Posted on 10/06/2016 12:26:27 PM PDT by LibWhacker
No one will ever know for sure whether it has oceans. Who is going to take a trip to another star, knowing you will certainly die before ever arriving? What government could fund a 500 or 1,000-year mission for a stellar probe? This is fantasy, not science.
My guess is that it may not have oceans
Gravity pulls everything down into a rounded shape, for objects more massive than, say, 10% of earth’s mass, iirc.
Think of it as a giant spherical sucking machine, or vacuum cleaner, a very powerful one. Imagine what such a vacuum would do to a cloud of dust. The final clump of dust the vacuum cleaner created would be round, not having giant spiky tendrils of dust sticking out everywhere, because, if they even tried to form, they would be pulled down tight to the central mass, and wouldn’t stick out; it’d be a roundish ball of dust.
OTOH, something created by a less powerful vacuum cleaner, could be potato shaped, all lumpy, etc. Thus, planets are round. Asteroids, at least the smaller ones, have all kinds of shapes, potatoes, etc.
Like I say, no one will ever know.
To your question — absolutely. Why not? It’s a better cause IMO than most of the other crap government wastes money on.
Voyager,,,That is it.
Imagine that apparatus has not gotten stopped.
A big Universe...
Hey they are planning Mars but to dream of these things when our Nation needs to be saved from suicide....
gravity pulls everything towards the center
if it is big enough, it forms a globe
No one has to go there to get that information. Project Starchip in one such idea, not science fiction.
On a somewhat related note, anyone else reading the “Three Body Problem” series? Scifi books from a Chinese author that involve first contact with a civilization from the triple-star Centauri system who evolved with very unique problems due to the the unpredictable motion of the 3 stars near their planet. Very interesting stuff.
Man, their store people must have to change their seasonal displays like crazy!
Yes, just think about it. If you were born there you could legally drink alcohol at 8 months old (21 Proxima Centauri years old).
My wife read one of those. Loved it. Now she’s reading the other two.
Yeah I only read the first one. Going to pick up the other two today I think, I need some new reading material.
Whoa...EXACT distance the article says. They know so much. Will they apologize when they find out it is off by a few thousand miles.
Planet in star system nearest our Sun 'may have oceans'It also "may" have rainbows and unicorns.
But it's probably a barren, lifeless hulk.
Ancient astronaut theories say yes, lots and lots of oceans, and a race of intelligent dolphins with space ships, lots and lots of space ships, and ...
Warp speed. The numbers change by the episode.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive
A nice healthy atmosphere could mitigate some of that and extremophiles could, possibly, endure it without a heavy atmosphere. But life, if it's there, is probably going to be weirder than weird. The fact scientists are still talking about possible life on Titan tells me that well-adapted forms of life may very well be able to handle anything Proxima b throws at them!
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