Beyond Earth: Webb Space Telescope Detects Key Molecules on Exoplanet K2-18 b

Scitech Daily ^ | SEPTEMBER 12, 2023 | By SPACE TELESCOPE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

[Red Badger]

Exoplanet Ping!.................

[Beowulf9]

God hasn’t looked here lately, took a look and thought ‘I’ve got to start over, it’s a wreck down there’.

[The Louiswu]

“120 light-years from Earth...” at Warp factor 7, 686 times the speed of light it will only take us 67 days to get there...oh wait...

[reed13k]

I’m struggling with this article. It states “8.6 times as massive as Earth”. Saturn is ~9x Earth, and Neptune is ~4X Earth, so I don’t understand why they call this one a sub-Neptune planet.

[NWFree]

Which means this data is older than your grandmother

[Red Badger]

The writer is confusing mass with volume I think................

[reed13k]

Ah - yeah I just caught the diameter reference of 2.5.

[Telepathic Intruder]

Neptune is 17 earth masses.

[Carl Vehse]

The usual tapdancing hype.

[Red Badger]

[Verginius Rufus]

C-SPAN recently re-aired a scientific discussion from 1975 about the possibility of life elsewhere than on earth. It included some big name scientists like Carl Sagan and George Wald (Nobel Prize winner 1967) and a theologian. Most if not all thought that life must exist elsewhere.

[jonrick46]

We need warp drive:

[Red Badger]

Even if there is, we will never see it. Not any living human being will ever travel among the stars.

The ‘Speed of Light’ is not anywhere near fast enough and that is the limiting factor of space travel.

Neither is 10 times the Speed of Light, which is technically impossible to achieve.

When we become Spirit Beings, like God and the Angels, and can traverse the universe at the speed of thought, then we will see everything that’s out there.................

[Verginius Rufus]

I doubt it will ever be technologically possible to travel to a planet orbiting another star, given the distances involved and the impossibility of going faster than the speed of light.

We now know there are lots of "exoplanets" out there and it may be that some have some kind of life--but perhaps only very primitive forms. The chances of intelligent life evolving somewhere else may be infinitesimal--but given the number of stars in the universe, there could be one or more elsewhere, maybe in another galaxy. So we are very unlikely ever to make contact (and it may be safer not to), but it is conceivable that we will find evidence of some kind of life elsewhere even if we can't actually visit it.

[Red Badger]

Somebody has to be ‘first’, why not us?.............😁

[jerod]

And exactly when can we go to this planet? Ah... That’s the rub. We can’t and never will. Oh well.

[Bounced2X]

I say round up the climate loons, stuff 'em in a SpaceX Starship and send 'em off. A little sweat equity and they can have that dump terraformed into Utopia in no time. They are climate experts aren't they?

[Lee'sGhost]

Dang! It looks SO easy.

[Telepathic Intruder]

Although not technically violating any known laws of physics, there might be a few minor engineering difficulties involved in building one. Elon Musk once said it would require several Jupiter masses of equivalent energy just to power it. That’s just one. There’s also pronouncing it.