Oh bucket! Unpack the suitcases. TRAPPIST-1 planets too wet to support life New research published in Nature Astronomy has poured, er, cold water on hopes that it may be possible to detect life on Earth-sized planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system. The planets might be just too wet. There was considerable excitement a year ago, when NASA's veteran Spitzer Space Telescope spotted seven Earth-sized planets …
Well, if we're to send a Generation Ship or Seed Ship to another system, it seems all we need is water, rock and energy to survive. We will have found some alternative to a magnetosphere,too, to protect us from those pesky waves and particles. A lush green planet is just a bonus.
Still, by the time we're in a position to do that, we'll have had plenty of experience living in domes* or caves on Mars so we'll know if spending your whole life in a giant Centre Parcs will drive you nuts or not.
*Buckminster Fuller on BBC's Horizon:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01z2ltf
Oceans and land are a narrow window to aim at. You either end up with a water world or a hunk rock. (Remember earth is only a fraction of a percent of water. If you were looking at it through a telescope, you'd probably write off the water as an error and conclude it was as dry as mars.)
They do give a graph in the paper. No amount of error is going to give f and g continents. b and c could get there. But, if their assumptions hold, the balance of probabilities is "land" is a long way down.
(Remember earth is only a fraction of a percent of water. If you were looking at it through a telescope, you'd probably write off the water as an error and conclude it was as dry as mars.)
Given that looking through a telescope at Earth you see a mostly green and blue planet, I doubt that you could conclude that.
...and with Earth lit up like a disco ball from the cities light pollution.
And if they can see that, you can do a specto and measure the man made products in the atmosphere, they may even wonder what the brief massive flashes that were our above ground nukes going off were (depending on light year distance and scattering).
After all, if we can't complain about it being too wet then we can certainly complain about it being too cold, and it'll still be light years (ha!) ahead of a typical British summer.
I can even think of a few people I'd like to send there, too.
Esteemed Author» To put that into context, if you were to wring out the Earth, you'd find that less than 0.7 per cent of our world is water.
Really, fancy you forgetting that the Earth is not actually hollow (as is commonly believed) but actually filled up with water so that our Lizard Overlords have somewhere to rule from.
"With a crushing lack of romance, scientists named the planets b, c, d, e, f, g and h."
That's the standard astronomical convention for naming stellar/planetary systems. The parent star is 'a'. (It gets more complicated for a binary star.)
If they become significant, due to us going there, or 'someone' coming from there, they might get a more interesting name.
Did I miss the memo? I though life evolved in water, then eventually moved to land. Does life require a tidal margin?
As for us, surely this thing called a "ship" can handle living on the surface of an eternal ocean.
Or by "habitable" are we now requiring that a Club Med already be set up for us when we get there?
So confused.
0.7% Water....Earth?.....Really?
Can anyone confirm this figure, as that seems plain wrong to me? (admittedly I'm not a boffin)
I thought that there was around 76% water on the face of the Earth (Just looking at it from the perspective of land to sea surface-visible ratio), and potentially up to 7 times more water in the mantle (than on the surface of Earth), and while I am not using the 76% figure as the base of that 'upto' 7 times (which would be a false result), it seems to me that there must be a far greater amount of water by mass, than 0.7%.
I know there is a lot of other stuff on Earth (pesky rocks 'n stuff), but 0.7% sounds more like a figure for Mars,
I'm not a scientist, so please forgive my ignorance, it may be I am missing something entirely, and that probably shows, but even 7% doesn't strike me as being accurate. If I was to take a guess....which I am....I would have thought in the region of a fifth of the World's matter would be water (including the H2O in the atmosphere).
What's the average depth of the world's ocean? 1 km maybe? Compare that to the 6000-some km radius of the globe. Well actually it's a ball, so the ratio is (r1^3 - r2^3) / r1^3 == 1 - r2^3/r1^3 . Where r1 = outer radius at sea level, r2 = at average depth. Anything under the ocean floor is mostly solid rock. Till the depth where it melts. Oh wait... that would be about 0.05 % of water... :-)
Thank you for your responses,
I mentioned Earth's mantle, because a few years back I remember watching a documentary which claimed potentially 7 times more water exists in the mantle than on the surface, however, new research suggests approximately the same amount of water exists between the upper and lower mantle boundary, which would mean, if true, that the figure should be doubled to 0.14% approx (not a fifth admittedly, and much lower than I originally thought).
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2133963-theres-as-much-water-in-earths-mantle-as-in-all-the-oceans/
Thanks for the article and the feedback, I'm off to do more research on this as it's fascinating stuff!
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