Our Galaxy is FULL of Earth-Like Planets!

Discussion in 'Science and Technology' started by skip, Apr 25, 2007.

  1. Asmodean

    Asmodean Slo motion rider

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    I understand, but how did they get the assumption that there could be water and a similar temperature if they only know the size of the planet and the distance of it from the star?
     
  2. wandrnshaman

    wandrnshaman Member

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    colors and clouds, asmodean :)

    It is possible your doubts are correct and Einstein's Theory of Relativity is wrong. As far as the speck of dust thing...If everything in the Universe is moving and the movements can be predicted, The universe could be mapped, fed into a computer which would plot a safe course. With no air to provide friction (only, like you said, the vacuum of space) a minimal amount of thrust provide constant acceleration...even the amount of energy it takes to power a watch but it may take a very long time, theoretically speaking, of course.
     
  3. Asmodean

    Asmodean Slo motion rider

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    So they actually saw the planet? Well, seems pretty logical if you want to determin what kind of planet it is :). But what I know of it is that they only discovered it by the movement of the star. That's also why I wondered how they found out it's earthlike.
     
  4. fat_tony

    fat_tony Member

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    Thanks for the relativity lesson, let me have a go at this relativity lark. One postulate of special relativity is that the speed of light is seen as a constant from any inertial reference frame. This meas that no matter how fast you go light always seems to be traveling at the same speed relative to you. So yo can get to 99%c, 99.99999999c but NOT 100%c. An object such as a photon that has no mass will travel at the speed of light. So if you want to travel at the speed of light then you must be massless. I wont use the phrase pure energy as the boundary between matter and energy is somewhat blurred anyway. Though dont confuse this, as you get fast you wont turn into pure energy. Fear not there is an invariant quantity in special relativity that is, E^2 + p^2*c^2 = (mc^2)^2.
     
  5. sentient

    sentient Senior Member

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    Is the WRONG ANSWERRRRRRRRR !!!!! you just lost tonights star prize, now folks for the star prize of $300,000,000,000 and a trip to the planet under discussion, can anyone explain in terms a lunk head could understand, exactly why a spaceship could not accelerate to the speed of light because if E=Mc^2 then the spacecraft would accumulate so much mass it would become the heaviest object in the universe and would therefore no reach lightspeed due to gravitational forces and the accumulation of space debris

    Its the reason that planets dont reach light speed and neither do other space debris

    Ok will we find a winner on - GET 2 THAT PLANET ! ?
     
  6. wandrnshaman

    wandrnshaman Member

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    ...and I was waiting for your reply here, sediment. I'm interested in how you can prove your statements and if you can as readily as you disprove others. Your words border less than factual though quite bitter:
    http://www.hipforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=232735&page=1&pp=10

    ...Are you speaking from experience or is another unproven theory? I'm not arguing on the internet. It is just that the tone of your posts overshadows anything valuable you might have to say. Any 12 year old can be an asshole. If all you have is a theory you have permission to tuck tail again and maybe I'll see ya in another thread.
     
  7. Share the Warmth

    Share the Warmth Member

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    Can't wait for the Vatican to trip over themselves in the next 100 years while they update the bible to account for this.
     
  8. Flight From Ashiya

    Flight From Ashiya Senior Member

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    If you could travel faster than the speed of light couldn't you go back in time because time is the movement of light?.

    Going back to the header title-hey,let's not enourage The Whitehouse,Vatican,Kremlin,Buckingham Palace etc.that there may be another habitable Planet in this galaxy as it may make the wholesale destruction of Planet Earth through Global Warming,Nuclear War etc. a little less unpalatable for the super rich & priviliged.
     
  9. skip

    skip Founder Administrator

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    I have to update this. It isn't known whether the newly discovered planet has any water yet. It's the temperature range that most interests scientists. It is the range in which liquid water COULD exist.
     
  10. fat_tony

    fat_tony Member

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    I think all we know from the gravitational measurements is the planets size and probably some measure of its distance. By other measurements we'll know the luminosity of the star. From this you can have a guess as working out it sufrace tempertaure. But its always worth remembering that this alone isnt enough to be certain of the temperature. Think of Earth and Venus from light years away could look very similar, and indeed if our atmospheres were the same they could be, of course Venus would always be hotter. But due to the chemical composition of its atmosphere Venus is more like the hottest parts of Mercury. I may read this paper as it seems like im the only person left on Earth who hasnt.
     
  11. Shane99X

    Shane99X Senior Member

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    so then we have no idea if it's earth-like or not?
    could be another mars or venus?
     
  12. ronald Macdonald

    ronald Macdonald Banned

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    Lets face it, the place is so remote it hardly matters and would take about 15 trillion years to get there in a ship of todays speeds. No-one on the planet believes light speed is possible apart from some idiots who cant tell the difference between an arse and an elbow, and some people who can but just read too much sci fi.

    So what does it matter? Even if you beam messages over there
    like this
    "Hello space aliens help we've screwed our planet up"
    it will take 40 years for them to say
    "Oh shit, we've never had that problem here, sorry have you tried phoning a plumber"

    20 years to get there - 20 years for the reply

    so little information could be conveyed because first of all youd have to know their language, mathematical systems, assumptions, and culture, before huge tracts of data could be swapped. So whats the big deal?
     
  13. Asmodean

    Asmodean Slo motion rider

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    Uhm, knowledge?
     
  14. ronald Macdonald

    ronald Macdonald Banned

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    well you gonna spend shitloads of money that could have provided hospitals and pollution controls into looking at some shit heap of a planet 20 light years away - oh dear thats deplorable - science needs to be focused on practical applications that will benifit humanity
     
  15. fat_tony

    fat_tony Member

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    Someone has to do the groundwork. If the Curies and Bequerel hadn't started messing around with radioactivity over a century ago, we wouldn't have radiotherapy now. The first particle accelerator is now known as the TV (although LCD is taking over). Your right we do need to people to work on the present but the stuff that we will rely on in 100 years needs to be started now, what we need is a bit of everything. Otherwise we'll still be using radiotherapy while listening to our IPods and driving around with petrol cars. The entire electronics and semi-conductor industries of the 20th/21st Centuries are based on purely academic concepts of the late 19th and early 20th century. Ecologists and Economists don't agree on much but one thing they do agree on is that the Earth can't hold us forever, the exact time varies depending on the assumptions you use. Though its a fair best that if everyone wants to live a 'western' lifestyle with current technology we'll need more than one Earth. Of course technology will improve, and push this boundary back, but the day will come when we need to leave, thats not a trivial task and it could well take centuries.
     
  16. ronald Macdonald

    ronald Macdonald Banned

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    yeah but I mean come on - the first light speed starships are probably a thousand years from being built on earth and we dont have that much time - seriously - even the best of scientific estimates suggest huge numbers of people will be wiped out in the next 40 years due to climate change. Posibly up to 1/3 of the present population#

    its a bit airy fairy to suggest we should still be pandering to the notion that our answers are out there in the universe trillions of years away
     
  17. fat_tony

    fat_tony Member

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    I've not heard anything that severe but I agree that people could suffer, though there is more than global warming at work, we also have to fold in the effect of the massive population that now exists. Which of course is tied to global warming, but I think of global warming of a symptom of the number of people, not the root cause itself. Many of the challenges i'd argue are social and engineering. As far as transportation goes there are a raft of alternatives to petrol cars, some reasonable concept cars are now in production, there its the political will to build the infrastructure. To some extent the same can be said for power, Nuclear power is mature, though waste is a problem its carbon free. Solar is coming on nicely as is wind, with a lot of renewables its a matter of making more and more efficient components as they are inherently harder to extract energy from. Fusion has a lot of work to be done. A big problem is just feeding the world, unfortunately at a time when we should be using ever more intensive farming techniques the west has developed a taste for organic food, which pesticide free it maybe it does use more land. Feeding the world this way is not an option, there'd be no forests left. Well we could do it pesticide free, but the intensity of farming will have to increase massively.
     
  18. ronald Macdonald

    ronald Macdonald Banned

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    and your point is ?

    I mean are you suggesting we should just spend millions gazing at this planet because its difficult solving the problems on earth
     
  19. heartsnotfarts

    heartsnotfarts Member

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    See "Drake Equation".
     
  20. trekker

    trekker Intrepid Traveler

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    I think there must be planets like ours in the Universe. They may have lifeforms. These lifeforms may be even more sick and destructive that we are. Why should we be in such a hurry to find them?
     

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