Read enough astronomy press releases, and you'll know that "habitable" is better than "earth-like," which means a certain distance from a star, which is better than "earth-sized," which could mean Venus which looks like pizza right out of the oven. So "Potentially Habitable," this is good. The planet's name is Gliese 581g, it's around three earths, it's probably not made of gas, it could conceivably hold on to an atmosphere, and it's at the right distance from its star, Gliese 581, to have liquid water on the surface. Gliese 581g for some physics reason always faces Gliese 581, so half of it may or may not be always a 70°C degree daytime and the other half, a -35°C degree night (I'm not converting these to Farenheit, life is already short).
This means, said an optimistic astronomer at the NASA press conference, you could evolve for light and heat or dark and cold, take your pick, all niches filled. Astronomers say Gliese 581g is in the Goldilocks zone, and from that sentence alone you can divide astronomers into geeks and poets.
Exoplanets are scientifically hot these days. Around 30 years ago, astronomers didn't see the point to them-what new do you learn about the universe? Not much-and any astronomer who looked for them pretended he didn't. But technologies have gotten much more stable and sensitive, and at last count, astronomers had found 490 exoplanets. Most of the exoplanets are Jupiters, few have been in the Goldilocks zone, all the earth-sized ones are much bigger than Earth, and nobody knows yet what they're made of or whether they have atmospheres that can protect life, let alone whether anyone could or would live there. So astronomers in universities and at NASA are using satellites and telescopes on the ground, and everyone has high hopes and great plans-the most breath-taking being Terrestrial Planet Finder Interferometer in space, you don't even need to know what it does, all you have to do to get your breath taken is look at it.
I'm still not entirely sure why astronomers are looking for these things. Nevertheless, the exoplanet hunt isn't all NASA-hype or astronomers-wangling-cash-from-Congress, because the normally-impassive National Academies of Science said it had the potential for making "the most profound discovery in the coming decade," and even better, "one day, parents and children could gaze at the sky and know that a place somewhat like home exists around 'THAT' star." And a usually-skeptical astronomer-blogger said that given the number of stars in the galaxies and the discovery of a relatively nearby planet "practically in our lap" makes him "extremely optimistic that earthlike planets are everywhere in our galaxy."
Then he added, "I don't want to extrapolate from a data set of two (us and them)," which he went on to do and you might want to ponder the statistical certainty of that. But I'm back 30 years ago, not quite seeing what new this says about the universe, I mean, we know planets support life, right? I'm more interested in the dark sector.
Ann Finkbeiner is a proprietor of The Last Word on Nothing, and is newly the author of A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering In A New Era of Discovery. She runs the graduate program in science writing at Johns Hopkins in The Writing Seminars.
Dibs on some of that twilight property, preferably next to the ocean of liquid nitrous oxide.
I'll convert. -40C equals -40F (I think, cuz I learned this so long ago we lived on the planet we lived on before earth) so -35C is, like, COLD. And 70C? Fuck, you know from just eyeballing it that THAT SHIT IS HOT. So, nevermind, you were right to begin with. Life IS too short.
When do we leave, cuz I haven't packed yet.
But the commuting time . . .
Oh, astrophysicists. "I don't care about the possibility of alien lifeforms and the existential and ethical conundrums that engenders, Imma model some sweet fucking equations for antimatter shit that could annihilate your shit up!"
I always assumed that they are looking for these things just so we have some potential colonization spots if everything goes to shit here on Earth
I'm sure ETS is working on a standardized test for the New Planet Application as we speak.
I'd always thought that, too. (And watching the plume of oil spread out in the Gulf this past summer, I thought maybe they'd better hurry up.) Is that not the case, though? Is the commute time Smitros mentioned just too unrealistic?
Also: great post!
It's going to have to get pretty bad on Earth before exoplanets start looking good.
Living on this thing would be like living on Antarctica with great solar power. Plus, we don't know if there's oxygen. Even if we're putting on helmets every time we step outside, it's going to be better than shipping off to a rock we aren't evolved to survive on.
P.S.
The sci-fi folks will say "terraforming," but again, why not just terraform Earth into something less horrifically polluted? It's just a sexier way of saying "environmentalism." As Dylan said (in reference to space colonies), you ain't goin' nowhere.
Gliese 581 is 20 light years away, so be 20 years old, fire up them light-speed warp drives, and get there while you've still got some years of work left in you.
Also: actually picking up and permanently moving a not insignificant number of humans to another planet: not gonna happen even within our own solar system. It costs like $10k/kg just to get to low earth orbit. And since your typical human weighs around 70kg (roughly - obviously it depends on whether you're a man or woman, fat or thin, etc), and you would need 2 or 3 times that much weight in gear (space suits, clothes, various bits of personal gear), plus food, water, life support, propulsion, energy generation, capital equipment (if you're going there to stay, you need a job, right?), IT gear, etc, etc... you can see that the cost spirals out of control pretty damn quickly, even if you were just going to Mars.
If you want to head for this exciting new planet, you also have to take into account the fact that it's 20 light-years away, which means that even under the best realistic scenario, it's going to take hundreds of years to get there. So now in addition to everything else, you're going to need to move an entire ecosystem along with you, which of course adds tons of weight. Further - we don't really know how to make a self-contained ecosystem. There were two attempts: one in Russia (I forget the name) that wasn't completely closed off from the outside world, and Biosphere II, which had massive problems: oxygen levels fluctuated wildly inside the dome, and the overall ecology was quite unstable - there were several boom & bust issues that caused extinction of some of the species within the dome, while others multiplied out of control. Further: we don't really have a reliable means of propulsion that would get us to other stars. We've got some theory, but no practice.
Bottom line: interplanetary (to say nothing of interstellar) colonization is pretty much a non-starter.
If they would just get their shit together on the space elevator, the cost per mass would plummet. It requires a larger initial investment, but it really pays off afterwahahahahaha wtf am i talking about THIS IS AMURRICA
Gliese 581 is a red dwarf so if there's life on that planet, it's bound to be funky cat people.
Blah blah blah. Let's just hotbox Mars, give it two seasons and then we can live there. PLUS: we'd all weigh a whole lot less, because of gravity and whatnot.
It's totally doable. It was an essay question on a standardized test in 7th grade. GET ON THIS, SCIENCE.
Dibs on the Big Lady Disguise Suit.
TW-WWOOO WEEKS!!!
^jrb. Just toss me out the airlock already.
Awesome.
Wake me up if they find Jodie Foster's dad there.
Yeah you're right. It's not worth looking at exo-planets. I don't even know why we look at stars and galaxies. don't get me started on that boring background radiation. Dark energy? Who needs it. That place outside your front door's pretty dull to, but if you stay in you bight see dull stuff on TV. Really! the whole shabang sucks. We'd best kill ourselves before we see something. It's the only way.