NASA Hubble Finds a True Blue Planet
nasa.gov
nasa.gov
Maybe I'm showing my age, but it astonishes me how quickly the study of exo-planets has progressed. I wonder if I'll live long enough to see images beamed back from an interstellar probe?
I would say you have a small, but definitely non-zero, chance of that - but it probably depends more on the development of effective life prolonging therapies that anything else. We're quite a long way from being motivated enough to build a dedicated interstellar probe and then you would probably have to wait a few decades for the probe to actually get somewhere and a, much smaller, time for the signals to get back.
Personally, I'd settle for seeing manned exploration of Mars and I think that may just happen...
Its too early to think of traveling to far points in space using the technology we have.
Imagine some thousands of years back, planning to explore the world using an ox cart. Yet today, airplanes have made that perfectly possible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propul...
I suspect if we do send out interstellar probes they will be tiny rather than flying battleships:
Of course no individuals 'traveled the globe' in that era, but a gradual process was plenty sufficient to cover the globe with humans.
Edit: here's a brief article that gives an overview of a lower-budget, swarm technique being proposed by Planetary Resources - http://www.dvice.com/archives/2012/04/could_planetary.php
>> It is only 2.9 million miles from its parent star, so close that it is gravitationally locked. One side always faces the star and the other side is always dark.
and
>>day side and night side temperatures on HD 189733b differ by about 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
Means life similar to us doesn't exist there.
Seems like our exploration of the cosmos and some drastic results with regards to that will only happen after some drastic changes in technology. It took a ship, and a few determined men to explore places on earth.
It will take some radical invention in transport systems. And few determined men this time too.
I don't think we will ever discover anything substantial as long as the physics of that is limited by things like speed of light. Its like thinking of heavier than air flying machines before the discovery of bernoulli's theorem.
> On this turbulent alien world, the daytime temperature is nearly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and it possibly rains glass -- sideways -- in howling, 4,500-mph winds.
Are they using something in addition to a spectograph to know this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus#Aerostat_...
Also, it's a gas giant...
After dropping the weight, the same thing happens with the weight as if you dropped it from Earth orbit: it speeds up in free fall and will start to heat up quickly as it compresses the gases in front of it, like any space rock falling on a planet. In HD 189733 b's case the atmosphere is crazy hot from the outset, so the steel weight will flicker like a bright light and evaporate very fast. After that the matter of the weight becomes part of the planet's atmosphere. Since iron gas is heavier than the other gases in the atmosphere, it will slowly sink towards the center - but due to wind motion that may take a long time.
On its way down, the matter of the steel weight will encounter increasing pressures and temperatures until it reaches a fuzzy transition layer where gases are liquid, and even further down may exist in pseudo-liquid states that are like nothing found on Earth, called metallic hydrogen. At the center of the gas giant, there may be a molten or solid core of rocky elements, where the iron from the steel weight will eventually settle.
If you'd try gently dropping a larger object (preferrably into a cooler gas giant), it will survive the heat of atmospheric entry mostly intact, however. After that, it will reach terminal velocity and fall down based purely on its buoyancy. Traversing the atmosphere might take a long time during which the object may encounter many layers of clouds and other cool weather phenomena. As it falls, it too will encounter ever-increasing density and temperature which will eventually result in the dissolution of the object.
(Really! This seems like a very suitable question for that treatment.)
Even if we never manage to get past the limit of speed of light eventually we will reach out and populate other planets, even if we have to terraform them before. But our destiny lies on the stars. For all that matters let's be grateful of what we've achieved so far. In just fifty years of space exploration we've already managed to land a car on Mars and we've send some probes at the limits of our solar system. Fifty years from now we could already have a self-sustained colony on Mars or the Moon. This is huge by any measure.