/sci/ - Science & Math

fund it

Ignore them

we don't want no aliens

What I don't get is why we can't communicate with life from other planets through the internet.

>mass 3 times higher than earth's
>habitable

It best be spinning real fast... Also, how many lightyears away is it from earth?

3x the gravity man,
a nice place to train

>>1823416
What if they're sexy space babes though?!!?

I'm packing my bags. How many light years away is it again.

>>1823430
Approximately 20.

>>1823430

It's not spinning at all.

Name it Reach

>>1823452
no video game bullshit for a planet -.-

>>1823444
Planets that don't spin have a large habitable zone around a star. However on the surface there is only a sliver of habitable area. Also all the watter will migrate to the frozen side so really tidally locked planets are not habitable to water loving life. You could transform such a planet using huge arrays of mylar reflectors to redistribute the light.

>>1823452
No don't

>>1823444

Oh wow, if species were to develop on there, they'd be particulary strong and would kick our asses.

>>1823443

Looks like that destroys the dream of exploring another planet. Even if I'd live a hundred years, I don't believe we're able to travel at least at a third of c? Plus, living in a space ship for 80 years. Ah, the dreams. Can someone post "feels bad man.jpg"?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100929/sc_afp/usastronomyplanet_20100929210707

>With surface temperatures decreasing the further one goes toward the dark side of the planet and increasing as one goes into the light side, the most habitable part of the new planet would be the line between darkness and light, which is known as the "terminator".

It's like that planet from Chronicles of Riddick.

>>1823499

Are they gonna be super strong dummies?

>>1823499
They would probably need some kind of suit to survive Earth's thinner atmosphere and they would probably have a harder time adapting to space travel though.

FUCK YEAR WE FOUND RY'LOTH! Time to open up trad with the Twi'leks!

>>1823430 approximately 3 times earth's mass

That's a problem, and even worse this measurement was made with the doppler method, so 3x only represets the minnimum mass it can be.

Hey guys.
hey guys hear this
Guys.
Guys, the plan
guys.
How about.
Guys.
How about we not name it reach?
guys.
captcha: zeus reports

>>1823499
With our current technology, it would take us an estimated 2-3 months of thrusting rocket fuel 24/7 to reach 1/3c if my calculations are correct, hahaha.

>>1823430
Its about 20 light years away.

Its in tidal lock with its sun, so not spinning fast at all. One side is going to be allways facing away and cld, and one allways facing the sun and hot. We could allways live in the twilight though.

>>1823568

Reach was in the Epsilon Eridani system

>>1823569
Keep in mind you need to do all that thrusting again in reverse when you get there or you just fly right by.

Also, your calculations are probably wrong unless you took into account te fact that time dilation slows down the rate any thrusters operate at relative to statonary observers.

I have a plan. We're going to develop a colony of small space pods, and a large mothership. All built in space so we don't have to first overcome Earth's gravity or its atmosphere. Then when they're all built, we load a decent population onto it with doctors and everything, and we make ourselves a giant fuck-colony, centered around fucking, as to produce enough offspring of every age to survive the new and unknown environment of the planet. Deal?

>>1823432
>>1823430
The gravity also depends on the radius. If it is very large you are further from the centre and the gravity is less. Also, there's no reason at all why life couldn't evolve in gravity 3 times that of Earth's. Sure we wouldn't do very well there, but we evolved here. God damn use your brains.

>>1823585

FINALLY SOMEONE WITH A GOOD IDEA. JESUS.

>>1823585
>we end up arriving in about 120 years
>everyone on board is relatively uneducated and all of the great scientists and engineers have already died off
>the planet is already inhabited
It will be District 9, except we'll be the aliens.

Ah, splendid, you're already discussing it! /tg/ here, planning colonization games. Could use some numbers and speculation!

First, how long would it take to get there? Posit a generation ship with a hydrogen ramjet capable of 1.2g acceleration in perpetuity. How long's 20 light years gonna seem like shipboard, due to dilation? How long would it look like from earth? Don't forget the halfway flip for deceleration, we want to land there, not faceplant at a goofy chunk of c.

What's the weather? Tidal locked, so light-side, dark-side, and twilight band... average temp. is fairly low, so colonies are gonna be a ways into the lightside. Constant winds, obviously... free energy from windmills! But what about the hydrological cycle? Would it always rain/never rain? And what kinda life do you get in a place where the wind is as constant as gravity?

Article says not to worry overmuch about the gravity; I assume a larger radius compensates somewhat for the higher mass.

Obliged!

Guys. If there is alien life there, and it uses amino acids and carbohydrates (and they probably will have similar chemistry to us due to the liquid water)... then as soon as we step off the spaceship we're going to be eaten alive by a fuckton of bacteria that our immune systems have never encountered before. Viruses evolve to suit a specific host, but bacteria just need somewhere warm and moist to grow, like your respiratory tract.

TL:DR Habitable world = Local life will kill us.

I got an email about this from my school.

Their press release:
http://news.ucsc.edu/2010/09/planet.html

>>1823608
Like how all the Europeans died when they went to the New World...oh wait...

>>1823608
>bacteria just need somewhere warm and moist to grow

implying they evolved in a warm and moist climate/same pH as your system/same oxygen requirements as your system/etc

About 3 sizes bigger than earth. And 20.5 lightyears away. It's almost in our backyard!

If it even has a large lake of water, it's almost sure to have life. :D

Have a 3d volcano!

>>1823585
ok bro

but please let me finish my sandwich

>>1823617

They did die. A lot.

>>1823608
Not the case at all.

Our immune system is not a one trick pony that is so easily defeated by something it's never encountered before.

Our bodies will attack and mercilessly kill foreign bacteria, and it is far far far more likely that the alien bacteria will have trouble even surviving in the completely new and alien environment of our bodies.

More dangerous would be eating alien food with opposite chirality.

>>1823608
What's not to say we(humanity) would bring out diseases and kill off the native life? Forever making a non-habitual world to every planet we go too.
Feels bad man

>>1823654
How do you think that H1N1 really got around to us? You really believe that a pig was what caused it?

>>1823650
Damn Turians and their deadly space salads!

>>1823660
You sound like you don't even know what a virus is or how it targets certain species and not others.

Meteorology major here, this place sounds absolutely hardcore from a weather perspective. If there was enough liquid water on the daylight side, I'd suspect the spot directly facing the star would be full of storms and rainy as fuck all the time. If the atmospheric dynamics were strong enough, the nightside might be a shade more moderate in temperature, but last I checked, there was still some debate on the subject.

As for the gravity, it'd probably be more around 2 to 2.5 times the Earth's gravity given the mass and radius figures in the articles. That's not too terribly out of our league, but anything living there would make short work of any colonists in the time it would take to become accustomed to the gravity.

>>1823654

Why would we necessarily expose ourselves to the environment prematurely, without first establishing that we wouldn't adversely affect ourselves or the environment?

>The planet is tidally locked to the star, meaning that one side is always facing the star and basking in perpetual daylight, while the side facing away from the star is in perpetual darkness. One effect of this is to stabilize the planet's surface climates, according to Vogt.
OH MAN IMAGINE IF THERE WAS LIFE ON BOTH SIDES, RADICALLY DIFFERENT FROM ONE ANOTHER.

Gleise 581 is 8 billion years old. I don't know what the luminosity evolution is for these low mass stars, but I have a hard time believing the habitable zone has been fixed that whole time.

Dibs on naming.
I dub thee, Planet Theodore.

>>1823739

More than likely because there will be a large corporation pushing the people in question to do that very thing for monetary gain.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1009/1009.5733v1.pdf

the paper.

>>1823760
>>1823760
>>1823760
>>1823760
>>1823760
>>1823760
>>1823760
>>1823760
>>1823760
>>1823760

>>1823760

Colonize it, name it Arcadia.

It'll be called Reach as a homage to Halo

Planet Nigger

my mind is full of fuck. I WANT TO BELIEVE

meh, venus probably looks earthlike from afar

>>1823783
Name it RAPTURE

A planet with no gods or kings, only man free to do whatever he pleases.

fuck all the exoplanets so far.

let me know when we find something that is earth sized or smaller, because on a planet 3 times as massive as earth you could barely even walk around even if you didn't have to wear a heavy space suit.

>>1823444
It spins 360 degrees in the same amount of time it takes to orbit it's sun bro. Thats why one side is always facing the sun. Just like our moon.

The planet is tidally locked to the star, meaning that one side is always facing the star and basking in perpetual daylight, while the side facing away from the star is in perpetual darkness.

Cuz thats good.

>>1824674
The twilight area where they meet would be livable

Hah, I go to UCSC, and I'm totally going to go ask Vogt what his team is planning on naming it tomorrow.

That is, assuming he won't be swamped with other various people pestering him with questions on this day and night.

Although I already know that it's gonna be an International Astronomical Union decision. But still I bet the team will at least get to make the first suggestion and we'll see how it pans out. Knowing Santa Cruz, the astronomy faculty here is possibly having some beers and drawing the name out of a hat as I type. Or actually, they might have already done that weeks or months ago, whenever they first detected it and noticed its location.

I first heard it was 1.4 times Earth's mass, but haven't read the original article, so I might be wrong.

"Habitable" is used very loosely in this context. Tidal locking isn't a huge problem... although most of the planet is pretty hot or pretty cold all the time, there are definitely temperate regions, and people on Earth live in some hotter regions already. It seems likely that it has water, just because most planets do, but it can't get much sunlight (~1.4 AU from the star, which is low mass and already red), so Earth plants wouldn't grow there readily. Plus it probably doesn't have an oxygen atmosphere.

Still, it's awesome that such a planet exists so close to us. It suggests that there are going to be a lot more of them out there.

>>1824712

Yeah, the guys who discovered it were most surprised by how quickly it happened; they assumed that any Earthlike planets were rare as fuck period, but now they think upwards of 20% of all star systems might have one in the habitable zone.

The thing is, there is so much goddamn more than habitable zone + rocky planet required to be a life-supporting world. Which means that giant Mars or Venus-like places might be common, but a world with the right atmosphere and a magnetic core + a sun that doesn't fluctuate too much and isn't too bright etc... a million other factors out there would all need to come into play correctly.

Also when life arose on Earth there was pretty much no oxygen in our atmosphere. It was a reducing atmosphere that rained fucking cyanide in truly primordial days. All original life was anearobic, but cyanobacteria / algae farted out so much O2 that the planet's atmospheric chemistry changed and killed countless millions of organisms ill-suited for it, but of course life eventually adapted to this and here we are, breathing in an atmosphere composed of about 21% farts. Well they're not farts technically but I fancy that description because it better illustrates how life utterly changed the world.

I can only hope no white people go there in the distant future, to try to " encorage life" but end up fucking the entire planet up...

>>1824712

No, it's closer to the sun than earth is to our own. Which is why water could be liquid despite the sun being a red dwarf.

i hope i live long enough to see the day i step foot on that planet, which i will if i have anything to do with it. read up on the manhattan beach project

>>1824706
Hey I heard UCSC is a big party school which would normally make it uninteresting to me, but the astrophysics major there makes it my back-up choice for transfer because of TAG not working on my first. What are the related departments like? I mean, it doesn't sound that bad if they're discovering stuff like this.

Okay guys, it's up to us to figure out FTL travel

This "habital zone" shit is shit.

If Earth had no magnetic field, it would not be habitable by us. Yet it lies in the "habital zone". The composition of Earth is resonsible for its magnetic field.

This mean habitablity is not determined by the distance from a star. It is based on many factors.

The scientist's working on this are doing nothing but shit. Distance is about the only factor they can guess at, and once you learn how they guess at the distances you will know all this work is pretty fucking pointless.

What are the odds of this planet being habitable? This study increased those oddes from 0 to about .000000001% chance. PROGRESS!

>>1824803
>This study increased those oddes from 0 to about .000000001% chance.

which is, in fact, an infinite increase in odds. i'd say they are doing pretty well.

The question is guys.. does any of this really matter? We will all live and die on this Earth, and most likely we will die in a horrible war that we wage against each other.

So, instead of relying on vain hopes and useless dreams, we should try to do good in like while we can, and ignore the silliness.

>>1824818

>which is, in fact, an infinite increase in odds. i'd say they are doing pretty well.

Your understanding of math is pretty fucking retarded

>>1824824
Or better yet, direct some of our efforts to maintaining the stability of our existence until we are ready for such interstellar expeditions, while maintaining steady scientific progress. Everyone wins.

>>1824845
I would have to continue living on this fucking dirt ball, I do not win.

>>1824845

You have a good point! But unfortunately for us, the stability of our existence would depend mainly on regressing our technology to a less harmful state, but we as humans rather create tools of destruction and so called "ingenious" gadgets to fill in the gaps between such other gadgets.

The world most of us live in that post on here relies on the rest on the much of the other parts of the world not living like us, because it is literally impossible to afford the luxury of living in the U.S. and to give that to everyone in the world.

We will never ever be able to inhabit other planets, never be able to go back in time. Instead, we will be our own destruction...

As I said before, do not rely on vain hopes, for they are the assets of fools and idiots. Do good to your human brethren on this Earth, adopt good qualities and live by them, since that will be your only true salvation.

20 light years away? That actually sounds like its at a reasonable distance. Anyone think the old cryotube method used in movies could actually be used in real life too?

>>1823606

noko goes in the email slot newfag... get it right or get the fuck out faggot

>>1823608
That would be extremely unlikely actually. Various reasons:

1) Saying you can get sick from just any microorganism, even those that evolved on alien worlds, is tantamount to claiming that you stand a realistic chance of catching a disease that only affects trees
2) Your immune system viciously attacks foreign proteins. Rest assured that alien microbes would trigger immune reactions just like microbes here on Earth

>>1824690
Not necessarily. That small "habitable" band would be getting pounded by hurricane-force storms almost 24/7 thanks to the fact that you'd have an entire hemisphere's worth of very hot air hitting an entire hemisphere's worth of very cold air

>>1824887
Maybe, but we don't have the technology to do it yet. Well, actually we do have the technology to freeze you, it's just that we don't have the technology to freeze you and not rupture every cell in your body in the process.

Likely the only way we're ever getting there is via generational ships or traveling at a very significant proportion of light speed and thus aging a lot more slowly on our way over there.

Never change Yahoo

>Oh my goodness, did they see alien ships leaving the planet? Or maybe they actually have pictures of the life. Smells like funds are needed for further study, as in someone needs to keep their jobs! Give me a break a habitable planet. The earth is the only habitable planet, so quit dreaming and wishing you fools.

>>1824928

Man that guy is such a downer.
He might just be right though.

;_;

>>1824914

or hyperspace :D

>>1824914
>>1824941
We don't need to travel fast!

>>1824963

You say that as if its easy to fold space or something.

it would probably just be easier to travel fast

>>1824963
>>1824963
>>1824963
but wut happens wen u fold space out again? things'll be back to where they were.

>>1823360
PANDORA MOTHERFUCKERSSS!!!!
GONNA STEP INSIDE GLEISE 581g's ASSHOLE AND RAPE ALL THE OIL FROM IT!!

>>1824978
When you flatten it out again, both points go to their original distance apart.

>>1824975
You say that as if anyone's ever tried.

apparently, they're going to name the planet Goldilocks...

Can /sci/ come up with a better name? A legitimately better name, not LOLOLOL PANDORA or ARRAKIS LOL

>>1823608

Well in that case, we better cleanse it with nuclear fire before we drop our boys off.

GOD BLESS AMERICA

>>1824975
Here's a simple experiment I devised to show you just how easy it is! It can be done in the comfort of your own home.

>>1825005
planet faggoty faggot

>>1825005
Call it Soil.

Then Earth and Soil can team up and be bros and get terran all over the galaxy.

>>1823757

>Gleise 581 is 8 billion years old. I don't know what the luminosity evolution is for these low mass stars, but I have a hard time believing the habitable zone has been fixed that whole time.

No, the habitable zone moves over time as the star ages 581g just happens to be in the center right now. I don't know the exact numbers either but i do know that smaller mass stars evolve slower than high mass stars. This means that Gleise 581g could be habitable for hundreds of millions or even billions of years after Earth passes out of Sol's habitable zone.

I think we should launch a voyager-esque space probe to take close up pictures of the planet. By the way, what's the top speed of something we can launch into space anyway?

>>1824788

Ah, I went right to bed after making that post, but am surprised this thread is still here today.

Physics and astronomy is what this place does best, actually; astrophysics in particular is consistently rated among the highest in the nation here. The way that overall ratings work though is an average of the entire school's curriculum; I mean places like Davis or Santa Barbara technically get more points than us for having a better arts or business program and other shit like that. As far as the sciences are concerned this place is fine. Even though a big piece of the school budget got slashed last year (all UCs got dinged due to the state being broke), practically nothing got clipped off the physics and biological programs budgets while a bunch of liberal arts stuff got axed.

The place is in a weird kind of divide, on the one hand its main function is actually mostly scientific research, however, because of the location (Santa Cruz itself is hippie/bro/surfer city capital of the world), all sorts of riffraff come here who in turn lower the ratings. It's not a very subtle divide either. For example the 1st floor bathroom of Engineering has stuff like this all over the walls sometimes.

The place is just fine as far as high-end sciences are concerned. I mean, my genomics professor was the leader of the team that published the first-ever draft of the Neanderthal genome last May. He mentioned that Ozzy Osborne recently had his genome sequenced, and they were analyzing it to see if they could find traces of neanderthal in him.

as a biofag, im going to say not only is there probably life on this planet, but ill bet theres life within our own solar system. im very confident.

and yes i kno the picture is bullshit. no aliens have visited earth

>>1828145

And this is why we are aggressively against the liberal arts faggots here. Their notable presence induces a somewhat /sci/-like divide here between us and them.

Liberal arts hipsters (which are in dangerously high concentrations around some parts of campus) don't like what they simply perceive as "The Man" having a huge influence over the school. Hurr durr protect the aminals etc.

(Self-sage due to now wholly offtopic)