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Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
- dopamean 7y agoWhat makes a planet an "alien" planet?
- Rerarom 7y agoNot being in our Solar System, I guess.
- makerofspoons 7y agoIt is part of a different solar system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet
- onemoresoop 7y agoI never encountered the term alien planet but exoplanets are planets outside our solar system. In a way all planets are alien to one another. Alien to us is anything extraterrestrial in this context.
- infradig 7y agoThe media.
- lucb1e 7y agoYeah that was my first thought when reading the headline: "yet another habitable planet found" is getting old, now we need to mention it's "alien" (generally associated with green men, or more broadly, life not originating from earth; not with a planet) to get attention.
- typeformer 7y agoI say let's go. Now, whether you believe it or not, it is a fact that the US government has acquired alien technology and yet continues to keep it hidden by being stuck in a cold war mindset of, "well, we can't let the Chinese or Russians get their hands on this". That is the ultimate expression of narrow thinking, especially when there is a whole universe out there! Bring on the downvotes but history will vindicate my comment.
- brlewis 7y agoHistorians please note: At the time this comment was made, the HN guidelines said, "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
- fooker 7y agoEvidence?
- scrumbledober 7y agoclearly it's all being hidden in area 51...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- typeformer 7y agoThe government has been studying UFO's at the highest levels since at least 1947 and likely prior. You don't study something closely for 7 decades and not learn anything. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol40no5/pdf/v40i5a09p.pdf https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...
- vecter 7y agoUFOs are literally just Unidentified Flying Objects. Doesn't mean that they're alien in origin (and in fact, they're almost certainly not).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- typeformer 7y agoExcept when they are not. https://www.history.com/news/ufo-sightings-speed-appearance-movement https://www.history.com/news/ufo-sightings-speed-appearance-...
- transreal 7y agoWith a planet this large, visiting it would be a one way trip due to the "The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation" [0]. I'm looking forward to the day we start finding exo-planets that are closer to Earth in size and which could potentially have space-faring races (and which we could leave if we were ever to visit them). [0] - https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition30/tryanny.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/exped...
- kadoban 7y agoSo that's purely for a chemical rocket, right? Is there any combination of tricks that can realistically push the envelope there? For example can we use a space elevator to start higher/faster (or, I don't know, balloons? a catapult or railgun or something?), laser power delivery from the ground, so we don't have to carry all the fuel, and an orbiting way-station for refueling, etc.?
- Miner49er 7y agoSolar sails might be able to beat it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail
- AgentME 7y agoAren't solar sails just for propelling yourself once you're in space? I can't imagine how you could launch off the surface of a planet with a solar sail.
- 0xffff2 7y agoYes, and even then they're incredibly low thrust devices. A light sail (whether solar or laser powered) may well be viable for sending a tiny unmanned probe to another star system (see [0]). It's really unlikely that it will ever scale up enough to take an average communication satellite the same distance, much less a manned craft. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
- Miner49er 7y agoIt's depressing to think that if there is intelligent life on that planet, we won't be able to communicate with them in any way in our lifetime, yet it's so close. Unless they started sending communications our way over a century ago.
- tyri_kai_psomi 7y agoIf it is depressing to think about it, then why think about it? Does it have any real implications for significant outcomes about your life or is it in a way some type of FOMO?
- Miner49er 7y agoWell, I suppose I'm using a bit of hyperbole. Maybe I should say sad. And don't worry, I won't think about it very long.
- gist 7y agoWhy is it sad at all? What would it do for you? It would be about as relevant as being able to communicate in some way with people in the past. Would be interesting and entertaining but a leap to imagine it would yield some kind of better quality of life in the current day.
- Miner49er 7y agookay, maybe sad wasn't the right word either. How about disappointing?
- trianglem 7y agoI feel like the ideal of life existing on another planet would improve my quality of life. The additional potential would do wonders for my everyday narrative.
- tyri_kai_psomi 7y ago
- cryptoz 7y agoLots of discussion on the possibility of going or communicating, but for me the excitement is the narrowing of uncertainties in the Drake equation and the focusing of discovery of alien life, intelligent or otherwise. Discoveries like this improve our understanding of likelihood of extraterrestrial life, which has direct Earthly implications. It also enables better estimates and searches for planets that are closer, say ~4 to 20 lightyears away, for those super interested in the traveling & communicating possibilities.
- tontonius 7y agoAfter reading Liu Cixin's Three body Problem, let's just say I'm less super interested in communicating :)
- novaRom 7y agoI am thinking to get a not very expensive refraktor (120 mm) with Azimutal mounting, for deep space and terrestrial observations. Just interested in Astronomy, but have no idea what level of details can be seen with that kind. I am fascinated by Orion Nebula and Andromeda which I can see with simple 8x42 ED binoculars. Now thinking about telescope. Dobsonians look pretty heavy, I want something portable and inexpensive. Do you have any suggestion? Are refractors good for that?
- eggpy 7y ago> potentially life-friendly Spoiler: it's not
- calgaryeng 7y agoIsn't it odd to think that one day, there will be a top post on Hacker News: "Alien Life Discovered on Nearby Planet (430 points)".
- DC-3 7y agoOne would like to think that it would get more points than that :-)
- yiyus 7y agoBut if it gets more than 430, it will have 430 at some point.
- calgaryeng 7y agoPeak pedantry - I love it
- alex_duf 7y agoIt depends if it's the same day apple announces their new iPhone
- escapecharacter 7y agoRight underneath “10 Reasons why Git 3.7 is going in the wrong direction (583 points)”
- nmfert 7y agoFor sure would get more points than 430 haha
- chenning 7y agoA very quick search suggests that earth will become uninhabitable somewhere between 500 million and 2 billion years from now. If we shot a probe to this life-friendly alien planet with some sort of primordial soup, even traveling at the speed of light it would take 4 billion earth years to get there. Do I have that right? Basically we'll never even come close to being around when it finally arrives, if it ever arrives. Has anyone ever thought about doing this? We've shot gold records out into space for aliens with turn-tables. Why haven't we tried this?
- 0xffff2 7y ago>A very quick search suggests that earth will become inhabitable somewhere between 500 million and 2 billion years from now. I'm 99% sure that Earth is inhabitable right now... perhaps you meant "uninhabitable"?
- chenning 7y agoIs it though??? (edited, thanks)
- mdgrech23 7y agoYour assumptions may be wrong especially considering how far in the future we're talking.
- kadoban 7y agoIt would not take 4 billion years at the speed of light, it would take 111 years. That's what light-years are, the distance travelled by light in a year.
- 0xffff2 7y agoStrictly speaking, if you actually traveled at the speed of light, the trip would be instantaneous from the reference frame of the craft making the trip. It would still take 111 years from our frame of reference on Earth.
- ghostbrainalpha 7y agoSerious question - Do we have the capability to send human life there now? Obviously its going to be a one way trip. And it would require a generational ship. So could we build a ship that held 12 people initially, 6 couples, all who were allowed to have 2 children, so 24 people max, and could we load it with enough supplies to last over 100 years? Even if the group that eventually arrived had no way to sustain life, and they just went there for a quick swim before dying... is it possible?
- 0xffff2 7y agoWe don't have the capability to send anything there now. Sending even a tiny probe that is capable of communicating back to Earth from our closest stellar neighbor is beyond our current technology. People are actively working on it, but it's unlikely that we will have the technology to even send an unmanned probe to this star within our lifetimes. We might send a probe to Alpha Centauri, but it's even questionable whether it will be fast enough to arrive within our lifetimes.
- trhway 7y agoProject Orion - riding nuke explosions - using existing tech/materials and those 100K nukes that both sides had at the peak of the Cold War would bring a 30K ton ship to the 5-10% of c. Curiously, getting all that 100K+ ton of hardware to LEO where one can finally start exploding the nukes seems to be more complicated task right now.
- manicdee 7y agoSome caveats per Marina Koren https://twitter.com/marinakoren/status/1171873631808438273 https://twitter.com/marinakoren/status/1171873631808438273 1. This planet probably doesn’t have a solid surface 2. Being in the “habitable zone” doesn’t mean a planet is habitable 3. The detection is of water molecules, chances are the water only exists as vapour in the atmosphere of this small gas giant. 4. If you ask 10 astronomers about this you will get 11 opinions
- mabbo 7y agoYears ago as a second year computer science student, I mentioned to a grad student I knew how disappointed I was about a certain algorithm. "It's O(n), but the constant is enormous! There's no point unless you have billions of elements"! She said to me "Yeah sure, but who cares? What it really tells us it's that it's possible to do this in linear time at all. That might not have been true, and now we know we might find a faster linear algorithm." (All of this is paraphrased because it's been over a decade). The point is: we have found another planet with water. We now know this is possible! We know that it's probably not super uncommon (or else we wouldn't have found one so soon). That's what's amazing about this. So what if it's not perfect, it's a great discovery!
- ant6n 7y agoWe already knew it's possible to have a planet in the habitable zone with water (and life, incidentally). Whether it's common is still unclear, given that so far there's a big bias towards detecting large exoplanets that are close to the host star.
- saagarjha 7y agoThe point is finding planets aside from our own.
- solipsism 7y agoSometimes N=2 is extremely different from N=1. Specifically when we have N=1 and we suspect that it might be unique, or extremely rare to the point that you wouldn't expect to find instances. Sometimes N=2 is not that different from N=1 though. Specifically when you don't think the situation is necessarily that rare, you just don't have a big population to choose from. That's the situation here. Astronomers expect to find other Earth-like planets. We suspect rocky planets aren't that rare, we know planets at comparable distances from the star are not that rare, and we know H20 is plentiful in space. The problem is one of detection. The smaller the planet, the harder it is to detect water, so most of what we've found so far is gassy giants. A good analogy is the fact that I don't know anyone who shares my birthday. That doesn't mean I would be amazed if I were to find someone did share my birthday, cuz I have no reason to suspect my birthday is particularly rare. I just don't know that many people.
- carrozo 7y agoSo tired of hearing about “habitable” planets that would take millennia to get to. Call me when the space elevator has been commissioned.
- 0xffff2 7y agoIf it makes you feel any better, virtually all of them are uninhabitable to humans. The excitement comes from the idea that they could be locations of alien life that we would easily recognize. In other words, we need better communications tools, not better space travel.
- anyfoo 7y agoOr even just better observation tools, that would be amazing already. Sadly, at the scales we are talking here, even "just" getting those tools seems very improbable, at least...
- carrozo 7y agoImagine if we could somehow have optical closeups of these planets and all we found were trillions of dinosaurs incapable of all but crow-like tool-making. We’d be so buzzed and bummed at the same time.
- hungryas 7y agonot surprising really. it is more likely than not that what we have here on earth exists elsewhere in the universe.
- lachlan-sneff 7y agoThere are lots of people in the comments here talking about how long it would take to send a probe, or how many generations a generation ship would have, but it seems clear to me that that's not how humans are going to go to other solar systems. Once we solve mind uploading (assuming that it's possible), we can send a blob of grey goo on a solar sail at a very high acceleration to another solar system. It can shed half of the sail and bounce the laser back to decelerate. The grey goo would go and convert part of asteroid or something to computronium, and then we'd upload a bunch of humans over to the other solar system.
- ryacko 7y agoIf we can simulate wetware perfectly, we would also be able to solve any health condition. This is all presumptive of the preferences of individual humans. It may be that the giant extrasolar Earth-type planets could be dismantled and rebuilt into smaller Earths located at various Lagrange points.
- lachlan-sneff 7y agoFor sure, maybe future humans won't want to do that. The important takeaway is that they'll have the opportunity to do so if they wish. They could even clone them back on the other end and install the preexisting mind, basically teleportation.
- gremlinsinc 7y agoYou're assuming that we'll have a means to send data across Galaxy faster than the speed of light. If not then it'll take 111 years to upload your mind.
- lachlan-sneff 7y agoNah, I was assuming it'd take 111 years to send the minds there. It's really not a very long time when we have digital immortality.
- russellbeattie 7y agoOnly 1,050,000,000,000,000 kilometers away...
- tunesmith 7y agoI got into the Wait Calculation[1] a few weeks back and made a Jupyter notebook out of it. At our current max speed (692,000 km/hr, stated max speed of Parker Space Probe), it would take about 173,000 years to get to that planet. We could instead choose to Wait and grow our tech. By picking a constant annual growth rate and then doing some calculus to find the minimum, we can calculate the shortest possible time it will take for us to arrive there. One common recommendation for annual energy growth rate is 1.4%, and then taking the square root to get velocity growth rate since velocity has a square root relationship with energy. By plugging that in, we can minimize our time by growing for 1020 years, and then traveling for 144 years, for a total time-from-now at 1164 years. Another paper[2] estimated an annual velocity growth rate of 4.72%, quite a bit faster. Plugging that in, it says we should wait 195 years for a travel time of about 21 years, or 216 years overall. This is of course incorrect since it assumes being able to travel FTL. So if you instead look at how long it would take to get to light speed travel at that rate, you're looking about about 159 years, or arriving at the planet at a time-from-now of about 270 years. Of course, if you're seeking to minimize time-from-now from the perspective of a traveler, maybe you'd take off sooner. Kind of a tradeoff - less time to wait for the traveler, more time to wait for the home planet. I haven't figured out that part of the math yet. [1] https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/Wait_Calculation.html https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1m... [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.01481 https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.01481
- Simon_says 7y ago> taking the square root to get velocity growth rate This is your mistake. It's an approximation that works well only at low speeds.
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- dylan604 7y agodoes this take into consideration that you would need to start slowing down halfway there?
- munherty 7y agoSomeone please correct me, because with a planet that is at 111 light years away aren't we technically looking back in time? Any type of observation was only a period Of time and any type of life used to be there, but may not be there presently?
- Simon_says 7y agoEverything you look at is looking back in time.
- dyslexit 7y ago110 years in the past is insignificant relative to a planet's geological period's age.
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- gre 7y agoMiss me with that interstellar travel, bitch.
- ryeguy_24 7y agoCorrection, water “was” found. This water was there 111 years ago.
- ballsyballsman 7y agoCalling it "alien planet" has a negative warmongering tone.
- leonroy 7y agoReading about that led me to this article about a water world that was discovered: ‘A giant waterworld that is wet to its core has been spotted in orbit around a dim but not too distant star’ With oceans 9000 miles deep (15000 km). For context the Earth’s diameter is 7900 miles (12700 km). The imagination really does boggle at the thought. I think science fiction is going to have a hard time keeping up with the incredible science fact we are observing in our lifetimes. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/dec/16/waterworld-planet-earth-life https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/dec/16/waterworld-p...
- known 7y agoIf water is found can we assume fish like life in that planet?
- flywithdolp 7y agoThat's the kind of news that makes me smile and worry at the same time All my life I wait for the moment we will find life I just afraid if it will really happen from everyone reactins
- ygmelnikova 7y agoSo many comments, so many dreams. As Peterson would say, "If you can't clean up your own room, who the hell are you to think you could travel to other worlds?"
- DoctorOetker 7y agothat title should read "Water found on a potentially life-friendly exoplanet"
- jug 7y agoSo they finally got there. Detecting atmospheric water vapor on a planet 110 light years away. amazing.
- sbarre 7y agoThis reminds me of a sci-fi book I read when I was a kid called Rocheworld by Robert Forward. They were going to the Barnard Star, but it had binary planets where one was all water. Good book (if I recall)..
- timpannn 7y agoThought this was found multiple years ago?
- carapace 7y agoI think we would have to manage to extend human lives to ~10,000 years or more to be spacefaring.
- najarvg 7y agoSorry if it's been mentioned in the threads before - Here is Phil Plait's (@badastronomer on twitter) practical explanation of this finding - https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/water-vapor-detected-in-the-atmosphere-of-a-temperate-mini-neptune-exoplanet https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/water-vapor-detected-in-the-at... TLDR - "NO, THIS DOES NOT MEAN THE PLANET IS EITHER EARTH-LIKE OR HABITABLE."
- ahmtokta 7y agoI wish I could write in my own language, but it's good.