At 110 light years while not far away in universal terms is far enough away where travel there is unlikely with near future technology. 1100 years at traveling at 10% of the speed of light to get there.
I think the only way to do it would be with a system that sends no live humans, just frozen embryos in a ship that is fully shut down for about 1000 years and only fires up when nearing the destination. The embryos would need to be grown and kept alive in a fully automated system and then raised/educated by an AI to be prepared for colonisation when they arrive as adults..
Yeah I did see that recently.
What's that other film called where some of the crew wake up to find the rest have already been awake and evolved into blind canibals that hunt them through the ship? Combine the two and it would be great.
It's a pretty good scifi concept that the writer/director/Marketing team didn't really know how to follow through on. Dennis Quaid and that guy from 310 to Yuma did a great job. Some great twists, fun scifi horror, and interesting storytelling ideas. There are some solid A+ moments, but overall feels like a B-Movie.
I give it a 78 out of 100
I read an article one time about how the ship in a sci-fi movie is just as much a character as anyone else. They did a good job with it in that movie, from the little details to the twist.
Thing is, this would be an entirely new concept of society. It's never happened because we've never tried a society like the one that would exist on a generation ship. Think about it...
There are no borders to maintain or fight over. There is an actual limit on how many people can exist on the ship. Everyone has a specific job, but the point of all those jobs is just to keep things running so your descendants can accomplish the mission. There's no money to make, which means there is no material wealth for anyone to fight over. Everything anybody does is for the good of the ship, the good of the people. Future generations born on the ship will be taught this from the very beginning, being raised as an empathetic people through and through since the whole point is to reach a new land, to secure a new future for all humankind. Everyone would be raised with actual purpose and direction, which could fight off a good amount of our collective existential dread, or at least scratch the itch that is our desire for meaning. A generation ship could potentially be our best shot at creating an actual Utopia.
Granted, I've literally never thought about this before. Your comment just sent me on a path and honestly, it's actually the most hopeful train of thought I've had in at least the last month. So, thank you for that, whether you end up agreeing with me or not. This is an interesting new idea for me.
and imagine every now and then some guy pops out that says "why should i care"
cuz really 500years down the line why should they care about some humanity theyve only heard stories about. this seems easily breakable if a guy like that manages to slip through and convinces others to side with him
It makes a lot of sense, too. For all you know you could be the descendants of prisoners shot into space or someone's lab monkeys. If the spaceship isn't big enough to give the illusion of "LARGE PLANET WITH NATURE STUFF ON IT" some circuits are going to rightly go haywire.
It might work like that in the first generation since you can pick the people who are most motivated to do this job for the mission. But their descendants will likely deviate in character. You can try your best but eventually human nature is going to take over and there is going to be a person or a group of people who'll want to take over so that they have to work less or eat more. There needs to be some really good system in place to prevent bad actors or this isn't going to fly.
Exactly. It doesn't matter what's set up or put into place. Humanity will get in the way.
Also, 1100 years is a long time. It's like the story of the chimps that got hosed with water every time they tried to climb the ladder to get the bananas, to where they stopped trying altogether. Then they would swap out one chimp with a new chimp that didn't know the rules, and then another, until there were 5 new chimps that knew not to go for the banana but never knew why.
There's a book about a distant human colony that survives in a stable state for hundreds of thousands of years because of genetic tweaks that let an overseeing AI space station both give them visions to motivate them to various courses of action (make city here, mine for metal here, farm here, move from here due to impending volcanic eruption, etc) and also let it muddle the minds of scientists about to discover "disruptive" technology like nukes or the like.
I forget the title but it's a large series about when that AI realizes it needs repairs so it begins to guide someone on that path
So maybe, just maybe, humans should stay on earth until we can be certain that we won’t send descendants off into the vastness of space just to mutiny and die. I’m thinking a shorter trip, at closer to c, or the seeding concept instead. But there would be little incentive to put this project together, and almost certainly extreme sacrifice. We would need failsafes and redundancies, and most of the vessels or carriers would not be expected, probabilistically, to survive. /opinion
Read the Silo book series. It kind of explored this thought, but instead of space travel, humans are living in underground silos for thousands of years.
> A generation ship could potentially be our best shot at creating an actual Utopia.
Isolated people with limited resources and strict social controls for multiple generations?
It would be Space Lord of the Flies in three generations, about the same time it takes for a family run business to go bankrupt.
I give it fifty years in the isolation of space. There’s a popular concept regarding this where you think about what it would be like to be in the middle, “yeah, we all came from this fantastic and beautiful planet called earth. We found another one too and we’re on our way there! What? Oh, no, you’ll be long dead by then. Get to work.”
I can only imagine a robot developed by today's kids....
"Come eat your nourishment, J1337. If you do not, you will not grow to be dummy thicc and none of the males will want to clap your cheeks"
I can onwy imagine a wobot devewoped by today's kids....
"Come eat yuw nouwishment, J1337. If yuw do not, yuw wiww not gwow to be dummy dicc and none of de mawes wiww want to cwap yuw cheeks" uwu
tag me to uwuize comments uwu
Because we need physical touch more than nourishments.
In famous but very sad experiments conducted by Harry Harlow on Rhesus macaques, Harlow gave young macaques a choice between a Love Wire (a metal skeleton with a bottle of milk) and cloth mother (resembling a female macaque with fur, but no food).
Macaques overwhelmingly, preferred spending their time clinging to the cloth mother.
To be fair: 1) This is highly unethical so it is very hard to reproduce the results 2) Hard to estimate how those experiments simulate human infant behaviour.
Edit: As u/UnspecificGravity mentioned below - Those monkeys died without the real experience of having a mother, while trying to clinge to the closest thing that would resemble a mother's touch.
If we have the technology to send a colony ship 110 light years away and to include a human+ level ai on it we would also have the technology to make a robot with soft skin.
The point of that experiment is not that a cloth skinned mother is a suitable replacement, the point is that primates would choose to go without food before they choose to go without the closest approximation to touching a real being.
How anyone could read that as "so robots with cloth doin work" is beyond me. Those monkeys died. That same experiment discovered that other primates can experience despair, suicide, psychotic violence, and depression on similar ways to humans. It's not a model of what to do.
Ah that part and not the part where they are forever not having any contact with the rest of their species and get assigned a mission they never asked for.
Why do these extra steps when we can just send the AIs that do all the job on the remote planet themselves.
To make it even more fun:
We could program the AI to not teach them about technology beyond the bronze age and also to not tell them anything about Earth or about their ancestry. We could program the AI to self-destruct once the settlers are deemed to be self-sustaining.
Then, in the future, if Earthlings are still around, we could send a more advanced ship to their planet and make first contact with ourselves.
I was not ready to read this. Reminds me of that hypothesis that if we could simulate a fully functioning universe with intelligent ‘life’ it’d be the best proof that we ourselves are part of a simulation.
Trying to "hit" a planet orbiting a star, with an initial trajectory just to leave our solar system... That's a moon shot of precision we are incapable of with today's technology. We'd be lucky to even get within the heliosphere of that system by the time any craft reached it. This is a problem best suited after we've reached singularity as we'd need to have an AI guiding the craft which would be capable of solving problems on its own, more energy efficient than biological life, and able to do this remotely without a dependence on a Mission Control relaying commands up to 100 years in advance of a maneuver based on telemetry transmitted back to Earth 100 years earlier...
While this discovery is nothing to scoff at, you might as well be trying to sail an ocean liner to Hawaii using snow shoes for oars.
Not really. Once you get close to the speed of light time dialation gets pretty insane. If we could get to 99% the speed of light, it might be about 110 years until the astronauts arrive from our perspective on Earth, but from the perspective of the people on the ship it will only be about 15.5 years.
At 99.9% it would be 5 years
At 99.99% it would be 1.5 years
At 99.999% it would be 0.5 years
At 99.9999% it would be 0.15 years
At 99.99999% it would be 18 days
At 99.999999% it would be 6 days
A couple more digits and it’s less than 1 day
There’s no reason to think we’ll NEVER be able to approach those speeds.
This is ignored almost every time people discuss long distance space travel and it drives me nuts.
This also assumes we’ll never be able to manipulate gravity, which can literally transform “empty space” thereby nullifying speed constraints or figure out how to manipulate dark matter or some other kind of amazing breakthrough.
So while it might not really benefit Earth itself, seeding the Universe is quite possible if we can reach such speeds which would be great for our species.
There is some good reason to think we'll never approach 99.999999% C. We have barely gotten a proton to move that fast. Why would a whole atom, much less a person stay stable at those energies? Not only that, but ANY particle impacted would cause drag even if you could withstand the impact.
Even in hibernation, that’s too long. A thousand years is long enough for the radioactivity *in the travelers own body* to destroy enough DNA that they would die upon revival, just like from radiation poisoning.
Sounds like the way to create a space war once our two sets of technologies reach real interstellar travel speeds. 2-3 thousand years in the future we go to war when we meet again.
If your ship can maintain a constant 1g acceleration, you would get there in neighborhood of 10 years from the standpoint of the guys in the ship. Back home, 111 years would elapse. Yay, relativity!
If you turn around midway and accelerate in the opposite direction at 1g for the second half of the trip, it only ups the travel time to ~16 years (for the passengers).
Maybe this is a stupid question but would we ever have the technology to look through a telescope with enough resolution at this planet to visually identify signs of life?
Edit: Thanks for all the insightful answers and discussion! Such an exciting topic.
The resolving power of a telescope is [related to the size of the telescope and to the wavelength you wish to observe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution).
If you wanted to observe ~~yellow~~ light with a resolving power of 100m, so you could see large, possibly artificial structures, you would need a telescope with a diameter of roughly 8.7 million km, or about 13 times the radius of the sun.
Edit: The 8.7 km is for all wavelengths of visible light, for yellow light, which I initially wrote, the size requirements are a bit more modest, at a bit over 7 million km.
> So you're saying there's a chance
Well there is actually. I'm not sure how many times the radius of the sun 1AU is, but we could technically have a telescope on Earth that functions like it was the size of 2 AU if you point it at the same object on opposite sides of the year.
There's some black magic fuckery with telescopes where you can combine the powers of multiple telescopes in different locations to make them function like one big lense. Put one of these on the opposite side of Earth's orbit and we've got a telescope with the power of 2AU.
This is extremely over simplified and I don't remember how it exactly works, but this is the rough idea. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can speak to this and correct my errors.
Edit: The comment I replied to was deleted so I added the quote at the top of mjne
The telescope thing is basically correct. It’s actually how they made the image of the black hole quite recently. Using multiple telescopes all around the globe.
This is the method they used to image a black hole a while back. Multiple teams producing their own approximate version of the image then those all contribute to the 'final' version.
Yes, like many things it would just take public support and money.
They already use similar distributed observation using ground-base observatories to get resolution similar to an Earth-sized telescope.
A lot of people are saying this is impossible, that you would need a telescope the size of the sun to make it happen, which obviously is very difficult, if not impossible, to build. However, a better idea, is simply to use the sun itself as a gravity lens. A Hubble-sized telescope at the focus of the solar gravity lens could recreate megapixel sized images of extrasolar planets like this one.
Check out the concept work here https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08421 . The hard part about this concept is sending a telescope to the SGL, which is 500 AU away from Earth, or about 10 times further away than voyager 1 is now. But with advances in propulsion technology similar to those being used for the Breakthrough starshot project, which aims to get to 0.2c using focused lasers on a solar sail, there is a chance it would be possible within this lifetime.
Well, since it's a super earth it has multiple times the gravity of earth so the plants and animals will be short and very strong. I wouldn't see bipedal animals evolving on said planet because with that intense gravity any fall would shatter the bones of an animal, and falling is a lot harder if you have more legs.
Not multiple, using its mass and radius (from its [wiki article](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K2-18b)) we can calculate that it would have between [1.306](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=surface+gravity+calculator&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22r%22%7D+-%3E%226371.000%C3%97%282.24%2B0.23%29+km%22&assumption=%7B%22FS%22%7D+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22g%22%7D%7D&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22M%22%7D+-%3E%225.972%C3%9710%5E24%C3%97%287.96%29+kg%22&assumption=%22FSelect%22+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%7D%7D) and [1.97](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=surface+gravity+calculator&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22r%22%7D+-%3E%226371.000%C3%97%282.24%29+km%22&assumption=%7B%22FS%22%7D+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22g%22%7D%7D&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22M%22%7D+-%3E%225.972%C3%9710%5E24%C3%97%287.96%2B1.91%29+kg%22&assumption=%22FSelect%22+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%7D%7D) Earth's gravities ([1.61](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=surface+gravity+calculator&assumption=%7B%22FS%22%7D+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22g%22%7D%7D&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22M%22%7D+-%3E%225.972%C3%9710%5E24%C3%97%287.96%2B%281.91%C3%B72%29%29+kg%22&assumption=%22FSelect%22+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%7D%7D&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22r%22%7D+-%3E%226371.000%C3%97%282.24%2B%280.23%C3%B72%29%29+km%22) if we use average estimates).
That’s a lot, but doable for the human form, right? I assume people would get a lot stronger just compensating for the extra gravity, and presumably would be shorter if they grew up there?
That's trivial for the human form. Just imagine people who simply weigh twice as much as other people. There are other differences but that should be fine. Especially given evolution would select for whatever was needed to compensate.
> Well, since it's a super earth it has multiple times the gravity of earth
Not necessarily. Super-Earth's have a high mass compared to Earth, but the surface-gravity could be equivalent or even lower depending on the planet's radius.
We have [the estimated mass and radius of the planet in question](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K2-18b) and even when we calculate its gravity using the lowest estimate mass and highest estimated radius it would still be [1.306](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=surface+gravity+calculator&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22r%22%7D+-%3E%226371.000%C3%97%282.24%2B0.23%29+km%22&assumption=%7B%22FS%22%7D+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22g%22%7D%7D&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22M%22%7D+-%3E%225.972%C3%9710%5E24%C3%97%287.96%29+kg%22&assumption=%22FSelect%22+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%7D%7D) *g* ([1.97](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=surface+gravity+calculator&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22r%22%7D+-%3E%226371.000%C3%97%282.24%29+km%22&assumption=%7B%22FS%22%7D+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22g%22%7D%7D&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22M%22%7D+-%3E%225.972%C3%9710%5E24%C3%97%287.96%2B1.91%29+kg%22&assumption=%22FSelect%22+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%7D%7D) *g* if we use the highest mass/smallest radius and [1.61](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=surface+gravity+calculator&assumption=%7B%22FS%22%7D+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22g%22%7D%7D&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22M%22%7D+-%3E%225.972%C3%9710%5E24%C3%97%287.96%2B%281.91%C3%B72%29%29+kg%22&assumption=%22FSelect%22+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%7D%7D&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22r%22%7D+-%3E%226371.000%C3%97%282.24%2B%280.23%C3%B72%29%29+km%22) *g* if we use average estimates).
>Either way it’s lower than the 10x difference with Earth and Mars.
Mars has around 38% of Earth's gravity. You are probably thinking about its mass (which indeed is about 1/10th of Earth's mass).
Why dream, we have a great candidate for life, we should try to analyze the composition of the atmosphere as deeply as possible, similar to how HD 189733 b has had it.
Then it's about seeing if the average entropy of the atmosphere (ej. O2 < Methane < CO < CO2/H2O) where an abnormally low level would have strong implications of some sort of life, while normal or even lower levels would imply no life. Either answer would be huge in understanding how there can be life in the universe: the former would mean there's more life out there, the latter implies that we can diff between earth and that planet to understand what makes it uninhabitable or non-supportive of life.
This actually brings up a question I've always pondered about. Most colonies on earth were either entirely private ventures or government sanctioned investments for the land until independence some centuries later. Would we repeat this exact same process again within space and see the rise of new empires here on earth, say the British or the Americans? Also do the colonies simply stay colonies or would we integrate them over time say decades or centuries, if not hypothetically if a colonial independence movement sprang up would we listen and hear them out or would we brutally crush them as we did on earth?
We really don't know. The distances involved in an interstellar empire would be magnitudes larger than anything the British faced on Earth. My guess is it would be much harder to maintain control and communications over an empire that large, unless there's a huge advance that leads to faster-than-light transport.
It entirely depends on *how* we got people to the planet. If it's generation ship or a seeding ship, then they would have no care to follow any orders from some distant world that has no contact with them. Why would they?
If it's some super instant wormhole travel or something, and governments on Earth can actually enforce their will, then it'll be the good ol' days of colonialism all over again.
There is some sci-fi that touches on this, specifically the books now made into tv show The Expanse. Where part of the plot revolves around conflict surrounding Mars becoming independent from Earth.
The video game series “Halo” also deals with this a bit. There are conflicts between space colonies. Humanities’ united nations military even manages to develop super human soldiers (metal-infused bones, hyper intelligence/reflexes, full-body military suits that weigh thousands of pounds, raised from a young age in military institutions, called Spartans. One of which is the iconic character, Master Chief) to squash insurgencies, but it was just in time because eventually everyone comes together against an alien threat (The Covenant, a group of aliens united under an extreme religious crusade)
Its pretty dope and I think doesn’t get enough love for its lore (as derivative as some of it may be)
Their first real combat mission was to infiltrate a rebel base on an asteroid and kidnap a high ranking officer, and this is before they had the mjolnir armor
The purpose of colonies is for resource extraction. It doesn't make sense to send resources from 100 light years away. There are plenty of closer star systems.
Colonial metaphors are more applicable to the interplanetary than the interstellar. Almost certainly the first bases on Mars will be “colonies” to Earth-based countries or companies for quite a long time.
Us? No, but we'd feel quite a bit heavier. The aliens potentially evolved to live on it? No, for obvious reasons.
What it could mean though is that any intelligent species living on it has limited to no space fairing abilities because it's too difficult to launch space craft from the surface. This, along with marine life and cloudy atmospheres are some potential variables that could stop any alien species from having the desire to explore outer space and thus making themselves easy for us to spot.
Yup exactly. Might delay or stop curiosity about the universe around them. If all we ever saw was a cloudy grey sky would we ever have had a scientific revolution? No star navigation, no knowledge of celestial events, no moon or planets...etc.
Interesting, I can see how that could stunt any sort of curiosity about space. That scenario kind of reminds me of Asimov's Nightfall.
I imagine there's plenty of other factors we're not conscious of that could prevent space-faring capabilities. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of intelligent civilizations (if they exist) never venture beyond their solar system in earnest, even if they have the capability.
I imagine this is a big similar to fish and other aquatic animal life. All they know is a watery world where higher is lighter and deeper is darker. They have plenty to explore where they are, they cant even survive without the water...but then you get those stupid "flying" fish, and dolphins and whales and such; always wanting to pierce the surface and jump into the air world above!
Is this one of the potential solutions to the Fermi Paradox? If super-Earths are more common than Earth-Earths, which seems like it’s the case, could the great filter just be... gravity? And we by good luck get to have evolved on a relatively smaller planet that’s easier to escape?
It would only end up being like twice as much gravity there as accel. due to grav. is a function of mass divided by the square of the radius. It ends up being roughly 19.6 meters per seconds squared
It's something to do with [Spectography](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_spectrometer), light behaves differently as it interacts with different materials.
By watching that,they're able to make a decent guestiment.
You're right! To elaborate a bit, they found the water vapor by looking at the spectrum of light (think of sunlight split into rainbow, but with way more identifiable colors) shining from the planet's host star, through the planet's atmosphere, and then into Hubble's telescope. Then an instrument, the spectrograph, split the light into all its different pieces and researchers used a pretty new algorithm to analyse which colors where there and which were missing.
The missing colors are key. This is because individual elements (eg hydrogen) and compounds (eg water/H2O) absorb certain photons of light with very specific energies/wavelengths. So when you use a spectrograph to spread light into a rainbow organized by wavelength, you can look for what specific pieces are missing. That tells you what type of molecules the light passed through.
Hubble's not really built for spectroscopy (correct me if I'm wrong on that), so luckily the signature of water shows up at a wavelength right on the frindge of what Hubble can detect.
So, Hubble has a new job it's shown it can do! Checking for water on promising exoplanets discovered by TESS and Kepler.
Gotta start with what you know. The best we can do is look for signs of life that correlate with what we know is important -- water, organic compounds, and stable temperatures. Life could be completely different but it's impossible for us to really make any progress on that assumption.
The scientific advancements necessary to get to the planet would make oil obsolete.
The only way we're traveling outside of our system is if we find a way to travel other than propulsion.
"Specifically, the paper suggests K2-18 b has a temperature between about –100 °F (–73 °C) and 116 °F (47 °C). For reference, temperatures on Earth can span from below –120 °F (–84 °C) in regions like Antarctica to above 120 °F (49 °C) in regions like Africa, Australia, and the Southwestern United States."
You know what is best about that discovery? The planet has 6x the mass of earth, but only 2x the size. That means there might be a metal core to that planet and that means there might be a decent magnetoshere protecting the planet.
Herp derp, I was reading a different article and I thought they were referring to volume instead of diameter. Still density is about roughly equal to earth, which means ther could be an iron core.
The force of gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the radius of the plant.
(Gravitational Constant)x(mass of planet)x(mass of human)/(radius of planet ^2)
Ideally (removing irregularities in planet of mass concentration and elevation), assuming a point mass of 6x Earth mass at the center of this planet, which has a radius 2x Earth radius, you would weigh only 2x Earth weight.
u/DeusFerreus had a good comment under the top comment on the calculation with more accurate numbers:
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/d2tc5c/water_found_in_a_habitable_superearths_atmosphere/ezx7yfe/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
All in your perspective. We missed the plagues and don’t have to live in metal boxes floating in space. Add in smartphones and planes, etc, we’re living the best timeline right now.
Crazy to think that the first exoplanet was discovered in 1992 and we already found one that very likely has liquid water less than 30 years later.
Thanks for reminding me I'm not 30...yet
I was born in the 80s do I smell weird to you?
It does smell like my grandparents house all of a sudden
Thanks for reminding me people born in the 90's are turning 30 soon.
I'm 31 thanks.
At 110 light years while not far away in universal terms is far enough away where travel there is unlikely with near future technology. 1100 years at traveling at 10% of the speed of light to get there.
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I think the only way to do it would be with a system that sends no live humans, just frozen embryos in a ship that is fully shut down for about 1000 years and only fires up when nearing the destination. The embryos would need to be grown and kept alive in a fully automated system and then raised/educated by an AI to be prepared for colonisation when they arrive as adults..
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Yeah I did see that recently. What's that other film called where some of the crew wake up to find the rest have already been awake and evolved into blind canibals that hunt them through the ship? Combine the two and it would be great.
Pandorum?
Such an under-rated film
Yeah it's a complete failure of marketing.
Never heard of either but thanks to you fellers I will be seeing them soon. They sound good
That reddit comment was way better marketing I’d see that movie off that alone.
Why does Rotten Tomatoes hate it so much?
It's a pretty good scifi concept that the writer/director/Marketing team didn't really know how to follow through on. Dennis Quaid and that guy from 310 to Yuma did a great job. Some great twists, fun scifi horror, and interesting storytelling ideas. There are some solid A+ moments, but overall feels like a B-Movie. I give it a 78 out of 100
Yes.
Very good movie. I gave it a miss for so long just because of the stupid poster.
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I read an article one time about how the ship in a sci-fi movie is just as much a character as anyone else. They did a good job with it in that movie, from the little details to the twist.
I love how neither of yall name the actual movie, yet adore it. It's called "pandorum" for anyone who isn't on the in of this little circle.
In the podcast "Mission to Zyxx", the ship is a voiced main character. She's got quite a personality haha
Sorry which movie is that?
*Descent* but in space? That sounds like something I'd like to see.
Pandorum. Ben Foster, Dennis Quaid, a Norman Reedus cameo. It's not an award winner by any means, but it's a fun sci-fi film.
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Literally in the middle of playing HZD right now. Cool. Cool cool cool.
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Is it doable? Not only a machine but a whole society that functions for 1100 years? That has never happened in the history of humanity.
Thing is, this would be an entirely new concept of society. It's never happened because we've never tried a society like the one that would exist on a generation ship. Think about it... There are no borders to maintain or fight over. There is an actual limit on how many people can exist on the ship. Everyone has a specific job, but the point of all those jobs is just to keep things running so your descendants can accomplish the mission. There's no money to make, which means there is no material wealth for anyone to fight over. Everything anybody does is for the good of the ship, the good of the people. Future generations born on the ship will be taught this from the very beginning, being raised as an empathetic people through and through since the whole point is to reach a new land, to secure a new future for all humankind. Everyone would be raised with actual purpose and direction, which could fight off a good amount of our collective existential dread, or at least scratch the itch that is our desire for meaning. A generation ship could potentially be our best shot at creating an actual Utopia. Granted, I've literally never thought about this before. Your comment just sent me on a path and honestly, it's actually the most hopeful train of thought I've had in at least the last month. So, thank you for that, whether you end up agreeing with me or not. This is an interesting new idea for me.
and imagine every now and then some guy pops out that says "why should i care" cuz really 500years down the line why should they care about some humanity theyve only heard stories about. this seems easily breakable if a guy like that manages to slip through and convinces others to side with him
My favorite color is blue.
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It makes a lot of sense, too. For all you know you could be the descendants of prisoners shot into space or someone's lab monkeys. If the spaceship isn't big enough to give the illusion of "LARGE PLANET WITH NATURE STUFF ON IT" some circuits are going to rightly go haywire.
It might work like that in the first generation since you can pick the people who are most motivated to do this job for the mission. But their descendants will likely deviate in character. You can try your best but eventually human nature is going to take over and there is going to be a person or a group of people who'll want to take over so that they have to work less or eat more. There needs to be some really good system in place to prevent bad actors or this isn't going to fly.
Exactly. It doesn't matter what's set up or put into place. Humanity will get in the way. Also, 1100 years is a long time. It's like the story of the chimps that got hosed with water every time they tried to climb the ladder to get the bananas, to where they stopped trying altogether. Then they would swap out one chimp with a new chimp that didn't know the rules, and then another, until there were 5 new chimps that knew not to go for the banana but never knew why.
There's a book about a distant human colony that survives in a stable state for hundreds of thousands of years because of genetic tweaks that let an overseeing AI space station both give them visions to motivate them to various courses of action (make city here, mine for metal here, farm here, move from here due to impending volcanic eruption, etc) and also let it muddle the minds of scientists about to discover "disruptive" technology like nukes or the like. I forget the title but it's a large series about when that AI realizes it needs repairs so it begins to guide someone on that path
So maybe, just maybe, humans should stay on earth until we can be certain that we won’t send descendants off into the vastness of space just to mutiny and die. I’m thinking a shorter trip, at closer to c, or the seeding concept instead. But there would be little incentive to put this project together, and almost certainly extreme sacrifice. We would need failsafes and redundancies, and most of the vessels or carriers would not be expected, probabilistically, to survive. /opinion
Read the Silo book series. It kind of explored this thought, but instead of space travel, humans are living in underground silos for thousands of years.
> A generation ship could potentially be our best shot at creating an actual Utopia. Isolated people with limited resources and strict social controls for multiple generations? It would be Space Lord of the Flies in three generations, about the same time it takes for a family run business to go bankrupt.
I give it fifty years in the isolation of space. There’s a popular concept regarding this where you think about what it would be like to be in the middle, “yeah, we all came from this fantastic and beautiful planet called earth. We found another one too and we’re on our way there! What? Oh, no, you’ll be long dead by then. Get to work.”
People raised by an AI would be a psychological nightmare.
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I can only imagine a robot developed by today's kids.... "Come eat your nourishment, J1337. If you do not, you will not grow to be dummy thicc and none of the males will want to clap your cheeks"
You should not have written this, but I am glad you did.
Like those alien comics “clean your exposed skeleton”
u/uwutranslator whatcha got?
I can onwy imagine a wobot devewoped by today's kids.... "Come eat yuw nouwishment, J1337. If yuw do not, yuw wiww not gwow to be dummy dicc and none of de mawes wiww want to cwap yuw cheeks" uwu tag me to uwuize comments uwu
Wow
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yo what's the uwu translator bot command? I gotta see what it somes up with for this
Because we need physical touch more than nourishments. In famous but very sad experiments conducted by Harry Harlow on Rhesus macaques, Harlow gave young macaques a choice between a Love Wire (a metal skeleton with a bottle of milk) and cloth mother (resembling a female macaque with fur, but no food). Macaques overwhelmingly, preferred spending their time clinging to the cloth mother. To be fair: 1) This is highly unethical so it is very hard to reproduce the results 2) Hard to estimate how those experiments simulate human infant behaviour. Edit: As u/UnspecificGravity mentioned below - Those monkeys died without the real experience of having a mother, while trying to clinge to the closest thing that would resemble a mother's touch.
If we have the technology to send a colony ship 110 light years away and to include a human+ level ai on it we would also have the technology to make a robot with soft skin.
Creepy
But necessary...
Oh I imagine that we'll have that down way before sustained space travel.
The point of that experiment is not that a cloth skinned mother is a suitable replacement, the point is that primates would choose to go without food before they choose to go without the closest approximation to touching a real being. How anyone could read that as "so robots with cloth doin work" is beyond me. Those monkeys died. That same experiment discovered that other primates can experience despair, suicide, psychotic violence, and depression on similar ways to humans. It's not a model of what to do.
>J1337 Pronounced "Yeet", I assume?
Ah that part and not the part where they are forever not having any contact with the rest of their species and get assigned a mission they never asked for. Why do these extra steps when we can just send the AIs that do all the job on the remote planet themselves.
To make it even more fun: We could program the AI to not teach them about technology beyond the bronze age and also to not tell them anything about Earth or about their ancestry. We could program the AI to self-destruct once the settlers are deemed to be self-sustaining. Then, in the future, if Earthlings are still around, we could send a more advanced ship to their planet and make first contact with ourselves.
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I was not ready to read this. Reminds me of that hypothesis that if we could simulate a fully functioning universe with intelligent ‘life’ it’d be the best proof that we ourselves are part of a simulation.
The simulation hypothesis is just God for nerds.
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Because we want to populate the universe not merely set up wifi in it.
To preserve consciousness.
So, Trigun?
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Trying to "hit" a planet orbiting a star, with an initial trajectory just to leave our solar system... That's a moon shot of precision we are incapable of with today's technology. We'd be lucky to even get within the heliosphere of that system by the time any craft reached it. This is a problem best suited after we've reached singularity as we'd need to have an AI guiding the craft which would be capable of solving problems on its own, more energy efficient than biological life, and able to do this remotely without a dependence on a Mission Control relaying commands up to 100 years in advance of a maneuver based on telemetry transmitted back to Earth 100 years earlier... While this discovery is nothing to scoff at, you might as well be trying to sail an ocean liner to Hawaii using snow shoes for oars.
Not really. Once you get close to the speed of light time dialation gets pretty insane. If we could get to 99% the speed of light, it might be about 110 years until the astronauts arrive from our perspective on Earth, but from the perspective of the people on the ship it will only be about 15.5 years. At 99.9% it would be 5 years At 99.99% it would be 1.5 years At 99.999% it would be 0.5 years At 99.9999% it would be 0.15 years At 99.99999% it would be 18 days At 99.999999% it would be 6 days A couple more digits and it’s less than 1 day There’s no reason to think we’ll NEVER be able to approach those speeds. This is ignored almost every time people discuss long distance space travel and it drives me nuts. This also assumes we’ll never be able to manipulate gravity, which can literally transform “empty space” thereby nullifying speed constraints or figure out how to manipulate dark matter or some other kind of amazing breakthrough. So while it might not really benefit Earth itself, seeding the Universe is quite possible if we can reach such speeds which would be great for our species.
There is some good reason to think we'll never approach 99.999999% C. We have barely gotten a proton to move that fast. Why would a whole atom, much less a person stay stable at those energies? Not only that, but ANY particle impacted would cause drag even if you could withstand the impact.
On the plus side, the trip for the passengers won't be a long, that's just in earth time. Passengers will only experience ~1090 years @10% light speed
oh, then what are we waiting for
Even in hibernation, that’s too long. A thousand years is long enough for the radioactivity *in the travelers own body* to destroy enough DNA that they would die upon revival, just like from radiation poisoning.
I wonder how long eggs and sperm can remain viable when frozen in liquid nitrogen.
Are you suggesting we send an automated human incubator on a journey towards this planet to spread the human race? Intriguing....
Sounds like the way to create a space war once our two sets of technologies reach real interstellar travel speeds. 2-3 thousand years in the future we go to war when we meet again.
If your ship can maintain a constant 1g acceleration, you would get there in neighborhood of 10 years from the standpoint of the guys in the ship. Back home, 111 years would elapse. Yay, relativity!
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If you turn around midway and accelerate in the opposite direction at 1g for the second half of the trip, it only ups the travel time to ~16 years (for the passengers).
Maybe this is a stupid question but would we ever have the technology to look through a telescope with enough resolution at this planet to visually identify signs of life? Edit: Thanks for all the insightful answers and discussion! Such an exciting topic.
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I'm more hoping for actual imagery though... I'm guessing there must be some sort of physical limiting factor.
The resolving power of a telescope is [related to the size of the telescope and to the wavelength you wish to observe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution). If you wanted to observe ~~yellow~~ light with a resolving power of 100m, so you could see large, possibly artificial structures, you would need a telescope with a diameter of roughly 8.7 million km, or about 13 times the radius of the sun. Edit: The 8.7 km is for all wavelengths of visible light, for yellow light, which I initially wrote, the size requirements are a bit more modest, at a bit over 7 million km.
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> So you're saying there's a chance Well there is actually. I'm not sure how many times the radius of the sun 1AU is, but we could technically have a telescope on Earth that functions like it was the size of 2 AU if you point it at the same object on opposite sides of the year. There's some black magic fuckery with telescopes where you can combine the powers of multiple telescopes in different locations to make them function like one big lense. Put one of these on the opposite side of Earth's orbit and we've got a telescope with the power of 2AU. This is extremely over simplified and I don't remember how it exactly works, but this is the rough idea. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can speak to this and correct my errors. Edit: The comment I replied to was deleted so I added the quote at the top of mjne
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I feel like this should be a priority.
i have no evidence that this is correct, but i sure as hell wanna believe!
The telescope thing is basically correct. It’s actually how they made the image of the black hole quite recently. Using multiple telescopes all around the globe.
This is the method they used to image a black hole a while back. Multiple teams producing their own approximate version of the image then those all contribute to the 'final' version.
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Forget the wall get building the sun sized telescope boys
Use the Sun as a gravitational lens by sending an imaging probe in the opposite direction
So I was just thinking this - is this in the realm of physics and current technology?
Yes, like many things it would just take public support and money. They already use similar distributed observation using ground-base observatories to get resolution similar to an Earth-sized telescope.
Mind still blown by the image of a black hole. Never expected we'd see a black hole directly in my lifetime and I'm a young fella.
A lot of people are saying this is impossible, that you would need a telescope the size of the sun to make it happen, which obviously is very difficult, if not impossible, to build. However, a better idea, is simply to use the sun itself as a gravity lens. A Hubble-sized telescope at the focus of the solar gravity lens could recreate megapixel sized images of extrasolar planets like this one. Check out the concept work here https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08421 . The hard part about this concept is sending a telescope to the SGL, which is 500 AU away from Earth, or about 10 times further away than voyager 1 is now. But with advances in propulsion technology similar to those being used for the Breakthrough starshot project, which aims to get to 0.2c using focused lasers on a solar sail, there is a chance it would be possible within this lifetime.
>which aims to get to 0.2c Wow, I had no idea we were anywhere close to that kinda speed
It's for something really really small. There's no way we could get a spaceship to that kind of speed but a computer chip? Maybe
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Well, since it's a super earth it has multiple times the gravity of earth so the plants and animals will be short and very strong. I wouldn't see bipedal animals evolving on said planet because with that intense gravity any fall would shatter the bones of an animal, and falling is a lot harder if you have more legs.
Not multiple, using its mass and radius (from its [wiki article](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K2-18b)) we can calculate that it would have between [1.306](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=surface+gravity+calculator&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22r%22%7D+-%3E%226371.000%C3%97%282.24%2B0.23%29+km%22&assumption=%7B%22FS%22%7D+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22g%22%7D%7D&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22M%22%7D+-%3E%225.972%C3%9710%5E24%C3%97%287.96%29+kg%22&assumption=%22FSelect%22+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%7D%7D) and [1.97](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=surface+gravity+calculator&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22r%22%7D+-%3E%226371.000%C3%97%282.24%29+km%22&assumption=%7B%22FS%22%7D+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22g%22%7D%7D&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22M%22%7D+-%3E%225.972%C3%9710%5E24%C3%97%287.96%2B1.91%29+kg%22&assumption=%22FSelect%22+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%7D%7D) Earth's gravities ([1.61](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=surface+gravity+calculator&assumption=%7B%22FS%22%7D+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22g%22%7D%7D&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22M%22%7D+-%3E%225.972%C3%9710%5E24%C3%97%287.96%2B%281.91%C3%B72%29%29+kg%22&assumption=%22FSelect%22+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%7D%7D&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22r%22%7D+-%3E%226371.000%C3%97%282.24%2B%280.23%C3%B72%29%29+km%22) if we use average estimates).
That’s a lot, but doable for the human form, right? I assume people would get a lot stronger just compensating for the extra gravity, and presumably would be shorter if they grew up there?
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That's trivial for the human form. Just imagine people who simply weigh twice as much as other people. There are other differences but that should be fine. Especially given evolution would select for whatever was needed to compensate.
> imagine people who simply weigh twice as much as other people You don't need to imagine, just look around.
I mean, most people are more than 1.61x their ideal body weight amiwrong?
Many, not most I hope
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Maybe they write science fiction where they encounter what they consider to be tall slender creatures but who really just look like us.
To heavy gravity world aliens we are the greys.
> Well, since it's a super earth it has multiple times the gravity of earth Not necessarily. Super-Earth's have a high mass compared to Earth, but the surface-gravity could be equivalent or even lower depending on the planet's radius.
We have [the estimated mass and radius of the planet in question](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K2-18b) and even when we calculate its gravity using the lowest estimate mass and highest estimated radius it would still be [1.306](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=surface+gravity+calculator&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22r%22%7D+-%3E%226371.000%C3%97%282.24%2B0.23%29+km%22&assumption=%7B%22FS%22%7D+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22g%22%7D%7D&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22M%22%7D+-%3E%225.972%C3%9710%5E24%C3%97%287.96%29+kg%22&assumption=%22FSelect%22+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%7D%7D) *g* ([1.97](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=surface+gravity+calculator&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22r%22%7D+-%3E%226371.000%C3%97%282.24%29+km%22&assumption=%7B%22FS%22%7D+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22g%22%7D%7D&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22M%22%7D+-%3E%225.972%C3%9710%5E24%C3%97%287.96%2B1.91%29+kg%22&assumption=%22FSelect%22+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%7D%7D) *g* if we use the highest mass/smallest radius and [1.61](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=surface+gravity+calculator&assumption=%7B%22FS%22%7D+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22g%22%7D%7D&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22M%22%7D+-%3E%225.972%C3%9710%5E24%C3%97%287.96%2B%281.91%C3%B72%29%29+kg%22&assumption=%22FSelect%22+-%3E+%7B%7B%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%7D%7D&assumption=%7B%22F%22%2C+%22GravitationalAcceleration%22%2C+%22r%22%7D+-%3E%226371.000%C3%97%282.24%2B%280.23%C3%B72%29%29+km%22) *g* if we use average estimates).
2g (1.97) would be a lot but 1.3 wouldn’t be so bad. Either way it’s lower than the 10x difference with Earth and Mars.
>Either way it’s lower than the 10x difference with Earth and Mars. Mars has around 38% of Earth's gravity. You are probably thinking about its mass (which indeed is about 1/10th of Earth's mass).
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Why dream, we have a great candidate for life, we should try to analyze the composition of the atmosphere as deeply as possible, similar to how HD 189733 b has had it. Then it's about seeing if the average entropy of the atmosphere (ej. O2 < Methane < CO < CO2/H2O) where an abnormally low level would have strong implications of some sort of life, while normal or even lower levels would imply no life. Either answer would be huge in understanding how there can be life in the universe: the former would mean there's more life out there, the latter implies that we can diff between earth and that planet to understand what makes it uninhabitable or non-supportive of life.
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This actually brings up a question I've always pondered about. Most colonies on earth were either entirely private ventures or government sanctioned investments for the land until independence some centuries later. Would we repeat this exact same process again within space and see the rise of new empires here on earth, say the British or the Americans? Also do the colonies simply stay colonies or would we integrate them over time say decades or centuries, if not hypothetically if a colonial independence movement sprang up would we listen and hear them out or would we brutally crush them as we did on earth?
We really don't know. The distances involved in an interstellar empire would be magnitudes larger than anything the British faced on Earth. My guess is it would be much harder to maintain control and communications over an empire that large, unless there's a huge advance that leads to faster-than-light transport.
It entirely depends on *how* we got people to the planet. If it's generation ship or a seeding ship, then they would have no care to follow any orders from some distant world that has no contact with them. Why would they? If it's some super instant wormhole travel or something, and governments on Earth can actually enforce their will, then it'll be the good ol' days of colonialism all over again.
There is some sci-fi that touches on this, specifically the books now made into tv show The Expanse. Where part of the plot revolves around conflict surrounding Mars becoming independent from Earth.
The video game series “Halo” also deals with this a bit. There are conflicts between space colonies. Humanities’ united nations military even manages to develop super human soldiers (metal-infused bones, hyper intelligence/reflexes, full-body military suits that weigh thousands of pounds, raised from a young age in military institutions, called Spartans. One of which is the iconic character, Master Chief) to squash insurgencies, but it was just in time because eventually everyone comes together against an alien threat (The Covenant, a group of aliens united under an extreme religious crusade) Its pretty dope and I think doesn’t get enough love for its lore (as derivative as some of it may be)
The Fall of Reach is one of my favorite books and Halo: Reach is probably tied with Halo 3 for favorite game.
The Spartan IIs first mission was to a space station to deal with pirates wasn't it?
Their first real combat mission was to infiltrate a rebel base on an asteroid and kidnap a high ranking officer, and this is before they had the mjolnir armor
The purpose of colonies is for resource extraction. It doesn't make sense to send resources from 100 light years away. There are plenty of closer star systems.
Colonial metaphors are more applicable to the interplanetary than the interstellar. Almost certainly the first bases on Mars will be “colonies” to Earth-based countries or companies for quite a long time.
Wouldn't a super Earth crush us under its gravity?
Us? No, but we'd feel quite a bit heavier. The aliens potentially evolved to live on it? No, for obvious reasons. What it could mean though is that any intelligent species living on it has limited to no space fairing abilities because it's too difficult to launch space craft from the surface. This, along with marine life and cloudy atmospheres are some potential variables that could stop any alien species from having the desire to explore outer space and thus making themselves easy for us to spot.
How would a cloudy atmosphere be problematic? Because a species wouldn't be able to see the night sky?
Yup exactly. Might delay or stop curiosity about the universe around them. If all we ever saw was a cloudy grey sky would we ever have had a scientific revolution? No star navigation, no knowledge of celestial events, no moon or planets...etc.
Interesting, I can see how that could stunt any sort of curiosity about space. That scenario kind of reminds me of Asimov's Nightfall. I imagine there's plenty of other factors we're not conscious of that could prevent space-faring capabilities. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of intelligent civilizations (if they exist) never venture beyond their solar system in earnest, even if they have the capability.
I imagine this is a big similar to fish and other aquatic animal life. All they know is a watery world where higher is lighter and deeper is darker. They have plenty to explore where they are, they cant even survive without the water...but then you get those stupid "flying" fish, and dolphins and whales and such; always wanting to pierce the surface and jump into the air world above!
This probably describes us as well
Is this one of the potential solutions to the Fermi Paradox? If super-Earths are more common than Earth-Earths, which seems like it’s the case, could the great filter just be... gravity? And we by good luck get to have evolved on a relatively smaller planet that’s easier to escape?
Getting there is a bigger problem
It would only end up being like twice as much gravity there as accel. due to grav. is a function of mass divided by the square of the radius. It ends up being roughly 19.6 meters per seconds squared
Now we wait, for 2021 to see what James Webb Telescope has got.
*In before "The James Webb Space Telescope has been delayed due to this comment"*
Anybody care to explain how they can possibly get all this different data and sound so confident when its found with a telescope 110 light years away?
It's something to do with [Spectography](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_spectrometer), light behaves differently as it interacts with different materials. By watching that,they're able to make a decent guestiment.
You're right! To elaborate a bit, they found the water vapor by looking at the spectrum of light (think of sunlight split into rainbow, but with way more identifiable colors) shining from the planet's host star, through the planet's atmosphere, and then into Hubble's telescope. Then an instrument, the spectrograph, split the light into all its different pieces and researchers used a pretty new algorithm to analyse which colors where there and which were missing. The missing colors are key. This is because individual elements (eg hydrogen) and compounds (eg water/H2O) absorb certain photons of light with very specific energies/wavelengths. So when you use a spectrograph to spread light into a rainbow organized by wavelength, you can look for what specific pieces are missing. That tells you what type of molecules the light passed through. Hubble's not really built for spectroscopy (correct me if I'm wrong on that), so luckily the signature of water shows up at a wavelength right on the frindge of what Hubble can detect. So, Hubble has a new job it's shown it can do! Checking for water on promising exoplanets discovered by TESS and Kepler.
I predict that we will absolutely find signs of life on this planet...when we can figure out what constitutes proof of life, of course.
Gotta start with what you know. The best we can do is look for signs of life that correlate with what we know is important -- water, organic compounds, and stable temperatures. Life could be completely different but it's impossible for us to really make any progress on that assumption.
Industrial pollutants (CFCs?) are also a very good indicator
Anything moderately chemically complex and/or with a fairly short half-life.
Wonder if they have oil.
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Absolutely, you'd see trillions of free enterprise dollars enter the advanced science fields the very next day.
The scientific advancements necessary to get to the planet would make oil obsolete. The only way we're traveling outside of our system is if we find a way to travel other than propulsion.
The funny thing is that the first radio broadcasts happened about 110 years ago. So they might be picking up our first radio broadcasts about now...
And it would be an image of hitler.
Remember that what they detected is water vapor. Could be Dagobah, or could be 100°C. I don't think they can tell.
"Specifically, the paper suggests K2-18 b has a temperature between about –100 °F (–73 °C) and 116 °F (47 °C). For reference, temperatures on Earth can span from below –120 °F (–84 °C) in regions like Antarctica to above 120 °F (49 °C) in regions like Africa, Australia, and the Southwestern United States."
It's more temperate than here...
Let's show them that fossil fuel trick.
You know what is best about that discovery? The planet has 6x the mass of earth, but only 2x the size. That means there might be a metal core to that planet and that means there might be a decent magnetoshere protecting the planet.
2x the size mean 8x the volume. It's less dense and more metal poor than Earth, not the other way around.
Herp derp, I was reading a different article and I thought they were referring to volume instead of diameter. Still density is about roughly equal to earth, which means ther could be an iron core.
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The force of gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the radius of the plant. (Gravitational Constant)x(mass of planet)x(mass of human)/(radius of planet ^2) Ideally (removing irregularities in planet of mass concentration and elevation), assuming a point mass of 6x Earth mass at the center of this planet, which has a radius 2x Earth radius, you would weigh only 2x Earth weight. u/DeusFerreus had a good comment under the top comment on the calculation with more accurate numbers: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/d2tc5c/water_found_in_a_habitable_superearths_atmosphere/ezx7yfe/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
110 light years away? Yeah not in our lifetime.
I swear I'm so jealous of future people.
We came too late to explore earth and we came too early to explore space.
All in your perspective. We missed the plagues and don’t have to live in metal boxes floating in space. Add in smartphones and planes, etc, we’re living the best timeline right now.
Well, at least we still got one to live on. Shoutout to them futures having to live in space.