NASA announces discovery of Earth-like planet with earth similarity index 0.98
nasa.gov
nasa.gov
(I'm aware he might have other sources for the title, but it's still misleading)
cricket noises
It turns out we are, and I don't meant to suggest that GP didn't know this. But what if we weren't in daylight savings time, and GP said "EST"? Would we have to change an hour?
I highly recommend just saying "Eastern Time."
All the more reason to never specify it! :)
You may find these links interesting:
- "So you want to abolish time zones" (http://qntm.org/abolish)
- "You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform" (http://qntm.org/calendar)
I think OP is referring to the Kepler Candidate KOI-4878.01 [0] with the ESI as 0.98.
[0]: http://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/DisplayOver...
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This post is ridiculously clickbaity! There should be a {{citation needed}} tag there or the title be changed.
Anyways, the anticipation for the 9AM PDT announcement is feverish.
;)
* provide substantive links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9936945
* point out possibly-critical missing information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9936448
* compare the author's approach with one's own: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9937333
* describe showing the material to one's grandmother: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9934321
* link to the commenter's presentation on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9935644
* give detailed usability feedback: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9935477
People often make false generalizations about HN. I doubt that's particular to HN—probably just humans in general being human, with sample bias and all. But getting the wrong generalizations in your head can prevent you from seeing things. Here that might mean seeing less of what's good about HN, and thus getting less out of it.
This is on my mind because we've been thinking lately about new ways to highlight the positive and amazing things this community comes up with, many of which go unseen by the majority of readers.
Regardless this is a bit off topic.
For something to be REAL and weird automatically puts it on another level.
I'm not sure I agree, but I think it's good to keep this perspective in mind any time we find ourselves tempted to think of something as 'the biggest thing ever.'
I really keep trying to think whether aliens existing would actually radically change my life, individually. On one hand, maybe, but on the other, probably not (and this is more likely).
I feel like I already experience my existence like I am alien to everything that is not me, whether it is talking to a cat or a person or a tree, the whole thing is like 'reality blob' that I am not really sure how all of this happened, nor do I ever have any hope whatsoever of finding the answer to that question. When I wonder thoughts to myself I wonder who it is that thinks the question and who it is that responds with an answer. So many thinkings are just permutations of what has already been heard, and they form patterns and it's really weird.
It's easy to get 'used to things' and 'acclimated to things', I just feel like I have it hardwired in me to perpetually be weirded out by my own existence. Complexity doesn't even describe it, strange doesn't either, as these are all human concepts. You really just have to learn to observe with a completely blank mind. Then it's just like being in this interface that's always super weird and confusing, and it's ridiculous how some people really think they know what they are doing (like in their deepest philosophical and spiritual core, not like 'have to go to work today to feed the kids').
From my personal experience in psychedelics, all of them, LSD, mushrooms and so forth, the user still maintains a reference point to reality around him however weird it might look. With DMT, the whole content of present reality disappears and you are seemingly transported in a completely different reality booming with alien intelligence (described by DMT users as self transforming machine elves) that purportedly is also very happy to see you "broken through". Users also report an incredible amount of information being transmitted to them, albeit completely indescribable by present human language and concepts and find themselves being under a dome-like structure (called the "DMT Dome").
From what I know, these effects are only present if you follow a specific dosage and no less than that.
Another strange fact is that while all other psychedelics are boundary dissolving substances with your ego first to get booted, with DMT you apparently "maintain" your present self throughout the trip.
This is what the "Death by astonishment" quote of the same author, refers to.
But we are fast getting out of HN accepted topics of discussion so.. :-)
Ultimately one should (not must) explore these things on his/her own instead of reading it on the web. All this quickly degenerates to entertainment if one only reads about them online.
I've only done my share of LSD in the past, which by comparison, seems quite tame and merely "psychological" than DMT.
For example, you used a rather non-rigorous descriptor, "weird". What constitutes a weird phenomenon?
Can we subject said constituents of a weird phenomenon to the same kinds of validations we can make about known true facts, i.e. observable existent things?
It reminds me of Jon Stewart's character in Half Baked who thought everything was better "on weeeeed!" If your drug of choice prevents you from enjoying other experiences, like staring in wonder at the mysteries of the universe, that's like being in an abusive relationship.
There's no good reason the existence of a drug should prevent you from enjoying an announcement like this. There's definitely no good reason to assume that in this 16 billion year old universe which you've been part of for a negligible amount of time, which you've physically experienced only a negligible amount of, that you've already found the weirdest or most interesting thing ever.
I'm not sure if the parent was advocating or saying this. It was in reference to Terrence Mckenna's view of the present assumptions that mankind has about what aliens should look like and how one should go about contacting them (and that DMT and mushrooms are probably an alien artifact).
And certainly one can lose the plot and spend his entire life tripping. Noone is saying thats a good thing.
Many long-term meditators who have previous experience with psychedelics would disagree with you.
I'm only making the assumption of agnosticism, that it's fundamentally impossible for you to know that something already within your realm of experience will trump all that exists in the unknown.
See, the problem here is that you are debating an argument you haven't bothered to fully read.
Terence McKenna has literally volumes to say about this argument. So now that we've moved beyond this simpleton back-and-forth, what say you about his position vis a vis meditation?
Specifically, what do you say about his argument that, without being willing to ingest a drug, you haven't humbled yourself to the basic notion that your brain is physical and its operations electrical and chemical?
If somebody makes a living telling people things like aliens brought us mushrooms and that's why evolution happened they aren't worth my time. They're too far gone. I responded to a comment on a message board encouraging people to not get excited about space exploration and instead focus on the wonders of DMT.
I simply don't care what he says about meditation.
> Specifically, what do you say about his argument that, without being willing to ingest a drug, you haven't humbled yourself to the basic notion that your brain is physical and its operations electrical and chemical?
Narcissistic, egocentric, closed-minded, a little horrifying. I don't understand why he thinks doing drugs is not only the best path but the only path to understanding the realities of being a human. That's how cult-leaders operate, they teach their followers there is no other way and everybody on the outside of their bubble just doesn't get it. Then when people try to help them get out they say "You just don't understand how great our leader is! He even said this would happen!"
1) Whomever says the experiences of meditation are akin to those of psychedelics is plainly full of shit. I've done psychedelics for about 4 years, and western ceremonial magic which involved plenty of meditation daily and consistently for about a decade. Apples and oranges. And thats including all the freaky spectacular shit I've experienced.
2) Practically, how much of "all that exists in the unknown" you think you will or can experience living a basic run of the mill western life in a human body? As I said, ingest 5 dried gramms, then come to talk to me about what will get trumped in your realm of experience. Until then, its only thinking you understand sex because you read dirty magazines, only for something that is several orders of magnitudes out there.
I've been around enough to reject the notion that an amalgamation of 1001 chemicals is fundamentally different from an amalgamation of 1000. With that goes the illusion of being "deep" while tripping balls. I'm not rejecting the intensity of the psychedelic experience, I'm rejecting the ideas that it's wholly unique in intensity, that it brings unique insight and that it reliably brings insight.
As far as meditation vs psychedelics I defer to people who have done enough of both to have informed opinions on the matter.
If you don't think that human neurochemistry is astonishing, I think that's weird. But don't sit here and straw man his research; that doesn't help anyone.
McKenna says that neurochemistry, and its material application called "the psychedelic experience," is the most astonishing thing you can personally suppose, or in some cases, even that you can't suppose. But that doesn't say anything about the (real or imagined) notion of a totality of "things in the universe."
2. Ignore the confidence intervals around those values.
* Radial Velocity - just as the gravity of a star effects a planet's orbit, the gravity of a planet also has an impact on the star's. It's just this impact is extremely small. By measuring variations in a star's movement due to the planet's gravity we can both detect the planet and estimate its mass.
* Photometry - when a planet moves in front of a star it reduces both the brightness and spectrum of the light we perceive. By carefully measuring this we can determine not only the size of the planet, but also it's chemical make-up - light from the star travels through the atmosphere of the planet, changing its spectrum in response to the elements present.
There are several other ways we can detect and examine planets, but nearly all of them are based not on observing the planet itself but its impact on much larger, detectable things that surround it. There's a comprehensive list here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_detecting_exoplanet...
Not sure what the primary means of doing that is, but I think it includes Doppler shift measurements of the star's light.
This page contains the measurements of the planet which might be the subject of the announcement; it gives you an idea of what kinds of metrics drive such an analysis:
http://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/DisplayOver...
We've had a pair of binoculars up in space for a while, but it was designed to see way further than Pluto. That is why we have always had blurry images.
For example, here's a Hubble photo of Mars: https://milesobrien.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/mars_hubble....
Here's a great explanation of the physics involved: http://www.askamathematician.com/2013/04/q-what-kind-of-tele....
Quite poorly, I believe. I think surface temperature is estimated based on the distance from the star, and I think it assumes an albedo (reflection coefficient) and maybe a typical(?) atmosphere (though I'm not sure about this). In any case, I imagine the error's quite large.
Unfortunately, we only have our own solar system to go on, and until we find better ways of studying these exoplanets, we have no good way of knowing if the planets in our solar system are really representative of what's out there or not. But that's why this research is so important.
http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog/dat...
water habitable zone
ultraviolet habitable zone
photosynthetic habitable zone
ozone habitable zone
planetary rotation rate habitable zone
planetary obliquity habitable zone
tidal habitable zone
astrosphere habitable zone
For example, "tidal habitable zone" doesn't mean "we need [ocean] tides to survive," it means "tidal heating effects have an enormous impact on planetary conditions". For example, an Earth analogue in orbit around a tiny red dwarf in a seemingly "habitable zone" would be subject to tidal heating effects which would bake the surface, whereas a similar planet in a similar orbit around a sun-like yellow dwarf would not.
Similarly, "rotation rate habitable zone" doesn't mean "the planet must have a ~24 hour day", it means "all else being equal, a planet's rotation rate can greatly affect habitability," mostly due to weather patterns and air/heat circulation. By including rotation rate in our models, some planets previously thought to be inhabitable may turn out not to be, and vice versa.
I just feel everyone gets excited over nothing solely because its extra-solar. Our own solar system is fairly diverse. If life was common, we'd probably be seeing more of it here.
We'll have a better picture when we study our solar system in more detail. Maybe 100 years? I agree that speculation this early in the game isn't enough to get excited over.
http://www.windows2universe.org/glossary/plasmaspheric_gain....
Or would the star near it just haze everything too much?
Is it impossible to observe a planet in more detail like that without travelling next to it?
Is there a source? If not, it makes sense to change this title to "NASA to make announcement that 'astronomers are on the cusp' of finding 'another earth.'"
Interesting comment by `admiralrewd` regarding KOI-4878.01 & general critique of ESIs on reddit from 6 months ago:
http://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/2rbjo9/if_confirmed_k...
edit: the post links to a couple of papers making a few pretty reasonable points about the assumptions underlying the ESIs, and the errors involved in the calculation.
Even so, giving a rough estimate of mean surface gravity would make the tables more accessible to non-experts.
It's also a parameter that is quick to compute starting from radius and mass, which are often the first things you know about an exoplanet due to the way they're found.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Similarity_Index#Formula...
I guess the parameters were chosen by some curve fitting procedure to make sure it gives 1.0 for Earth, 0.7-ish for Mars, 0.2 for Uranus and Neptune which are basically the most "not like the others" in our solar system and so on. It's not really a measure of habitability or anything like that. "Equalizing the parameters' meanings" presumably has to do with mapping their relative variation (and the effects of that variation over various observable parameters) over a smaller range.
They need to match our platform.
2) Some types of molecules involved with life have chirality so the chances are small that our biological components as a whole would be compatible. (Think of it as several different kinds of "endianess." There would be a coin-flip for each molecule type with chirality.) So at worst, if we ate each other, we'd give each other molecular "indigestion."
More complicated operations, like that of viruses hijacking our cells to replicate themselves are probably right out. Invading foreign cells couldn't get very far in our bodies if all of their enzymes malfunction and they find our material "indigestible."
(They mention the upcoming announcement, but they don’t know know what it is about either.)
http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog/dat...
EDIT: Unless that list was literally just updated with ESI 0.98 planet this thread is referring to...
We need to work out how to bend spacetime.
However, The stream has reached "maximum capacity" at this time.
Sounds pretty similar.
You mean like the dearth of humour?
Problem is even with a probe at 10% the speed of light we'll never even see it.
Heck if it was 107.5 light years away it would still be "useless" but might inspire better telescopes.
intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation
Here [0] is Noam Chomsky's talk referencing that in it's entirety. Quite fascinating. I'll link to the video when I find some time.
Edit: Video snippet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzBqPiSpgVA
its 1400 light years away in habitable zone and the sun is 8% different than ours (don't quote me on the 8% but its very close in size)
Mars is at 0.697, for reference.
If something has all of those properties, then because of the way it's defined, it has an ESI which is strictly > 0 and <= 1 (it can only be zero if, for one of its properties, x - x0 / x + x0 == 1, i.e. x - x0 == x + x0 - and since x0 is strictly nonzero, that can't happen). So nothing has an ESI of 0. But you yourself, to pick an object at random, probably have an ESI very very close to zero.
Incidentally, the formulation of the ESI is a good generic formula for creating 'similarity' measurements for, for example, matchmaking algorithms or similarity searches.
- Infinite mean radius.
- Zero mean radius.
- Infinite density.
- Zero density.
- Infinite escape velocity.
- Zero escape velocity.
- Infinite surface temperature.
- Zero surface temperature.
Given the nature of the calculation, it probably would have been better to define perfectly Earth-like as zero, and assign positive indices to bodies, with higher numbers indicating greater dissimilarity to Earth. It would be a distance calculation along multiple axes of similarity, but adjusted by scale factors to coerce the differences between comparison axes with different units to have an order of magnitude proportional to perceived importance to humans.
If you have a difference function for each axis that yields a number from 0-1 for comfortable, 1-10 for tolerable, 10-100 for survivable, and 100+ for lethal, then you can take the square root of the sums of the difference functions for the overall index.
Anything less than 1 would be a near clone of Earth. Anything less than 10 would definitely be habitable. Anything less than 100 might be explorable. Anything greater than that, and you might just seed it with Earth extremophiles and ignore it for a few million years.
Mathematically you could zero out one or all of the multiplicands (e.g. with a surface temperature of 0 degrees K) but constraining oneself to the realm of the possible, you'll always have a non-zero ESI.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Similarity_Index#Formula...
It certainly seems strange that Venus is scores lower than Mars, too -- by any reasonable definition it's the more "Earth-like" of the two -- it has an atmosphere, it's closer in size and mass and so on. The weights on the surface temperature measure just kill it, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Similarity_Index
Turns out Venus is at 0.444 and Mars is at 0.697 so 0.98 is really close.
The moon also caused tides which increased the environmental pressures on water-based life forms living in tidal pools to evolve to live amphibiously.
Awesome for potential terraforming would be an atmosphere containing gaseous NO2, H2O, CO2, NH3, and SO2. That would be oxygen-rich, but not as molecular O2, which is almost as good as putting up an "OCCUPIED" sign on the planet.
Unless, of course, you're actually looking for alien life. In that case, any atmosphere with F2, Cl2, O3, O2, NO, CO, H2, or N2 is nearly a dead giveaway. Those don't persist for long in that form on a geological time scale, so if you detect them, something must be continually generating them.
Okay, to make this slightly on-topic now, I am excited to hear about the discovery in about an hour and a half. Even if it was a 1.00 on the similarity scale, I'm more interested in finding out how habitable it would be for earth-like life.