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http://www.livescience.com/55868-closest-earth-like-planet-proxima-b-discovered.html Sure, it's a bit tidally locked, but with a Red Dwarf that's not too bad. It's reassuring to know that there's another planet for us next door for when this one goes to poo poo. Nerve staples for everyone !! 
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Aug 24, 2016 21:25
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 04:56 |
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gently caress the ROW posted:it was proxima you stupid stupid gently caress Of course, But Alpha Centauri is a more well known name to attract the scientific neophytes
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Aug 24, 2016 21:29
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I just checked and it would take New Horizons 78,000 years to get there !! WTF ? I thought that was the fastest thing we had flying ? These numbers are totally unacceptable ! This is going to be way harder than crossing the Atlantic or circumnavigating the globe, isn't it ? Although that was considered impossible for 100's of years too.A "maybe" then ?
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Aug 24, 2016 21:41
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gently caress da Mods posted:gently caress savin the earth lets go to new earth There's literally no way we would ever run out of planets. The Universe is infinite after all. Our atmosphere is full of the farts from the previous inhabitants 
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Aug 24, 2016 21:55
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Angry Birds Suicide posted:Proxima not alpha you loving shitforbrains cocksucker What's a mere 0.24 light years between friends
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Aug 24, 2016 22:13
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-S- posted:your moms waist size Lame insults are an abomination on Proxima 1's face. I'm afraid there won't be room on the colony ship for your kind
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Aug 24, 2016 22:33
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Professor Shark posted:Remember that the grass is always greener on the other side Like...space weed ? Just think what Proxima's weird luminosity and energy patterns will do to the grass bro !
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Aug 24, 2016 22:45
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Donkwich posted:Last time I checked red dwarf stars weren't thought to have habitable zones. I'll have to read the whole article but the title seems exaggerated. Why not ? They output energy don't they ? They also live longer than than the whole Universe and 100's of times longer than our Sun. So life has a lot of chances to get interesting. Tidal lock might be an issue but whatever. Heat moves around and think how interesting life on a planet like this would look ! Also we could have solar farms on the always sunny side for virtually unlimited energy and thus solve a big ecology problem and move towards ascension !
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Aug 25, 2016 12:41
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Iron Crowned posted:Whoa, I just watched some show on Netflix about a tidally locked planet orbiting a red dwarf. Can you please give us a synopsis and the methodologies used by the scientists to reach their conclusions ? I think this will be really relevant to the discussion at hand.
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Aug 25, 2016 14:05
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Germstore posted:"orbiting something that outputs energy" is a pretty low bar to set for habitability. Proxima's planet is in it's habitable zone though. They found planets around pulsars too (like PSR 1257+12) and that's pretty amazing when you think about how a star becomes a neutron star. A bit of X-ray only makes organism heartier so pulsar planets must have some interesting life on them.
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Aug 25, 2016 14:23
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hemophilia posted:you need a biosphere that won't shred amino acids and shred simple lifeforms with horrible radiation, cook them with heat, or destroy them with weird chemical reactions, and I dunno tidally locked planets don't seem to fit that bill. You think Europa has small chances then, considering Jupiter's tremendous radiation belt ?
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Aug 25, 2016 14:25
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Skeleton Ape posted:Yeah but the more we learn about life the lower the bar gets. Look at water bears and tube worms and stuff. There's probably some extremophile bacteria or something that would do just fine there Yeah but what if life needed a milder environment to start and only then it can evolve into extromophiles and conquer inhospitable places ?
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Aug 25, 2016 14:58
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Jabor posted:It's a fun fact that Europa missions have much stricter sterilization requirements than missions to other places, because we don't want to finally arrive there looking for life only to see that oh, it's just a bunch of earth bacteria that hitched a ride on an earlier mission. I think they're exaggerating a bit when it comes to Europa and contamination. Jupiter's radiation will sterilize anything we send over there pretty quick I think. If anything survives I assume the probe would be able to do some kind of genome test and it will be easy to distinguish between Earth life and something else. Plus the chance of contamination is a minuscule issue when you compare it to the fact that I might die without ever seeing a picture of what's beneath that ice ! All these missions to Mars and even Pluto but nothing to Europa even though they just sent a probe to Jupiter to survey it's north pole (WOW super exciting stuff you dumb scientists). I want my tax dollars to be used for entertaining science too, nut just the other kind.
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Aug 25, 2016 16:08
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+1 Gaia Harmony with the Planet is paramount!
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Aug 25, 2016 16:23
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I hope SETI is pointing some antennas over there now. Also with the new James Web telescope we'll be able to actually get an image of the planet. How cool is that ! And to think that the Government almost didn't approve of it's construction. I'm glad we're still throwing money at the F-35 though.  Those Lockheed engineers who worked on it deserve to be harvested for organs.
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Aug 25, 2016 17:27
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Toadvine posted:Every naysayer about extra terrestrial life is basing their pessimism on the very narrow span of human understanding and it's freaking pissing me off Maybe there's methane based life on Titan ? That would also be a good target (besides endless Mars missions). They dropped the Huygens probe on it but it only had, like 1 hour of battery ?! WTF why not make one of those plutonium batteries for it and make it float ???????? imagine that thing sailing on a methane sea and peering into the depths ! I don't know who programs the NASA and ESA mission, but they have 0 imagination. You have hordes of highly trained scientists at your disposal and this is what you come up with ?!
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Aug 25, 2016 17:43
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Germstore posted:Any civilization that can make a teeny tiny black hole can harvest unlimited energy with whatever the gently caress matter they feel like feeding the black hole with. Maybe advanced species never move past their solar system because they don't have to. But stars tend to become dangerous as they grow old, unless you're around a stable red dwarf or something, so they would have to leave at one point.
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Aug 25, 2016 18:58
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Germstore posted:The theory is you create a black hole with the mass of a large freighter, which takes far more energy than we can currently produce. The smaller a black hole is the more hawking radiation it gives off. So this black hole is giving off around three orders of magnitude more energy than the earth uses. If you leave it alone there's no net energy gain and the black hole evaporates in a few years. If you feed it with with a few hundred grams of matter, any matter whatsoever, per second you get energy from it as long as you keep it fed. This is direct conversion of mass to energy, no need for anti-matter or fusion. It's certainly speculative, but the theory is sound. Let's focus on more real & feasible projects, like fusion (which, by the way, is only a decade away), before we start messing with things like black holes; which are "magic" as far as scientists are concerned. Fucker, how are you gonna tell me that physics break down ?! What does that even mean ? Is it like Lord of the Rings and elfen magic ?
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Aug 25, 2016 19:27
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Moridin920 posted:it means math stops working like we think it does What needs to be discovered so that we understand what actually happens then ?
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Aug 25, 2016 22:32
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 04:56 |
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What about an antimatter engine like in that James Cameron documentary? Sure, antimatter is expensive to produce and store, but once those 2 small issues are conquered we could be on our way!
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Aug 26, 2016 17:05
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