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Kepler 186 is an M1V red dwarf [1]. We don't know how old it is, but red dwarves tend to last tens of billions to trillions of years. (No red dwarf is known to
by kijin 13y ago
Kepler 186 is an M1V red dwarf [1]. We don't know how old it is, but red dwarves tend to last tens of billions to trillions of years. (No red dwarf is known to have died of natural causes since the beginning of the Universe.) So this star could be much older than our Sun. The low metallicity of the star also supports the hypothesis that it is older than our Sun.
Which means that if there is life on Kepler 186f, it could be billions of years ahead of us. Would that have been a long enough time scale for an intelligent species to emerge, civilize, and develop a way to traverse the 500 light years between us and them? Or did the dim light (less UV ~ less mutation) and lower availability of heavy elements (less iron) in the star system hemper the evolution of life and/or civilization?
Will there ever be an answer to questions like this, perhaps in a thousand years, a million years, or even a billion years?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-186 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-186
- wellboy 13y ago< red dwarves tend to last tens of billions to trillions of years. The universe will be dead in 10 billion years tho ;)
- sanxiyn 13y agoCitation needed.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- lutusp 13y ago> The universe will be dead in 10 billion years tho ... Not so. There's no basis for this claim. The universe will continue to expand, and will eventually become much colder and darker than it is now, but there's no mechanism that ends the universe in our current models. More here: http://arachnoid.com/dark_energy http://arachnoid.com/dark_energy
- kijin 13y agoYou're confusing the universe with our solar system. The Sun is expected to have a lifespan of approx. 10 billion years, of which 4.6 billion have already elapsed. As for the universe, see various conjectures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe
- KhalilK 13y agoWe'll let Ω be the judge of that. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Friedmann_universes.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Friedman...
- danieltillett 13y ago> We don't know how old it is, but red dwarves tend to last tens of billions to trillions of years. I am not sure if it is logical to argue that since red dwarfs can live a long time that any particular red dwarf is older than the sun. It is like arguing that since bristlecone pine can live for thousands of years that a particular individual tree you chance across is thousands of years old - it could be a young sapling. I do agree that the low metallicity supports it being old, but there are young stars with lower metal levels. Really we just don't know at this stage, but it is an exciting discovery.
- jotm 13y agoWell, from the looks of it, Mars was suited for life a long time ago. We still don't know if it had any intelligent life...
- atmosx 13y agoI like the idea of evolved civilizations using prime numbers[1] to contact us. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_US_film) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_US_film)
- hcarvalhoalves 13y agoWhile it's fun to speculate, that's a lot of assumptions: intelligent species, civilization, travel, DNA mutation via UV... Considering we don't know anything besides Earth, we may not be even in a position to recognize life (let alone intelligent life), since we have such a biased definition of it. Just as until the microscope invention a whole universe of lifeforms was unknown, we could be looking at things at the wrong space/time scale and missing the obvious. I find this more exciting than the possibility of ever finding carbon-based, spaceship-building creatures.