First Habitable Planet Confirmed by French Scientists
- Thread starter Greg Tito
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You know, what really is the guarantee that this planet can even support life? What if it doesn't even have an oxygen atmosphere, or what if all the plant life is poisonous or something? What happens if we spend trillions on a colonizing mission and the ship gets there and the planet has been destroyed by a meteorite? Sheesh, call me when we actually get tangible proof.
[link]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13423085[/link]Racecarlock said:
TL;DR: The planet was discovered years ago, but originally thought to be incapable of supporting life. New research has since show this initial assumption to be wrong, hence the news story.
OT: If this planet can support life, but is 20 light years away, how can they have heard the word of our Lord? To the Jehovah-mobile!
"perpetual murky red twilight"
Red dwarfs do not produce red light, while they are not as bright as our sun they are still hot enough to appear white. Our sun is a yellow dwarf and we don't live under yellow light.
Brown dwarfs give off significant heat but not significant light and this probably would be a dim red glow from a human perspective. But red dwarfs are hotter than your average light-bulb and they don't look red.
Red dwarfs do not produce red light, while they are not as bright as our sun they are still hot enough to appear white. Our sun is a yellow dwarf and we don't live under yellow light.
Brown dwarfs give off significant heat but not significant light and this probably would be a dim red glow from a human perspective. But red dwarfs are hotter than your average light-bulb and they don't look red.
Exactly. The planet seems to lie in an orbital region for liquid water on its surface. That does not equate to "habitable". Mars is in an orbit where liquid water is possible, and we don't call that habitable.Darth_Dude said:
The conditions on Earth have changed quite alot over the years, including a few different ways of being what we would call "uninhabitable" (including once when the planet was frozen over, without its orbit being any different, mind).
Am I the only one getting tired of these things pretending to be massively exciting news?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Valkyrie
^ Would cost us a decade of income of the entire planet, but it would get us there in, what, 22 years? And it would feel much shorter for the crew!
But no, it's not the most hospitable place I can imagine. Our cardiovascular systems wouldn't last a month. Imagine spending 22 years in a can, and then dying on a 2G planet of an aneurysm...
EDIT: Oh, sorry, the craft would have to accelerate and decelerate from 0.92c, so... it would take more than 22 years, probably a lot more. But still orders of magnitude less than a space shuttle would take!
^ Would cost us a decade of income of the entire planet, but it would get us there in, what, 22 years? And it would feel much shorter for the crew!
But no, it's not the most hospitable place I can imagine. Our cardiovascular systems wouldn't last a month. Imagine spending 22 years in a can, and then dying on a 2G planet of an aneurysm...
EDIT: Oh, sorry, the craft would have to accelerate and decelerate from 0.92c, so... it would take more than 22 years, probably a lot more. But still orders of magnitude less than a space shuttle would take!
Let's start colonizing! Remember, name it Eden Prime so that when the Reapers attack, we can act like we fucking called it.
I meant more pillaging and slaughtering anything that says we can't have their landRainforce said:
Ta da. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_laws_of_motion]SomethingAmazing said:
Accelerate to near light speed, then turn off the generator. Better yet, relativistic effects mean the time will seem to pass by quickly for those on board.
Huzzah!
Light is massless. Unless you want to just send a signal to the planet, you'll be sending something with mass. But, simply put, to move something you have to give it energy. Since mass and energy are two measures for the same thing, like feet and inches, an object gains mass the more energy it has. Essentially, when any mass starts to approach the speed of light, it becomes infinitely heavy, and infinite energy is required to accelerate it even faster. So only massless stuff can reach the limit.Dulcinea said:
We could still get pretty close, even 80% or 90% light speed would be awesome for trotting around nearby star systems.
zxBARRICADExz said:anyone want to assist me in the creation of a gravity drive?
Sure bro, I'll come over to your place this weekend. I'll bring some donuts.
Of course, and no doubt that those researchers know that themselves, but you have to start somewhere with searching for life. For now, these are the only parameters of life that we know of and the only things we can actually look for. You can't really look for nothing.Deathfyre said:
Plus, it's nice to know which planets could be habitable for us. We gotta expand some day y'know.
Hence why NASA, until recently, did some theoretical research on bending space-time to circumvent that nasy bugger Einstein.Seneschal said:
