New Planet Discovered

"For the first time, astronomers have spotted a cosy alien planet that might be hospitable to life. The planet is not much bigger than the Earth, and it enjoys balmy temperatures of about 20° C (68° F) as well as spectacular scarlet sunsets."

"We have black and white people running all around right here for a reason. One color reflects infrared and the other one reflects ultraviolet."

The extra melanin in darker skin is protective against the ultraviolet. But in the mid-infrared (thermal band of human and room-temperature objects, 8-13 micron wavelength peak emissions for objects near 300K temperature) band, all human skin (even albino) has a high absorption and emissivity. Basically we all have dark skin in the mid-infrared.

"all human skin (even albino) has a high absorption and emissivity. Basically we all have dark skin in the mid-infrared."

I understand your answer. In my terms, we all have a high absorption coefficient (S21) for infrared. With ultraviolet, we have a high reflection coefficient (S11) with dark skin. And if we don't start off with dark skin, UV will ramp up melanin production until we get dark skin for protection. So we approach -> a higher reflection coefficient (return loss) to UV.

I'm just comparing what I see on a microwave network analyzer to your biophysical answer and it makes total sense.

Let's check that planet out. The gravitational pull from that sun must be huge. And a lot of cosmic rays and neutrons flying out. It's not a dead star.

“This is over-hyped. The fact that the sun is a red dwarf almost certainly rules out life. Our sun has its radiation peak in the energy range where most chemical reactions take place. The radiation from a red dwarf falls mostly in the infrared. There’s not enough energy in the infrared photons to carry out anything resembling photosynthesis. Liquid water is necessary but not sufficient for life resembling ours. Properly energetic photons from a star are also needed. These guys made an interesting discovery, but they’ve gotten carried away.”

Great scientific thought process my friend. Also, how about the French comment about exploring this planet in the next two or three decades? The planet is 20.5 light years away from earth. I don’t think we have invented the warp drive yet have we Scotty? Perhaps we may travel to Alphi Centuri in our lifetime if you are young, approx. 4 light years from earth with nuclear or fusion propulsion systems.

My theory is that man will evolve into energy which is far less limiting then being bio-organic matter in the next 150 years. Quantum physics has proven that energy can be accelerated many, many times the speed of light making a trip to this new planet an hour of travel time tops. I don’t think we will ever need to try and figure out how to end-around the theory of relativity which says it would take more energy then possible to move matter faster then the speed of light.

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