Astronomy & Space Exploration

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/81557.html?rss=1

Kepler-438b and 442b: Are These the Planets We're Looking For?

Still, "Kepler-438b is the closest to Earth we've seen considering those things," Caldwell said.


Scientifically, however, "the important result is not just that we're getting planets that are closing in on an Earth twin, but that we're finding a range of planets out there and filling in a neighborhood of things like Earth," he pointed out. "We're starting to understand more about the population of planets that could possibly be habitable."
 
No disrespect to anyone who posted here....

But how does this shit not mess you up?! It would destroy me!

I often ask myself, "what is nothing?!".....I can't answer because there is always something.
I then ask, "What was there before the big bang?"....I often say nothing but, there's no such thing.

So what was there? How did it get there? How did it form? Did a higher power put it there?....It can't have come from nothing because nothing exists.....

Gonna stop typing now because I'm making myself feel shocked and scared and alone....Don't quote me btw. I'm drunk now. I'd get a nosebleed and my body hair would fall off if I discussed this when sober
 
.Rossi said:
No disrespect to anyone who posted here....

But how does this shit not mess you up?! It would destroy me!

I often ask myself, "what is nothing?!".....I can't answer because there is always something.
I then ask, "What was there before the big bang?"....I often say nothing but, there's no such thing.

So what was there? How did it get there? How did it form? Did a higher power put it there?....It can't have come from nothing because nothing exists.....

Gonna stop typing now because I'm making myself feel shocked and scared and alone....Don't quote me btw. I'm drunk now. I'd get a nosebleed and my body hair would fall off if I discussed this when sober
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Well the beauty is finding out isn't it? It might take us millennia but I see it as a challenge and something that's not scary. Also in space there isn't really "nothing" its full of particles and atoms, radiation etc, you just can't see it. Besides I believe in the big bang and to try and answer the question, there was "nothing" but perhaps for a nano second there was nothing. I think people have this idea that there was nothing for ages, but that's not the case imo, it happened too fast and spontaneously to have nothing for longer.
 
.Rossi said:
No disrespect to anyone who posted here....

But how does this shit not mess you up?! It would destroy me!

I often ask myself, "what is nothing?!".....I can't answer because there is always something.
I then ask, "What was there before the big bang?"....I often say nothing but, there's no such thing.

So what was there? How did it get there? How did it form? Did a higher power put it there?....It can't have come from nothing because nothing exists.....

Gonna stop typing now because I'm making myself feel shocked and scared and alone....Don't quote me btw. I'm drunk now. I'd get a nosebleed and my body hair would fall off if I discussed this when sober
Click to expand...

This should help

 
If you assign consciousness as the key: Nothing is unconsciousness until it becomes aware of itself (Binary)

I would recommend looking into the Gnostics if you haven't since they encouraged people to see for themselves. There are many questions such as how did the first children survive? When you are a kid, your brains still developing. We can't stand up or do anything. How did we do it? They also talked about a mind parasite which I think is important - especially since they were slaughtered by certain well known fractions of society. Archons could explain a lot of the evils and deceit in society, and City/Chelsea supporters...
 
I've been reading a little about Walter Russell and how the universe is basically a massive electromagnetic field, which led me to a quite good documentary on Youtube called the primer fields, it is worth a watch if you have a couple of hours to spare.
 
Closing in on Ceres...



One big asteroid.
 
XdanielredX said:


Still love this video.

Edit: just realised I actually posted this not long ago, but.. oh well, it's worth it.
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It's a good visualisation of how important we really are, not only as a species but what our ego tells us we are worth as a individual. I believe you can fit over 1 million Earths in our Sun alone. Then when you look at our entire galaxy compared to the known universe and all the stars inside that, add on all the space that we don't yet know about and it really shows how small we really are. Yet with all that said, some people really love with a passion called hate. I hope at some point in the future, in the future that our planet has and maybe even the human life-form if we cannot travel further afield and make somewhere else home that we can live in harmony and realise that we have nothing but each other in understanding life, in enjoying life and consciousness. Here's to above and beyond, here's to peace and love, here's to here and now, here's to us.
 
Curiouser and curiouser

PIA19185_ip.jpg


Dawn arrives at Ceres this Friday, looking forward to some closeups of that alien base.
 
theyneverlearn said:
What's the official word on what this is?
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Not seen anything official yet, probably waiting for some decent resolution pics, but speculation I've read elsewhere is that it's some water-ice that got thrown up from beneath the surface after an impact. You can see less stark examples dotted elsewhere as well.
 
Ubik said:
Curiouser and curiouser

PIA19185_ip.jpg


Dawn arrives at Ceres this Friday, looking forward to some closeups of that alien base.
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Gif of it

PIA18920.gif


Some speculation that it's probably a reflection of some sort, and as the planet rotates you can see other lit bits, but I'm curious how it and some of the smaller dots don't lose too much luminosity even as they enter the dark side.

Also a comment on Reddit:

I just want to add that the Great White Spot doesn't have that high an albedo- it's around 0.49 0.40, with 0.0 being black and 1.0 being white.

The darkness of Ceres' surface makes it seem extremely bright but in reality it's just grey.

Source
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It's about the same brightness as ice is apparently so that's my guess. Awesome gif.
 
Raptori said:
I always find stuff like that both uplifting and depressing at the same time. The chances we'll ever get that far are miniscule, and if we do it'll be well beyond our lifetimes (assuming no technological singularity in the next few decades). :(
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Yeah the most interesting idea i've heard is that there's probably a lot of life elsewhere but we will never know about it for technological reasons. Although, I can't believe we'll be limited by technology for much longer.
 
Raoul said:
Yeah the most interesting idea i've heard is that there's probably a lot of life elsewhere but we will never know about it for technological reasons. Although, I can't believe will be limited by technology for much longer.
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Yeah, it's unlikely in the extreme that Earth is unique. Even more so when you consider that all the "probability of life" calculations completely ignore the possibility of life in situations where Earth's creatures would not survive, simply because the only life we're currently aware of is from Earth. Reminds me of the Fermi paradox, I once found a calculator where you could put in your own assumptions and it came up with a predicted number of technological civilisations that should currently exist in our galaxy. Iirc the assumption that I disagreed with the most - which completely changed the outcome - was that technological civilisations last hundreds of thousands of years on average. Seems a bit optimistic to me :D
 
Raptori said:
Yeah, it's unlikely in the extreme that Earth is unique. Even more so when you consider that all the "probability of life" calculations completely ignore the possibility of life in situations where Earth's creatures would not survive, simply because the only life we're currently aware of is from Earth. Reminds me of the Fermi paradox, I once found a calculator where you could put in your own assumptions and it came up with a predicted number of technological civilisations that should currently exist in our galaxy. Iirc the assumption that I disagreed with the most - which completely changed the outcome - was that technological civilisations last hundreds of thousands of years on average. Seems a bit optimistic to me :D
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Interestingly, I get the sense Biology is gradually embedding itself into Technology which may eventually allow for some different travel/communication options that are virtually inconceivable today.
 
Raoul said:
Interestingly, I get the sense Biology is gradually embedding itself into Technology which may eventually allow for some different travel/communication options that are virtually inconceivable today.
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Yeah that's true, a lot of the stuff you see in sci-fi is becoming increasingly plausible. Prosthetics are becoming incredibly advanced, like all the fully functioning nerve-controlled arms that are appearing all over the place at the moment. If we don't kill ourselves, there's so much potential there. As to travel, that depends really. The distances involved in interstellar travel are well beyond anything we're even vaguely close to theorising about at the moment, I think the best hope is either wormholes (which exist according to our current theories) or something like the sci-fi hyperspace concept (which I think I remember reading does not exist).
 
Raptori said:
Yeah that's true, a lot of the stuff you see in sci-fi is becoming increasingly plausible. Prosthetics are becoming incredibly advanced, like all the fully functioning nerve-controlled arms that are appearing all over the place at the moment. If we don't kill ourselves, there's so much potential there. As to travel, that depends really. The distances involved in interstellar travel are well beyond anything we're even vaguely close to theorising about at the moment, I think the best hope is either wormholes (which exist according to our current theories) or something like the sci-fi hyperspace concept (which I think I remember reading does not exist).
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Like in Star Trek? It is theoretically possible. The problem is that apparently requires a massive amount of energy which makes it 'almost' impossible.

Or at-least that is what I read somewhere.
 
Revan said:
Like in Star Trek? It is theoretically possible. The problem is that apparently requires a massive amount of energy which makes it 'almost' impossible.

Or at-least that is what I read somewhere.
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Star-trek doesn't have hyperspace, it has warp drives (as far as I'm aware, I've never really watched it much) - warp drive = travel faster than the speed of light (which may or may not be possible, at that point the laws of physics as we know them become useless), hyperspace = travelling via some other dimension which allows you to jump from one place to another, similar to wormholes in that respect but functionally different. :D
 
Raptori said:
Star-trek doesn't have hyperspace, it has warp drives (as far as I'm aware, I've never really watched it much) - warp drive = travel faster than the speed of light (which may or may not be possible, at that point the laws of physics as we know them become useless), hyperspace = travelling via some other dimension which allows you to jump from one place to another, similar to wormholes in that respect but functionally different. :D
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Ah, cool. Doesn't often get outnerded but kudos to you.

Wormholes are apparently theoretically possible, but pretty much impossible to create them (unless we already have FTL travelling, can move/create neutron stars etc)

Warp drives - probably theoretically possible. NASA has started a program on that. Again it is likely that even if they can be done, in practice they can't because they require a massive amount of energy (probably many kg or even tons of antimatter)

Hyperspace travelling - Star Wars? Battlestar Galactica? No idea but I don't think that there has been any scientific research on them.

I think that all of them are at best, centuries away from happening (if they'll ever happen).
 
Revan said:
Ah, cool. Doesn't often get outnerded but kudos to you.

Wormholes are apparently theoretically possible, but pretty much impossible to create them (unless we already have FTL travelling, can move/create neutron stars etc)

Warp drives - probably theoretically possible. NASA has started a program on that. Again it is likely that even if they can be done, in practice they can't because they require a massive amount of energy (probably many kg or even tons of antimatter)

Hyperspace travelling - Star Wars? Battlestar Galactica? No idea but I don't think that there has been any scientific research on them.

I think that all of them are at best, centuries away from happening (if they'll ever happen).
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:lol::cool:

Yep exactly, it seems like we're either unsure if they're possible or not, or light-years away from a working technology. It's possible that our best bet is AI - if we can somehow develop a superintelligent computer, and it wants to help us (however unlikely that would be), and it agrees that travelling to other planets is a good idea, it could possibly solve those problems for us. Or it could come up with the grand unifying theory, and then we could piggyback on that and work out the solutions we want. That's basically what happens in Isaac Asimov's Robots/Empire/Foundation universe, hyperspatial travel is invented by a robot :)
 
Raptori said:
:lol::cool:

Yep exactly, it seems like we're either unsure if they're possible or not, or light-years away from a working technology. It's possible that our best bet is AI - if we can somehow develop a superintelligent computer, and it wants to help us (however unlikely that would be), and it agrees that travelling to other planets is a good idea, it could possibly solve those problems for us. Or it could come up with the grand unifying theory, and then we could piggyback on that and work out the solutions we want. That's basically what happens in Isaac Asimov's Robots/Empire/Foundation universe, hyperspatial travel is invented by a robot :)
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No spoilers :lol:

The other good bet is aliens coming here, being nice (for whatever reasons) and just giving us the technology.

Or finding a wormhole near Pluto.

All very unlikely.
 
Revan said:
No spoilers :lol:

The other good bet is aliens coming here, being nice (for whatever reasons) and just giving us the technology.

Or finding a wormhole near Pluto.

All very unlikely.
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It's not really relevant to the plot of any of the books - just a short story or two I think. ;)

Yep, exactly. And that's why it makes me feel a bit sad. The thought that there are countless millions of planets out there like Earth, that if we could somehow get there it'd be a whole new era of exploration... if only :p
 
The thing that fraustrates me the most is that when they say they find a Planet X light years away. We are observing it from X years ago.

So if we found a planet 20,000 light years away that definitely had life on it, it's entirely possible that natural disasters might have happened and life no longer exists on it.
 
Pexbo said:
The thing that fraustrates me the most is that when they say they find a Planet X light years away. We are observing it from X years ago.

So if we found a planet 20,000 light years away that definitely had life on it, it's entirely possible that natural disasters might have happened and life no longer exists on it.
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True, but the point of it at the moment is that if we could see life somewhere else (which we lack the ability to do at the moment) then it would categorically answer a huge number of uncertainties about the probability of extra-terrestrial life existing. Even if what we found had already been destroyed, the fact that it existed on one of the few planets close enough for us to observe would imply that life would be very common.
 
Raptori said:
True, but the point of it at the moment is that if we could see life somewhere else (which we lack the ability to do at the moment) then it would categorically answer a huge number of uncertainties about the probability of extra-terrestrial life existing. Even if what we found had already been destroyed, the fact that it existed on one of the few planets close enough for us to observe would imply that life would be very common.
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Oh I agree. It doesn't make it less fraustrating.


As you say it answers questions.

If we find basic life on another planet, even if it's insect like (which is still incredibly advanced in the grand scheme of things) you could then come to the conclusion that if that insect exists far away and we ourselves exist here and we have both come to fruit from seperate cosmic soups then it's likely to an almost certain probability that something as intelligent or more intelligent than ourselves already exists elsewhere.


As far as the Fermi paradox goes, I wonder if we are already being observed and that terrestrial being has decided that as a species we are too hostile to get involved with. If we were given the technology to advance you can guarantee that we would spread out, colonialise and destroy other planets just as we did with other countries and continents in the past.
 
Pexbo said:
Oh I agree. It doesn't make it less fraustrating.


As you say it answers questions.

If we find basic life on another planet, even if it's insect like (which is still incredibly advanced in the grand scheme of things) you could then come to the conclusion that if that insect exists far away and we ourselves exist here and we have both come to fruit from seperate cosmic soups then it's likely to an almost certain probability that something as intelligent or more intelligent than ourselves already exists elsewhere.


As far as the Fermi paradox goes, I wonder if we are already being observed and that terrestrial being has decided that as a species we are too hostile to get involved with. If we were given the technology to advance you can guarantee that we would spread out, colonialise and destroy other planets just as we did with other countries and continents in the past.
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Yeah, there are all sorts of theories about it. I was just reading an article about it - this one - which was really good. Some of the potential arguments are ones I'd never thought of, for example that the reason we don't receive signals from other species is that there are predator species who go around homing in on worlds that reveal themselves via that kind of technology... makes movies like Independence Day seem a hell of a lot more plausible. :nervous:
 
Raptori said:
Yeah, there are all sorts of theories about it. I was just reading an article about it - this one - which was really good. Some of the potential arguments are ones I'd never thought of, for example that the reason we don't receive signals from other species is that there are predator species who go around homing in on worlds that reveal themselves via that kind of technology... makes movies like Independence Day seem a hell of a lot more plausible. :nervous:
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That was a brilliant read, thank you for sharing.
 
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