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Comment by parksy | Hacker News Reader

Sweet let's crank up the generation ships. Of course picking a suitably inspiring name should be the first priority. Unity? Terra Nova? Gaia?

On a more serious note is this a good candidate for JWST, would it be able to infer chemical composition from the planet's spectrum or something?

Awesome though we went from (in my lifetime) learning at school that other planets have never been observed, to finding them sprinkled around basically every star just like our own. I feel like it won't be long before we detect the first potential chemical markers of alien life, if it's out there. Keep doing your thing space science folk!

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Before anyone gets too excited I'd just point out that all they have found is a rocky world within Proxima's habitable zone. That doesn't mean that world necessarily has a breathable atmosphere, water, sufficient gravity, a geomagnetic field, rotation sufficient to distribute heat equitably across its surface (as opposed to it being tidally locked facing Proxima), or any of a dozen other features requisite to support life.

Oh... and did I mention that Proxima is a known flare star?

Wake me up when they find a terrestrial world in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri instead.

Easier to add water to Mars, or fix Venus, all possible to have well underway by end of century.

Yeah I was being a little tongue in cheek with the excitement, still it's pretty crazy we're actually seeing and cataloguing exoplanets now which was still in the realms of science fiction less than half a century ago.

Anyway if Stellaris has taught me anything it's that the flares will add additional energy credits to the system... what's not to like?

Unrelated but I keep reading that abbreviation as Json Web Space Token

Now the seed is planted, one of us is going to talk about JSON Webb Telescopes in a development meeting.

>> Sweet let's crank up the generation ships. Of course picking a suitably inspiring name should be the first priority. Unity? Terra Nova? Gaia?

Titanic. Moribund. Lethe. Purgatory I-X. etc.

Titanic sounds good. We should also call it an unexplodable space ship.

Generation ships will take some time to get ready. We can railgun tardigrades and aphanizomenon flos-aquae there this year and let evolution do the rest. By the time we (or, more likely, the descendants of cockroaches) get there, it will be teeming with DNA-based life.

We should perhaps be extra sure that there isn't life there already, before starting to attack a distant planet with terraforming weaponry.

Why bother, even if there is no life there now that doesn't mean their won't be when we finally arrive. Or contrary if there is life there now that doesn't mean it will survive until we get there.

The odds that there is life on our generational ship when we arrive are not that great either.

I seem to remember in an Iain M. Banks novel that there was some controversy about terraforming, like there was an other civilisation that considered it an atrocity and hated The Culture fot that?

It would be even more exciting if we detect industrial processes.

> Of course picking a suitably inspiring name should be the first priority. Unity? Terra Nova? Gaia?

It’ll be Spacey McSpaceface if we put it to a vote.

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