Looking for a home off-world? Take your pick: Astroboffins estimate there are nearly 6bn Earth-likes in the Milky Way There may be more than five billion Earth-like planets that are rocky, potentially habitable and orbit main-sequence stars like our Sun scattered across the Milky Way, according to the latest estimates. Astronomers from The University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada, arrived at that figure by combing through old data …
Actually, getting to them will probably be the lesser of your worries unless you just want to commit suicide expensively. Ecosystems are complicated, and finding a niche is hard even on Earth where all life has fundamentally co-evolved. Hard in the sense that there are masses of failures, both at the species and the individual level. This will be all the more the case for an entirely alien species (us) on a distant planet with its own evolutionary history.
Even if the lovely fantasy of a perfect human-supporting habitat devoid of competitors were to be found, staying a live long enough to take advantage of it would be a serious challenge as adaptation takes generations to accomplish. Either way, we should expect more than half of the human settlers to die before they reproduce - probably vastly more than half, so we'd have to send huge populations of settlers with a known high probability of snuffing it as part of the deal.
Only on Star Trek are small human communities able to settle stably on alien planets, and that's just because the writers ignore the science.
So you're saying if we ignore science then we can do it, right?If that's the case, the Government seem like the ones in the best position to get us there. .... logicalextreme
That's an extremely perverse and subversive fuzzy lazy logic exercised there, amigo, which requires more immediate action from actors, both state and non-state, sooner rather than later because of the true nature on Earth of both elected and fascist governments alike for they be both parasitic and inevitably deadly self-destructive, hence the rush needed to get anything planned long term done ‽ .
“You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity, by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives for not working for, another person must work for without receiving.The government cannot give anybody anything that the government does not first take from someone else.
When half of the people get the idea they do not have to work, because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work, because someone else is going to get what they work for, that my friends is the beginning of the end of any nation.”
And they just can't help themselves from taking and using future generations wealth to pay for present situations which are predicated upon past gross practices.
And they just can't help themselves from taking and using future generations wealth to pay for present situations which are predicated upon past gross practices.
Amen to that AMFM, in addition they certainly cant help foray into veritable Vatican exploits of exponential learnings lurking in live operational virtual environments, invoking torture and torment and taking innocent individuals on battalion spread betting human fox hunts for estranged entertainment.
Just as well we dont have the Church Comittee in blighty to hold those ultimately accountable with mass MK Ultra experiences and experimentation so blatantly wielded is it not?
Quite so, CT. But to imagine it not an embarrassment to have a Church Comittee in blighty to hold those ultimately accountable with mass MK Ultra experiences and experimentation so blatantly wielded tangling with a Vatican type operation, is surely evidence of a lack of necessary intelligence in both required in order to proceed.
The Vatican appears presently to be somewhat currently cuckolded rather than reigning rampant in the Realm ......... and that is surely as a result of deficient top down leadership/Papal Impotence/Immaculate Virgin See Blindness.
No rules says you cant live on a planet if you have to wear a suit outside.
I personally am ill equiped for a sunny day or a winter's night on this planet without some protection against the natural environment.
I suspect we will make the moon and mars habitable in some ways, as we make this planet unbearable without protection outside.
I should point out that both Venus and Mars would be considered to be in the "habitable zone" around our own star.
TBF the authors probably had a bit more detail in the original publication, such as an actual definition of "earth-like", which I suspect was along the lines of "rocky planet with the possibility of liquid water". Fun to think about though.
I think it's been posited that we could potentially live in a particular part of Venus's atmosphere, in some sort of ridiculously high treehouses, if we were really bored and due to a budgeting error suddenly had an infinity of money to spend.
Down nearer the surface…well, I seem to recall that the Venera probes that managed to land were all fairly quickly crushed by the density of the atmosphere.
I think it's been posited that we could potentially live in a particular part of Venus's atmosphere, in some sort of ridiculously high treehouses, if we were really bored and due to a budgeting error suddenly had an infinity of money to spend.
But that's old-fashioned capitalism and economic thinking. Central banks already discovered we have infinite money, just a finite amount of practical things to spend it on. In a post-scarcity future, we'd have a near infinite amount of resources, and different mediums of exchange. So instead of promising to pay the bearer of £1 err.. £1, it could be lifting 1lb of <something> from surface to space. Which would still give banks something to gamble on based on local gravity rates.
Or, given the number of planets just in the Milky Way, everyone could be offered their own planet in exchange for their labor. Delivery not included, refer to travel & subsisdence schedule and royalty table to understand your earn-out.
But it's fun stuff that SF writers have addressed, amongst others. Like what has value in an interplanetary or interstellar economy, and what would be the exchange rate? Things that are currently scarce wouldn't be. Peter F Hamilton's Fallen Dragon has some interesting themes of value in a post-scarcity and post-FTL future.
In a post-FTL future nothing has value because the resulting causality-violation means you can fuck with the past so games of chance, like the stock market, stop working.
(I know, you meant special magic unphysical sci-fi FTL which conveniently lets you do the going-to-the-stars thing without the inconvenient build-a-timemachine thing which is an immediate consequence of it and is what you'd really want to to (if you don't get to work sending information about markets back in time so you can win the stock market and take over the world someone else will, and you'll be their slave (literally)). I read books like that too, but you have to ignore any predictions they make because of huge holes like this.)
I read books like that too, but you have to ignore any predictions they make because of huge holes like this.
But.. but.. I guess there's a variation on Fermi's Paradox. So if travelling to the past were possible, someone would already have done it. Unless there were time cops, who'd prevent tampering with causality. I suspect Joanna Lumley of being one. Or someone may be transmitting tachyons with vital information to us so our future selves can save our present ones. Or it's proof of branching universes, and it's been done, yet we remain stubbornly in our original time line.
Or it's been done. But our future selves decided to redefine both Imperial and Metric units as legacy values, set sail for where the Earth was, and missed.
But OK, so FTL travel is something of a dream to get around the vastness of space. But to an extent, the idea that we couldn't exceed the speed of light is also SF.. albeit the 'S' is rather stacked against it. But who knows, some day, Elon may create the infinite improbability drive that just keeps accelerating.
Either way, the stock markets get more interesting with commodity futures.. But there's also historical precedent for this, ie trade ships getting faster, then communications aiding price discovery. I think it'd still leave Earth in an interesting position. So assuming colonies become self-sufficient, they wouldn't need Earth, but Earth would need their resources.. But why trade? Or what to trade? I think that would leave a market for luxuries, so genuine Earth champagne, or the original Mona Lisa, but it's fun stuff to think about.
Yes those stories – the ones with time police or branching universes or ... – those are the interesting ones, the ones which take the trouble to explain away why we can't just bargain FTL communication into sending information into our own past with technology we could, in principle, build now. The ones that just drop FTL travel in to make a better space opera without addressing the consequences can be fun to read but they are just space operas. I'm not against them – I've read many – I just think they're not plausible.
Neither Venus or Mars are 'habitable' you are correct. They both, however, lie in the habitable zone of our solar system. Which is, AIUI, defined as they get enough solar radiation to allow liquid water to exist on the planetary surface.
Their human habitability shows just how little that 'habitable zone' designation means. It's a lower bound - nothing more.
Let's not repeat the European exploitation of Americas, or Arabs in Africa moving south. Ethically would it be right to settle without an invite?
It's likely anywhere able to really support life would be teaming with life of its own. Likely the existing plants and animals would only be good for fats, sugars/carbohydrates and maybe protein. They'd likely lack suitable vitamins and amino acids. Even here not all plants or animals can sustain humans, you'd likely die just living on rabbit. Animals here also have differing needs of vitamins, amino acids and things that are toxic.
However, as C.S. Lewis remarked, perhaps the interstellar distances are a quarantine system. We have no evidence that any sort of interstellar travel other than a mostly coasting Generation ship is possible. We need to sort out our own problems here instead of exporting people and their associated shortcomings.
Interesting science.
We need to sort out our own problems here instead of exporting people and their associated shortcomings.
And if it turns out most of our problems are due to being cooped up on one increasingly overcrowded rock, with some trying to carve out their own niche, others trying to climb to the top of the heap no matter whose face they step on?
Then we're not going to make it. Because despite the dreams of various fantasists this is almost certainly all we will ever have.
We probably will make it as a species until the next big meteorite strike: even quite bad human-driven events (flat-out nuclear war) probably won't kill everyone, and the worst plausible climate change leaves hundreds of millions alive. We almost certainly won't make it as a civilisation.
If you do the sums, you'll see that the likelihood of our radio waves being detectable even at the nearest star is slim to zero. They might detect our oxygen, water, CO2, nitrogen and industrial pollution via spectroscopic analysis. SETI using radio is pointless unless Aliens arrive at the edge of the Solar system.
I remember when they confirmed the first exoplanet (90s) which means I remember the time when it was unknown if planets like earth were very rare or even unique. I'm not even that old... now we not only take their existance for granted, we know they are pretty commonplace.
How drastically this particular field has evolved in only 20ish years is pretty amazing, many of you have children who are older, when one considers what a huge impact it has on our view of the universe.
Me too! I remember the episode of Horizon from 1996 that dealt with it, "Planet hunters". I still have a digitised copy which I occasionally watch for nostalgic reasons, and it is amazing to see how far we have come.
At the time of that episode, they still had no idea how many planets there were out there, most stars they investigated seemed to have none. Finding the first ones (AFAIR, it was orbiting a pulsar), was a serious event, even though they had no hope of harbouring life.
Now it seems almost every star has some kind of exoplanet, we have so many we need machines to keep track of them, and keep finding more and more planets in existing data.
I've just been looking at my copy of Misner, Thorne & Wheeler. There is a spooky footnote in the introduction which must have been added late in the publication process, saying 'As of April 1973, there are significant indications that Cygnus X-1 and other compact x-ray sources may be black holes.': when they wrote the book there were no known black holes, and I don't think everyone even thought they were physically plausible. I bought it in 1985, Hawking conceded his bet that Cygnus X-1 was not a black hole in 1990, and Thorne Weiss & Barish won the Nobel prize in 2017 for the direct detection of gravitational waves, from BH-BH mergers among other things.
I've said this before but we're living through a golden age for astronomy and astrophysics. All the theoretical physicists who mourn the lack of progress in fundamental physics are just not paying attention: something that some astronomer observes or has observed is going to be the key which leads to the next big revolution in fundamental physics. They've already observed things which mean that the form of the equations of GR is now different than the one in MTW (there's no index entry for 'cosmological constant' in that book that I can see).
The universe, and galaxies like our Milky Way are literally teaming with life, Even if only 1% of what they imply actually has sentient life, that's an awful lot still. We just havent found it yet, because let's be honest, humanity is probably the equivilant of a neanderthal in comparison to many other civilisations.
Question your assumptions and define your terms. Tiny changes in a planet's geology and chemistry would have profound implications of the development of life and thus ideas like sentience. Even taking the temporal dimension into account, our solar system is relatively young, this does not imply that things could have started elsewhere much earlier while taking a similar enough path, especially if some of the universal constants turn out to be slightly less than constant in spacetime.
That said, I'm sure the universe will continue to surprise us.
Maybe if a world that was never hit by an asteroid hears us then they will send a big spaceship to pick us up, probably piloted by a T-Rex (not Marc Bolan). Be careful though, it might only accept travelers who are chocolate coated to make a nice snack when they arrive on the new Earth-like world.
"Never hit by an asteroid" doesn't necessarily mean there were no mass extinctions and reshuffling of the biosphere: Volcanoes can do that too, and you can't avoid volcanism (because liquid core, because magnetic field, without which your atmosphere tends to take a hike making life impossible. See Mars).
Also climate is apparently quite unstable on the (geological) long run (ice ages, hot periods, etc.), so life is probably going to successively try several, wildly different solutions to the environmental challenges present at any given time.
My point is, we have no chance to imagine what we might find on those far-away "habitable" planets. I mean, we're still baffled by the things we discover living on our own planet...
That's a good point. Is today's climate hospitable to dinosaurs? If it's not, and if the dinosaur-killing event didn't have really long-term (millions of years: obviously it had large shorter-term effects)) effects on the climate then they wouldn't be here now anyway.
> they wouldn't be here now anyway
I'm no paleontologist but from what I heard, some of the strange creatures which have existed in the past were only possible due to the increased temperature and oxygen levels of that time. Indeed, huge cold-blooded lizard-type creatures would obviously only be possible in very hot climates, and animals which breathe through the skin, like insects, can only grow as big as the current oxygen levels allow. And so on.
Given it's our own planet which has gone over time through all those very different phases (and certainly hasn't finished doing so yet!), it is clear that "Goldilocks" planets out there will display a astounding variety of ever-changing situations, climates, and thus ecosystems.
> Not all reptiles are cold-blooded
Sure, but a big part is, and my point was just about the environment limiting what life type you might encounter. For instance woolly mammoths would have a hard time in the present times at temperate latitudes (abundant sweat+wool causing them to shrink until they eventually become purse pets for rich ladies).
Presumably meant to be a comment on 'For years, the internet giants have held on dear to their get-out-of-jail-free card. Here are those trying to take that away,' but somehow ended up putting it here, instead.
... be sure to first check their library and verify they don't have a book called "To Serve Man."
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