Earthlike Planet Found

[Ekirä]

So I found this pretty exciting, thought I'd share it.

From the AP, "Could 'Goldilocks' planet be just right for life?"

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hA43mkzqSSZkUClEC9-Y6IdRlmRAD9IICCCO0?docId=D9IICCCO0

[Seykxetskxe te Vawm 'Ewan'ite (Kalin Kato)]

YES I just read this on Yahoo. Very AWESOME! It's very exciting, yet I hope humans in the future don't decide to ruin it like earth..

[Kì'eyawn]

I was reading this earlier today.  Cool stuff!

[Payoang]

Whoa, Steven Vogt is the co-discoverer? He's a professor at UCSC-where I'm studying film. Way cool.

[Nyx]

AWESOME!

But if you were standing on this new planet, you could easily see our sun, Butler said.

Imagine looking up at the sky there and being able to say "that tiny speck over there, that's where Earth is"...

[Txura Rolyu]

Thats cool but I dont think that we should go prodding the planet all too much. We could end up raping it for resources and that isnt fair or right if something else is there. BUT if there are Na'vi I am gonna get on that planet as fast as I can.

[Redpaintednavi]

A video about the planet:

New Earthlike planet discovered Gliese 581c

[Elektrolurch]

I'm sooo sure that they do. The human race is made up of hate, fear, anger, greed and laziness.  And if so, I'm sure that they'll destruct the whole galaxy..

[Kerame Pxel Nume]

Another article about it:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/gliese_581_feature.html

And wow, it's only 20ly away. In cosmic distances that's VERY close. Actually 20ly is a distance that in theory we could travel.

Spoiler

I think it would be very cool if we'd send a probe there in my lifetime, though it will probably take >100 years for it to get there. I'm thinking of using a solar sail for initial acceleration until solar radiation won't contribute to acceleration. Then a nuclear powered ion propulsion, and maybe a Orion.

The probe? I'm thinking of something like Envisat, but fully autonomous, sending a constant stream of data back to Earth. This planet is either in or close to the habitable zone, so there's plenty of solar power there, so a transmitter with several kilowatts could be easily powered.

Heck, we could start building that probe today, we have the technology for that one, the problem would be the requirements on long time reliabilty of all used components. It's very likely that for such a mission technology from the 20th century would be used: Magnetic core memory, but probably with much smaller structures. A few weeks ago Intel engineers showed a CPU that's been designed to tolerate and correct failures. THIS kind of technology is essential for such a mission.

The biggest obstacle is the propulsion system. So far we've got only chemical combustion rockets, and feeble attempts on ion propulsion.

Now I'm curious what's there. Definitely no life/civilisation using radio, we'd have detected those way back when SETI started. But life... if it's earth-like, has water, an atmosphere and is in the habitable zone: Very, very likely.

[Txura Rolyu]

It would be great to know about it, especially if there is a primative intelegant life form.

[Ekirä]

Now I'm curious what's there. Definitely no life/civilisation using radio, we'd have detected those way back when SETI started. But life... if it's earth-like, has water, an atmosphere and is in the habitable zone: Very, very likely.

Yeah, Vogt seems pretty confident that there's life on Gliese 581g......

"Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say, my own personal feeling is that the chances of life on this planet are 100 percent," said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, during a press briefing today. "I have almost no doubt about it."

[Kerame Pxel Nume]

Now I'm curious what's there. Definitely no life/civilisation using radio, we'd have detected those way back when SETI started. But life... if it's earth-like, has water, an atmosphere and is in the habitable zone: Very, very likely.

Yeah, Vogt seems pretty confident that there's life on Gliese 581g......

"Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say, my own personal feeling is that the chances of life on this planet are 100 percent," said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, during a press briefing today. "I have almost no doubt about it."

So, I took the time to read a bit more about it. Here's my conclusion (so far): The mass of this planet is at least 4 times that of earth. Which means more gravitation. In the ocean this is no big problem, just look at whales. But any landbound lifeform would be either very small or/and have a very sturdy, massive body. Think about elephants scaled down to the size of dogs. Any atmosphere would be very dense, so flying is easier, if you're light enough. Also bouyancy in the atmosphere would work (think of living balloons, yes yes, I know 1995 Avatar/Project880 scripment).

The central star is a red dwarf and the planet orbits it at about the distance of mercury to the sun. So it is tidally locked. To the star being a lot colder than our sun, it recieves about the same amount of radiation power like we do, but at much longer wavelengths, i.e. lower mean quantum energy (think of light the colour of a sunset, but at the brightness of noon) -- this has some implications on photosynthesis. The weather at the sides either directly facing the star or the night will be boring, but along the day/night boundary (called terminator) a lot of interesting convection would be going on (if there is an atmosphere). Likewise in any water surface. A constant hurricane. Albeit this weather this would probably also be the region, were most lifeforms -- if there are any -- would live. I already mentioned photosynthesis: Our plants -- so much we know -- depend on a multistage chemical process driven at two stages by photostimulation with different quantum energies: One in the blue, one in the red (that's why plants are green, they don't use the green component of light so they don't absorb, i.e. reflect it. It's ironic, because the sun has the highest radiation output at green wavelengths, so our plants don't make maximum use of our sunlight). The photosynthesis (of our plants) part which converts the red light would be more efficient, but the blue-light part would be almost down to a stop. Or in other words, the kind of photosynthesis our plants do wouldn't work there. So if it were without life and we'd attempt terraforming using our plants we were out of luck. Any form of photosynthesis that might have developed there will have a whole different chemistry. Or be nonexistent, as the tidal forces will probably drive intense vulcanism. All the life may be in the depth sea, thus independent and uninfluenced by the sun (with some probably exceptions which may use sunlight for other means). If the sea is deep enough. Due to the high mass the planet will have much less surface features than, say earth, the tidal forces will even it out even more. It may well be, that any ocean there is quite shallow, which will of course means the might be some "deep (in terms of alien ocean-deep) sea" life, still depending on sunlight.

[abi]

Kerame Pxel Nume's post doesn't give much hope for life. Not that'd it matter much right now though, chances are if there is life on Gliese we wouldn't have to technology to detect it anyways.

[Kactima]

Gliese 581/Wolf 562/HIP 74996 : is a Star that lies in the southern constellation of Libra. Luminosity: 0.00201x Sun Steller class M2V. It has 6 Planets
581 e, b, c, d, f, and g. c and d orbit on the edge of the Habitable Zone, g is right inside the Habitable zone. There are many unknowns about these planets. At this moment, There is only one earth-like planet found and that planet is called Earth.....

[guest2859]

Fun Fact...

[Human No More]

Another article about it:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/gliese_581_feature.html

And wow, it's only 20ly away. In cosmic distances that's VERY close. Actually 20ly is a distance that in theory we could travel.

Spoiler

I think it would be very cool if we'd send a probe there in my lifetime, though it will probably take >100 years for it to get there. I'm thinking of using a solar sail for initial acceleration until solar radiation won't contribute to acceleration. Then a nuclear powered ion propulsion, and maybe a Orion.

The probe? I'm thinking of something like Envisat, but fully autonomous, sending a constant stream of data back to Earth. This planet is either in or close to the habitable zone, so there's plenty of solar power there, so a transmitter with several kilowatts could be easily powered.

Heck, we could start building that probe today, we have the technology for that one, the problem would be the requirements on long time reliabilty of all used components. It's very likely that for such a mission technology from the 20th century would be used: Magnetic core memory, but probably with much smaller structures. A few weeks ago Intel engineers showed a CPU that's been designed to tolerate and correct failures. THIS kind of technology is essential for such a mission.

The biggest obstacle is the propulsion system. So far we've got only chemical combustion rockets, and feeble attempts on ion propulsion.

Now I'm curious what's there. Definitely no life/civilisation using radio, we'd have detected those way back when SETI started. But life... if it's earth-like, has water, an atmosphere and is in the habitable zone: Very, very likely.

Most civilisations will likely eventually move past radio, so their visibility to radio-based SETI disappears again, so there could still be a VERY advances species there. Just saying

[Kekerusey]

Most civilisations will likely eventually move past radio, so their visibility to radio-based SETI disappears again, so there could still be a VERY advances species there. Just saying

Possibly but far more problematic than that is the time-slice effect (not sure it's actually called that) where we can only ever see a slice of the universe ... if you consider that our galaxy is about a hundred thousand light years side to side (excuse me if I don't break into song) that means that we will see various bits of the galaxy at various times in our past so given that we are about 25,000 LY out from the centre the furthest stars from us (in The Milky Way) will be about 75,000 years in our past. IOW we never see the galaxy as it IS, only as it WAS and it is only close up to us (primarily on Earth) that it doesn't really matter.

When you think that we could well have wiped ourselves out in the 50's (less than 10,000 years after record keeping really began ... don't quote me on that) and assuming that any putative aliens actually and culturally evolve at the same rate (and that they are as aggressive as we are) we might have quite a limited "window" in which to detect them before they wipe themselves out. Until such time as faster-than-light travel is possible (and at present it remains the stuff of science fiction) it seems to me we are highly unlikely to meet or contact an alien species.

Keke

[Kerame Pxel Nume]

Like Human No More already said: It's very unlikely that any sufficiently advanced civilization will stop at using radio for communication. At least radio, that sticks out from the background noise. Just look at our technology: Most of high bandwidth communication goes though fiber optics, coax cables and telephone lines. And what we transmit by radio is modulated using spectral spreading methods, the data is compressed very close to the Shannon limit. So if there are aliens with a SETI program, they'd be able to detect only signals from at most 5 decades, the time between 1950 to 2000. Anything transmitted past then is indistinguishable from noise unless you know the modulation and encoding parameters.

[Neyn'ite Te Tsahìk Txeptsyìp'ite]

ngaytxoa for bumping a rather old thread

this is quite interesting; I don't believe I heard about this. however, though scientists deem this a habitable planet, I doubt there is any large species on the planet.

maybe we can convince whoever to let us inhabit the planet, and there we go, there's our Real Life Na'vi Tribe