Scientists discover potentially habitable planets
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
Now imagine these people, who've lived all their lives in wonderful space habitats, worked in ships and on other planets and such. I don't think they'll be looking for another Earth. Why would they? They'll think their space habitat is far more comfortable.
As far as interstellar travel is concerned, I'm certain we will solve longevity well before we travel to the stars. FTL won't be the big obstacle it seems now. When your lifespan is several centuries, spending 30-50 years of it traveling across the stars is as reasonable as our ancestors crossing Europe, the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, or the American Continent to colonize a new land.
Since their colony ship is a fine habitat, they won't be looking for an Earth-like planet; they'll be looking for a Sun-like star. Of which there are many. Humans can spread out at a sub-light speed across our arm of the Galaxy. But most trips will be one-way. Each colony must be self-sustaining. The best find would be an asteroid belt in the habitable zone. Cheap resources!
I really, really, really doubt that. People who spend most of their time living on oil rigs now, or people who lived large parts of their lives on ships, did not end up losing the desire for dry land.
Similarly, it's easy to argue that there will be incremental improvements in space technology, but it's very hard to argue that they will snowball into large-scale luxury platforms that can sustain human life indefinitely.
That is probably not too far away. We are getting very good into semi-autonomous transformations, and at turning anything into the materials we want.
The cost of every square foot of living space in x years is something we can't have the smallest idea about.
I agree. And it goes beyond just being cooped up.
Having a planet's atmosphere to burn up flying space debris or at least being inside of a cave in an asteroid (as long as it is really a cave) can provide a lot of protection. A high-speed space rock could easily tear through the one foot of protective wall in your space station, and all of the pretty plants and oxygen in your biosphere will be dead from having been almost instantly frozen, even if you patch it up.
If we want colonization, we not only need orbiting stations/stations at Lagrangian points, we must be colonizing big rocks. Once you perfect your shields, it's another story, but we are nowhere near the energy requirements or technology of a ship or viable station that is safe for humanity to live in long-term. Even if I live to be 1000 years old, I'd never want to take my chances in a station or ship that isn't at least in orbit, protected by a large planet on one side, for any great length of time. And our orbit is filled with space junk- not very safe.
Now, if it were a Firefly-class ship, that'd be different. I'd live in that in a heartbeat. Or the original Enterprise or the Tantive IV.
This is a myth. If you remove the air from a spacecraft you don't instantly freeze, nor almost instantly freeze. Without air there is no means to conduct the heat away from your body, so you'll stay warm until you radiate your heat away.
The effects of sudden decompression are more an issue than freezing. The moisture in your mouth and eyes will start to boil off, the dissolved gasses in your body fluids will start to come out of solution. But if you can fix the decompression issue quickly enough most things will survive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_exposure#Ebullism.2C_hyp...
The phrase "ultracool dwarf star" is descriptive, but both less familiar and less precise than "brown dwarf". Perhaps the author assumed the audience wouldn't know what a brown dwarf is, but a lot of us do (and the rest could have it explained easily enough).
> TRAPPIST-1 is an M8 dwarf, only 0.08 times the mass of the Sun; just barely massive enough to fuse hydrogen into helium in its core. If it were much lower mass we wouldn’t call it a star at all (we’d say it’s a brown dwarf).
And the Wikipedia article on brown dwarfs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf
> Brown dwarfs are substellar objects not massive enough to sustain hydrogen-1 fusion reactions in their cores, unlike main-sequence stars.
Apparently TRAPPIST-1 is an actual star, which makes it a (small, cool) red dwarf, not a brown dwarf. But it is near the dividing line.
(A brown dwarf with planets would be interesting, but they probably wouldn't be potentially habitable.)
2 planets are orbit-locked. I've always thought those make the best for sci-fi fiction, since they're effective halo's in terms of habitability.
source: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu... [paywalled]
Wikipedia already has some info on the telescope and findings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST
Via the ESO press release: http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1615/
That's quite a variation in temperature. Especially since Venus generally isn't considered to be "habitable."
But gosh, imagine going to bed on such a habitat knowing that all that's keeping you from a hot and fiery end are your gas balloons and a couple of steel cables!
I wonder what the effects would be of a child forming in a womb, being born, and growing up in zero gravity conditions.
1. Incredibly expensive.
2. Massive beyond the scale of anything ever assembled in orbit.
3. Big enough to carry a self-sustaining colony, above minimum population size for genetic issues.
So, newborns in zero-g, not necessarily needed, if we're really going to the stars the old fashioned way.
However, if we start building stuff from raw materials found in space these costs should drop dramatically. Honestly, we are looking at hundreds of years either way so it's sort of meaningless with our current lifespan.
Really, we need to build the Orion nuclear pulse ship for heavy lift and intra-stellar transport.
Without a reworking of modern physics, the Alcubierre Drive for example, transport is going to take a loooong time.
Even if we didn't need a backup planet, this is the next phase is human exploration. It's inherently part of human nature to expand our prescense.