedy series ever.
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You can say that again. Red Dwarf rules! ;-)
That said, I don't know if it's *really* underrated; it was pretty popular in its day, and it has achieved cult status by now.
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But that's only because those ____ Klingons have cornered the market on dilithium crystals.
Re:interstellar mission (Score:5, Interesting)
Making an antimatter rocket is "do-able" for some value of do-able, but making the antimatter is whole 'nother issue. According to Wikipedia, estimates put the cost of a gram of antimatter somewhere between $25 billion (2006) and $62 trillion (1999). Given the 2014 gross world product was about $78 trillion, the puts the price somewhere between "a lot" and "all of the money".
If we started now, I guess we could build a two-copy redundant probe set in 20-50 years that would take 400-4000 years to get to Proxima using either ion propulsion or nuclear pulse propulsion (Orion type) (assume max roughly 1% light speed). The probe set would cost $10-1,000 billion depending on how you amortize costs, R&D and NRE, launch facilities, and fuel. The US, EU, and China have GDPs of roughly $17, $17, and $11 trillion, respectively, so that's the scale you'd be working against.
Re:interstellar mission (Score:5, Funny)
That's a pretty intense rate of deflation. At that rate we'll all be walking around with antimatter keychains next year.
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Which is entirely scary. How big would an antimatter bomb have to be in order to have the destructive power of an H-bomb? I guess it all depends on the size of the containment vessel and its power supply, because the amount of antimatter needed would be around 25 grams, I think. (I'm basing that on estimates elsewhere on the web, I haven't done the calculation myself; but roughly 50 grams of matter totally converted to energy per megaton equivalent.)
I hope we can't produce large quantities of anti-matter
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We could probably do a regular-matter probe that'd get there in a hundred years, as long as it's an extremely light micro-probe which only does a flyby. The thing about sending a probe though is that it might be more cost-effective to build a bigger telescope to get the same data. It's not necessarily better to get a tiny probe close for a brief flyby than to develop the tech to look from afar.
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We could probably do a regular-matter probe that'd get there in a hundred years, as long as it's an extremely light micro-probe which only does a flyby.
I have read proposals to do exactly that, using a probe about the size of a postage stamp, and using a 1x1 meter solar sail made of mylar. The proposal was by a group of high school students. It would launch from a Cubesat, and would cost ~$10k. The hardest part was figuring out how to steer the contraption with sufficient accuracy.
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Oh yeah, thats the hardest part. The steering.
Indeed. The target is about a second of arc squared. There is no way to just point it in the right direction and go, but in-route adjustments are hard because of the lack of power in deep space. The students' proposal was for the "sail" to be an inflated sphere, with aluminum coating on half, and carbon black coating on the other half. It could then be rotated to steer with differential thrust. The reflective surface gives slightly more thrust than the absorbent surface. The plan was to leave solar or
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Exactly what type of signal would they be receiving from a postage stamp sized probe in another star system?
I don't remember the exact details since I read the proposal a while ago, and I am not an RF guy, but I think their plan was to reel out a carbon-fiber directional antenna, and then use a very high gain antenna here on Earth as a receiver. Or something like that.
Re:interstellar mission (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope, anti-matter is not just a theory. It has been confirmed to exist in the first half of the last century: https://home.cern/topics/antim... [home.cern]
Antimatter can be used as very efficient rocket fuel, so you would have to carry less weight.
The problem however is how to do efficient production of antimatter.
Also, you would still have to carry some kind of propellant with you.
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Christ, space nutters are delusional. Anti-matter rockets? Don't you realize that anti-matter is simply a theory? It isn't something you just stuff in a rocket. Christ.
Yes, talking about visiting is nuts. But you're objectively wrong about the "just a theory" part, anti-matter-wise. That doesn't make it practical or even plausible from an engineering perspective, but your understanding of it is simply incorrect.
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Don't you realize that anti-matter is simply a theory?
Antimatter has been created and stored [sciencefocus.com] (quote below) and noted here Q & A: How to make antimatter [illinois.edu], so it's more than a theory, but doing so in large quantities and using it is still a wild impracticability.
This has been done at CERN, the European centre for nuclear research, by slowing the antiprotons in a machine called the AD (Antiproton Decelerator). Electric and magnetic forces then gather them together with positrons. Since 2009, ALPHA has trapped atoms in a magnetic bottle on a few hundred occasions.
In 2011, the ALPHA experiment at CERN managed to make atoms of antihydrogen, the antimatter equivalent of hydrogen, and store them for nearly 17 minutes.
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Christ, space nutters are delusional. Anti-matter rockets? Don't you realize that anti-matter is simply a theory? It isn't something you just stuff in a rocket. Christ.
Sure, anti-matter rockets are merely theoretical. Anti-matter, however, exists [wikipedia.org].
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Don't you realize that anti-matter is simply a theory?
That's good. Gravity is only a theory. Evolution is only a theory. God, on the other hand, is not even a theory.
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Why would you need to pull anti-matter particles out to create a flash of visible light? Surely electrons dropping down a few energy levels into ordinary positively charged ions is enough. Happens at the surface of the Sun all the time.
Good luck with that. (Score:2, Insightful)
Proxima Centauri is a flare star. Good luck with it being Earth-like.
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It's most likely also 'tidal-locked', meaning one side will always face the sun (and be damn hot) and the other side permanently dark (damn cold) - with storms between which will make Earth's hurricanes look like the blow of a butterfly.
With an evironment like that, we can rule out higher life forms.
However, even primitive algae and amoebae in the belt between the extreme zones would be a sensation.
Re:Good luck with that. (Score:4, Interesting)
Take a tidally locked planet around a flare star. Let the sunny side be too hot for life, so that the dark side is just the right temperature for life. The dark side is also well-protected from radiation by the mass of the planet, isn't it? As long as the atmosphere isn't blown off, which it wouldn't be according to theory, what would be the difficulty for life? Obviously photosynthesis wouldn't develop, but we have plenty of life on Earth that doesn't require that, and the abundance of photosynthesis on Earth may simply be an adaptation to the abundance of sunlight we have rather than a necessary path for life.
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anyone running from Neptune?
Re: Good luck with that. (Score:5, Funny)
"With an evironment like that, we can rule out higher life forms."
Centaurians called.
They wanted to know how can we sustain higher life forms on Earth - since we have neither the cyclic megahurricans that are essential to recharge cyclic biotanks, nor we have a proper dark side of the planet where we can comfortably hatch our silicon eggs.
To be frank, they sounded rather narrow minded about any real possibility of life without those things.
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We'd just tell them we defy all known physics, from flares and radiation to pure mechanical forces like they do, obviously
Re: Good luck with that. (Score:4)
In fact, their armored trading fleet is being readied right now...to back up negotiations for that bit of prime real estate closest to Sol.
Perhaps we could trade Mercury for one of their worthless water worlds. As the Centaurians like to say, "If you like mucking about in the slime, we will view you, but we will not see you". (It loses something in the translation)
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CAP === 'ballad'
The first thing I though of when seeing TFA was '39 by Queen; a ballad about interstellar travel and Lorentz factors.
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They already sent a Mr. Trump to clear out the humans.
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Nuts, I was going to say this, but you beat me to it. Anyway, well said!
" first interstellar mission." (Score:3)
Holy shitballs, all the sci-fi books were right. (Score:5, Interesting)
Also with 50 years and we find something worth visiting, and now can think about sending people. 500 and we are back to science fiction.
Minimally, this justifies building one huge honking telescope to get a good look at this planet.
Re:Holy shitballs, all the sci-fi books were right (Score:5, Funny)
Minimally, this justifies building one huge honking telescope to get a good look at this planet.
Didn't you read the article? They were able to take a pretty detailed picture already [tumblr.com].
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Re:Holy shitballs, all the sci-fi books were right (Score:4, Funny)
Seems to me I once read that early last century someone said words to the effect of "what's the point of airplanes? Not like they'll ever be able to fly nonstop across the Pacific or anything".
Oddly, your comment reminded me of that....
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Seems to me I once read that early last century someone said words to the effect of "what's the point of airplanes? Not like they'll ever be able to fly nonstop across the Pacific or anything".
Oddly, your comment reminded me of that....
Oddly, your comment reminded me of how much progress has halted, not to say reversed. We had SR-71. We had Concorde. We had the Space Shuttle. We had man on the moon.
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Seems to me I once read that early last century someone said words to the effect of "what's the point of airplanes? Not like they'll ever be able to fly nonstop across the Pacific or anything".
Oddly, your comment reminded me of that....
Oddly, your comment reminded me of how much progress has halted, not to say reversed. We had SR-71. We had Concorde. We had the Space Shuttle. We had man on the moon.
Progress was neither halted nor reversed. We had to take a step back and focus on efficiency, rather than just relying on brute force. All of those systems worked fine, but they were just too resource-intensive to justify their operation. We'll get back to the moon soon enough, and it will cost a tiny fraction of what the Apollo missions did. The SR-71 is just unnecessary today given better satellite coverage and better optics. The Concorde... that may never be back.
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More like progress has gone sideways. The focus has changed from high speed vehicles to high fuel efficiency vehicles ever since the 1970s oil crisis. It's the same reason you do not see cars powered by Wankel engines or turbines. It's not that we do not have the technology it just does not make economic sense.
Today we have satellite reconnaissance and regardless of how fast you make a jet aircraft a SAM rocket will prove to be faster. You might as well send a high-altitude relatively slow drone like the Gl
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I don't think the issue with reviving the Saturn V is the fuel, it's the cost of building those engines, and everything else that goes with it. (Including more reliable sources of electricity than Apollo 13 carried, although I guess that's solved.)
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The fastest probe we ever has built goes 0.023%. It is doubtful we will even get to 1%, ever.
And yet decades have technology has improved since, and we've never built a probe for this purpose. Everything else has been built with planetary observation/fly-by in mind, not blazing out of the solar system for blazing's sake.
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There is nothing stopping us from building a probe that goes that fast except for the expense (more weight) and some engineering (bigger/better shielding, more efficient rockets, bigger fuel production). We have the tech for it, we just don't have the political willpower to do it, I mean, who really wants to have a nuclear reactor going up in the air, something goes wrong and the US will be turned to dust and be inhabitable for 1000 years.
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You're exaggerating the effect that a simple nuclear reactor would have even in a catastrophic failure by a whole lot.
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who really wants to have a nuclear reactor going up in the air, something goes wrong and the US will be turned to dust and be inhabitable for 1000 years.
I don't claim to be a nuclear scientist, but I'm pretty sure that even in the worst-case scenario that would not happen.
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"mission" (Score:2)
starshot project and similar, preliminary designs of tiny probes less than a gram, in a swarm of hundreds to thouands accelerated to sizeable fraction (10-20%) of the speed of light seem like the only plausible way to explore other "nearby" star systems for the next century.
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leading physicists are working on it and believe it technically possible.
so you know more than they do?
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starshot project and similar, preliminary designs of tiny probes less than a gram, in a swarm of hundreds to thouands accelerated to sizeable fraction (10-20%) of the speed of light seem like the only plausible way to explore other "nearby" star systems for the next century.
And they would get data back to us how?
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1W laser doing comm in very short bursts
read the real project description, the dumbed-down popular ones leave a lot of details out
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Will the USPO still be around then?
"to announce"? (Score:5, Interesting)
I like the "to announce" part. Like, if they haven't announced it, why are you reporting on it? Maybe there's a reason they haven't actually announced it yet! Perhaps the data is tentative and admits of another explanation, which, on further review, will prove to be true. Perhaps it's simply one guy's wild-ass guess based on incomplete data.
Maybe, just maybe, there's a reason he's not making any comment? Like, they want to avoid making false statements in public and embarrassing themselves? Quite unlike certain (most?) Internet "news" sites which are perfectly happy both to make false statements and to embarrass themselves? "Who cares? Just give us those clicks!"
Anyway, this is pretty cool if confirmed, but at this point, I'm treating it with all the seriousness it deserves, which is approximately zero.
Re:"to announce"? (Score:4, Funny)
p.s. I realize I've violated the unwritten rules of slashdot by actually reading the article and commenting on what it says, instead of leaping to snap judgment based on the headline alone. In my defense, I actually read the article yesterday, before it was posted to slashdot. :)
Great news! (Score:5, Funny)
I am so relieved that all those colonization spaceships I've sent to Alpha Centauri, over many years of playing Civilization, will have somewhere to land!
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Yes, but the real estate agent was selling land on a planet around Alpha. It's much more expensive over on Proxima.
Wait a minute... (Score:2)
I saw that movie [youtube.com].
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Movie? MOVIE?????
There are those of us who watched the series on Black & White TV.
I'm tempted to ask you to hand in your geek card, but you're probably too young to remember the series.
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Careful, you're showing your age. :-)
I watched the first run of LiS in glorious black in white. I was, um, pretty young, but remembered loving the first season, and disliking the show more and more as it descended into camp. (Although I didn't know what "camp" meant at the time. I just found the later episodes awkward and frivolous). When the SciFi channel first started, they ran reruns of LiS, Voyage, and Time Tunnel back to back for awhile, and I was able to confirm my earlier impressions.
I used the m
What's it Called? (Score:2)
The still nameless planet is believed to be Earth-like and orbits at a distance to Proxima Centauri that could allow it to have liquid water on its surface -- an important requirement for the emergence of life," said the magazine.
Of course it's still nameless stupid. We haven't got there yet to ask the locals what the planet's called.
Small issue (Score:2)
Name it Chiron for Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear (Score:3)
James P. Hogan's comments from: https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
=====
An Earth set well into the next century is going through one of its periodical crises politically, and it looks as if this time they might really press the button for the Big One. If it happens, the only chance for our species to survive would be by preserving a sliver of itself elsewhere, which in practical terms means another star, since nothing closer is readily habitable. There isn't time to organize a manned expedition of such scope from scratch. However, a robot exploratory vessel is under construction to make the first crossing to the Centauri system, and it with a crash program it would be possible to modify the designs to carry sets of human genetic data coded electronically. Additionally, a complement of incubator/nanny/tutor robots can be included, able to convert the electronic data back into chemistry and raise/educate the ensuing offspring while others prepare surface habitats and supporting infrastructure, when a habitable world is discovered. By the time we meet the "Chironians," their culture is into its fifth generation.
In the meantime, Earth went through a dodgy period, but managed in the end to muddle through. The fun begins when a generation ship housing a population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, armed military force to compel. But what happens when these methods encounter a population that has never been conditioned to respond?
The book has an interesting corollary. Around about the mid eighties, I received a letter notifying me that the story had been serialized in an underground Polish s.f. magazine. They hadn't exactly "stolen" it, the publishers explained, but had credited zlotys to an account in my name there, so if I ever decided to take a holiday in Poland the expenses would be covered (there was no exchange mechanism with Western currencies at that time). Then the story started surfacing in other countries of Eastern Europe, by all accounts to an enthusiastic reception. What they liked there, apparently, was the updated "Ghandiesque" formula on how bring down an oppressive regime when it's got all the guns. And a couple of years later, they were all doing it!
So I claim the credit. Forget all the tales you hear about the contradictions of Marxist economics, truth getting past the Iron Curtain via satellites and the Internet, Reagan's Star Wars program, and so on.
In 1989, after communist rule and the Wall came tumbling down, the annual European s.f. convention was held at Krakow in southern Poland, and I was invited as one of the Western guests. On the way home, I spent a few days in Warsaw and at last was able to meet the people who had published that original magazine. "Well, fine," I told them. "Finally, I can draw out all that money that you stashed away for me back in '85. One of the remarked-too hastily--that "It was worth something when we put it in the bank." (There had been two years of ruinous inflation following the outgoing regime's policy of sabotaging everything in order to be able to prove that the new ideas wouldn't work.) I said, resignedly, "Okay. How much are we talking about?" The one with a calculator tapped away for a few seconds, looked embarrassed, and announced, "Eight dollars and forty-three cents." So after the U.S. had spent trillions on its B-52s, Trident submarines, NSA, CIA, and the rest--all of it.
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Physics disagrees.
http://www.space.com/32546-interstellar-spaceflight-stephen-hawking-project-starshot.html
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If you can accelerate, you can decelerate with the same technology. That assumes of course fuel. And I did say *if*.
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That would require Intrepid-class starships for the really useful and good holodecks, so that's quite some time into the future.
Re:will Earth like planets matter? (Score:5, Funny)
That would require Intrepid-class starships for the really useful and good holodecks, so that's quite some time into the future.
Actually, holodecks in Intrepid-class starships are notoriously unreliable and liable to tricky failure modes like "the safeguards have somehow been shut off" and "everyone in the simulation is now alive and they all want to kill me".
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That would be Clarion, on the opposite side of the sun from us. Truman Bethrum met a captain from one of their ships, Aura Rhanes, who was small and latin-looking, who wore a tight black dress, a red blouse, and a red beret at a jaunty angle. The people on the planet Clarion are all Christians and can speak any language on Earth. Ms. Rhanes was named as a corespondent on Bethurum's divorce papers. See "Aboard a Flying Saucer" 1954.
Re:Misquoted (Score:4, Interesting)
In cosmic terms, I think "nearby" is fair. However, I always snicker a bit when planets get described as "earthlike" just because of their mass and distance from their star. We have counterexamples right in our own system. A distant astronomer using the same logic, upon discovering Venus would have declared its surface "Earthlike" and start going on about how it probably has oceans perfect for discovering life.
A body being "earthlike" requires a lot more than a similar mass and proper solar distance. Heck, do we even know that it's rocky? Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf - would it actually have blown away most of the volatiles during its formation like our sun did? Or by contrast maybe it's volatile-devoid. Earth was whalloped with volatile-containing rock during the Late Heavy Bombardment thanks to Jupiter. Does Proxima Centauri contain a Jupiter? Probably not. Also: my understanding of the habitable zone of red dwarfs is that they leave their surfaces too irradiated for LAWKI. Now, one could say, "well, it'd be in subsurface water". But you can make that argument for half a dozen bodies in our own solar system without requiring a 4+ light year journey.
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And your qualifications vs his are?
I'm pretty sure Dr. Hawking has thought this through a lot more than you have.
What exactly have you done that qualifies you to gainsay him?
Please explain in detail.
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OK Dipshit. You're going to run your mouth without justifying it, you can go fuck yourself. *plonk*