habitable planet found.

[Sera13]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070425/...bitable_planet

So i was looking on yahoo a little while ago and found this. I thought it was very intresting. After further thinking on the subject A major question has come to mind. If the planet was proved habitable, and the government decided to start moving people to this other planet (given they have the nessisary means of doing so) Would you be willing to go? Explain why or why not. Also how long do you think it would take us as a society to discover functional and convient means of transportation to said planet? Do you think we would have the technology in time to move the entire earths population to this new planet before we have completely made our own planet uninhabitable. One last question. If our planet was dying and we had the means of transporting people to the new planet and start fresh, but there was not room to take everyone Who should be permited to go? Should anyone if not everyone can?

[Reach]

Assuming there was proof we could live on it, maybe. Even then it's not really that simple. You can't just land there and start doing stuff. It would take a very long time to set up and build a colony large enough to support a decent sized population. Habitability aside, we won't be able to breath the air or drink their water without at least filtering/processing it because we'll be killed by the microorganisms in it. This causes a major problem. Even in a concealed colony, there are immense problems with dusts and storms. What if there is a crack/ect, and the colony leaks and the air gets in and people start getting infected and die? What then? How do you prepare for these kinds of things? It's a really big move and would take so much preparation it's not even funny.

Even when going to a planet like mars we have to consider biohazards seriously, and mars has only the most basic levels of bacterias floating around. I wouldn't even want to imagine how many completely unknown hazards we would find on this planet. In a sense we'd be better off living on a planet like mars, as it's easier, closer and we'd be living in the same conditions anyway (and mars has the potential for a long term terraform too).

The only good reason for actually going to this planet is it probably has valuable resources on it. But of course, the cost of getting there is going to make these worthless XD So I wouldn't plan on us making our home there, unless of course we destroy Earth. Eventually we'll use up all of this planets resources, so I could see planning to habitat other plants like this would be a viable plan at this time.

[mmeegghhaann]

What are the odds that this new planet has any resources we could use? Extraterrestrial oil could be useful but humans would never be able to make the flight in reasonable time. One light year is about 5,879,000,000,000 miles.

The article also said that it is unlikely that the planet rotates so on one side it is light out all the time and dark on the other side. It would be difficult to live a life similar to one on earth. Also what about the atmosphere on the planet? Even if the temperature is right could humans breathe without aid?

To me this doesn't seem possible until we live in a vastly more technologically advanced society.

[Bahamut-X]

Wouldn't the planet be freezing cold?

[Ice wolf]

I thought it was "habitual"

[tsugomaru]

Well, even if we do get there, the gravity is five times that of Earth. Think about how hard it would be to live there! It's also some 30 light years away (correct me if I'm wrong) so by the time we get people to report things back to us, it would've happened 30 years ago. So much would've happened.

~Tsugomaru

[Maid]

Originally Posted by tsugomaru

Well, even if we do get there, the gravity is five times that of Earth. Think about how hard it would be to live there! It's also some 30 light years away (correct me if I'm wrong) so by the time we get people to report things back to us, it would've happened 30 years ago. So much would've happened.

~Tsugomaru

You would weigh twice as much as on earth, its actually bearable.

btw it wont be 5g. Size is not linearly proportionate to gravity.

It will be around 2.25Gs

[Relambrien]

Originally Posted by Ice wolf

I thought it was "habitual"

"Habitual" refers to the word "Habit," as in a repeated action.

Oh, and even if the planet didn't rotate, there would still be day and night. It would change with the seasons, though. If the planet didn't rotate, different parts would face the sun at different times of the year, so you would still have day and night, except one day would equal one year.

As far as I'm concerned, this isn't a scientific breakthrough. It's more of a "Hey this could be useful...in several thousand years...let's document it away somewhere!"

[inflames07]

Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but there isn't bacteria on mars. Bacteria would be considered life, and I've never heard of actual life being on mars. I googled Bacteria on Mars and only found things about how some Earth bacteria COULD survive on Mars.

Next, we can't travel the speed of light, nor send messages at the speed of light (Unless they hooked up 2 computers that could send/receive morse code. But the light would probably dissipate in space). It would take a hell of a lot longer than 30 years to get there. Then it would take about the same time to receive data.

Also, why does the Earth need to spin to keep the layer of ozone working?

Anyways this is pretty interesting. I can't wait to hear more. (Although I'll probably be 40 by the time there is something new on this haha)

[theinsomniacnimrod]

Distances in space are ridiculous by our standards. We would have to travel near the speed of light and weird stuff happens when you have mass and are going at high speeds. Matter approaches an infinite mass, there are Lorentz transformations, and time dilates - which makes long-distance travel for humans impossible with the physics we understand now.

When the sun runs out of Hydrogen and is ready to become a red-giant in approximately 5 Billion years, I doubt humans will be around to have to worry about it. We'll just have to see where evolution / extinction takes us and the rest of the species on this planet.

The only reason this is interesting is because it allows astronomers to search for other life in the universe - not for us to go populate elsewhere.

[Raveren]

Originally Posted by Maid

You would weigh twice as much as on earth, its actually bearable.

btw it wont be 5g. Size is not linearly proportionate to gravity.

It will be around 2.25Gs

Ugh, you people didn't read did you?

Originally Posted by CNN NEWS

Gravity is 1.6 times as strong as Earth's so a 150-pound person would feel like 240 pounds.

[Chromer]

Someone cue "Another Planet."

[jewpinthethird]

Really, we haven't even mastered getting out of our atmosphere yet.



So don't count on visiting said planet anytime soon.

[Maid]

Originally Posted by Raveren

Ugh, you people didn't read did you?

That's CNN news, then there is another news, just quoting one of the sources of "lol". Margin of deviation will be big..... because no one knows for certain save few very vague details.

same thing how they found "Kryptonite" even though it's not same composition!

[SpookG]

Originally Posted by jewpinthethird

Really, we haven't even mastered getting out of our atmosphere yet.

So don't count on visiting said planet anytime soon.

I call party foul!

[RB_Dreamscanner]

i wonder what would happen if earth was gonna like die lol, how deh fuk would we get to a new planet =/

[Reach]

Originally Posted by inflames07

Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but there isn't bacteria on mars. Bacteria would be considered life, and I've never heard of actual life being on mars. I googled Bacteria on Mars and only found things about how some Earth bacteria COULD survive on Mars.

Next, we can't travel the speed of light, nor send messages at the speed of light (Unless they hooked up 2 computers that could send/receive morse code. But the light would probably dissipate in space). It would take a hell of a lot longer than 30 years to get there. Then it would take about the same time to receive data.

Also, why does the Earth need to spin to keep the layer of ozone working?

Anyways this is pretty interesting. I can't wait to hear more. (Although I'll probably be 40 by the time there is something new on this haha)

Last time I checked there was evidence on ancient bacteria on mars, but they wern't sure and there was some debate over the whole issue. Since mars has water on it, it's not a complete long shot. Either way, sort of irrelevant to my argument, since I was making a simple hypothetical comparison. I think the whole idea of the topic was that it was mostly a hypothetical question, if you could fill in the gaps right now for getting there and such.

Also, it could take a lot less than 30 years to get there. Given we could get our speed up to about 182000 miles per second, because of time dilation speed outside of the ship would be moving over 25 times faster than in the ship. In terms of how fast we're moving in our reference frame, about 4550000 mps now. Given it's 21 million light years away, we could get there in about 310 days ^^ About half that if you could get your speed up to 184000.

It's questionable as to if you could survive at such speeds. I would figure you might be able to, but of course we have absolutely no idea right now XD



It does strike me as interesting though, when people say Earth is unique, yet astronomers have looked at less than 200 planets outside our solarsystem out of who knows how many quintillion or more there are that exist and have already found one 'similar' to Earth >__>

[Chromer]

XD Spook actually spoke.

[flashman41]

Originally Posted by Reach

It does strike me as interesting though, when people say Earth is unique, yet astronomers have looked at less than 200 planets outside our solarsystem out of who knows how many quintillion or more there are that exist and have already found one 'similar' to Earth >__>

Hmm, we've looked at quite a few more than 200 planets outside our solar system... Where are you getting this information?

[AOL_blows911]

Originally Posted by flashman41

Hmm, we've looked at quite a few more than 200 planets outside our solar system... Where are you getting this information?

To put it bluntly, no. We've looked at far more than 200 STARS outside of the solar system, but only discovered ~200 extrasolar PLANETS

Wikipedia says:
"An extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, is a planet beyond the Solar System. As of April 2007, the count of known exoplanets stands at 229."

And as to the origional question about leaving for a possible planet, I don't believe it's possible at the moment. If, for some reason, we could....meh, I don't know if I'd go. Depends on what we know about the given planet. If the environment is tolerable, and we have good info on it, I suppose I'd go, but it'd be a hell of a hard decision, so I'm not sure. But, like I said, we still can't make a journey that long, so it's a moot point. :/