
Closest Temperate World Orbiting Quiet Star Discovered - beefman
http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1736/
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OldSchoolJohnny
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
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
I like the abstract pictures on quanta magazine, e.g.

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutron-star-collision-
shakes...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutron-star-collision-shakes-space-
time-and-lights-up-the-sky-20171016/)

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/squishy-or-solid-a-neutron-
st...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/squishy-or-solid-a-neutron-stars-
insides-open-to-debate-20171030/)

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phkahler
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.

~~~
dejawu
Why do we say the universe has a "comparatively short age" when we have no
other universes to compare it to?

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QAPereo
There is no reason to believe that the universe has a meaningful end, but it
appears to have had some kind of origin less than 15 blya. Even if you posit
proton decay and use heat death as and endpoint, you’re still talking about
many more orders of magnitude of “future” than “past” and... well... what else
do we mean when we say _young_?

~~~
bpd1069
If you use the Stelliferous Era [From 10^6 (1 million) years to 10^14 (100
trillion) years after the Big Bang. --wikipedia] as a meaningful period we are
still at the very beginning, less than 0.0138% through.

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sixothree
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.

~~~
chasil
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.

~~~
oldandtired
Considering the extreme difficulty in getting organic chemistry processes to
work in the laboratory, having random chance work to get any pre-biotic
sequences is of such low probability that all the hand waving and blackboard
erasures of the current biology experts, etc., means nothing.

We do not know and cannot show any viable means of creating the full sequence
of pre-biotic chemicals needed for the first organism to exist. When one of
the top organic chemists in the world puts out that challenge and nobody
responds, one can then say that all of these experts know full well that they
do not have a clue and are just deluding everyone else as to how life even
came to be.

Just using probability to say that life came about without at least a
semblance of an idea of possible sequences that could work is useless. You
need at least some possible viable sequence for the full biotic complement of
chemicals to be available. Since the sequence requires processes and solvents
that are inimical to previous and follow-on chemicals, this sequence
development is a major, major problem that is regularly ignored by those who
use probability to say life can arise.

When these things are taken into account, the simple fact that there is life
here on this planet can be seen as a unique event throughout all of the
universe.

On some estimates of random action giving rise to life anywhere in the
universe, the probabilities are so low that the universe would need to exist
for many magnitudes of time longer than its apparent age at this time. Your
"one in a billion" is oh so many magnitudes of order higher than the
probabilities estimated.

Of course, your view can be very different and if you can come up with a
viable sequence then simply accept the challenge that has been put out. There
will be an awful lot of relief if this could be done.

~~~
interfixus
The simple truth is, we have no idea. Of course we don't. Data points so far:
One. Statistics on that kind of basis tend to be rather meaningless.

One thing we _do_ know to be extremely unlikely: That we - exactly we, us,
here at this specific point in time - should somehow have arrived at a point
where we can confidently secondguess the universe in all its glorious details.
We can't, and we don't really even have the foggiest idea what kind of life is
possible, or how it comes about in the first place.

All the Drake equations in the world can't hide the fact that we know nothing.
Every single galaxy may be bursting with life, or we may the only specimens
anywhere in the dark, cold void.

My personal guess - which is no better or no worse than anyone else's - is
that life or its functional equivalents is more or less everywhere, but that
_intelligent_ critters like ourselves are exceedingly rare.

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V2hLe0ThslzRaV2
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.

~~~
amorphid
I reckon we'll master terraforming worlds here in our solar system by the time
practical (or impractical) interstellar travel becomes a thing. We can get to
Mars, Venus, Titan, etc. Will it ever be possible to get to another star
system in a useful amount of time? Terraforming Venus would be sweet; as soon
as you do it, I'll come visit!

~~~
stcredzero
Venus is pretty sweet as it is. Go high enough in the atmosphere, and you have
about Earth atmospheric pressure and room temperatures. That altitude in the
Venus atmosphere is effectively an Earth biosphere sized almost-Earthlike
living space.

One convenient circumstance: A breathable Earthlike atmosphere will float at
that altitude, so it would be easy to live in floating balloon habitats.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ5KV3rzuag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ5KV3rzuag)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-
old7YI4I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-old7YI4I)

~~~
Simon_says
If you go to all the trouble to get out of one gravity well, what's the point
of anchoring yourself?

~~~
stcredzero
Escaping radiation? Scenery? Proximity to lots of other people? There's a good
chance that the barrier of a gravity well is going to go the way of the
barrier of mountainous terrain.

Also, exchanging the fixed geography of land for the fluid geography of fluid
might result in changes to the underlying nature of society. In hunter
gatherer days, dissenters could simply walk to a different part of the
environment. Farmer's fields and defensive walls anchored people to particular
pieces of land. If everyone lived in mobile floating habitats, everyone would
be free to move. This is quite likely to change the nature of government.

You also get this in a Dyson Swarm, but there's a matter of scale. A minimum
viable space colony is likely to be larger and more expensive than a minimum
viable floating Venusian compound.

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empath75
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
> 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
Because we're in the dark and that's where we're most likely to find other
keys?

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AnimalMuppet
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.

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

~~~
delibes
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
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)

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crankylinuxuser
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.)

~~~
ajross
> 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
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. :/

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

~~~
beefman
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.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
What happens if you hit dust going that fast?

~~~
topspin
Plasma.

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beamatronic
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
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
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
Apparently the designers of Mass Effect did their Sci Fi homework.

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ilija139
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.

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petre
So is Ross 128b tidally locked or not?

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dddw
let's go!

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

~~~
vardump
Not many played Frontier Elite 2?

[https://www.sharoma.com/frontierverse/permits.htm](https://www.sharoma.com/frontierverse/permits.htm)

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

~~~
krylon
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.

