7 new planets discovered; may be like Earth

[Eichhörnchen]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/22/thrilling-discovery-of-seven-earth-sized-planets-discovered-orbiting-trappist-1-star

[Von Due]

One thing that is of great interest is the fact that planets are discovered at all and not just hypothesized. The increase in tech level just the past decade or so that makes it possible to in some cases get pictures of exoplanets, is truly remarkable.

As for the Quest for alien life forms, well, got to get out there first. Sitting here won't give us anything to discover. Unfortunately, interstellar travel is slightly more complicated than Star Trek wants us to believe.

[ValoWay]

An obvious answer would be to suggest that the problem is too open-ended. It's possible that even if we poured huge amounts of money into the search, nothing would be found. Bookies can't give sensible odds for success, even to those willing to gamble. Other countries are just being practical.

yea, very unusual to find 7 planets which could maintain life in only one system. Tbh though, I would rather see NASA or ESA report finds of large veins of metals and other resources on asteroids, for example. We need to find more incentives for companies to go up there just like back in colonial times. Colonization would probably have been a whole lot slower without sugar in the Caribbean or gold in south america.

Another huge problem is that the general public doesn't really like science, because of its short attention span! The problem with the world we live in nowadays is that we can get all information we want in a matter of seconds. When an earthquake happens somewhere in Mongolia everyone will in a matter of hours know about it as long as someone decides that it is worth reporting.. Now, because of that, expecting people to wait realistically decades for a thing to happen like technology for faster space travel, for example, or the discovery of alien life will only create frustration and disappointment. We see things like the discovery of the new world from a very well researched point of view but think about the people which actually lived in those days. Things didn't happen immediately back then either which is simply something people nowadays have a hard time with to grasp and rather call things impossible or unrealistic..

An interesting article about that topic here:
http://www.nbcnews.com/mach/space/only-americans-are-interested-hunt-alien-life-n698706

[Jimbuna]

Be interesting to see how long before anyone from this planet pays a visit seeing as how a one-way ticket is 30+ life years.

[Commander Wallace]

This is a great find. Now all you need is a faster than light drive system to get there. I'm sure they will find other planets as time goes by in the " Goldilocks Zone ".

[ikalugin]

Tbh though, I would rather see NASA or ESA report finds of large veins of metals and other resources on asteroids, for example.
Better still they go and develop a new type of engine with high ISP and thrust to mass ratio. 40k ISP and t/m ratio of 20 would work perfectly.

[AndyJWest]

7 new planets discovered; may be like Earth

My commiserations to the inhabitants...

[AVGWarhawk]

These planets are nothing like earth. Where are the nutty people?

[Mr Quatro]

What if these planets are like the New World Columbus found and we transmit diseases to them and they get mad and kill all of our spacemen and women that travelled the some odd (30) years it took to get there?

or worse yet the spacewomen and men that we send have sex with these aliens in another world and bring back a virus after the (60) years round trip that kills every man woman and child on the planet earth, leaving only the apes in the special laboratoires set up to find an end to this planet ending disease.

The apes get mad as hell and they won't take it anymore ...:timeout:

I don't think we should fund this expeditionary move to another strange world like or unlike ours. :o

[Dowly]

These planets are nothing like earth. Where are the nutty people?On Earth?

[Eichhörnchen]

One of them will be populated entirely by squirrel-men (and women)

[AVGWarhawk]

On Earth?

Exactly. The 7 planets do not look like earth. These are pristine untouched pieces of prime space real estate!! Trump will get a piece of these. Then it will not be long until these planets look like earth.

[Moonlight]

The fastest thing that's ever been built is the New Horizons space probe which is currently on its way to Pluto, it can travel about 36000 mph, at that speed it would take it about 750,000 earth years to get to these planets, it puts current technology beyond the scope of travelling to the stars me thinks. :doh:
An FTL spacecraft is a pipe dream thought up by some hare-brained scientist with too much time on his hands, by the time anyone could work out how to build one of these things the human race will either be dead or they'll be back in the trees where they belong. :D

[AVGWarhawk]

The fastest thing that's ever been built is the New Horizons space probe which is currently on its way to Pluto, it can travel about 36000 mph, at that speed it would take it about 750,000 earth years to get to these planets, it puts current technology beyond the scope of travelling to the stars me thinks. :doh:
An FTL spacecraft is a pipe dream thought up by some hare-brained scientist with too much time on his hands, by the time anyone could work out how to build one of these things the human race will either be dead or they'll be back in the trees where they belong. :D

Warp factor 7 Mr. Sulu.

[mapuc]

It was fascinating news. Some questions popped up in my head when I read and heard about this discovery

1. Is there life on one or more of these planets ?

2. If yes to number one, what kind of life could it be ?

3. If there is life, is it seen from earthly point of view, intelligent ?

4. If intelligent, how far have they come ? (I know the time it takes for the light to reach us)

Markus

[ikalugin]

The fastest thing that's ever been built is the New Horizons space probe which is currently on its way to Pluto, it can travel about 36000 mph, at that speed it would take it about 750,000 earth years to get to these planets, it puts current technology beyond the scope of travelling to the stars me thinks. :doh:
An FTL spacecraft is a pipe dream thought up by some hare-brained scientist with too much time on his hands, by the time anyone could work out how to build one of these things the human race will either be dead or they'll be back in the trees where they belong. :D
With high ISP drives it is possible to make generation ships. "36000 mph" is a useless figure, what you want to know is the delta-v stored onboard.

[Commander Wallace]

It was fascinating news. Some questions popped up in my head when I read and heard about this discovery

1. Is there life on one or more of these planets ?

2. If yes to number one, what kind of life could it be ?

3. If there is life, is it seen from earthly point of view, intelligent ?

4. If intelligent, how far have they come ? (I know the time it takes for the light to reach us)

Markus


Of course there is intelligent life on them. Spock, Yoda, Chewbacca and the Ewoks came from somewhere, right ? :03:


Seriously, I would think life exists elsewhere in the universe.

[Platapus]

Be interesting to see how long before anyone from this planet pays a visit seeing as how a one-way ticket is 30+ life years.


In all seriousness, I hope we never make it. Intelligent life that evolved independently should continue to evolve independently without the interference from life forms such as ours.

We are crapping up one planet, why infect other planets.

[Rockstar]

Life on other planets? meh. What about life in another dimension. Presently we see this physical world because we are a part of it. We are tuned to detect particals, everything we use to taste, touch, smell, hear, and to see are partical detectors. What about the those things the science of our time has revealed what if we were tuned to perceive boundary less waves of energy, who or what would we encounter? Perhaps too the world would appear more like a thought than a physical thing.

"It has occured to me lately I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities that both questions (the origin of consciousness in humans and of life from non living matter) might be brought into some degree of congruence. This is with the assumption that mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has always existed as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality the stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff. It ks the mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create: science, art, and technology making animals. In them the universe begins to know itself. ". George Wald.

[nikimcbee]

It was fascinating news. Some questions popped up in my head when I read and heard about this discovery

1. Is there life on one or more of these planets ?

2. If yes to number one, what kind of life could it be ?

3. If there is life, is it seen from earthly point of view, intelligent ?

4. If intelligent, how far have they come ? (I know the time it takes for the light to reach us)

Markus

http://savagehenrymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/JarJar.jpeg

[Oberon]

We'll be hitting that moral question within the next few centuries when we start colonising Mars, if we find microbial lifeforms on Mars then what do we do? The ultimate goal of human existence on Mars would be to terraform the planet to suit us as much as we will transform ourselves to suit it, but in doing so we will drastically change the environment for these microbes and may even destroy them. It wouldn't be the first time in history that we've done that...and that's not even beginning to factor in cross-planetary contamination, although generally speaking we're pretty good at trying to cut the risk of that down.
Still, whatever might exist in the Trappist system it's not got radio or television before the 1970s.

You know, it's a shame we can't just gather up all the nuclear weapons in the world and put them on an Orion drive ship...would be a much better use for them than blowing each other to smithereens.
Of course, the downside is that an Orion drive ship is the space equivalent of a Volkswagen, so we will probably get fined for emissions breaches. :oops:

[Oberon]

http://savagehenrymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/JarJar.jpeg


:o

https://media.giphy.com/media/AcPT09jtaLbNK/source.gif

(Someone should really get those guys standing by the massive death laser blast a railing or something...talk about non-OSHE compliant (http://www.nealromanek.com/death-star-osha-report/))

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bSZXucTH4A

[dsawan]

They might harbor hostiles. Could be nomads wanting to sterilize us. from the nomad probe episode of star trek tos. or the khan noonian singhs.

[Kaptlt.Endrass]

ALIENS!

Let's be honest, I doubt that any sentient life out there, if it has the capability to get a spaceship in the air and to another planet light-years away, then I'm sure they've reached a point in society where it isn't 'KILL EVERYTHING!'

Who knows, maybe they have their own version of Subsim?

Of course, with our luck, we'd be visited by an extremely intelligent race that has never warred with one another, and they'd come see us and bang their heads on the nearest hard object.

[Catfish]

[...]
"It has occured to me lately I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities that both questions (the origin of consciousness in humans and of life from non living matter) might be brought into some degree of congruence. This is with the assumption that mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has always existed as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality the stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff. It ks the mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create: science, art, and technology making animals. In them the universe begins to know itself. ". George Wald.

I must say since Heisenberg's "Unschaerferelation" and the Higgs Bosons you cannot be sure about anything anymore. I mean we can still work of course with Newton's models, but... arrgh

Can we even say we see this, or do we create it by assuming it exists? :doh:
https://home.cern/topics/higgs-boson

Raises eyebrow: "Fascinating."