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Wow oh wow. Universe Today just posted an article about an Earth-like planet discovered around a nearby red dwarf star. (The original source appears to be a UC Santa Cruz press release.)
It's right in the star's "habitable zone" (which mostly means "right temperature for liquid water") and has a mass about 3-4 times Earth's, so a quick estimate is that gravity there might be about 40% stronger than here (it wouldn't be too different than standing in an elevator as it gets going). That's plenty to hold an atmosphere. The planet has its quirks, of course: it's close to its cool sun, so a full orbit only takes about a month. Also, like our Moon it always has the same side facing "in": a planet of eternal sunlight on one side and eternal shadow on the other. Naturally, the only comfortable places to live would be in the twilight region encircling the planet between the extremes of hot and cold, where the red sun burns forever on the horizon.
This is awesome. And it's sooner than most people expected to find something like this, which may mean that planets like ours really are pretty common after all!
Now if only we could find a way to get there.
It's right in the star's "habitable zone" (which mostly means "right temperature for liquid water") and has a mass about 3-4 times Earth's, so a quick estimate is that gravity there might be about 40% stronger than here (it wouldn't be too different than standing in an elevator as it gets going). That's plenty to hold an atmosphere. The planet has its quirks, of course: it's close to its cool sun, so a full orbit only takes about a month. Also, like our Moon it always has the same side facing "in": a planet of eternal sunlight on one side and eternal shadow on the other. Naturally, the only comfortable places to live would be in the twilight region encircling the planet between the extremes of hot and cold, where the red sun burns forever on the horizon.
This is awesome. And it's sooner than most people expected to find something like this, which may mean that planets like ours really are pretty common after all!
Now if only we could find a way to get there.
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Another suggestion that I saw a few years back was that more advanced civilizations may have found more effective means of communicating over vast distances. I read a paper discussing the advantages of neutrino communications over EM waves. It sounds like some of our newest neutrino detectors might be sensitive enough to pick up neutrino beam communications (the awesome Ice Cube that's based on a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, for example), and the technology for creating such a beam wouldn't be that far out of reach if we were really determined to make one.
Unless it turns out the practical way to do it is to leave most of our biological shells behind, in which case habitability might not matter so much
I don't know: I wouldn't be surprised if we came up of ways to avoid carrying biology along on the trip before we came up with ways of avoiding the need for it on the other end. (I'm envisioning something like an automated robotic nursery and learning center to raise children from frozen embryos, for example. Don't ask me too much about the ethics of that, but I might still prefer that scenario to never "getting out" at all.)