Two Potentially Life-Friendly Planets Found Orbiting a Nearby Star (nationalgeographic.com) 217
A tiny, old star just 12 light-years away might host two temperate, rocky planets, astronomers announced today. If they're confirmed, both of the newly spotted worlds are nearly identical to Earth in mass, and both planets are in orbits that could allow liquid water to trickle and puddle on their surfaces. National Geographic reports: Scientists estimate that the stellar host, known as Teegarden's star, is at least eight billion years old, or nearly twice the sun's age. That means any planets orbiting it are presumably as ancient, so life as we know it has had more than enough time to evolve. And for now, the star is remarkably quiet, with few indications of the tumultuous stellar quakes and flares that tend to erupt from such objects.
The two worlds orbit a star so faint that it wasn't even spotted until 2003, when NASA astrophysicist Bonnard Teegarden was mining astronomical data sets and looking for dim, nearby dwarf stars that had so far evaded detection. Teegarden's star is a stellar runt that's barely 9 percent of the sun's mass. It's known as an ultra-cool M dwarf, and it emits most of its light in the infrared -- just like the star TRAPPIST-1, which hosts seven known rocky planets. But Teegarden's star is just a third as far from Earth as the TRAPPIST-1 system, which makes it ideal for further characterization. The team of astronomers reported their findings in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The two worlds orbit a star so faint that it wasn't even spotted until 2003, when NASA astrophysicist Bonnard Teegarden was mining astronomical data sets and looking for dim, nearby dwarf stars that had so far evaded detection. Teegarden's star is a stellar runt that's barely 9 percent of the sun's mass. It's known as an ultra-cool M dwarf, and it emits most of its light in the infrared -- just like the star TRAPPIST-1, which hosts seven known rocky planets. But Teegarden's star is just a third as far from Earth as the TRAPPIST-1 system, which makes it ideal for further characterization. The team of astronomers reported their findings in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Why this definition of habitable? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why this definition of habitable? (Score:4, Insightful)
If they could think outside their dated views, they will see life can also exist in fractions of time so tiny they cannot measure it, in places they cannot imagine.
How do you know ?
Also, if you have limited resources to search for life, it simply makes sense to prioritize the most likely candidates first.
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Here's a better reason : what's the definition of life ?
We don't need a definition. We just scan the universe for anything that looks unusual, and then we can decide how to call it.
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Life is something that produces imperfect copies of itself which go on to produce imperfect copies of themselves. This happens recursively. When one branch of the tree doesn't produce copies we call that branch extinct.
That's my first cut, but it's got a few edge cases.
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Imagine how impossible it is to watch an entire Galaxy or Universe with mere telescopes!
Right, but having a good definition of "life" isn't going to help search in impossible places. places we can't observe.
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That doesn't mean we can take any of that and posit the existence of life based on chemistry we do not understand
I didn't say that we should. Just look for unusual stuff, and try to explain it. In most cases, there will be a natural explanation for things we observe, but we might stumble on something that people can only explain as a product of a life form.
Either way, we're advancing science.
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There may be life forms that live in time and experience space passing. Songs and clouds come to mind. It appears they are looking for planets that are habitable or useful to humans specifically.
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Why does a mirror image of earth the only source of life they can think of?
Why do you think that is the case?
Why do you think that especially considering the fact that isn't what was said, but explicitly "life as we know it"
If they could think outside their dated views, they will see life can also exist in fractions of time so tiny they cannot measure it, in places they cannot imagine.
But life as we know it means we need to KNOW it, not imagine it or think it or dream it up or not be ruled out by the laws of physics.
Do you have an example of such known life to share with the class?
Because if not, that is the answer to your question.
We don't know that exists because you refuse to share with anyone the fact it does exist.
We exclude "life as we
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Who would do that? It's as bad as defining rocks in geological terms, or numbers in mathematical terms.
Life Friendly Planets! (Score:5, Funny)
Quick , let's send some nukes and kill them now that they're not expecting it yet!
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Re:Life Friendly Planets! (Score:4, Interesting)
There was some serious discussion of this back in the 80s. Maybe it's better to hide and reduce our emissions, because if we are spotted the other civilisation may decide it's too much of a risk and take us out. Probably wouldn't even see the relativistic bombs coming.
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I recall speculations like that,
I'm no gamer but I got introduced to a single player game somewhere, must have been the nineties, where you had to develop your planet and civilization and invest in different things to keep defence/economic/environmental and parameters in check . I have no idea about the name. So the game was going along nicely and I was developing the planet and suddenly there was some alien encounter where a vessel of my planet was destroyed. So far the encounter with aliens. A bit later t
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There's no way to hide the fact we have an active carbon cycle and an oxygen rich atmosphere. Nor can we hide the fact Earth is lousy with water. Any alien civilization with a observatory capable of terrestrial planet finding will know Earth is likely teeming with life. We're at the cusp of having this ability for ourselves.
If some advanced alien civilization(s) is/are looking to relativistically blast potential opponents the bombs are already on their way. They wouldn't need to wait to see signs of the ind
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And the thing about "relativistic bombs" is that rocks work just as well as anything fancier.
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Iron? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Iron? (Score:4, Insightful)
Tidally locked worlds will also be problematic. Which these likely are. Age, distance.
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Our solar system's heavy elements were seeded by supernovas, not by our own sun, so it's hard to say. If there was a supernova which also seeded that ancient star's backyard then the current star itself wouldn't make any difference.
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Not if they're class M. Class M never get beyond fusing Hydrogen to Helium. They're too light. And this is a small class M. I forget which is the first class to go beyond H->He. G certainly, but perhaps also K. ("O Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me Right Now Sweetie.", but I think R, N, and S are off the main sequence, and Wikipedia seems to say my acronym list is obsolete.)
Life-friendly? (Score:5, Interesting)
Planets are never life-friendly, even our own one tries to kill us every day.
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And for very good reasons.
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That's kind of a backwards way to look at the only place in the universe where life arose, and the ecosystem that provides literally everything to keep every human (and every other creature) alive.
Thats a really 19th century european attitude, that humanity is against nature. If you look at first nations philosophies, we are meant to be at one with nature, as our one and only mother and source of all known life in the universe.
If providing all the building block
There you have it (Score:3)
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Journalists are just ignorant, because they have never been educated in the area. Space Nutters know better, but choose to believe in fantasy instead of Physics.
Re:There you have it (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmm, 10,000 years ago, it would have been perfectly reasonable to say "even the moon is a fantastically outrageously large distance and we humans have no hope of ever going that far".
And next month is the 50th Anniversary of us doing just that.
Are we going to visit another star system soon? Probably not. Depending on how we define "soon", or course.
Within 1k years? Fair chance. Not great, but fair.
Within 10K years? Probably.
Within a million years? Unless we drive ourselves into extinction before then, certainly....
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Within a million years? Unless we drive ourselves into extinction before then, certainly....
Civilization can collapse without extinction. It has happened many times before.
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To be fair civilizations have collapsed before, but we don't know of any global civilization collapses, yet. In the last few decades we've seen a number of countries collapse, but they haven't brought down the rest. So I wonder whether or not such a collapse is even possible now without an existential threat of some sort that is world wide. Not that there aren't any existential threats that we know of like Nuclear War, Global Warming, and Asteroid Impacts.
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Global Warming probably isn't an existential threat. Probably. More likely it would just increase the probability of, say, war to the point where THAT became the existential problem.
OTOH, it does clearly threaten civilization. And it MIGHT cause a global collapse without causing human extinction. True, much less than 1% of the population would survive, but that's not extinction. The problem is that I think that would put the end to metal-based civilization. The knowledge of how to make metals would di
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Have you ever tried refining steel into iron without a good blast furnace? Pennies into copper? And after a century or two (optimistic recovery time) they'd be buried deeply enough that nobody would know to look for them. Or where to look for them. Literacy would be gone, and even if it weren't there'd be no books to read. Folk stories would talk about the wondrous sorcerers of ancient times, but with no more accurate details than that. Airplanes might be marvelous flying beasts. Flying carpets would
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There's nothing about interstellar "migrations" that require faster than light travel. It's a lot safer to travel slower, and if you do, by the end of the trip the people are going to want to live in their "ship" rather than on a planet they really aren't suited for anyway. So plan it that way.
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That's only if you take the perspective of individuals getting there and not a civilization-level perspective. We all want the idea of getting on a spacecraft and personally going to another star, but that's not how it's going to be. However, that doesn't at all mean that we as a civilization can't "get" there. We have plenty of constructions that took hundreds of years to complete.
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It is true that we ourselves have no hope of ever traveling that distance, but our grandkids might even without new technology. They just have to be willing to use nuclear fission rockets and manufacture and launch from the moon. An Orion ship could do it in a few human lifetimes. We may have to Chernobyl the moon, but we could do it.
Well assuming lunar mining and manufacturing ever became a thing. Even without that given enough time we could probably launch enough parts to the moon to be assembled and laun
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For that matter, the obstacles to doing it today are more social than technical. This doesn't mean that they're currently soluble, since the problem of keeping a small society stable when isolated for generations is "beyond the state of the art", and artificial habitats are a lot more fragile than planets are.
Hightly unlikely these support life (Score:5, Interesting)
Tidal locking not necessarily bad (Score:5, Insightful)
The small robit, and the great age probably mean the planets are tidally locked, so the same fact always is turned towards the star.
On earth, the places where life evolved was often at the boundaries. On the sea-shore. By deep ocean vents. In or by rivers. Where there is a spread of temperatures, humidity, and other factors. If you have a tidally-locked planet, you will have a hot side and a cold side, but you will also have a twilight belt. It will be relatively safe from solar flares because the belt will see the star tangentially through the atmosphere. Rocks and outcrops will cast deep shadows. This star is supposed to be quiet, but it only takes one big flare in a million years would be enough.
The twilight belt may be quite wide if the planes have libration the way our moon does. Somewhere along the twilight belt, you will have your goldilocks temperature. We have no experience of life on a tidally-locked planet, but it does not seem silly to me.
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If only your first name was James rather than Richard. *sigh* Is your middle name Tiberius by any chance? ;)
more planets around (Score:3)
Not only this one, but also the Bernard star has a potentially habitable planet around twice as heavy as the Earth. The Bernard star has lots of similarities to the mentioned in the article Teegarden. Both are about 8bln years old, both are red dwarfs, about 12ly away and both are relatively quiet, which might be due to their age (red dwarfs are known to have violent flares - like e.g Proxima Centauri, which recently fried it's planet with an extreme flare). So lots of places to go for the starshot project.
Let's speculate about some properties of potential intelligent life evolved on a planet about twice the size of Earth, around a red dwarf:
- it is said that having manipulative limbs is critical for technological civilization - ergo hands like limbs
- so is fire - ergo land creatures
- too many limbs is not economical - ergo likely 4 (2 specialized manipulative, 2 additional for walking) - as all the Earth bigger size creatures
- such creatures would be smaller then e.g. us due to gravity and energy needed to supply their brains (intelligent land creatures would not reach sizes of dinosaurs)
- will have big eyes, so in case they visited Earth they would need good sun glasses, thus being advanced would have some sun protective contact membrane, which for us would appear close to black
- definitely a head, since all sensory organs have to move despite the rest of the body, and have to be close to the central data processing organ
- likely only 2 eyes in front (stereo vision and predatory ancestry)
- skin color would depend on their chemistry needed for energy, it is said that oxygen is the best (abundant and highly reactive) so they might be reddish (if iron, e.g. hemoglobin) or bluish (if copper, e.g. haemocyanin)
It's all just fun speculation, kind of a reverse engineering from LGM.
Disclaimer: I'am aware of the fact that things can go in many unimaginable ways with life, however on the other hand a chance is only one factor the other is economy and universal laws of nature.
Ultra-cool? (Score:3)
We've either found Zaphod Beeblebrox's home system, or we found the planet that all the hipsters hate.
Just two of millions of things needed for life (Score:2)
So these planets are the right size and the right temperature. These are important, yes. But they are only two of the millions of things needed to support life. How about, an ecosystem? Sure, you can build a biosphere in such a place. But we can do that on the moon, too. The circle of life is SO interconnected that it's impossible to really support life with just a few species in a glass bubble. Such an existence will require a functioning support and resupply system for a long, long time. That's kind of ha
All these worlds are yours. . . . (Score:2)
. . . .but you're on your own to get there. . .
Last I checked, NASA's "Alcuibierre Warp" design turns out not to be practical, anytime soon . . . . [jalopnik.com]
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It could also be entering... who knows.
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I do 12 LY with one jump with pretty much any ship in Elite: Dangerous game
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Re:Just 12 light years (Score:4, Informative)
The star is a small red dwarf. So that may make life a lot less likely, but it's hard to really say. Maybe we would get there and find a planet entirely populated by Pandas. If we really wanted to we could actually go there. It would be very very expensive though and the trip would take something like 140 - 150 years. It would have to be a generation ship and only the third generation would really get to see the system. Assume at least a hundred years just to build the ship though.
They are close enough that we could send messages there with microwave or laser pulses. That would only help if the life were intelligent and of the radio telescope building kind. though. 25 years for a reply. Probably there is no intelligent life there because they would have already sent us messages. Although maybe they did hundreds of years ago when we weren't listening and dismissed our system as dead.
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If we really wanted to we could actually go there. It would be very very expensive though
It would only be expensive if it was a manned mission. A robotic probe could be very cheap. It could be the size of a soda can with a long carbon nanotube antenna. It could be a flyby, so no terminal deceleration would be needed. It could take photos and measure the spectral absorption of the planet's atmosphere.
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A small probe doing a flyby of a star at a decent fraction of light speed is unlikely to get a decent shot of a planet.
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A small probe doing a flyby of a star at a decent fraction of light speed is unlikely to get a decent shot of a planet.
Aa better approach would be to put a good-size light sail on the small probe. As it leaves the solar system, accelerate it fast using large lasers to blast the sail until it reaches a usable speed. The probe will then spend the rest of its journey slowly decelerating toward the target, using its light on the sail. Use onboard fuel for local maneuvering at the target.
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Um, how? The fastest probe we have ever built went 0.00024604221364% the speed of light. That would take 48,000 years to reach the star. How could you build a probe that would last that long, and is cheap? Sometimes I think people have no concept of reality.
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Any energy you spend in speeding up a craft you have to spend again slowing down the craft when it reaches its destination. There has been no motivation to build a probe that can go super-fast.
The gap between stars is ocean sized to the puddle sized gap between planets. A lot more space to both accelerate and decelerate in. There is no friction in space so any force pushing the craft will continually cause the craft to increase in speed. It really doesn't take much to accelerate a craft in space, just a
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Air speed record 1919 Joseph Sadi-Lecointe 191.1 mph.
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You mean the probe that uses all of its fuel to slow down so it can fall into the sun?
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190 years? Where do you even get that number? Plus this is IN SPACE. Yes, making projects that LAST IN SPACE for 200 years isn't possible. It isn't possible on Earth either, but I will ignore that.
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Half of London is older than that and current political and civil issues aside it works pretty well.
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It isn't possible on Earth either, but I will ignore that.
You might want to check out how long many of the heritage buildings and structures on Earth took to build. Most of them are still standing too, even the ones that have been abandoned for longer than the 200 years that you say they can't last for.
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He got 190 years because he doesn't know how percentages work. I'm assuming 0.064% is also a truncated version of the number he used, as actually using 0.064 would get you 180.
Doing the math correctly, 12LY at 0.064% of the speed of light is 18,000 years.
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It isn't possible on Earth either, but I will ignore that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Usable examples of Roman concrete exposed to harsh marine environments have been found to be 2000 years old with little or no wear
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The Parker probe launched last year is planned to go at 0.064% the speed of light.
Aside from highly theoretical microprobes with laser powered solar sails nukes are the only way to go interstellar, but just like with the climate change debate people like to pretend nuclear fission doesn't exist. Aside from RTGs even NASA does it. Their famous Warp Drive When? page as great as that was did it too.
Let's check your math. At 1C it would take 12 years to make it to Teegarden's Star. At 0.1C which an Orion pulsed nuclear ship can just about do it would take 120 years neglecting time to slow down. Just divide your distance of 12 by your speed of 0.00064 (.064%) to get your time of...18750 years. It would take almost 20000 years for the Parker probe to reach Teegarden's Star. It's only traveling at around 40000 mph. Maybe you forgot to divide by 100 for the percent and got 187 years.
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0.064% of the speed of light is 0.00064C.
That's 18,000 years to go 12 light years, or twice as long as recorded human history.
Think we could build a mission on that timeline?
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I think a more important question is whether we should do it and no I don't think we should when there are much better nuclear rocket engine designs that can get there so much faster.
What we should be doing is establishing manufacturing and mining colonies on the moon and mars and various Jovian moons like Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Not just making round trips, but actually settling in and living there should be our goal. Building nuclear power plants and mining operations and eventually spacecraft man
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I see both of you don't understand how percentages work, because you're both off by two orders of magnitude. You convert percentages to raw decimals before calculating, where 100% is equal to 1. That means you shift the decimal two places to the right, so 100 becomes 1.00, see? Therefore, traveling 12 LY at a speed of 0.00064 light years per year (0.064% shifted twice to the right) is 18,000 years.
GP made the same mistake, 12 LY at 0.0000025 light years per year (0.00025% shifted twice to the right) would t
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Even if you could figure out how to send a microprobe and people are trying exactly that right now how would you send pictures back? You could aim a laser at it to accelerate the thing for a while, but it would take a lot of extra mass for a transmitter and antenna to send data back light years. Have you ever held a microwave magnetron in your hand? It aint light. You probably couldn't use a magnetron because it is so wide band you would need gigawatts of power. Probably you'd want a minimum 300kW long puls
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12 light years is a massive distance and the transmission power will be lost according to the inverse square of that distance whether you use a laser or microwaves pulses. And did I mention the absolutely massive RTG you would need to power this transmitter?
Why design the probe to generate all the power for the signal internally when you have the output of an entire star on hand? We detect exoplanets by observing the small changes in brightness which occur when a planet passes between us and its star. Given suitable sensitive detectors and a large enough solar sail—perhaps made of a material with electronically-variable opacity, though a fully mechanical design with shutters could also work—we should be able to send a detectable signal by selective
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Why design the probe to generate all the power for the signal internally when you have the output of an entire star on hand?
Well you could take along a solar panel to try to generate some electricity from the star but again it would no longer be a microprobe. Still I sort of like the idea of using photovoltaics to charge a small battery good enough for short bursts from a powerful laser. Then you slowly recharge the small battery again for the next pulse. The probe could encode a message that way with pulse position modulation or polarization modulation or something, but it would be a very slow way to transmit data. It would be
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That's an idea, but since I think the only practical propulsion would be ion-rocket, and for that you need to include a power source...probably a nuclear pile, it seems excess. It's not even redundancy, since if the pile fails you won't get where you want to get. Also, I'm not sure how well our solar cells would work with a sun whose radiation was in the deep red.
Also, I find it hard to believe in laser powered braking. That assumes too much fine engineering AND social stability. Radio reception, laser
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For something like that our current ion rockets could probably be scaled up to do the job. You'd need a small nuclear plant to power them, but it could be really small. I think we could ramp our ion rockets up to 10 pounds of pressure, which over a few years could send that probe faster than you want it to go. You don't want to pass through that system too fast or you won't get any good photos. Maybe you could slow it down before arrival, but gyroscopes in orbit have a bad history.
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What? How would you get to a place 12 light years away in 140-150 years? That would require going around 12% the speed of light. We have managed to go only 0.000142% the speed of light in our fastest unmanned probes. How would we go 12% the speed of light?
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How can you have been on slashdot for as long as you have been without knowing about Project Orion [wikipedia.org]? Freeman Dyson baby! We were at least theoretically able to reach 0.1C back in the 60s. Would have been a funny looking starship though. Lit by lava lamps?
And then you have fission fragment rockets [wikipedia.org] and nuclear salt water rockets [wikipedia.org].
All can get you 12 light years in well under 200 years but the last two designs are a bit more theoretical. A nuclear pulsed design like Freeman Dysan planned would very likely make it
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There aren't a lot of baseball sized rocks between solar systems. For very small stuff you'd probably want some kind of deflection shield in front of the main ship. But interstellar space is extremely empty aside from the occasional hydrogen atom.
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Interstellar space is estimated to be about 1% dust*. I can't be arsed to do the math for this scenario, but for a 50 LY trip for a ship the size of a Boeing 747 is going to hit around 150g of material - not much right? But at 0.5C that's 4e15 Joules, or 50x the Fat Man/Little Boy bombs. So it's empty, but not necessarily empty enough, especially as you approach the speed of light (which you're going to want to do to make these trips feasible). You're 100% right that larger objects, like tennis ball size +,
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And if we actually had any chance of building something that could do 0.5C that calculation would have a lot more weight. Interstellar collisions are an issue but not a deal breaker. There are ways to deal with such small particles. Deflection barriers and magnetic screens for charged particles. Stuff like that. It's a much bigger problem for microprobes than it is for kilometer scale starships detonating fusion bombs every few seconds.
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A long, long time ago in high school biology, my teacher explained the idea that if you discover a new species, and only have one example, you have to make the assumption that the specimen is "average" for the species. It might not be, but the odds are closer that it is than it isn't.
Now, we also have to assume that the formation of our solar system was "average," as well as the makeup of the system being "average," obviously given the mak
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Probably there is no intelligent life there because they would have already sent us messages. Although maybe they did hundreds of years ago when we weren't listening and dismissed our system as dead.
Those planets arrived at our age of evolution before our star even formed. Since there is less solar output, I would assume they would evolve more slowly: less energy/slower evolution. Regardless, they have a 4 billion year head start on us. If life was successful there, we would already know it because they would have been here evaluating us as we evolve, just as we will, shortly (on a cosmological timescale) be visiting them.
TL;DR, there is no advanced life there; otherwise, they would have been here alre
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Well yes maybe in that scenario it would not take a hundred years, but an interstellar ship would have to be nuclear (pulsed or fission-fragment etc) and that requires a pretty large ship. Probably kilometer scale and of course built off planet. With Lunar mining and manufacturing and maybe Lagrange assembly and launch stations. That's a lot of infrastructure that also takes time to build. Even with the entire planet working together trying to avoid some disaster It's hard to imagine building the infrastruc
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The planets elsewhere that will probably be found will probably worse than earth, even earth as it was during the millions of years long Permian-Triassic extinction. Consider that Mars climate is much worse than things were during the Permian-Triassic extinction. Permian-Triassic was no walk in the park which shows what a hellhole Mars is. This is another reason why this stuff about needing to get off earth in a hurry is pure nuttiness. Bezos sounds like the rantings of some doomsday cult. It would be eas
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But if you want to only lift a few thousand
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The distance makes a huge difference for direct imaging.
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12 light years is close enough to do spectroscopic studies of the planets fairly easily. We could also image them in nontrivial resolution if we wanted to.
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Right now the fastest way to get anywhere near another star (any other star), is to sit tight on spaceship Earth, and wait until it brings us within 'hopping' distance [wikipedia.org] of the nearest one. If I understand correctly, in my life I've already travelled hundreds of billions of km's from the place where I was born. Just doesn't feel that way using the frame of reference us earthlings usually apply. Anyway: try doing similar distances using current space technology...
And we can wait. Humans (or human-like creat
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Yeah but that ship has really poor handling.
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The Parker can go 0.00064120092040474% the speed of light. You are off by many digits. It would take 18,000 years to get there.
"It is unrealistic the expect funding for a project like that, but the technology we have."
We have technology that can build spacecraft that lasts even 1200 years? I dub thee: Chief Space Nutter.
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I imagine that comment was edited several times. That's usually how I make mistakes like that.
Either way, 18,000 years is actually correct for 0.064% of the speed of light, so his only mistake is he's got an extra % on one of his numbers that doesn't belong there, and obviously doesn't belong there, and doesn't change the conclusion in the slightest.
In other words, assuming you're the original AC (you responded as though you were), you are far more incorrect in saying 190 years, than Mr. 3208 was with his m
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How many 50 year old building are recording data and transmitting signals?
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Our civilization will not survive idiocy. The crush of climate if one is indeed upcoming (which I do not know for sure and neither do you) can be dealt with German way (similar to children crusade) - ineffective in all its alleged goals but very costly self-hatred driven movement. It can also be dealt with, if and when it comes in a technological way to which I count also spread of contraceptives in Africa as well as freeing of females from backward civilizations (I consciously avoid naming any - take your
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which I do not know for sure and neither do you
I do and I do beyond a reasonable doubt. That _you_ do not know for sure does not surprise me though. That is a problem of limited understanding of reality on your side though.
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It could be done in less than 50 years.
We'd be able to scale down Project Daedalus [wikipedia.org] once BFR gets flying.
Space-based assembly required - surface launch of a nuclear pulse rocket has NIMBY written all over it.
Building it in lunar orbit might make sense if some materials were sourced there.
Re:And given 1000 years, we may even get there! (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you are wildly optimistic. The problems are considerably harder than you realize.
The first difficult one is social stability. How to you keep a small group of people cooped up in a tight space for 50 years sane? For this purpose "sane" includes being interested in letting people back home know that you got there, and being willing to get off the ship.
A second difficulty is "incoming!". How fast do you think it's safe to travel? 0.1c would vastly increase your radiation damage, and would also vastly increase the chance of being penetrated by a meteor large enough to do damage. One problem is certain, the other is statistical.
A third difficulty is "this is essentially an infra-red star". Most of it's light is at frequencies below those that people can see. We'd find it extremely dark at all times, even "bright" noon.
A fourth difficulty is that we haven't observed this star long enough. Stars in this class are typically given to lots of solar flares. That this one is quiet now may well be an atypical period.
There are others. OTOH, if you design a mobile space habitat, where people are expected to live rather than optimized for travel, these are largely trivial. You don't travel fast, so many dangers are avoided. You don't expect to live on the planets, so the problems related to that are avoided. There's still the problem of social stability. A mobile space habitat would need to be considerably larger and support a much larger population. A few thousand minimum. Even that wouldn't suffice, as artificial structures are fragile compared to natural planets. A revolution or even insurrection would not end well. I see a good AI (not necessarily a strong AI) and good artificial reality as being essential. The society would need to be highly regulated, and the virtual reality would be the relief valve.
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That one is solvable through clever geoengineering. You just introduce large quantities of phosphine(*) gas into the atmosphere so that it phosphoresces on the sun side.
(*) Of course, phosphine gas is extremely toxic, so it would require some bioengineering to modify humans to be able to breathe it without dying,
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Unfortunately rocket designs usually don't scale down well - where rocketry is concerned, bigger is better. SpaceX abandoned the Falcon line in favor of developing BFR in large part because they couldn't realistically accomplish the level of reusability they wanted at Falcon scale while still maintaining a useful payload.
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You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
It's all relative innit. On a galactic scale that's practically spitting distance, on a human scale it might as well be in the next galaxy over.
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Amazing. "Captain Video" and "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet" have been off the air for 50 years now, and he's still being referred to.
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You do not operate on a "galactic scale".
Even if you've watched both Star Wars and Star Trek.
Fucking ignorant morons, the /. space cadets.
Not on earth we don't but when even the local star is mind boggling distance away what are you supposed to do?
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Damn. I remember that game. First Wargame I ever bought. In Junior High School. . .