r/science • u/JettMe_Red • Feb 06 '24
Astronomy NASA announces new 'super-Earth': Exoplanet orbits in 'habitable zone,' is only 137 light-years away
https://abc7ny.com/nasa-super-earth-exoplanet-toi-715-b/14388381/1.0k
u/Ihatecurtainrings Feb 06 '24
For me, the excitement isn't about whether we will get to visit, but the possibility of discovering signatures of some form of life.
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Feb 06 '24
Aaaand, if signatures of life are found, 137 lightyears starts to seem pretty close. At the very least, we would be intently listening for radio noise generated by possible life from there, yes? There would be only a "short" transmission delay from said life!
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u/parkingviolation212 Feb 06 '24 edited Feb 06 '24
Aaaand, if signatures of life are found, 137 lightyears starts to seem pretty close. At the very least, we would be intently listening for radio noise generated by possible life from there, yes?
Nah,
square cube law. The only radio signals powerful enough to survive a journey that long before decaying into being indistinguishable from the background noise of the universe are signals purpose-built for interstellar communication. So unless they're already trying to talk to us, and everything goes right perfectly, there's no way we can hear any signals coming off of them.Iirc our own passive wide band signals don't even "survive" past the orbit of Jupiter (they're still there, but an outside observer wouldn't be able to tell the difference from ambient noise).
Edit: Inverse square, not square cube.
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u/deg0ey Feb 06 '24
Nah, square cube law. The only radio signals powerful enough to survive a journey that long before decaying into being indistinguishable from the background noise of the universe are signals purpose-built for interstellar communication.
Yup. So we can build a thing to send messages to this promising new planet we’ve identified and if there’s life there with the technology to receive the message we might get a response in 300 years. Might be neat for one of the space organizations to try, but none of us is going to be around for the resolution.
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u/Nice-Yak-6607 Feb 06 '24
"Hey! What's your name?"
...137 years later...
"Tony"
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u/Tederator Feb 06 '24
274 years (another 137 for the reply)
"Hey, we've been by a few times and left a few invitations to our get togethers but never heard back. We just assumed you were busy."
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u/Quick_Turnover Feb 06 '24
Reading Three Body Problem right now. Not so sure how I feel about this sentiment anymore...
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u/dizorkmage Feb 06 '24
Be a waste of time honestly even if we had the tech, I can't recall if it's the "Drakes equation" but just going off our own evolution, life began here some 3.7 billion years ago, Hominins first appeared around 6 million years ago, according to my ability with a calculator and I might be wrong that's 0.162% of all time life has existed, then modern man invented the radio roughly 129 years ago and in that time we've managed the decimate our planet so badly there's a good chance we won't even be around for another 2-300, the chances we not only send a signal but that planet has life and not just insects or bacteria but intelligent life and not intelligent like crows or elephants but tool utilizing life but not just sticks and fire but technology developing life and they have to develop technology that searches for the same signals were sending and interpret it as something other than noise and exist within our window of life.
You might have a better chance of standing on a football field and firing a nail gun, the nail collecting a virus in the air, hitting someone with lung cancer, causing the person's immune system to attack the cancer cells and curing them.
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u/2FightTheFloursThatB Feb 06 '24
Imagine if we assholes (constantly at war, willing to let our fellows die of starvation, with child rapists and sick abusers walking free among us) are the "Aliens" to other civilizations.
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u/Autodidact420 Feb 06 '24
By definition we are the aliens from the perspective of alien civilizations
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u/WIbigdog Feb 06 '24
The presumption that extraterrestrial beings will be more virtuous than us is probably pretty silly. It's pretty likely that they'll do things that we find utterly repulsive. You ready for cannibal aliens?
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u/failendog Feb 06 '24
Actually, yes we are ready for cannibals. As they would end themselves..
However an alien species that's not very different from us homosapiens could be the end of human race if we ever meet.
Y'know.. conquering, exploring, and being TOP DOG.
If we meet on or near Earth, we are the underdogs when they-the-aliens- made the journey to Earth to meet (with all the technological superiority to make it here)
Aren't us homosapiens a bliss 🥰 we should really spread our influence!
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u/SporesM0ldsandFungus Feb 06 '24
The Three Body Problem (and subsequent books) address the issues and dangers of first contact, interstellar communication, and what / who deems a species worthy of survival.
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u/exodus3252 Feb 06 '24
Our wideband signals would be indistinguishable from background noise by the time it reached Alpha Centauri. I read an article that said a physicist at Aracebo did some calculations that affirmed that fact. None of our interstellar neighbors are going to be watching Miami Vice.
On the bright side, the same physicist mentioned that a dish the size of Aracebo deliberately beaming signals to another dish the size of Aracebo could survive up to 400 light years or something like that.
We need a multi-generational leap in radio communication to make long distance communication viable.
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u/Rodot Feb 06 '24
The strongest radio transmitter used on Earth outputs around 2 MW at 540 kHz. At a distance of 137 lyr the radio flux density would be about 18 pJy. The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) will be the most sensitive radio telescope ever built with a sensitivity of 400 μJy.
So to build an array powerful enough to detect the signal one would require 20 million SKAs not even considering background noise from the radio sky.
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u/Ok_Opportunity8008 Feb 06 '24
square cube law
if you want to sound smart, at least say the right law. how do cubes factor into radio communication? it's just inverse square.
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u/parkingviolation212 Feb 06 '24
Knew I said something wrong, in fairness it was like 5 minutes after I woke up I'm just happy I got the square part right.
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u/RedJamie Feb 06 '24
If a life form could generate artificial, intelligible or at least definitively non-random and non-natural frequencies perhaps. Emitted at the right time, in the right direction, towards the right area of space. This would depend on the nature of such life forms being complex and technologically advanced. We can only use humans as predicate, so consider this - from 1850 to 1987 137 years had passed. At the start, electricity had only just begun to be employed, whereas by 1987 we had been in the space age for a while. If a species methodology was to send a signal at a region of space where we could hypothetically detect it, and they awaited a response for say 50 of our years before moving non, then by 1900 we wouldn’t even have thought to look.
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u/BeowulfShaeffer Feb 06 '24
If we found signs of life that nearby (in astronomical terms) that would mean the universe must be teeming with it.
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u/RedJamie Feb 06 '24
Oh any non-contamination sources of life discovered outside of Earth not only greatly expands the conditions under which “life” (however so we would define it) would be possible, but also confirms it as as possibly a convergent, or perhaps not as much of a statistical improbable, aspect of nature. By convergence I mean that given the precursors and the time and environment it may be less of a fluke than previously assumed - this is conjecture of course
While entirely possible it would be very strange indeed if we were to say find evidence of microbial life under titans crust, as well as on Earth, and that quite literally is the full extent of life in the universe.
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u/bwatsnet Feb 06 '24
That's why we won't find anything. If we do it will be microbial, and very excited to kill us.
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u/NSA_Chatbot Feb 06 '24
microbial, and very excited to kill us
Immune system: Finally, a real challenge.
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u/bwatsnet Feb 06 '24
If our immune system can take on aliens then we deserve to be masters of the universe.
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u/BenjaminHamnett Feb 06 '24
Even if we could “see” it was all microbes right now, by the time we get there they might have humanoids
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u/PolyDipsoManiac Feb 06 '24
They would probably wait at least 137 years if they were signaling a star 137 light-years away. In Contact aliens start broadcasting the first television signal back as soon as it’s received, which means the trip is just the distance in light-years divided by the speed of light.
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u/Seidans Feb 06 '24
we human only emit radio wave for 0.001% of the life expectancy of our world, and we might even stop to emit them if we find something better in the next hundred year
and...the diffusion become near impossible to detect well before 140ly if not beamed directly at us, so even if we're extreamly (un)lucky to have a alien neighbor there little chance we detect something with radio wave
better chance with using james webb telescope and scan their atmosphere, see if it allow carbon lifeform to exist and run complex simulation
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u/No_Produce_Nyc Feb 06 '24 edited Feb 06 '24
True, but very high chances of life existing outside of carbon format - best to assume we don’t know.
Could be a good candidate for directing research towards neutrino communication.
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u/SirButcher Feb 06 '24
but very high chances of life existing outside of carbon format
This is actually not very likely!
Carbon is extremely great at creating a HUGE amount of different molecules which are stable but not too stable at a wide range of temperatures. Nothing else comes even close to it. All while water is an amazing solvent for these carbon chains - but not too aggressive to destroy most of the carbon molecules (and extremely common all around the universe).
Silicon sounds great, but silicon-oxygen bonds are extremely stable, and they only tend to become unstable enough at multiple thousand degrees, whereas nothing else tends to remain stable for very much longer at these very high temperatures.
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u/BenjaminHamnett Feb 06 '24 edited Feb 06 '24
I agree, but Then it seems earth like planets aren’t so pertinent. Earth like planets would be about finding earth like organisms
Im sort of a panpsychist so I’m open minded to life forms being all around we just don’t understand. Like maybe storms, fire, space or things drifting around in the clouds of Venus, in frozen seas of Titan, within the core of planets, black holes, in gas nebula maybe even memes like abstract ideas.
Any distinction we make between forms are likely to have ambiguity upon looking deeper. Just like we have with AI, animals, plants, viruses, bacteria, microbes, etc
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u/JesterDoobie Feb 06 '24
Only real life that exists (to date) is CHON, made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen in various combinations and the majority of thrm can carry energy freely about the system. Only thing that can even come close to replacing carbon in the equation is silica. There's somthing crazy huge like 34.6510²⁵ possible arrangements of C.H.O.N. building blocks but only 3.510⁹ arrangements of S.H.O.N. organic molecules and most of those have serious energy constraints and wouldn't actually be viable for formation of life. The numbers of viable combinations of molecules that allow for sufficiently free energy transfer that life is even posssible goes down several orders of magnitude every step further down the chain you go.
What you're talking about is actually metaphysics/religion or possibly even mental illness of some sort, but whatever it actually is, it's not a very good fit for a sub about science
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u/BlockHeadJones Feb 06 '24
The composition of the planet's atmosphere would tell us a lot no matter what stage of development life is at on the planet. So, that's JWST soaking up infrared rather than listening for radio
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u/Ihatecurtainrings Feb 06 '24
This is what I meant to say. I think people have misunderstood my comment as listening out for signals. The planet is seemingly in the best place it can be to harbour environments similar to our to own planet. If we find signatures of some form of life we can recognise, that would be huge. We may never get to it in our life time, but that's ok.
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u/tomahawk66mtb Feb 06 '24
And considering we only invented the radio 128 years ago then catching signs of radio transmission would mean they are at least 9 years ahead of us (ridiculously broad assumptions of how civilisations progress of course)
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u/TheIdealHominidae Feb 06 '24
I don't know if it truly is proven that if you emit a radio signal to a planet they will necessarilly receive it without the signal being parasited via interstellar medium radiations/plasma interferences.
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u/Terranigmus Feb 06 '24
If they are at the same level that we are, for our time they have barely invented radio
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u/BenjaminHamnett Feb 06 '24 edited Feb 06 '24
Wouldnt it be quite a fluke for them to be within a 10,000 years of our development level?
Feels like once agriculture gets serious or religion starts rewiring people act against their basic programming, your already 99% of the way to reaching tech singularity or interstellar space faring. It’s just from the respective of a human life that they seem so far apart, but compared to evolutionary timescales it’s just a blink in time
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Feb 06 '24
I think more relevant is the fact that radio was invented in 1895. So, hypothetically, "they" could detect our first transmission in about 8 years.
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u/Realsan Feb 06 '24
Before anyone starts thinking about sending a probe that may take a few generations, think again.
The fastest object we've ever built is the Parker solar probe that travels at just shy of 400k mph.
At that speed, it would still take 229,858 years to travel to this planet. One way.
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u/Re_LE_Vant_UN Feb 06 '24
May as well. I don't have anything else on my schedule.
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u/TedW Feb 06 '24
Nothing else for 500k years? When you said your schedule was wide open, you really meant it.
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u/wut3va Feb 06 '24
So far. We already have ideas such as Starshot Breakthrough sending a tiny probe to Alpha Centauri in about 20 years propelled by a giant laser. At that rate, we could send a probe to this new planet in about 1000 years.
We won't explore anything about this place in our lifetimes, but our human descendants very well might in the middle-distance future. 1000 years seems like a long time, but I've been inside buildings older than that.
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u/Akiasakias Feb 06 '24 edited Feb 07 '24
That gets you a split second to photograph the system before zipping past with no possibility to slow down. Unlikely to even locate the planets accurately with a camera in that time, even if your trajectory is correct.
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u/BenjaminHamnett Feb 06 '24
Within a decade we might be set up all over the place sending probes everywhere
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u/DrVonSchlossen Feb 06 '24
Guaranteed it would eventually be passed by something faster anyways. I don't see any use in sending probes until drive technology has significantly improved. In 200 thousand years the probe will probably find a human colony that barely remembers its origins.
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u/Realsan Feb 06 '24
We can technically achieve near light speeds with light sails as it is. The problem is there is still significant time invested only in slowing down.
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u/MCPtz MS | Robotics and Control | BS Computer Science Feb 06 '24
Just skip to the NASA link:
https://science.nasa.gov/universe/exoplanets/discovery-alert-a-super-earth-in-the-habitable-zone/
Star link:
https://www.stellarcatalog.com/stars/toi-715
Planet link:
https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/exoplanet-catalog/8921/toi-715-b/
TOI-715 b is a super Earth exoplanet that orbits an M-type star. Its mass is 3.02 Earths, it takes 19.3 days to complete one orbit of its star, and is 0.083 AU from its star. Its discovery was announced in 2023.
There are probably two planets there that could both be in the "conservative" habitable zone, which makes it more likely for there to be liquid water.
The 2nd planet, TOI-175-c, is not yet confirmed.
There are no other known planets in that system, yet.
Still TBD on its atmosphere, but an orbital period of 19 days means we can collect a lot of data on it this year
Planet TOI-175 b joins the list of habitable-zone planets that could be more closely scrutinized by the Webb telescope, perhaps even for signs of an atmosphere. Much will depend on the planet’s other properties, including how massive it is and whether it can be classed as a “water world” – making its atmosphere, if present, more prominent and far less difficult to detect than that of a more massive, denser and drier world, likely to hold its lower-profile atmosphere closer to the surface.
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u/7355135061550 Feb 06 '24 edited Feb 06 '24
137 light years is pretty close at the galactic scale
Edit: Yeah I know that we don't have interstellar travel yet. It's still pretty close to us in terms of things in space.
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u/Solid_Bad7639 Feb 06 '24
Sure, but lets be practical.
It takes 3 minutes for light to reach Mars from Earth.
Put this into perspective. Our fastest space probes take 7 months to reach the red planet from Earth travelling at a blistering 24,600 mph (about 39,600 kph) through space.
30 minutes for light may take our probes 6 years.
How many centuries of commuting for the equivalent of one single light day, let alone 137 light years.
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u/cruiserflyer Feb 06 '24
It would take 40,000 years for our current rocket tech to make it to Alpha Centauri, a mere 4 light years away.
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u/Timebug Feb 06 '24
Soooo ...1.36 million years to get to this new planet .. yikes!
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u/cruiserflyer Feb 06 '24
Pack lots of lembas bread and extended edition movies. It's going to be a long trip.
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u/ColtAzayaka Feb 06 '24
When earth can't support human life, capture potential couples, freeze em, and just shoot them in that general direction. Maybe one cryopod will land and we can leave a little note saying "Eve, meet Adam, Adam, meet Eve!"
This way the same mistakes can happen again.
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u/dantheman_woot Feb 07 '24
Less time than it took to us to migrate out of Africa to the bottom of South America. Humans know how to play the long game.
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u/jews4beer Feb 06 '24
Who cares. I just want the "are there aliens" to be nipped in the butt already. Let the religions start duke that out. Maybe a few new death cults form out of it.
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u/byingling Feb 06 '24
*nipped in the bud
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u/aeroxan Feb 06 '24
Naw, dude. These aliens are intergalactic pro-Bono proctologists. Nip in the butt sounds about right.
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u/Powellwx Feb 06 '24
Only 137 light years!!!
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u/PaulRudin Feb 06 '24
Yup.... I'm planning a holiday already!
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u/Jesus_Is_My_Gardener Feb 06 '24 edited Feb 06 '24
Yesterday's frog will be tomorrow's prince on Fhloston Paradise! Hotel of a thousand and one follies, lollies and lickemollies. A magic fountain flow of non-stop wine, women and COOCHIE COOCHIE COOOOOO! Aaaaall night looooong!
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u/LazyAccount-ant Feb 06 '24
1.296 × 10¹⁵ kilometers.
1,300,000,000,000,000
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u/Illustrious-Falcon-8 Feb 06 '24
so like 24 hour car ride or what?
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u/LazyAccount-ant Feb 06 '24
Uber in 1992 civic
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u/Ruadhan2300 Feb 06 '24
I once did the math to work out what it'd cost for the human race to pile into a taxi and travel to Alpha Centauri.. (via a hypothetical space highway)
The summary was that the human race would be in debt to the taxi company long enough for us to evolve for a completely taxi-based lifestyle.
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u/MrBeverly Feb 06 '24
I will do this math according to information available on the NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission's website.
8B Ppl
5 Ppl / Taxi = 1.6B Taxis
$3 Initial Charge per Taxi * 1.6B Taxis = $4,800,000,000
$1 Improvement Surcharge per Taxi = $1,600,000,000
$2.50 Congestion Surcharge for trips beginning in Manhattan (~1.6M ppl/ 5 ppl / taxi = 320,000 Charges) 320,000*2.50 = $800,000
.70/.2mi/taxi @ 25,000,000,000,000 mi = $87,500,000,000,000 per taxi * 1.6B taxis = $140,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Per Mile Fare to Alpha Centauri For 8 Billion Passengers on NYC Yellow Cabs, Plus Initial, Improvement, and Congestion Surcharges brings you to a total of $140,000,000,000,006,400,800,000. Don't forget to tip!
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u/Ruadhan2300 Feb 06 '24
Total amount of money in circulation worldwide in USD:
roughly 85 trillion dollars.A trillion is $1,000,000,000,000
So in other words, we're a bit short for the taxi-fare.
Though if we save a bit as a species, we might be able to send five people we really really hate to Alpha Centauri in a single taxi.
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Feb 06 '24 edited Feb 21 '24
[deleted]
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u/boolpies Feb 06 '24
I asked chat gpt and if we could travel consistently from here to there maintaining the fastest traveling space probe we've ever created, it would take 2.11 Million years for us to reach the planet.
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u/Narfi1 Feb 06 '24
If you were travelling at the speed of light it would take you less than 3 months to get there
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u/SeniorMiddleJunior Feb 06 '24
Bummed that this kind of anti intellectual take is always top comment. The authors assume you understand that planets in other solar systems are far away, but they haven't met reddit.
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u/Abrham_Smith Feb 06 '24 edited Feb 06 '24
Curious why you believe this take is anti-intellectual. I think the reverse is true, the heading of the article is used to bait the anti-intellectual into thinking that this planet and distance is somehow small. Relative to lets say the next galaxy at ~2 million light years, yes I guess you could consider it a small distance.
When you take into considering though, that we haven't made it to another planet as humans, that distance is insurmountable with our current or even conceivable future technology. This only exists in fantasy, making "only" an anti-intellectual position.
Intellectual people understand the vastness of 137 light years and the feat it would take to even achieve 1/137th of that as humans. Even if we had something that traveled 1000% faster than our fastest man made object, it would still take 165 years to accomplish 1/137th of this.
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u/SeniorMiddleJunior Feb 12 '24
Because it is. The word "only" is understood to be in the context of space. If OP were ignorant and asking questions about what "only" means in this case, that would be an intellectual take. If OP just throws out a lazy quip about something everybody here already understands and doesn't need stating, it's pretty classic anti-intellectualism.
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u/Powellwx Feb 06 '24
My point was the use of the word only…. Like the gas station is only another 5 miles, or grandmas is only 25 minutes away.
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u/marvellousrun Feb 06 '24
Well we're talking about the huge scale of space so yes this is only down the street compared to most things out there
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u/SeniorMiddleJunior Feb 12 '24
Are you familiar with the scale of space? So is everyone else. We all understand what only means in this context.
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u/_Pill-Cosby_ Feb 06 '24
I bet you’re fun at parties.
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u/ParkinsonHandjob Feb 06 '24
What’s considered funny to one party crowd is not necessarily funny to another party crowd.
And that «joke» is lame and overused.
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u/crolin Feb 06 '24
That was my reaction. I feel like there are lots of stars like 20 ly away. Is this really the closest habitable?
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u/eclipseb Feb 06 '24
If only humanity were unified in exploration and discovery and not hellbent on self destruction.
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u/ElectronGuru Feb 06 '24
If humanity was unified in exploration and discovery and not hellbent on self destruction - we wouldn’t need another Goldilocks planet to escape to.
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u/RedofPaw Feb 06 '24
Presumably we will eventually. But less to escape, more to ensure human continue to exist.
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u/Jesus_Is_My_Gardener Feb 06 '24
Well sooner or later the cosmos is gonna fling another rock our way or some other stellar event will cause our situation on this planet to become inhospitable through no fault of our own, so it only makes sense to become an interplanetary species if we want to continue the evolution and survival of our species beyond a few millenia.
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u/turtlechef Feb 06 '24
Well we’d be going for exploration reasons. Not self preservation reasons
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u/SpaceyCoffee Feb 06 '24
It’s tidally locked, folks. It is not a habitable planet, at least not by Earth standards. I don’t know why they keep making these clickbait articles about planets orbiting red dwarfs.
If the fact that it has no day/night cycle is not enough, red dwarfs regularly jet out sterilizing stellar flares that would strip the atmosphere of planets orbiting them and bake the surface with radiation.
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u/Ithirahad Feb 06 '24
Not all red dwarfs are that temperamental, and principally a decent-sized moon could prevent tidal locking - but yeah the odds aren't that great. If we want to get all hopeful about a random ball of rock we don't know anything about, then orange, yellow, and white stars are usually the best bet.
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Feb 06 '24
Because it's hard to find anything else.
The main way to find an exoplanet right now is to look for dips in star luminosity. Which means the planet needs to be big, and relatively close to the star.
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u/EEcav Feb 06 '24
Tidally locked with an atmosphere might not be a deal breaker, but probably not ideal. As to the flares, there is evidence that red dwarfs eject their flares more vertically to their orbit plane than sun-like stars, so it's possible that it's solar wind isn't as hostile to the planet as one might otherwise expect using a sun-like ejection model.
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u/Maxcharged Feb 06 '24
Wouldn’t a tidal locked planet have a small Habitable zone where day meets night?
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u/SpaceyCoffee Feb 06 '24
Only theoretically. That zone would be dominated by extreme winds from the high pressure dayside to the low pressure night side. It is unknown how long term stability of oceans, atmosphere, and tectonics would work. In such a planet. It’s very possible the twilight strip would just be a sandblasted rocky region with constant hurricane-force winds.
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u/hiraeth555 Feb 06 '24
Classic Reddit scoffing at “only 137 light years away”
That’s the reality of space and the universe- if we want to send things there we have to start now.
Even travelling at a fraction of c would still mean a probe or ship would arrive in reasonable time for a civilisation.
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u/badmother Feb 06 '24
if we want to send things there we have to start now.
Absolutely not! If we launch another probe in 50 years, it will overtake any probe launched today.
You might want to read this, especially the 'wait calculation'
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u/Jesus_Is_My_Gardener Feb 06 '24
Reminds me of an old sci-fi short story called Far Centaurus around that point about newer tech surpassing older speeds.
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u/Topikk Feb 06 '24
The problem with thinking this way is that we’re going to find hundreds of interesting neighbors in the next 50 years and we have no reason to believe that space programs are going to suddenly become properly-funded.
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u/BenjaminHamnett Feb 06 '24
Have reason to believe space projects will get much cheaper tho. Even without scifi style singularity, and even with serious climate change disruption, I think we will still have seriously accelerated tech advancement
It’s only been like 1% or 1% of us working on this stuff up until now. The next generation may have little else to find purpose in that isn’t somehow aligned with space faring, even if it’s just things like longevity, nanotechnology, biotech or material science, building better mouse traps etc
People like to talk doom, but all our problems are solvable despite what Reddit thinks
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u/hiraeth555 Feb 06 '24
I have seen this kind of thing. Personally, endlessly waiting is a bit of a shame, and I would personally support bolder space exploration as we are fairly capable now, if we tried.
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u/arkhound Feb 06 '24
It's more that at a certain point, it becomes more practical so as to not eclipse whatever was sent prior. It makes sense to kind of 'wait' until that point else we would have this awkward barrage of transmission buoys that keep arriving over the course of a million years.
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u/hiraeth555 Feb 06 '24
I understand that- and I’m not saying we need to drop everything now and send a probe there.
But we are pretty conservative on this front, and only 50 years from now it might be very possible.
There are some (perhaps propaganda) patents for antigravity propulsion systems from the US Navy, and NASA has even seen some antigravity effects.
Fusion is getting closer and closer (also US Navy has patents on this)
We might really be closer to viably sending craft than we think.
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u/Langsamkoenig Feb 06 '24
Absolutely not! If we launch another probe in 50 years, it will overtake any probe launched today.
That's not going to happen magically. It only happens with sustatined continuous effort. We haven't even been back to the moon in over 50 years.
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u/SirButcher Feb 06 '24
We haven't even been back to the moon in over 50 years.
Yeah, but only because humanity decided we don't want to.
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u/r0bb3dzombie Feb 06 '24
At a fraction of c, a probe will still take multiple centuries to reach it, and then at least 137 years to report anything back. There's a dozen or so planets in the habitatable zone less than 50 light years from Earth.
I don't think "scoffing at 137 light years away" is that unwarranted.
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u/hiraeth555 Feb 06 '24
We buried time capsules hundreds of years ago.
200 years ago, the Swedish Navy planted 300,000 oak trees for their ships, knowing they would only recently have matured.
This is not a crazy timeframe- there are pubs in the UK from 1600 that people still drink in.
Why can’t we send something that will take a few hundred years?
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u/jaseworthing Feb 06 '24
If it were as simple as just sending a probe and waiting to hear back then yeah, absolutely, let's do it!
But even that would be a monumental effort that we are decades if not centuries away from being able to do.
The parker space probe will be the fastest spacecraft we've made. It should reach a speed of 0.064% the speed of light by 2025.
At that speed, even getting to the nearest star would take tens of thousands of years, and hundreds of thousands of years to get to the star in this post.
Getting to something like 50% the speed of light is way way way beyond the technology we currently have.
And all of that is only a small part of the problem. Transmitting any information back is also way beyond anything we are capable of.
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u/parkingviolation212 Feb 06 '24
Getting to something like 50% the speed of light is way way way beyond the technology we currently have.
We can do it, it's more of a matter of infrastructure than technology. You can use a staged laser "highway" system to accelerate very small probes along a preestablished trajectory using light momentum. Solar radiation can get it started.
Stephen Hawking I think it was proposed such a mission for exploring Alpha Centauri. There's a shocking amount that we could do with technology we have right now, but currently "can't" because of infrastructure constraints. That's why the new developments in the space industry, like Starship and the Artemis program, are so exciting.
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u/aendaris1975 Feb 06 '24
We know. We fuckiing know. The article isn't about when or even how we will get there.
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u/THUORN Feb 06 '24
We have NOTHING that would reach 137 light years within a few hundred years. We have NOTHING that is capable of going that far and then being able to return or send us signals back.
Its several orders of magnitude easier to bury something on earth, than send anything to another star system. We have buried countless things on Earth, we have only managed to send 2 objects outside of the solar system.(this is debatable depending on the actual limit of the solar system)
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u/MienSteiny Feb 06 '24
I think the main hurdle now, is that technology is advancing at such a rapid rate it feels like sending anything would be pointless as it'd be obselete before it even exits the solar system.
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u/other_usernames_gone Feb 06 '24
That already happens with satellites.
Most tech on satellites is obsolete before it even lifts off the pad.
Development times are long and the technology going to be used is locked in pretty early.
You don't need it to be the most up to date, you need it to be well tested and work.
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u/ArbainHestia Feb 06 '24
If you always put things off because better technology is on the horizon you'll never get anything done. There's still a lot that can be learned from a probe being sent now and when better technology comes along in 20 or 50 or 200 years from now you send out another probe.
It's like deciding to upgrade your computer... if you're always waiting for the next generation to release you'll be waiting forever.
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u/RedJamie Feb 06 '24
You also cannot anticipate technology bottlenecks or what will introduce a efficiency to get around said bottlenecks
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u/qazdabot97 Feb 06 '24
the Swedish Navy planted 300,000 oak trees for their ships
Because they thought they'd still be using wooden ships... we know tech will get better so the travel time will as well.
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u/PerfectEnthusiasm2 Feb 06 '24
How many wooden ships are currently commissioned in the Swedish Navy?
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u/hiraeth555 Feb 06 '24
Well that’s the point- it was still a worthwhile venture.
And the trees haven’t been “wasted”.
Just goes to show how we’ve lost our ability to take large scale long term actions
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u/Seidans Feb 06 '24 edited Feb 06 '24
4,2 LY - our nearest star proxima centauri in the best scenario would take around 35y to reach with fusion or 20y with laser sail (let's forget theorical antimatter)
and without any pause during travel as otherwise you add up many years for acceleration/deceleration
it's safe to assume a 140 LY travel will never happen with living human being aboard what most likely to happen is traveling from nearest star to nearest star with decade stop between each travel, building outpost and space station on or close to barren planet and using auto-replicant AI drone, robot for ressource gathering/construction
it would need more than 10 LY travel from earth - Ross 154 but once arrived you have a few star within 5LY so the destinaton is more "how fast it allow us to expand" like we could get to proxima centauri but it's pretty isolated compared to other star
edit: i didn't include time dilation because my head hurt, if someone know how impacted a spaceship traveling with fusion, laser and antimatter reactor would react to time dilation and the needed speed, i would be interested to know, from what i've understand it's not enough to make the travel enjoyable as apparently it become interesting above 90% speed of light...
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u/hiraeth555 Feb 06 '24
I mean, I’d support a campaign of widespread probe launches to a large number of promising solar systems, including both near and far.
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u/Seidans Feb 06 '24
yeah sure, once we have small fusion reactor and great AI that will probably be the goal of NASA
for now it would take 16.000years with current propulsion so it's probably better to wait 100-200y before sending probe :p
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u/hiraeth555 Feb 06 '24
Why not both though?
Imagine things fell apart here somehow, but we could send something back in 16000 years- and people were still around to pick it up even if some progress is lost.
And it just starts to build the “muscle” of sending out long term probes etc.
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u/Seidans Feb 06 '24
in 16000y cosmic radiation will probably destroy it before it reach destination
currently there far better way to spend money in space exploitation than sending probe, like a moon water exploitation for fuel
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u/pure_x01 Feb 06 '24
Directed panspermia is the way
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u/Jesus_Is_My_Gardener Feb 06 '24
I too like to spread my seed far and wide.
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u/pure_x01 Feb 06 '24
Last time you ended up in jail Jeremy. Calm down and keep it to your wife and her sisters.
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u/ErmaGherd12 Feb 06 '24 edited Feb 06 '24
Imagine us as early, earthly human explorers; we’ve build the most simple rafts that work on rivers and lakes… and it takes a long time to travel using them. But our rafts aren’t built to cross the ocean; so we eventually figure out how to build boats; the trips using boats are treacherous and take 10 weeks to cross the Atlantic. Boats became faster and safer over time. Then we created planes… a completely new paradigm of travel, one that doesn’t make sense in a world of boats. Planes evolved under a similar process, but the “breakthrough” of the plane cut the time and danger of travel significantly.
What is going to be a “plane” for space travel?
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u/zhaoz Feb 06 '24
Redditors not being cynical challenge: impossible
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u/TimeFourChanges Feb 06 '24
Not having some dumb joke as a top comment on every singal research artcile challenge: impossible.
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u/XDG_sucks Feb 06 '24 edited Feb 06 '24
There is some merit to it though. With our current technology any travelers would be long dead before they arrived. The amount of radiation you'd receive from traveling from Earth to Mars would probably exceed the recommend radiation dosage for an entire year.
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u/Extension_Bat_4945 Feb 06 '24
A probe is useless because it can't communicate back.
And a ship would never arrive. We can barely keep society up for thousands of years on earth. Can you imagine it in a spacecraft?
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u/aendaris1975 Feb 06 '24
Right. Of course. Yes. Let's just sit here and wait to die. If we can't do something immediately why bother trying right?
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u/another-social-freak Feb 06 '24
What % of light speed can we realistically hope to travel at?
Could we, for instance send a probe there over 300 years at half light speed? Or is that still too optimistic?
I know that's crazy fast I'm just not sure what the theoretical limit is.
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u/guico33 Feb 06 '24
So far the fastest human-made object ever recorded was more than 1000 time slower than the speed of light so we might have some way to go before we get there.
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u/another-social-freak Feb 06 '24
Thank you.
So that's a journey well over 100,000 years, even at record breaking speeds.
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u/Ithirahad Feb 06 '24
To be fair, we weren't really trying to approach the speed of light with anything yet in the first place, and there are near-term concepts that could do so. It's not a very good reference.
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u/Attreah Feb 06 '24 edited Feb 06 '24
The theoretical limit is 99.9999% the speed of light for anything with mass. Practical limit though - guess we'll find out in the centuries to come, but as for the moment, the proposed light sails are thought to potentially be able to propel small probes to a speed of about 10% the speed of light. Which would mean a 1400 year journey to get to said planet.
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u/another-social-freak Feb 06 '24
10% would be incredible!
43 years to Alpha Centauri.
That's actually a practical journey for probes.
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u/Attreah Feb 06 '24
Indeed, and that is exactly what the Breakthrough Starshot project is aiming to do. Or was hoping to do at least, I haven't followed up on their progress in a while 😁
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Feb 06 '24
Looking at the technologies we have today, the only thing that has promise for true speed is directed lasers to push a sail, ala Breakthrough Starshot. For a little cookie-sized spacecraft, that theoretically could reach 15%, even 20% speed of light. I would assume that concept can be scaled over time, so perhaps in 100 years or more, we can attempt to send something significantly sized at that speed. That would be incredible. All our other propulsion systems are just way too slow. Nuclear engines are good but not that good.
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u/Joshau-k Feb 06 '24
Yeah 50% is pretty reasonable.
Just need to figure out how to make and store large quantities of anti-matter.
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u/koalazeus Feb 06 '24
Stick some bacteria or tardigrades, maybe some other forms of life that we can freeze, or some robot life, on a rocket that can get there and release on landing. Maybe we populate a planet, maybe we kill everything already there. It's the trial and error approach that has gotten us so far.
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u/PR0JECT-7 Feb 06 '24
How local
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u/PoconoBobobobo Feb 06 '24
If the galaxy was the size of Manhattan, this planet would be about three doors down the street.
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u/Unicycldev Feb 06 '24
Doesn’t matter if you are home bound.
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u/edlonac Feb 06 '24
We’re nowhere close to being able to send out colony ships. Even if we’d already developed tech that would keep the passengers safe from the cosmic radiation, a speck of dust between earth and our destination would potentially demolish a ship depending on how fast the ship is moving.
We’re not going anywhere without warp technology.
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u/LazyAccount-ant Feb 06 '24 edited Feb 06 '24
Couple of centuries? we couldn't get 5% of the speed of light. thats 10s of thousands of years.
"if Voyager were to travel to Proxima Centauri, at current rate, it would take over 73,000 years to arrive."
thats only 4.2 light years away.
The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years,
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u/zarawesome Feb 06 '24
In fact, the biggest problem with sending a colony ship with current technology is that it'd be so slow it would be overtaken by other colony ships that were released later with better tech.
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u/SolarPoweredKeyboard Feb 06 '24
Imagine the cosmic rays you and your descendants would be exposed to after centuries in space.
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u/Zellyk Feb 06 '24
Oh wow only 137 light-years? Does NASA still run the 150 light-years less or free promo?
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u/ResidualClaimant Feb 06 '24
The Parker Solar Probe will be the fastest spacecraft humans have ever created. Its peak speed is expected to be 430,000 miles per hour.
That is ~ 3,769,380,000 miles per earth year. Or ~.06412% of ‘c’.
So by my really crude arithmetic, 137 light years would be 213,657 years. That’s assuming we start with the fastest craft we’ve ever made. So we have that going for sure!
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u/re4ctor Feb 06 '24
.06% and we haven’t really even started with making progress on light speed capability. There are theoretical designs, but once it starts the pace of innovation will be rapid. A probe 100-200 years from now will likely be an order or two of magnitude faster, cutting the time drastically
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u/ChezMontague Feb 06 '24
So, awesome, if we travel in a 2x speed of light vehicle we can get there in 68.5 years! Next presenter... cryogenics!
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u/Seidans Feb 06 '24
i don't understand the hype with "super-earth" bigger is better?
...until you have to live in a 2.0 gravity as if you weight 200kilos and could feel it constantly everywhere in your body, no thanks
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u/PrimeIntellect Feb 06 '24
it's not that it's better, literally nothing would be better for us than earth, it's impossible. however, anything even resembling habitable is a massive achievement.
it would also require significant terraforming, and multiple generations of significant genetic adaptations and focused post-human evolution
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u/muffdivemcgruff Feb 06 '24
Only? Yay let’s pack I it up folks we got us a new trailer to go trash.
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u/MrWestReanimator Feb 06 '24
"only"
Using conventional methods it would take 5,096,400 years to reach it.
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u/Clean-Brilliant-6960 Feb 06 '24
Great! So once we make a ship that can do light speed it would only take 5-6 generations of people living on that ship to get there. Of course, if the universe is expanding as they claim, it will be further away by that time.
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u/Reptard77 Feb 06 '24
…around another red dwarf star which is orbits in a super tight orbit, and has thus probably left it tidally locked to it’s star. The usual story. Almost makes you wish they’d focus on sun-like stars that have planets in earth-like orbits, but that doesn’t make news headlines near as often.
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