Everywhere it looked, Kepler found planets. I wonder how many are out there, and if we could even comprehend the number if we knew.
Astronomy & Space Exploration
- Thread starter MrMarcello
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Everywhere it looked, Kepler found planets. I wonder how many are out there, and if we could even comprehend the number if we knew.
There could be up to 10 trillion planets in the Milky Way alone.
Galaxies like Andromeda could have up to 25 trillion stars.
IC1101 (the largest observable galaxy in the Universe) has an estimated 100 trillion stars, which could put the numbers of planets it has or had into the quadrillions.
There are apparently up to 2 trillion galaxies, so if extrapolated, the number would be something like ~10 to the 25th planets that orbit stars, with some ~10 to the 26th to 10 to the 30th additional starless planets.
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/planets-universe/#:~:text=With 400 billion Milky Way,10 trillion orbiting planets, total.
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Pour one out for the octillion rogue planets out there. Some of them are bound to have life on them as well.
In an infinite universe I don't see why not but considering we are yet to find extra terrestrial life on planets with a source of heat in our own solar system, I'm not gonna hold my breath on life being on a rogue planet just yet!
Life could probably develop on a starless planet, if it's the type of planet to have a hot core. With that many planets, it's bound to have happened at some point, I reckon. Hell, probably some unlucky intelligent species has reached the space age or further on a planet that is then ejected from its system due to a passing star. If they're advanced enough they could feasibly make a go of it underground, though it wouldn't be a very fun existence.
They come back with o holy night to a Latin groove? Mambo!Yea but why haven't we picked up on their crappy radio broadcasts...
Best case scenario: an exo planet 116ly away could be a a few days/months/years behind us in their technological development, so their said crappy broadcast could be just over the horizon and hopefully SETI will give us their O holy night variation in due course. we live in hope don't we fellow space muppets.
It would have to be a fairly massive planet for the core not to have frozen, though.
Would it freeze, though? Eventually it would, but that's the case if it orbits a sun anyway. Maybe it would happen faster, but I don't know. I'm pretty sure the Earth's core would stay hot for a good while.
How is this not getting responses?!
Sounds like 70s sci-fi noises!
tbf the tweet buried the lead by not just going: "HEY, WANNA HEAR A BLACK HOLE?!?!"
It all depends on the age and size of the planet. The more massive a planet is, the more radioactive decaying elements which help to sustain warmth, and the lower surface area to core size so the core heat dissipates more slowly. However, an older planet would have used up all of its radioactive decay, and primordial heat is likely to have dissipated also.
Even if the Earth's core stayed warm, without the Sun the atmosphere would freeze. As far as our science currently tells us any life developing anywhere requires liquid water, therefore a planet that has no star is extremely unlikely to have liquid water. And if you had a planet that had a large/warm enough core but thin enough crust to retain liquid water on the surface, the surface will be bombarded by charged particles in the interstellar medium, which would destroy life.
You could have miles of ice, and then liquid water at the very bottom. After all, we're pretty sure Europa has liquid water. Of course, it has more water than the Earth despite being far smaller, but I don't think it's completely out of the question that the Earth could have some liquid water in the parts of the ocean? I don't know the science to say that it would or wouldn't, there's probably a formula out there somewhere. Europa is actually an interesting hypothetical. If Jupiter got ejected and Europa stayed with it, the tidal force could keep it "hot" (enough for liquid water) for a long time. Though I wonder what would happen to Jupiter in that case, and how it would affect Europa's orbit.
I'm no physicist but I imagine if a body large enough to eject Jupiter out of the solar system comes along, the moons are going to be scattered completely.
In terms of the Earth, if you turn off the Sun at midnight tonight, everything at the surface would freeze in 8 minutes.
Actually it would take longer. Turning off the sun isn't much different to just a normal night, so it definitely takes many hours or even days (depending on region and weather)
I read that there's a chance that a moon goes with it. This is all theoretical of course, we've never observed a rogue planet. If we do it'll be probably be because it comes flying into the solar system, but that's extremely unlikely.
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/ab...h-survive-if-the-sun-stopped-shining-beginner
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/ab...o-us-if-the-sun-went-out-for-an-hour-beginner
Seems like it might be a week or so before we're in real trouble. Long enough to contemplate our end, anyway. That second also seems to support the idea that some form of life could survive at the bottom of the sea. Probably not us, but hey.
Edit: this one is interesting too: https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-07/if-sun-went-out-how-long-could-life-earth-survive/
Yea the earth's core is nothing to do with the orbit around the sun if I'm following you guys. It's to do with the size of the planet and its decaying of radioactive elements left over from planet formation. Earth will remain geologically active for billions of years.
Also factor in that one theory of how life began on our planet was around hydrothermal vents, Far below where light could reach.
One of the prime areas in our solar system where life could exist is on i think Europa, for similar reasons.
(Already coverd)
Hubble found CO2, water vapour and methane around an exoplanet in 2008... so how is this a "first"?
I would imagine the amount of verify-able data would be in greater abundance with Webb
Yep! I hope I'm still alive when they drill down into Europa. Of course, the entire process will have to be done incredibly carefully, so there's zero risk of us contaminating the oceans.
Hubble's data wasn't good enough to be considered indisputable. While it is pribable that they really detected CO2 there, they couldn't prove it.
Life as we know it can still stay at a very basic (cellular, microbial, bacterial) stage forever (?), in many planets. In case of direct contact with such alien life, though, humans’ immune system will much probably have a very rough time.
In our lifetime im not so sure. The undertaking would be huge and ruinously expensive.
Thanks, lads. It blows my mind that humans have put a telescope a million miles from Earth that can identify a component of the atmosphere of a planet 700 light years away! Hopefully there's lots of novel data to come.
What's encouraging is its only been in operation a month or two and is already delivering impressive results.
I dont think that is a given. All life on earth came pretty much from the same place and thats why the pathogens have evolved together with the rest of the life forms to be "compatible" to reproduce within the hosts. It's highly unlikely that such compatibility would exist with extraterrestrial bacterial types of organisms, and for their equivalent of viruses, it's even less likely - because their form of genetic encoding must be biochemical exactly like our dna or rna
in order to trigger multiplication.
Depends on the atmospheric composition though, doesn't it? Heat flux goes like:
Core -> Mantle -> Crust -> Atmosphere -> Space
If you have a thick enough gaseous envelope that can trap heat efficiently for a long enough time, then I wouldn't be surprised to find liquid water. And if life develops in deep enough water, it shouldn't be worried about radiation too much, not that I think there would be enough of it in deep space to destroy it. There's also the fact that, assuming a tectonically active planet as we are, there should be a fairly robust magnetic belt to screen weaker fluxes.
Also, imagine a scenario where a Jupiter-mass planet and its satellites get booted out of its solar system. Imagine one of it's moons being large enough to retain an atmosphere. Then tidal heating provided by the Jovian would allow another such scenario sans a star.
The interesting thing is that the Universe is old enough and big enough for any imagined scenario to have already been played out somewhere.
If I'd live long enough to collect my winnings, I'd bet heavily that there are some very big surprises in wait when it comes to what's possible for life-bearing planets.
@The Firestarter is right. Humans are not adapted to counter pathogens that might be out there and, by the same token, those pathogens would not be adapted to infiltrate our defense systems; so we are likely to be safeguarded against many of those hazards (think of us having very different operating systems, relatively speaking). Fungi or bacteria might still be dangerous if they decompose and metabolize the same basic compounds as fungi or bacteria on Earth (wrt. humans), but viruses require too many interactions to be categorized as viable threats (for reference, certain viruses tend to successfully cross over from bats to humans because we're theorized to have a shared insectivorous ancestor from the Mesozoic era).
On a broader note, to explore the wonders of space (in our immediate neighborhood, let alone the enormous regions that lie beyond in our galaxy or the local group), we absolutely must overhaul and cyborgize our stupefyingly useless bodies. They're sooo feeble and break down sooo easily (can't survive moderately-extreme cold or moderately-extreme heat, for example), require long periods of rest while having very limited spans of optimal usage, are completely dependent on large-scale material resources for sustenance which is impractical if we plan on travelling in significant numbers (food, breathing air, water and other basic necessities), prone to biohazards and radioactive poisoning, and so forth. Just absolute shite and not fit for purpose, objectively speaking; need to be heavily upgraded and methodically stream-lined in the coming centuries, just as we evolved from primordial building blocks to unicellular organisms to multicellular organisms to where we are right now — or humanity is going nowhere, like piddly-ass monkeys stuck on a floating rock in the middle of a shoreless ocean.
how do you retain the essence of the human if you want to create some kind of weird cyborg hybrid? reminded of much postmodern literature, donna haraway and the like, which i always thought was rubbish inasmuch as it led to utopian ideals about what the human body could become rather than its analysis of objects used to augment human existence re pacemakers and so on.
which kind of brings me to this. i find the astronomical data to be fascinating but until we fix this planet, i also think it needs to be tempered. we're basically saying the next step is to go and colonize europa or the moon. might be worth fixing the climate clusterfeck on this planet, which is our doing, before we think about setting up ideal colonies elsewhere centuries or a >century into the future.
Yeah, I would think that would be the more likely outcome, unless the foreign body approaches close enough to tidally disrupt the orbits of the Jovian satellites (unlikely given how big space is). Think of it this way: when you 'look' at the Jupiter-moons system far enough away, all you see is Jupiter, from a gravitational point of view. That's the barycentre of the system.
But here's the thing, though: that's not how human history has played out. Europe didn't clean up its act before inflicting itself upon the rest of the world. As soon as someone finds a way to do it cheaply enough to get rich off it, it will get done. It won't be dictated by some larger concerns.
And who's to say one can't do both things at once? For example, I've often thought the challenge of creating a self-sustaining, closed ecosystem that can support multiple lifeforms applies equally well to engineering the life-support systems of an interstellar/interplanetary spacecraft as it does a planet. Or, in fact, a non-Earth planet, e.g. Mars.
true, but the challenge is different. for us to realistically do the things futurists and the general public who are interested in space travel want to see us do, we have first to actually survive, sustainably, over the next fifty years. don't do that and all of this will have been for nothing.
you can definitely apply principles from one discipline to another. happens all the time. there will be benefits from space progams which find their way into general industry and vice versa. that has always been the way.
There's no fundamentally unchanging essence of the human, methinks; everything is transient and relative. We've evolved from base form(s) to radically different higher level form(s) over the aeons because of an everchanging ecosystems of stressors, filters and incentives around us, and adapted to all the new experiences and challenges that were thrown at us. And cyborgization will be the next (and logically prearranged) step in our evolution as a projected space-faring species (which would bring more stressors, filters and incentives to the fore). All organic matter is ultimately comprised of inorganic matter, and all life is derived from nonliving components — so cyborgs are not inherently weird; we'll just have to find ways of extracting and fusing our abstract thoughts and sense-of-self and personhood with them (how that will happen I dunno, but we must, and given time, will devise reliable methods), and the rest will follow as we become accustomed to the new-normal of the age.
Por qué no los dos? We can progressively undo the harm we've brought upon the Earth and its inhabitants, and also try to spread our wings — those shouldn't be mutually exclusive endeavors, if anything they should be parallel and symbiotic as they both depend on the advancement and expansion of our capabilities. We're not going to colonize non-Earth objects within the Solar system in a meaningful sense for the foreseeable future anyway (even by the end of this century we'll be able to send and sustain a cohort of pioneers at best); by the time by have the capabilities to colonize Europa or Enceladus or the Moon or Mars en masse (and doing so is economically viable), we will have a smaller and hopefully more sustainable global population (which will peak in the 2060s according to demographic predictors) as well as much better (and cleaner and economically viable) technologies to restore and preserve the Earth. As I see it, humanity is close to its nadir (vis-à-vis the gratuitous environmental damage it can inflict upon the Earth and its offspring); if we manage to survive for a few decades, there's nowhere to go but upwards (and outwards) for our descendants!
this part just sounds dystopian to me because i don't see the necessity of it. just out of curiosity, though, what do you mean by "logically prearranged"? also, on organic and inorganic, i've never been one to draw a hard boundary. in the most abstract sense, i really don't think there's much of a conceptual difference between "living" and "non-living" matter. i mean that in the most phenomenologically abstract sense possible, though. so we agree there, i think, if only arriving at agreement by different paths.
it's this part that draws out my cynicism. we absolutely can but are we, or will we? they're waiting for the permafrost to melt so they can extract more oil from the arctic. that's not the way to progress along the lines needed for interspace travel, or even intercontinental or -national travel as earth becomes increasingly impossible to live on/in due to our sheer greed and collective stupidity as a species.
The challenge may be different, but so's the developing know-how.
I'd say the scenario I outlined is already being played out: space travel has been opened up to private interests, and we've seen SpaceX launch reusable spacecraft that were the stuff of NASA's dreams for decades. This within a few years. That drastically changes the nature of what is cheap to do, and therefore what allows survival.
There's talk of developing modular nuclear reactors earmarked for Mars colonies (and remote military bases) for local communities, and once again private firms are involved. The implications for a decarbonized energy grid are clear.
My point is, this isn't a case of do this one thing first, then the next, etc. Tasks can be executed in parallel for multiple purposes.
Thanks a lot! These are fascinating (and terrifying, indeed!) subjects… I was naively parroting what experts say about Earth-comparable liquid / wet environments near us… the ones they would really like to discover and analyze in our solar system, hopefully yet distantly resembling our very deep oceans?
And yes, thanks again, I can see now more clearly your points about the non-existent host-guest cumulative relationship that would make alien life receivable to us in principle… not sure there would be no possible contact/exchange at all, though, if the buiding blocks are the same?
As for cyborgisation of humans, even achieved step by step in the centuries to come, I don’t know… I am not sure Plato’s dualism would keep, and if you accept Aristotle’s opposite view of life being what it is at face value, there will be some ineludible border to prevent the transmigration of our essence (aka death or whatever it is)?!
Don't think this will happen today unfortunately, they had a hydrogen bleed issue earlier which they fixed but have another one now and it's not that long before todays window closes.