Thread: First Planet in Habitable Zone Confirmed

Originally Posted by Omnis Dei

If Negative Nancy doesn't want to celebrate a scientific achievement then Negative Nancy doesn't have to.

"Rumors of our scientific achievement have been blown greatly out of proportion." - People who found a planet over twice the size of earth a certain distance from a star.

lol Omnis, even though I rarely agree with you your posts are so funny sometimes.

Originally Posted by Omnis Dei

If Negative Nancy doesn't want to celebrate a scientific achievement then Negative Nancy doesn't have to.

There's a difference between negativity and living in the real world.

Most people who I've heard talk about this story seem to think they've found literally found a planet with oceans and life. This isn't helped by the bloody ridiculous 'artist's impression of the planet' that accompanied the press release which is basically covered in forests.

I can't wait until a habitable planet is found. I just have the sanity to not celebrate the discovery of what is likely a hellish lump of rock as said planet.

Artist's impressions are ridiculous these days. It's like they don't even bother with any facts or reality most of the time.
I think it has to do with either sites like getty and istock and those other graphic design/illustration sites where you just choose the most fitting image.
Or it's because the media outlet wants to excite people about science.

The former is obviously bad for the artists.
The latter is probably a good thing.

I dunno, science should really be about the truth, and giving people entirely false impressions of a discovery just so they'll be excited about it doesn't seem very much in the scientific spirit to me.

That's why I said probably, instead of definitely.
People do need to be more excited about science, but, as you said, I'm not 100% sure if it's worth it, when it's not really actual science.

Originally Posted by ThePreserver

But do they have any other valuable resources? Metals that can withstand the impact of micro-meteoroids over and over and over as it travels for hundreds of years through space? You need a hell of a lot of resources... you can't build a ship out of pure fuel... OR CAN YOU?! :O

Asteroids, as a whole, basically have all the same elements as Earth's crust. Did you really not know this?

Originally Posted by cmind

Asteroids, as a whole, basically have all the same elements as Earth's crust. Did you really not know this?

Once you get the metals/Oxygen out of the asteroids, how do we turn that into usable ship parts? Would we have a refinery floating in space, or do we have to bring it back down to earth? (In either case, where do we get the fuel to either 1) get the refinery INTO space, or 2) get the elements down to earth and back up to space?)

I'm confused by the logistics (or lack thereof) proposed for this project... Even if they have the base for fuels and metals... what do you do with the raw materials?

None of these projects sound feasible in ANY way; we need the initial resources to BUILD all of these "things" which only serve to go out and find more materials... but then we have to have a way to build the ship parts out of that, we need energy sources for all of these "things", which require more resources... It just seems a bit larger in scale than we can handle at any point even remotely within the next couple centuries (physics permitting) to build a generation ship.

Considering the planet's location to it's parent star I'm willing to bet the chances of it having water in abundance is pretty slim.

It has two stars.

Whats the name of the other star because afaik Kepler 22 is the planets host star. If 22b exist within a binary system that's new news to me.

Originally Posted by Ne-yo

Considering the planet's location to it's parent star I'm willing to bet the chances of it having water in abundance is pretty slim.

Why..?

Considering it's 15% closer to Kepler 22 than we are to the Sun, even though Kepler 22 is smaller but only slightly smaller than our Sun, then there's an extremely high probability that Kepler 22b is synchronously tidally-locked to Kepler 22 and that being the case we would only observe liquid water existing only in the twilight zone area's of the planet between the edges of night and day. However, we need to recognize that even if that's possible it's still going to have significant instability to keep water, because we know from previous research that all tidally-locked planets leak a little and there wouldn't be a permanent zone for liquid water.

Also, Kepler 22b’s radius is 2.4X that of Earth and for scale let’s look at Neptune and Uranus, which has a radii 4X that of Earth. If kepler 22b has the same composition as Neptune and Uranus then we would definitely expect it to be on the bottom end of the gas giant and Ice giants, which are the type of compositions that are mostly catalogued for exoplanet discoveries. I'm just sort of leaning to this planet being more on the bottom-end of a Neptunium type planet based off what we know so far.

Originally Posted by ThePreserver

We also need a fuel source to travel 600 light years, and be able to travel near (or beyond) the speed of light while keeping said people alive and sustained for that many years... the ship itself would take such huge quantities of resources for fuel, living requirements, etc...

I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's highly improbable without resources (plus China is stockpiling all of the precious metals they can to be used for energy production, solar cells, wind turbines, etc.) It would be a neat idea, though.

Project Daedalus estimated in the late 20th century that it would take a minimum of 50-100 years at ~10% of the speed of light to reach the furthest possible star system (15 light years). Not to mention the design for the fusion-powered plasma jet was about 4 times the size of the empire state building.

Good luck wit dat 600 light years.

Originally Posted by Xei

Meh, they really know nothing about the planet. It receives roughly the same amount of sunlight as Earth, but it's probably not remotely like Earth. It could have no atmosphere and be freezing, it could have no water on it, it could have a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus, it could be made of gas...

Good to see the technology for planet searching getting steadily more advanced, but there's still some way to go before it's useful.

If Negative Nancy doesn't want to invade Terra/Pandora then Negative Nancy doesn't have to.