Posted on 11/05/2013 6:51:23 AM PST by BenLurkin
All of the potentially habitable planets found in their survey are around K stars, which are cooler and slightly smaller than the sun, Petigura said. But the team’s analysis shows that the result for K stars can be extrapolated to G stars like the sun.
...
If the stars in the Kepler field are representative of stars in the solar neighborhood, then the nearest (Earth-size) planet is expected to orbit a star that is less than 12 light-years from Earth and can be seen by the unaided eye. Future instrumentation to image and take spectra of these Earths need only observe a few dozen nearby stars to detect a sample of Earth-size planets residing in the habitable zones of their host stars.
“For NASA, this number – that every fifth star has a planet somewhat like Earth – is really important, because successor missions to Kepler will try to take an actual picture of a planet, and the size of the telescope they have to build depends on how close the nearest Earth-size planets are,” said Andrew Howard, astronomer with the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii. “An abundance of planets orbiting nearby stars simplifies such follow-up missions.”
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
Well, it was a stupid parody.
My statement is just trying to show you that there is plenty of stuff we still don’t know, but you keep going back to how it is too expensive to travel to mars.
yes, it is very expensive to travel to mars, using CURRENT TECHNOLOGY.
But my statement is just that there may be some new technology that may make it faster and cheaper that has not yet been invented, while yours mocked with a fairy analogy.
In 1900 if you tried to tell people you could cross the ocean in a couple of hours or go to the moon they might say “sure only if you ride a magical unicorn”
“But my statement is just that there may be some new technology that may make it faster and cheaper that has not yet been invented, while yours mocked with a fairy analogy.”
Yes, but what you are missing is that, as far as science is concerned, finding a cheap and easy way to travel faster than light is just as likely as finding a candy forest filled with purple unicorns. Just finding any way to travel faster than light has a likelihood as close to zero as just about anything you can think of. That’s why my parody is not as stupid as you think.
So we are not talking about a likely hypothetical versus a baseless fantasy, we are talking a baseless fantasy versus another baseless fantasy.
ok so you don’t believe technology will ever advance so far as to allow FTL travel, and FTL will never happen... OK, that’s all you needed to say
I remember that they wanted to close the patent office after the steam engine was created because everything that could be invented was already invented.
It’s not a matter of technology advancing. It’s a matter of physical impossibilities.
Will technology some day allow me to create energy or matter from nothing? Nope.
Will technology some day allow me to create a perpetual motion machine? Nope.
Will technology some day allow me to travel faster than light? Nope.
‘Physical impossibility’ based on current understanding of the way the Universe works. In 4d spacetime the speed of light is a speed limit, but Physicists already know ‘something’ travels faster than light speed in order to communicate between two particle, so there is a distinct possibility that dimensional limits may be breeched, allow something ‘not in 4D spacetime’ to move about or effect uate at greater than light speed. If Guth is correct, the entire universe once moved faster than light speed.
“Physicists already know ‘something’ travels faster than light speed in order to communicate between two particle”
Not quite. There is the “spooky action at a distance” going on in quantum physics, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to anything traveling faster than light. It may appear that way to us, but it doesn’t mean that is the true explanation. To a photon, any travel would appear instantaneous, but that is not what is happening from the perspective of an outside observer. So just because something appears to violate an inviolable rule from one perspective, does not mean it is actually doing so.
Also, even if we could demonstrate that something can travel faster than light, it wouldn’t change the fact that we, being massive objects, can never hope to do the same. We’re stuck obeying the laws that apply to matter, not the laws that might apply to some theoretical thing that can’t be either matter or energy, and that we really have no clue what it might be or how we might go about detecting it.
For a significant length of time, the speed of sound was said to be a barrier, that exceeding the speed of sound would cause a human body to be crushed. ‘I find your lack of faith disturbing ...’
“For a significant length of time, the speed of sound was said to be a barrier, that exceeding the speed of sound would cause a human body to be crushed.”
Sure, but you’re talking about two entirely different kinds of barriers. There is a barrier at the speed of sound; that was no myth. If you simply accelerated a human body past the speed of sound, they really would be crushed, because the medium would not be able to get out of the way fast enough, and the human body is not aerodynamic enough to “cut” through the medium and remain intact. That’s a simple physical barrier that human ingenuity managed to find a way to bypass.
The speed of light is not such a physical barrier, because it is there no matter what medium you are in, or if there is no medium at all. It is possible that it is an effect of some non-physical medium, a temporal ether or something like that, but there is no way that we can simply bypass it like we have the sound barrier. If the most energetic, least massive, least reactive things in the universe can’t break the barrier, then we have no chance of doing it.
I think all this talk of going “faster than light” is really missing the point, because people are not looking at things from the proper perspective. We desperately want to get to light speed, but in the 3-dimensional, physical universe. On the other hand, I deduce we’re already moving at the speed of light if we take into account our motion through time. The sum of our motion in all dimensions is c, and the sum of the motion of anything in all dimensions is c for that matter. C is not a “speed limit”, so much as it is just “the speed”. It’s the speed of everything, you can’t go faster, and you can’t go slower, you can only change the direction of your travel between the temporal and spatial dimensions. That’s the real revelation that should be deduced from the length/time dilation effect and relativity.
They find appropriate planets around 1/5 of the K stars and none of the G stars so they extrapolate that there are appropriate planets around 1/5 of the G stars...
Maybe they’re in the wrong line of work.
the first two are impossible.
the last is mathematically possible
“the last is mathematically possible”
Mathematically? What does that even mean? We are physical objects, not numbers. It needs to be physically possible, and it isn’t.
You're one of the very few who "get it."
Ever read Rare Earth?
Is that by Hugh Ross?
Study: 8.8 Billion Earth-size, Just-right Planets
Thu, 11/07/2013 - 3:29pm
Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer
http://www.scientificcomputing.com/news/2013/11/study-88-billion-earth-size-just-right-planets
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