

Newly Discovered Planet: Hot, Muggy And (May Be) Livable - sytelus
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/09/12/140407389/newly-discovered-planet-hot-muggy-and-maybe-liveable

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yuvadam
"Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not.
Both are equally terrifying."

\-- Arthur C. Clarke

~~~
adriand
Before I die, I would like humans to find evidence of an alien civilization.
At the same time, as I gaze at my peaceful backyard, I can't help but wonder
what the consequences might be, and whether I really want my ordinary life
disrupted by something none of us can predict.

~~~
Tichy
If human history is any indicator, I think it would probably not go down well.
I think most of the time newly found civilizations were being obliterated by
their discoverers.

~~~
ed209
what's worse is that the "discoverers" in your equation could just as easily
be the humans... let's hope we've learnt from our history.

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klodolph
> "Temperatures there may range from 85 to 120 degrees with plenty of
> humidity," the AP adds.

Well, that's two different stories entirely, depending on whether those are
degrees Fahrenheit or degrees Centigrade. Before I take my vacation there, I
would like to know whether the ambient temperature is high enough to denature
my proteins.

~~~
aquateen
Is it really that ambiguous given the submission title?

~~~
hugh3
I'd say it's still ambiguous. Liveable for _us_ or liveable for something?

Even on Earth we have hyperthermophiles
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthermophile>) which can tolerate
temperatures of up to 122 celsius.

And before anyone says "water boils at 100C", that's only at Earth-ambient
atmospheric pressure.

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renegadedev
Hot, muggy, _may be_ liveable. Are we talking about Florida? (disclaimer: I
maybe live there)

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DanielBMarkham
Investigation and exploration is directly related to imagination and emotion.
Because of the great political impact involved, we need to have plans in place
to directly image these planets.

Show people a picture of another Earth and that will drive a lot of scientific
research. When Columbus returned from the New World, the _idea_ that there was
another world out there had just as big (or bigger) impact for the first few
decades as people actually going there.

I'm with Hawking on this. Earth is getting crowded, stale, stagnant, and in
some ways unstable. We need a very clear vision that there is somewhere else
to go should we put forth the effort.

~~~
hugh3
_Investigation and exploration is directly related to imagination and emotion.
Because of the great political impact involved, we need to have plans in place
to directly image these planets._

Plausible technology might, in our lifetimes, be able to resolve this planet
as a dot. But you'll never get more than that.

What _is_ interesting is that it's easier to measure the composition of its
atmosphere than to resolve it as a dot. Find me a planet with an oxygen-rich
atmosphere and it starts looking very likely that we might have life there.

On your other point, though, I don't think there's much _point_ in having a
political will to send people to another star. We're still (at the very least)
hundreds of years away from the point where we can even start to think
sensibly about how we might want to do it. It's like Columbus wanting to go to
the moon.

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nhebb
It wouldn't be muggy (humid) unless there is water. Shouldn't npr's title be
"Hot And (May Be) Muggy, Livable".

~~~
count
The article says there is plenty of humidity:

"Temperatures there may range from 85 to 120 degrees with plenty of humidity"

~~~
nhebb
_Humidity_ means water vapor. You can't have water vapor without water. The
article says "water may be present". QED.

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crxpandion
The first line says it all: "That's how The Associated Press describes the way
scientists are describing..." That's a lot of description without much proof.

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dongsheng
Does that mean it's possible to have living creatures on that planet? Looks
like a prefect environment to grow bacteria.

~~~
hartror
Yes, IF there is water on the planet. So far we're not sure how Earth came to
have so much water and it is thought that our water was a relatively recent
addition in our planetary formation. The method HARPS uses, which discovered
this planet among 50 others announced today, is spectrography on the host star
to detect the wiggle as the planet orbits.

This method doesn't give us the density or composition of the planets, which
are the other two values of primary concern in evaluating it for whether it
could host life or not.

As always Bad Astronomy provides a no BS rundown of this all this news:
[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/12/50...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/12/50-new-
worlds-join-the-exoplanet-list/)

~~~
guelo
That would be life as we know it on earth, there could be life that uses
different chemistry. But really the life questions seem unanswerable since all
we can detect is the wobble of these distant stars.

~~~
hugh3
For transiting exoplanets at least, we should be able to measure spectra
pretty soon. That'll mean getting some kind of chemical information,
hopefully.

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signa11
fredrick-pohl's novel 'jem' investigates this theme pretty nicely. highly
recommended if you have not read it already.

------
mattmanser
We're not all that confident about where there's water in our own solar
system. We seem to discover 'possible' water on the moon or Mars every week.
And yet we know this planet is warm and watery? Oh, did you not notice the
constant use of the word 'may'.

So I call Utter Bollocks.

This is the _worst_ type of science. It's like the old archaeologists, 'China
had Bronze making, therefore everyone got it from them'. They were wrong and
we had to wait till science developed carbon dating to prove them wrong.

It's pure speculation dressed up as science. A wild guess based on our own
solar system. A population of 1 does not a survey make.

And the artist's impression at the top really makes me cringe. Who is giving
these plonkers money to spend on artist impressions?

Unfortunately this is all a direct consequence of the way scientific funding
works. But as someone who has a scientific mind it makes me die a little
inside when I see this kind of thing.

~~~
hugh3
I haven't been able to find any original sources yet (and I'm not about to
watch that podcast) but I'm fairly sure that what they _have_ found is a
planet in the habitable zone. And that's pretty darn neat in itself. (What was
really missing was information about its size and density.)

As for the bits about it being "muggy", I can only assume that this is
something the journalists, looking for an angle, tricked the scientists into
saying. We _can't_ say anything definitive about chemical composition of these
planets at this stage, we can only infer things from their temperature and
density.

