15 ms·

Closest Temperate World Orbiting Quiet Star Discovered

204 points by beefman 9y ago

abainbridge 9y ago
I need sophisticated optical equipment to read that font. Presumably the target audience has such things in abundance.
- krylon 9y ago
  Firefox has a read mode for this. It displays only the relevant content, in a very eye-friendly font. It does not look very pretty in that mode, but it very easy to read. I love this feature.
sixothree 9y ago
I thought when I got older I would be able to look up at the moon and see expanses of colonies. I don't want to die not knowing whether life exists outside of our tiny little sphere. The future was supposed to have surface lighting.
- imustbeevil 9y ago
  We just got a different future. Different advancements were made. Colonies on the moon might sound cool, but there's no real economic benefit, and the cost is astronomical.
  - quickthrower2 9y ago
    Man doesn't have a great track record of making that much progress in 30 years. The fact we've made so much technological progress in the last 100 is an anomaly. Humans are attuned to survival not coordinating millions of people to a common goal. Give us a break!
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - wallace_f 9y ago
      The problem with getting off this earth is the people who are good at conquering other people through politics and emotions. Von Braun was the first to make a guided rocket (developments like the de Laval nozzle and rocket equation had just been discovered). The US poached him and sent him to West Texas, then Alabama, without a whole lot to do. Probably to keep him out of enemy hands. The US government had their money and "intelligence communities" lined up behind the Vanguard rocket. It was only because the Vanguard rocket failed so embarassingly while the Soviets won the space race that Eisenhower started NASA and gave Von Braun some funding. So Von Braun wrote a letter to Kennedy, and he got his childhood wish to go to the moon. And he did it. The greatest engineering and technological achievement in history. All the politics (like cost-plus suppliers) still hurt the program, but they really made a lot of progress. So then the new NASA bureaucracy pushed him out and went on to do bureaucratic things like build the ridiculously badly conceived STS (they proposed ideas and Nixon picked it), and crash it even when NASA engineers told them before hand that a foam strike was going to happen as was the case with the Challenger Groupthink disaster. The Soviets also had plenty of childish and embarassing dramas and politics of their own going on as well. It's all a shame, really. People can do amazing things, but I'm not willing to pretend our shortcomings aren't because of moral failings. There is no legitimately good reason for the Challenger disaster, or having to rely on Russians for their superior rocket tech to get into orbit.
      - DubiousPusher 9y ago
        I mostly agree. I used to buy into the narrative of human progress over the course of 10,000 years of civilization. Now I see human knowledge/achievement much more as an ebb and flow with some momentum retained across time and societies. I see our current state of progress as a kind of happy accident. Some combination of Secularism, Legalism, Bureaucracy, Entrepreneurship, Socialsim and Education has created the imperfect but better world (mostly better for humans) we inhabit today. Which means to me that none of us really know what's created this progress and we can't be entirely sure what has arrested it at times. There isn't an arrow of human progress but a churning jumble that right now has come out with a relative lull in human suffering and a corresponding bump in personal convenience. The upside of this is that if we can maintain this cocktail of traits while curbing the more obviously dangerous ones, we may be able to surpass greatly what we've accomplished so far. I hope anyway.
  - sdenton4 9y ago
    It's nice to dream about how different space travel would be if our gravitational well wasn't quite so deep...
    - usrusr 9y ago
      Then stop being lazy and build that mass driver to make this gravity well less deep, one escaping pellet at a time ;) (Has this ever been explored in fiction, a very determined and patient civilization digging themselves out of an unrocketably deep gravity well?)
      - mrec 9y ago
        If you can fire pellets out of the well using a mass driver, I'd think that firing whole spacecraft out is going to be a much more viable option than trying to reduce the depth of the well to any noticeable degree. Yes, spacecraft are more fragile than pellets, and canned primates even more so, but a ludicrously long acceleration track is still going to cost peanuts compared to the kind of planetary liposuction you're talking about.
        dougmany 9y ago
        Didn't the moon form from such a mass driver?
      - blacksmith_tb 9y ago
        Seems like a space elevator is a less scattershot approach? Even on rockets the acceleration your passengers and cargo experience is pretty serious, I'd hate to be in a rail gun's bullet.
        mrec 9y ago
        Building a space elevator involves getting a substantial amount of stuff into orbit, i.e. the cable and counterweight, so this sounds a bit like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Maybe you could launch materials and construction robots for an elevator using a mass driver then use the elevator for passengers, I dunno. Still need some non-rocket way to get things up there.
  - methodover 9y ago
    The delta v required to get off Luna is way less than earth. That's one big economic advantage.
    - cnlevy 9y ago
      Yes. But only regarding another colony farther out in space, say, on Mars. Therefore comes back the original question.
      - ericd 9y ago
        The clearest answer to the economic question I've seen is asteroid mining. A single asteroid can contain orders of magnitude more platinum than has been mined in all of human history, in a very concentrated form. Which would obviously crash the market for platinum, and could encourage interesting new uses for it when it's no longer ~$1,000 per ounce.
        Retra 9y ago
        How is that a clear answer? You're still shipping massive amounts of rock through outer space. If it costs you $100M/oz to mine and transport the stuff, then selling it for $1000/oz doesn't even make a dent. And crashing the market doing it is just lose-lose. Everything is economically viable when you can employ fantasy magic technology to make it happen.
        ericd 9y ago
        Why would it cost that much to transport it? You've got lots of gravitational potential energy to work with, in terms of shipping down to Earth, so it doesn't take the kinds of fuel that it takes to ship things out of the Earth gravity well. And you don't need to bring back the whole asteroid, just the products, so you're not shipping "massive amounts of rock through outer space". Are you familiar with the companies that are being set up to do this, and that are backed by Eric Schmidt et al?
- ssijak 9y ago
  One of my life goals is to find alien life. Yeah, dont ask to much questions..
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- chasil 9y ago
  Just assume there is life elsewhere. Even if the odds of life are astronomically low (one in a billion), there are billions of galaxies, with billions of stars. The odds are good, but the results are irrelevant. Only 5% of the stars that we see can emit light presently that will ever reach us - they will all recede beyond our cosmological horizon. There is very likely life elsewhere, and it makes no difference.
  - abecedarius 9y ago
    Your computer ran billions of instructions in the time it takes to read this. Therefore, it probably made a mistake in that time, even if the chance of a mistake in any one instruction is "astronomically low", right? No, many real-life frequencies are way below one in a billion.
    - opportune 9y ago
      That's a good point, but I think it's reasonable to say that the frequency at which planets are similar to Earth is high. Non-tidally locked, geologically active, high-water-content, with enough gravity to trap oxygen/CO2 but not hydrogen/helium, and within a certain distance from a star based on its output planets can't be that uncommon. I'm pretty sure Venus actually fits all those requirements - which isn't to say that there is life on Venus, just that superficially most of what we consider "the requirements" are there. In fact Mars fits all those requirements too, aside from geological activity. We can't know how probable life is given similar conditions to Earth because our sample size is too small. But there are definitely a lot of Earth-like planets out there.
      - abecedarius 9y ago
        Yes, there must be a lot of Earth-mass rocky planets out there in habitable zones. Twenty years ago I'd have said we just don't know. There may've been some real progress too on figuring out the origin of life, but our knowledge is still compatible with almost all potentially-habitable planets being lifeless -- it wouldn't badly contradict what we know so far (afaik) and would explain why we haven't seen any advanced aliens taking stars apart, etc.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  Read The Three Body Problem trilogy and just hope we’re alone.
  - taneq 9y ago
    "If they exist", the third group said, "they'll be mean."
- rayiner 9y ago
  I was just talking to my mom about this. She was born in the early 1950s, in Bangladesh. She was talking about how she grew up reading science fiction books and when the U.S. made it to the moon, thinking that we'd have space colonies and stuff. But, in her view, technology has progressed much less than she thought it would have by now.
  - taneq 9y ago
    This seems to be a popular position, and I think it's because space rockets and cities on the moon are large-but-simple advances that people can get their heads around. Computer tech is so far past their "magic" threshold that a modern smartphone doesn't seem much different to the original microcomputers. Maybe you could explain it as "if rockets had advanced as fast as computers, we'd have flying cities that could travel to the moon and back in minutes."
    - rayiner 9y ago
      At least for her, computer technology didn’t result in structural change in the way people live. They had television, phones, cameras, etc., when she was a teenager. She uses her iPhone and iPad as a television, a telephone, a camera, and a combination of television and telephone (FaceTime). Neat and convenient, but not life changing in the same way as cars, planes, moon colonization, etc. Certainly not “magic.”
      - harryh 9y ago
        FaceTime is a little magical. How often would she get to see and talk to her grandkids without it? And would people living on the moon have really changed her life either? Unless she was one of them she'd just end up hearing about it in the news and then going about her day. TBH if I really had to pick the thing that has most changed her life I'd bet it's the shipping and logistics technology that has dramatically lowered the cost of all the consumer goods she buys.
        rayiner 9y ago
coldcode 9y ago
I've always wondered if someone on such a planet is looking at us and wondering if there is intelligent life here.
- delibes 9y ago
  Not sure if we'd be sun-transiting to them, but perhaps they can get a highly sensitive atmospheric spectral line chart. Then they can start debating whether the CO2 level going from 0.03% to 0.04% indicates we're entering another extinction period. If they're within a few light-decades then the next century will be a very exciting time for their astro-xeno-biologists. Lucky them!
  - hobscoop 9y ago
    We would not be sun-transiting to them, at least at the moment: the current declination of Ross 128 happens to be less than 1 degree [1], meaning it's near the celestial equator rather than near the ecliptic. Since the ecliptic plane is at 23.5 degrees to the equator, they would see the Sol-Earth system tilted at that angle: much too large to be sun-transiting. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_128 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_128
HaterOfHeelies 9y ago
I feel like real life has become a space exploration game. "Player A has discovered a new habitable planet".
dddw 9y ago
let's go!
AnimalMuppet 9y ago
The article said that they aren't actually sure that it is temperate. It might be - or it might be as cold as -60 C.
Aardwolf 9y ago
So how long would it take to get there with current technology?
- arethuza 9y ago
  Depends what you mean by "current technology" - Orion style ships (i.e. throw H-bombs out the back and hang on tight) were estimated to be able to get to 0.1c. So perhaps 110 years? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
  - ourmandave 9y ago
    Assuming you're going .1c, how do slow down on your approach? Fire h-bombs out the front?
    - arethuza 9y ago
      Pretty much - turn the ship around and fire forwards. Alternatively you could try lithobraking which would be quite spectacular at that speed!
- rukittenme 9y ago
  82,000 years at 25 miles per second (speed of Juno).
- joshuamcginnis 9y ago
  The article states the planet is 11 light-years away from our solar system. Assuming you travel at around 60K km/h / 40K mph (roughly the speed of the New Horizons probe), it would take about 220,000 total Earth years to arrive.
- beefman 9y ago
  We have no operational space ships, so with current technology we will never get there. The fastest feasible technology for human-carrying ships is the fission fragment rocket, with a burnout velocity of about 0.1c. That's 40 years to Proxima b. An 11 ly trip to this world would not be feasible, because a multi-generational ship with the payload fraction needed to hit 0.1c is not feasible. Probes can be much lighter, enabling higher payload fractions and faster trips.
phkahler 9y ago
According to the Wikipedia page Red Dwarf stars sound like they'll be around longer than our sun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_dwarf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_dwarf "Red dwarfs therefore develop very slowly, maintaining a constant luminosity and spectral type for trillions of years, until their fuel is depleted. Because of the comparatively short age of the universe, no red dwarfs exist at advanced stages of evolution." And here I thought because of their small size they'd be LESS suitable for life.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  It's hypothetically possible that life as we know it could exist in the dim embers of stars a trillion years from now... it would be rare, it would be weird, but it could work. The key is to remember that you have more than one variable to play with; it's not just overall stellar output, but orbital radius as well.
- svachalek 9y ago
  It's a complex issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitability_of_red_dwarf_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitability_of_red_dwarf_syst... It's interesting to think about the old maps with "here be dragons" around the edge... on tide-locked worlds such maps could effectively be true.
  - jabretti 9y ago
    I like to think that there is a tidally locked planet somewhere out there whose inhabitants like to argue about whether life could ever evolve on a rotating planet. "I mean, it would be so unstable! Even with a thick atmosphere, temperatures at one point would fluctuate by tens of degrees, hundreds of times a year! Plants would be unable to photosynthesise for half the time! Animals would be blinded!"
- chasil 9y ago
  They also have TWO major drawbacks. Habitable planets would orbit so close that they would likely be tidally locked, and one side would always face the star, while the other would always be dark. The temperature variation could pose major problems for habitability. Red Dwarf stars are prone to intense flares, which could easily drive off an atmosphere. Red Dwarf stars are likely not where we should look.
vardump 9y ago
Ross 128? So when will we start shipping our prisoners there?
- vardump 9y ago
  Not many played Frontier Elite 2? https://www.sharoma.com/frontierverse/permits.htm https://www.sharoma.com/frontierverse/permits.htm
beamatronic 9y ago
Serious question. If we are going to discover or invent a "warp drive" or similar, what are we doing currently that will lead us to that knowledge? CERN?
- 317070 9y ago
  Currently, a warp drive is forbidden by relativity. So I would say, all research trying to find where relativity breaks. So I reckon the gravity wave detectors like LIGO and LISA are more relavant than CERN.
  - zero_iq 9y ago
    Actually, a warp drive is permitted by general relativity assuming it's possible to create 'negative mass': https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive Of course, that's not a small assumption...
    - nickh9000 9y ago
      Apparently the designers of Mass Effect did their Sci Fi homework.
  - blincoln 9y ago
    My understanding is that it's not forbidden (wormholes would explicitly allow FTL travel, for example), but that in Einstein's model, FTL travel or communication would break causality, because it would effectively allow one to send messages into one's own past. That may seem like "equivalent to forbidden", but some of the interesting surprises of quantum physics were originally theorized by Einstein and company as a way to disprove quantum physics because they were clearly too weird to be true. Maybe not as weird as "Oh, you thought an event's cause had to precede its effect? LOL.", but bizarre and non-intuitive nonetheless.
  - dghughes 9y ago
    In my mind I imagine warp to mean actually warp space not fly through space, the theoretical Alcubierre drive may warp space. Space is shrunk in front of the Alcubierre spacecraft and expanded behind it. The spacecraft doesn't actually move through space it pulls the space where it needs to go towards the spacecraft and pushes away the space behind it. I'm no rocket surgeon so don't quote me.
V2hLe0ThslzRaV2 9y ago
Is anyone aware of a reasoning of why a usable planet would be a requirement for space exploration? Sure, if a "clone" of Earth is found, it would make things created here more reusable on the new planet, but seems like a pretty limited way of viewing the potential for ventures in space. More to the point, is anyone aware of the requirements of non-planet staged space operations would look like and how viable such plans would be compared to planet dependent operations.
- patejam 9y ago
  For me, two reasons: 1. If we're already going to do the journey to a far off planet, it'd be nice if we didn't have to have a huge amount of infrastructure to stay alive on the planet. 2. I feel like one of the ultimate goals of space travel is to find other life. The only life we know is on Earth. Earth-like planets are a good place to start.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    I feel like one of the ultimate goals of space travel is to find other life. Dangerous assumption. That's like saying the purpose of science is to unify nature. If nature isn't unified, the goal won't make it so. The most likely outcome is probably that we will become our own aliens. Once we send out colony ships, those people will form their own branches of the evolutionary tree. Over millennia, that will equal aliens. It doesn't really matter that they're our ancestors when they end up looking, talking, and acting completely alien. This seems far more likely than running across other life in the local group. We're forever imprisoned to our local group, which is something like 0.001% of the observable universe. And for all we know, the total universe could be infinite. This requires strange assumptions, like running into your own doppelgangers, and infinite energy. But we can't know it's not true. And in such a circumstance, we have to face the unsettling half-empty truth that we're simply alone.
    - vtange 9y ago
      We'd have to be totally separated from those colonies for an unthinkable amount of time for stuff like that to happen - I'd imagine we'd at least keep contact with our own colonies and the Native Americans were largely separated from Eurasia for thousands of years and crazy stuff didn't happen aside from a gap in immune system prep.
empath75 9y ago
Do we have the technology yet that could even discover a planet the same size and distance as earth from a star similar to the sun? From these discoveries, it seems that truly earth-like planets around sun-like stars are rare, but i think it might be more of a drunk under a lamp-post looking for his keys because that’s where the light is.
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  > it might be more of a drunk under a lamp-post looking for his keys because that’s where the light is. Maybe, but we haven't looked everywhere the light is yet, so why struggle to look in the dark?
  - pc86 9y ago
    Because we're in the dark and that's where we're most likely to find other keys?
- dvtv75 9y ago
  I'm not very clear on this, are you suggesting that we shouldn't look where we're capable of looking because we can't look where we aren't? (Sorry, my disability sometimes makes it a little difficult to understand what people are saying. Genuinely not being a dick about this.)
petre 9y ago
So is Ross 128b tidally locked or not?
crankylinuxuser 9y ago
Speaking of space and planetary systems too far away to get to: What's the current status of the EMDrive? Has it stalled? Is there a space-faring test due soon to see if it actually works in space? It's seemed to have dropped off the news completely. (Reddit emdrive shows nothing of note.)
- badosu 9y ago
  EM Drive never was proved to have provided thrust on a rigorous test, the theoretical explanation for it also doesn't have any basis on current standard physics. I recommend this video for a good explanation [0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqoo_4wSkdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqoo_4wSkdg
- ajross 9y ago
  > It's seemed to have dropped off the news completely Gonna go way out on a limb here and guess "because it's totally fake" is the most likely reason.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    You'd think with as many people calling if fake as there are, we'd at least get some of them rubbing it in. Eh, it's probably just the media realizing that those stories aren't very engaging (the title gives you all you need to know), so they only get traction on really slow news days. :/
- contravariant 9y ago
  I wouldn't place too many hopes on a device that relies on violating the conservation of momentum to work. Special relativity and Noether's theorem place conservation of momentum on the same footing as conservation of energy and the constancy of the laws of physics itself.
- dghughes 9y ago
  I'm more interested in the Alcubierre drive it has greater potential. Or even better a combination of EM and Alcubierre drive one for "city" cruising one for the "highway".
OldSchoolJohnny 9y ago
I always dislike it when I click on an article like that and there is a giant artists conception that, for a split second I mistake for an actual photograph. It doesn't seem proper to have an artists conception of something on a scientific article.
- taf2 9y ago
  I mostly agree... but then there is the aspect of this that can be quiet inspiring to help us imagine what it might be like... a perhaps inspire us to get the real picture.
  - hansen 9y ago
    I like the abstract pictures on quanta magazine, e.g. https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutron-star-collision-shakes-space-time-and-lights-up-the-sky-20171016/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutron-star-collision-shakes... https://www.quantamagazine.org/squishy-or-solid-a-neutron-stars-insides-open-to-debate-20171030/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/squishy-or-solid-a-neutron-st...
- Parcissons 9y ago
  I violently disagree, it was pictures like this, in particular the "Cylces of Fire" book that created this live-long longing for a far away place i could never reach. Yes, they are tourist posters for a unknown world. So what? If we dont dare to dream, we dont dare at all.
- jessriedel 9y ago
  I hate bad pop sci articles and bad artist conceptions, but I actually support it if the depiction is designed to increase reader understanding (rather than just induce the "woah pretty" reaction). For instance, did you know that Saturn's rings are made of rocks that are separated by very human-scale distances? I find these images valuable in communicating that fact: https://www.quora.com/What-would-it-feel-like-to-touch-Saturns-rings https://www.quora.com/What-would-it-feel-like-to-touch-Satur...
- caf 9y ago
ygmelnikova 9y ago
"only 11 light-years from the Solar System" or you could say 'a probe sent today would arrive in about 300,000 years'. I guess these academics need to justify their pay somehow.
ilija139 9y ago
I expect we would find life on another planet within 50 years. But, it would take a lot longer to find or be found by an intelligent life.

204 points by beefman 9y ago

abainbridge 9y ago

I need sophisticated optical equipment to read that font. Presumably the target audience has such things in abundance.

krylon 9y ago
Firefox has a read mode for this. It displays only the relevant content, in a very eye-friendly font. It does not look very pretty in that mode, but it very easy to read. I love this feature.

sixothree 9y ago

I thought when I got older I would be able to look up at the moon and see expanses of colonies. I don't want to die not knowing whether life exists outside of our tiny little sphere. The future was supposed to have surface lighting.

imustbeevil 9y ago
We just got a different future. Different advancements were made. Colonies on the moon might sound cool, but there's no real economic benefit, and the cost is astronomical.
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  Man doesn't have a great track record of making that much progress in 30 years. The fact we've made so much technological progress in the last 100 is an anomaly. Humans are attuned to survival not coordinating millions of people to a common goal. Give us a break!
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - wallace_f 9y ago
    The problem with getting off this earth is the people who are good at conquering other people through politics and emotions. Von Braun was the first to make a guided rocket (developments like the de Laval nozzle and rocket equation had just been discovered). The US poached him and sent him to West Texas, then Alabama, without a whole lot to do. Probably to keep him out of enemy hands. The US government had their money and "intelligence communities" lined up behind the Vanguard rocket. It was only because the Vanguard rocket failed so embarassingly while the Soviets won the space race that Eisenhower started NASA and gave Von Braun some funding. So Von Braun wrote a letter to Kennedy, and he got his childhood wish to go to the moon. And he did it. The greatest engineering and technological achievement in history. All the politics (like cost-plus suppliers) still hurt the program, but they really made a lot of progress. So then the new NASA bureaucracy pushed him out and went on to do bureaucratic things like build the ridiculously badly conceived STS (they proposed ideas and Nixon picked it), and crash it even when NASA engineers told them before hand that a foam strike was going to happen as was the case with the Challenger Groupthink disaster. The Soviets also had plenty of childish and embarassing dramas and politics of their own going on as well. It's all a shame, really. People can do amazing things, but I'm not willing to pretend our shortcomings aren't because of moral failings. There is no legitimately good reason for the Challenger disaster, or having to rely on Russians for their superior rocket tech to get into orbit.
    - DubiousPusher 9y ago
      I mostly agree. I used to buy into the narrative of human progress over the course of 10,000 years of civilization. Now I see human knowledge/achievement much more as an ebb and flow with some momentum retained across time and societies. I see our current state of progress as a kind of happy accident. Some combination of Secularism, Legalism, Bureaucracy, Entrepreneurship, Socialsim and Education has created the imperfect but better world (mostly better for humans) we inhabit today. Which means to me that none of us really know what's created this progress and we can't be entirely sure what has arrested it at times. There isn't an arrow of human progress but a churning jumble that right now has come out with a relative lull in human suffering and a corresponding bump in personal convenience. The upside of this is that if we can maintain this cocktail of traits while curbing the more obviously dangerous ones, we may be able to surpass greatly what we've accomplished so far. I hope anyway.
- sdenton4 9y ago
  It's nice to dream about how different space travel would be if our gravitational well wasn't quite so deep...
  - usrusr 9y ago
    Then stop being lazy and build that mass driver to make this gravity well less deep, one escaping pellet at a time ;) (Has this ever been explored in fiction, a very determined and patient civilization digging themselves out of an unrocketably deep gravity well?)
    - mrec 9y ago
      If you can fire pellets out of the well using a mass driver, I'd think that firing whole spacecraft out is going to be a much more viable option than trying to reduce the depth of the well to any noticeable degree. Yes, spacecraft are more fragile than pellets, and canned primates even more so, but a ludicrously long acceleration track is still going to cost peanuts compared to the kind of planetary liposuction you're talking about.
      - dougmany 9y ago
        Didn't the moon form from such a mass driver?
    - blacksmith_tb 9y ago
      Seems like a space elevator is a less scattershot approach? Even on rockets the acceleration your passengers and cargo experience is pretty serious, I'd hate to be in a rail gun's bullet.
      - mrec 9y ago
        Building a space elevator involves getting a substantial amount of stuff into orbit, i.e. the cable and counterweight, so this sounds a bit like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Maybe you could launch materials and construction robots for an elevator using a mass driver then use the elevator for passengers, I dunno. Still need some non-rocket way to get things up there.
- methodover 9y ago
  The delta v required to get off Luna is way less than earth. That's one big economic advantage.
  - cnlevy 9y ago
    Yes. But only regarding another colony farther out in space, say, on Mars. Therefore comes back the original question.
    - ericd 9y ago
      The clearest answer to the economic question I've seen is asteroid mining. A single asteroid can contain orders of magnitude more platinum than has been mined in all of human history, in a very concentrated form. Which would obviously crash the market for platinum, and could encourage interesting new uses for it when it's no longer ~$1,000 per ounce.
      - Retra 9y ago
        How is that a clear answer? You're still shipping massive amounts of rock through outer space. If it costs you $100M/oz to mine and transport the stuff, then selling it for $1000/oz doesn't even make a dent. And crashing the market doing it is just lose-lose. Everything is economically viable when you can employ fantasy magic technology to make it happen.
        ericd 9y ago
        Why would it cost that much to transport it? You've got lots of gravitational potential energy to work with, in terms of shipping down to Earth, so it doesn't take the kinds of fuel that it takes to ship things out of the Earth gravity well. And you don't need to bring back the whole asteroid, just the products, so you're not shipping "massive amounts of rock through outer space". Are you familiar with the companies that are being set up to do this, and that are backed by Eric Schmidt et al?
ssijak 9y ago
One of my life goals is to find alien life. Yeah, dont ask to much questions..
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
chasil 9y ago
Just assume there is life elsewhere. Even if the odds of life are astronomically low (one in a billion), there are billions of galaxies, with billions of stars. The odds are good, but the results are irrelevant. Only 5% of the stars that we see can emit light presently that will ever reach us - they will all recede beyond our cosmological horizon. There is very likely life elsewhere, and it makes no difference.
- abecedarius 9y ago
  Your computer ran billions of instructions in the time it takes to read this. Therefore, it probably made a mistake in that time, even if the chance of a mistake in any one instruction is "astronomically low", right? No, many real-life frequencies are way below one in a billion.
  - opportune 9y ago
    That's a good point, but I think it's reasonable to say that the frequency at which planets are similar to Earth is high. Non-tidally locked, geologically active, high-water-content, with enough gravity to trap oxygen/CO2 but not hydrogen/helium, and within a certain distance from a star based on its output planets can't be that uncommon. I'm pretty sure Venus actually fits all those requirements - which isn't to say that there is life on Venus, just that superficially most of what we consider "the requirements" are there. In fact Mars fits all those requirements too, aside from geological activity. We can't know how probable life is given similar conditions to Earth because our sample size is too small. But there are definitely a lot of Earth-like planets out there.
    - abecedarius 9y ago
      Yes, there must be a lot of Earth-mass rocky planets out there in habitable zones. Twenty years ago I'd have said we just don't know. There may've been some real progress too on figuring out the origin of life, but our knowledge is still compatible with almost all potentially-habitable planets being lifeless -- it wouldn't badly contradict what we know so far (afaik) and would explain why we haven't seen any advanced aliens taking stars apart, etc.
QAPereo 9y ago
Read The Three Body Problem trilogy and just hope we’re alone.
- taneq 9y ago
  "If they exist", the third group said, "they'll be mean."
rayiner 9y ago
I was just talking to my mom about this. She was born in the early 1950s, in Bangladesh. She was talking about how she grew up reading science fiction books and when the U.S. made it to the moon, thinking that we'd have space colonies and stuff. But, in her view, technology has progressed much less than she thought it would have by now.
- taneq 9y ago
  This seems to be a popular position, and I think it's because space rockets and cities on the moon are large-but-simple advances that people can get their heads around. Computer tech is so far past their "magic" threshold that a modern smartphone doesn't seem much different to the original microcomputers. Maybe you could explain it as "if rockets had advanced as fast as computers, we'd have flying cities that could travel to the moon and back in minutes."
  - rayiner 9y ago
    At least for her, computer technology didn’t result in structural change in the way people live. They had television, phones, cameras, etc., when she was a teenager. She uses her iPhone and iPad as a television, a telephone, a camera, and a combination of television and telephone (FaceTime). Neat and convenient, but not life changing in the same way as cars, planes, moon colonization, etc. Certainly not “magic.”
    - harryh 9y ago
      FaceTime is a little magical. How often would she get to see and talk to her grandkids without it? And would people living on the moon have really changed her life either? Unless she was one of them she'd just end up hearing about it in the news and then going about her day. TBH if I really had to pick the thing that has most changed her life I'd bet it's the shipping and logistics technology that has dramatically lowered the cost of all the consumer goods she buys.
      - rayiner 9y ago

coldcode 9y ago

I've always wondered if someone on such a planet is looking at us and wondering if there is intelligent life here.

delibes 9y ago
Not sure if we'd be sun-transiting to them, but perhaps they can get a highly sensitive atmospheric spectral line chart. Then they can start debating whether the CO2 level going from 0.03% to 0.04% indicates we're entering another extinction period. If they're within a few light-decades then the next century will be a very exciting time for their astro-xeno-biologists. Lucky them!
- hobscoop 9y ago
  We would not be sun-transiting to them, at least at the moment: the current declination of Ross 128 happens to be less than 1 degree [1], meaning it's near the celestial equator rather than near the ecliptic. Since the ecliptic plane is at 23.5 degrees to the equator, they would see the Sol-Earth system tilted at that angle: much too large to be sun-transiting. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_128 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_128

HaterOfHeelies 9y ago

I feel like real life has become a space exploration game. "Player A has discovered a new habitable planet".

dddw 9y ago

let's go!

AnimalMuppet 9y ago

The article said that they aren't actually sure that it is temperate. It might be - or it might be as cold as -60 C.

Aardwolf 9y ago

So how long would it take to get there with current technology?

arethuza 9y ago
Depends what you mean by "current technology" - Orion style ships (i.e. throw H-bombs out the back and hang on tight) were estimated to be able to get to 0.1c. So perhaps 110 years? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
- ourmandave 9y ago
  Assuming you're going .1c, how do slow down on your approach? Fire h-bombs out the front?
  - arethuza 9y ago
    Pretty much - turn the ship around and fire forwards. Alternatively you could try lithobraking which would be quite spectacular at that speed!
rukittenme 9y ago
82,000 years at 25 miles per second (speed of Juno).
joshuamcginnis 9y ago
The article states the planet is 11 light-years away from our solar system. Assuming you travel at around 60K km/h / 40K mph (roughly the speed of the New Horizons probe), it would take about 220,000 total Earth years to arrive.
beefman 9y ago
We have no operational space ships, so with current technology we will never get there. The fastest feasible technology for human-carrying ships is the fission fragment rocket, with a burnout velocity of about 0.1c. That's 40 years to Proxima b. An 11 ly trip to this world would not be feasible, because a multi-generational ship with the payload fraction needed to hit 0.1c is not feasible. Probes can be much lighter, enabling higher payload fractions and faster trips.

phkahler 9y ago

According to the Wikipedia page Red Dwarf stars sound like they'll be around longer than our sun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_dwarf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_dwarf "Red dwarfs therefore develop very slowly, maintaining a constant luminosity and spectral type for trillions of years, until their fuel is depleted. Because of the comparatively short age of the universe, no red dwarfs exist at advanced stages of evolution." And here I thought because of their small size they'd be LESS suitable for life.

QAPereo 9y ago
It's hypothetically possible that life as we know it could exist in the dim embers of stars a trillion years from now... it would be rare, it would be weird, but it could work. The key is to remember that you have more than one variable to play with; it's not just overall stellar output, but orbital radius as well.
svachalek 9y ago
It's a complex issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitability_of_red_dwarf_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitability_of_red_dwarf_syst... It's interesting to think about the old maps with "here be dragons" around the edge... on tide-locked worlds such maps could effectively be true.
- jabretti 9y ago
  I like to think that there is a tidally locked planet somewhere out there whose inhabitants like to argue about whether life could ever evolve on a rotating planet. "I mean, it would be so unstable! Even with a thick atmosphere, temperatures at one point would fluctuate by tens of degrees, hundreds of times a year! Plants would be unable to photosynthesise for half the time! Animals would be blinded!"
chasil 9y ago
They also have TWO major drawbacks. Habitable planets would orbit so close that they would likely be tidally locked, and one side would always face the star, while the other would always be dark. The temperature variation could pose major problems for habitability. Red Dwarf stars are prone to intense flares, which could easily drive off an atmosphere. Red Dwarf stars are likely not where we should look.

vardump 9y ago

Ross 128? So when will we start shipping our prisoners there?

vardump 9y ago
Not many played Frontier Elite 2? https://www.sharoma.com/frontierverse/permits.htm https://www.sharoma.com/frontierverse/permits.htm

beamatronic 9y ago

Serious question. If we are going to discover or invent a "warp drive" or similar, what are we doing currently that will lead us to that knowledge? CERN?

317070 9y ago
Currently, a warp drive is forbidden by relativity. So I would say, all research trying to find where relativity breaks. So I reckon the gravity wave detectors like LIGO and LISA are more relavant than CERN.
- zero_iq 9y ago
  Actually, a warp drive is permitted by general relativity assuming it's possible to create 'negative mass': https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive Of course, that's not a small assumption...
  - nickh9000 9y ago
    Apparently the designers of Mass Effect did their Sci Fi homework.
- blincoln 9y ago
  My understanding is that it's not forbidden (wormholes would explicitly allow FTL travel, for example), but that in Einstein's model, FTL travel or communication would break causality, because it would effectively allow one to send messages into one's own past. That may seem like "equivalent to forbidden", but some of the interesting surprises of quantum physics were originally theorized by Einstein and company as a way to disprove quantum physics because they were clearly too weird to be true. Maybe not as weird as "Oh, you thought an event's cause had to precede its effect? LOL.", but bizarre and non-intuitive nonetheless.
- dghughes 9y ago
  In my mind I imagine warp to mean actually warp space not fly through space, the theoretical Alcubierre drive may warp space. Space is shrunk in front of the Alcubierre spacecraft and expanded behind it. The spacecraft doesn't actually move through space it pulls the space where it needs to go towards the spacecraft and pushes away the space behind it. I'm no rocket surgeon so don't quote me.

V2hLe0ThslzRaV2 9y ago

Is anyone aware of a reasoning of why a usable planet would be a requirement for space exploration? Sure, if a "clone" of Earth is found, it would make things created here more reusable on the new planet, but seems like a pretty limited way of viewing the potential for ventures in space. More to the point, is anyone aware of the requirements of non-planet staged space operations would look like and how viable such plans would be compared to planet dependent operations.

patejam 9y ago
For me, two reasons: 1. If we're already going to do the journey to a far off planet, it'd be nice if we didn't have to have a huge amount of infrastructure to stay alive on the planet. 2. I feel like one of the ultimate goals of space travel is to find other life. The only life we know is on Earth. Earth-like planets are a good place to start.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  I feel like one of the ultimate goals of space travel is to find other life. Dangerous assumption. That's like saying the purpose of science is to unify nature. If nature isn't unified, the goal won't make it so. The most likely outcome is probably that we will become our own aliens. Once we send out colony ships, those people will form their own branches of the evolutionary tree. Over millennia, that will equal aliens. It doesn't really matter that they're our ancestors when they end up looking, talking, and acting completely alien. This seems far more likely than running across other life in the local group. We're forever imprisoned to our local group, which is something like 0.001% of the observable universe. And for all we know, the total universe could be infinite. This requires strange assumptions, like running into your own doppelgangers, and infinite energy. But we can't know it's not true. And in such a circumstance, we have to face the unsettling half-empty truth that we're simply alone.
  - vtange 9y ago
    We'd have to be totally separated from those colonies for an unthinkable amount of time for stuff like that to happen - I'd imagine we'd at least keep contact with our own colonies and the Native Americans were largely separated from Eurasia for thousands of years and crazy stuff didn't happen aside from a gap in immune system prep.

empath75 9y ago

Do we have the technology yet that could even discover a planet the same size and distance as earth from a star similar to the sun? From these discoveries, it seems that truly earth-like planets around sun-like stars are rare, but i think it might be more of a drunk under a lamp-post looking for his keys because that’s where the light is.

LeifCarrotson 9y ago
> it might be more of a drunk under a lamp-post looking for his keys because that’s where the light is. Maybe, but we haven't looked everywhere the light is yet, so why struggle to look in the dark?
- pc86 9y ago
  Because we're in the dark and that's where we're most likely to find other keys?
dvtv75 9y ago
I'm not very clear on this, are you suggesting that we shouldn't look where we're capable of looking because we can't look where we aren't? (Sorry, my disability sometimes makes it a little difficult to understand what people are saying. Genuinely not being a dick about this.)

petre 9y ago

So is Ross 128b tidally locked or not?

crankylinuxuser 9y ago

Speaking of space and planetary systems too far away to get to: What's the current status of the EMDrive? Has it stalled? Is there a space-faring test due soon to see if it actually works in space? It's seemed to have dropped off the news completely. (Reddit emdrive shows nothing of note.)

badosu 9y ago
EM Drive never was proved to have provided thrust on a rigorous test, the theoretical explanation for it also doesn't have any basis on current standard physics. I recommend this video for a good explanation [0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqoo_4wSkdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqoo_4wSkdg
ajross 9y ago
> It's seemed to have dropped off the news completely Gonna go way out on a limb here and guess "because it's totally fake" is the most likely reason.
- kbenson 9y ago
  You'd think with as many people calling if fake as there are, we'd at least get some of them rubbing it in. Eh, it's probably just the media realizing that those stories aren't very engaging (the title gives you all you need to know), so they only get traction on really slow news days. :/
contravariant 9y ago
I wouldn't place too many hopes on a device that relies on violating the conservation of momentum to work. Special relativity and Noether's theorem place conservation of momentum on the same footing as conservation of energy and the constancy of the laws of physics itself.
dghughes 9y ago
I'm more interested in the Alcubierre drive it has greater potential. Or even better a combination of EM and Alcubierre drive one for "city" cruising one for the "highway".

OldSchoolJohnny 9y ago

I always dislike it when I click on an article like that and there is a giant artists conception that, for a split second I mistake for an actual photograph. It doesn't seem proper to have an artists conception of something on a scientific article.

taf2 9y ago
I mostly agree... but then there is the aspect of this that can be quiet inspiring to help us imagine what it might be like... a perhaps inspire us to get the real picture.
- hansen 9y ago
  I like the abstract pictures on quanta magazine, e.g. https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutron-star-collision-shakes-space-time-and-lights-up-the-sky-20171016/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutron-star-collision-shakes... https://www.quantamagazine.org/squishy-or-solid-a-neutron-stars-insides-open-to-debate-20171030/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/squishy-or-solid-a-neutron-st...
Parcissons 9y ago
I violently disagree, it was pictures like this, in particular the "Cylces of Fire" book that created this live-long longing for a far away place i could never reach. Yes, they are tourist posters for a unknown world. So what? If we dont dare to dream, we dont dare at all.
jessriedel 9y ago
I hate bad pop sci articles and bad artist conceptions, but I actually support it if the depiction is designed to increase reader understanding (rather than just induce the "woah pretty" reaction). For instance, did you know that Saturn's rings are made of rocks that are separated by very human-scale distances? I find these images valuable in communicating that fact: https://www.quora.com/What-would-it-feel-like-to-touch-Saturns-rings https://www.quora.com/What-would-it-feel-like-to-touch-Satur...
caf 9y ago

ygmelnikova 9y ago

"only 11 light-years from the Solar System" or you could say 'a probe sent today would arrive in about 300,000 years'. I guess these academics need to justify their pay somehow.

ilija139 9y ago

I expect we would find life on another planet within 50 years. But, it would take a lot longer to find or be found by an intelligent life.