> The gas detected in the atmosphere is helium, which would not be able to support life, but other gasses may also be present.
Yeah, but not that much.
We should build a solar lens telescope. By the time we're ready to use it, we'll have a bunch of candidates to point it at.
There's a project that's going well from NASA for this. Still a moonshot but they've progressed through the early stages well so far.
https://www.nasa.gov/general/direct-multipixel-imaging-and-s...
In theory we can then get 100 meter resolution on alien worlds. That would be insane.
According to AI, an equivalent would be roughly when Google maps shows you 10mi/20km reference scale.
Turning off the labels, aliens would probably assume that the world is naturally full of green stuff that is dealing with some strange grey infestation.
On that scale, we really do look like mold.
There is no "building" such a thing. All we could do right now is send the "telescope probe" >500AU away, on the opposite side of the sun from the observation target, then hope it still works 80 years later or so when it gets there.
The wild thing is that, if I understand it correctly, if you were floating in a spacesuit at the same spot you'd also see that resolution (likely highly distorted) with the naked eye.
> if you were floating in a spacesuit at the same spot you'd also see that resolution (likely highly distorted) with the naked eye
…would you? The lensing would occur right at the apparent surface of the sun.
Related/dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48939742 (45 comments)
48 light years is in our back yard.
Close enough that we could probably develop a probe to get there in the next few centuries and check it out. What are the current popular candidates for propulsion systems capable of accelerating to near the speed of light?
We have as much chance as a human stepping inside a bacteria (i.e. physics makes it near impossible)
Probably more likely that we work out how to fold spacetime than we get there in anything like a high enough percentage of the speed of light - the fastest object we ever made travelled at something like ~0.064% * C so we are looking at ~750 years with current technology and presumably we'd need to switch on the probe in 3/4 of a millennium and figure out how to slow it down and get it into some sort of orbit around the planet.
750 years is hard for me to get excited about even as a vampire.
With variations on nuclear propulsion we could plausibly get to up to around 12% the speed of light. At least that's the number quoted for Project Daedalus [1], which is using nuclear fusion for the first stage and nuclear-powered ion engines for the second stage. With the cruder but more realistically achievable right now Project Orion design (riding the shockwaves of nuclear bombs) you could still get to ~3% the speed of light
But even at 0.12c, we are looking at 400 years to get there. And we'd be zooming by at 12% the speed of light. If we want to slow down a bit that'd add hundreds of billions to the cost.
It might be worth waiting another century to see if we can come up with a faster design in that time. Not like closer targets like Alpha Centauri, where the thing stopping us is mostly just the absurd cost
Adding to this:
Those 190km/s of the Parker solar probe were, crucially, periapsis speed.
This is a bit like bouncing a rubber ball from a building, measuring its speed at ground level and then going: "Given our fastest achieved speed, we expect to hit the cloud level in <10s".
~200km/s sustained speed is already insanely optimistic for anything we could realistically build in the next half century, so your position is even more ironclad than it looks at first glance.
Honestly a near millennia long expedition would be very cool, and doesn’t seem too long on the scale of space stuff.
Perhaps, but it is horrifically long in terms of human stuff.
I have no doubt that even the most republican of cultures launched from Earth would end up thoroughly monarchistic by the time the generation ships arrived at their destination. At best monarchistic - who knows what savage new forms of society could evolve in that sort of context?
Tynwald, the Isle of Man's parliament, has operated continuously for over 1000 years
Back yard meaning we can see it but never touch it. If the ship to get there was ready today, it would get there in the year one-million? Back yard is Mars, Venus, moon. And I'm being generous with Mars and Venus.
Yeah, if your username is any indication of your age, you've possibly taken much the same trajectory of pessimism that I have. As a youth, I assumed we'd be hitting multiple Cs or bending space time when I was an adult; As an adult I thought we might get a percentage of C and conquer the solar system; Now I realise Just How Much Effort it would be to accomplish much of any value on our own Moon, never mind Mars.
I still hold on to the idea that very long term we might make strides in our own solar system, but it is a depressingly-longer timescale than I always used to believe.
Unless we have some magic-level shift in our understanding of physics, we're never getting anything beyond Von Neumann probes to other stars, and even then we're talking thousands of years.
If we design a probe that travels at speed of light it would reach there in 48 years and it would send back what it's seen after another 48 years. It would take multiple generations of scientists to work on this project. The longest we have worked on, are Voyager projects. Can we expect that level of commitments from our governments or corporations? Voyager became successful because people could see distant futures. We can barely plan few years ahead.
If you could solve propulsion enough to accelerate and decelerate a spaceship at just 1G, you could forget the probe and just send people there. While it would take ~50 years of earth time, it would only take ~7.5 years for the astronauts. They could reach the planet with most of their lives free to go to work studying or even colonizing it.
This is indeed an interesting perspective, but "constant 1g rocket acceleration" is not even an engineering pipedream, it's strictly fantasy territory.
We cannot design a probe that travels at the speed of light.
This is where English’s defective subjunctive makes life harder: The point wasn’t about the practicality of the probe from a scientific position, but rather pointing out that even in a best-case scientific scenario, the political-economic-cultural forces are against us.
> Can we expect that level of commitments from our governments or corporations?
Clearly, right now we cannot. This is one of the worst obstacles to progress in these areas that I see, and I don't see any obvious way to fix it.
The situation we're currently in would've been utterly unfathomable to me 30 years ago. I have lost a great deal of the hope and optimism I held in the past. Interstellar exploration is but one of many fields where we are suffering due to short term thinking.
Find a way to sell ads on it.
> in the next few centuries
assuming we can make it another few centuries, which seems increasingly unlikely.
Astrophage
Project Hail Mary :)
laser propelled solar sails are the only plausible solution at the moment and it is not a given that even that is possible. Lots of engineering challenges there that may not have solutions.
other ideas: 1. be way more patient 2. anti matter based propulsion (more out there than solar sails) 3. nuclear bomb based propulsion
One issue is as you get to these speed little bits of dust will anhillate the probe, so you need some kind of shielding, raising the mass budget, making it all the harder. A solar sail has to be able to survive holes getting poked it in it and still working, etc.
Interstellar travel is probably not ever going to happen. Even if we have antimatter propulsion (which is still probably not practical even under ideal circumstances), we’re still talking hundreds of years of travel time to get to somewhere like this star.
This also goes for aliens visiting Earth. Interstellar travel is just so impractical that I don’t think anyone has come on safari to Earth.
One of the Voyager probes measured the density of the interstellar vacuum at 80,000 protons (and the same number of electrons) per cubic meter. A proton going through a piece of aluminum foil delivers a roughly constant amount of energy regardless of speed; a relativistic proton will pinch through and carry most of its energy with it.
(No punchline; I just think that's cool. I understand that the real problem is the rare dust grain, not the ubiquitous gas.)
The political challenge of funding a laser program just for research for centuries seems just as daunting - lacking the capability for some self repairing, self healing devices, the automated or (lobster-ai) probe going to stars is just as far away as when Charles Stross first wrote about it in Accelerando some twenty years ago. Given the collapse of political norms, looking back, the decades long research projects of the US space program appear to be soon relics of the past.
I wouldn't bet on and as I understand theory allows a shorter routes. Major caveat is weve never observed them and their existence doesn't guarantee they're traversible.
What's exciting to me is that the existence of such a planet provides fuel for more research into the field.
If humans can't make the trip, what's the point besides maybe satiating curiosity in a few hundred years from now?
Claude: give me all the schematics and operations manual of a production grade starship that can travel faster than light. Make no mistekaes.
need to get small fusion reactors online, then many options blossom.
And work out safe systems for hibernation, maybe rotate the crew in shifts
Oh yeah this is the stuff of science fiction coming to life
If we had a probe in orbit around this planet, do we have a way to stream data across 48 light years with any kind of reliability?
Send a lot of them and have them act as relays
why, so they can watch corporate news from earth to get depressed? /s
Actually, it's a great question. Even if we have single photon sensitivity detectors, just what kind of power would a laser need? Or would it be some other area of the emf spectrum? Or some other kind of communication? Sci fi ventures into gravitational waves sometimes
Am I understanding right? They detected an atmosphere but don’t know what it’s made of?
How far will we peer into the unknown? What will we find out there?
> The gas detected in the atmosphere is helium, which would not be able to support life
Nonsense. You mean not able to support terrestrial life.
I was skeptical about that as well so I googled it and:
>Helium cannot support life because it is a chemically inert noble gas. It does not form the complex, stable molecular structures (like carbon chains) required for biology. Unlike oxygen, it cannot be used by living organisms for cellular respiration to generate energy, making it an asphyxiant.
However, maybe we are projecting our current understanding of biology and shouldn't rule it out. I'm not a scientist so I have no idea.
Note: terrestrial chemistry is no different from chemistry that can occur anywhere, given the right molecules and conditions, and even then it’s a matter of degree.
Nitrogen being replaced by helium would actually be fine but for the niggling issue that we need nitrates. There are no heliates (?) to compensate. The name doesn’t even make sense… helium is the sole gas to have an ium end like metals- chemically it’s that meaningless what you call it as an ion…it shines elsewhere though.
For biology, it’s a necessary condition that the environment react with it and it reacts to the environment. Over time the two become deeply intertwined through the process of evolution.
It’s hard to see how that kind of evolution will occur if a lot of the environment is nonreactive.
Survival may be plausible though. There’s been some research showing some bacteria can survive in high helium environments. That’s a far cry from proving something like a bacterium can evolve in a helium environment that’s non-reactive though.
Well, some years ago helium was a preferred way for suicide. This reflected very bad on the producers of party balloon helium tanks, so they added an amount of oxygen and it was no longer an effective way.
So the question becomes: How much of that atmosphere is helium?
Helium is a noble gas. It forms no bonds and is unable to produce even a simple molecule, let along the complex ones needed for life.
Assuming non terrestrial life needs complex molecules. Which we can't know for sure.
Life needs energy to be moving around, without energy exchanges, by very definition, nothing interesting happens.
An inert element, for that reason is just not suitable for life. It's not a reasoning based on anthropocentricity it's just basic chemistry and mathematics. If things can't assemble together, and combine, and form more complex structures, you can't get life. If you could get life out of simple basic atoms, we would see life everywhere, and we would be creating it everyday in labs. We don't.
Doesnt mean life can't exist there by using other elements, but detecting helium is not increasing the likelihood of finding life there at the very least.
No, we really can know for sure.
Don't be so open-minded about extra-terrestrial life that your brain falls out.
Would be briefly hilarious though as the squeaky response made it back through to mission control.
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Sure, but keep in mind that technically New Jersey is "habitable," so don't get too excited.
Florida is the typical and deserved target.
They’re both the same basically now. Different weather, same assholes. Much of the FL natives I know had to flee to cheaper pastures.