Re: [PLUG] "Nearby"

It is moving about 56 km/s toward us (thought not necessarily directly towards us, just that the distance between that star and our star is shrinking by 56 km/s). But don't get your hopes up.

The planets are probably tidally locked or near tidally locked and suffer run-away green house effects; also they are incredibly close to their star so they would need some very serious ozone protection or else life would probably be limited to deep oceans if they had oceans that hadn't boiled away or frozen over. They may possibly have lost their atmospheres due to being so close to the star.

Even for the moons in our solar system, though, when the ocean is frozen over, there is a suspected liquid layer underneath that could possible host life (e.g. Europa) which is why NASA has an interest in looking for potential life on Europa. So the conditions of the TRAPPIST-1 system may support some form of life but like with Europa, the ability for complex life to develop is highly limited due to lack of resources. Also, life can be fragile, and Earth went through many periods of mass extinctions; if any of the planets around TRAPPIST-1 have life, they are probably relegated to small regions in the twilight zones (that is, if one side always faces the star and the other always faces empty space, the part of the planet between these two zones would be in permanent twilight and have the mildest climates if the planets still have their atmospheres) making life on those planets much more vulnerable to total extinction, a fate Earth avoided in part due to being almost entirely habitable and thus having a more diverse biosphere.

Two things are interesting about our findings on exoplanets: it is pretty common for a star to have planets (just a few decades ago this wasn't an accepted reality); and our solar system seems to be a bit of an outlier in terms of the configuration of planets around the star. A lot of these systems have Jupiter size or larger planets in very close orbit around the star; in the case of TRAPPIST-1, the star is much much weaker than the sun and all the planets we've found are in a very close tight orbit. This later fact may be due to selection bias, i.e. it is easier to find planets around a star when the planets are large and very close because the motion of the star is more strongly affected (for Doppler-effect discovered planets and also the luminosity detection method) and also when they are closer to the star and the plane of orbit is nearly head on relative to Earth.

That being said, 40 lightyears is a long way away. Apollo 10's max speed was around 11082.5 m/s which is the fastest manned craft speed we've ever obtained. That's slower than how fast TRAPPIST-1 is moving toward us! 40 light years is 3.784e+17 meters away. If Apollo 10 went directly towards the start, it would close the distance at a rate of about 67082.5 m/s. It would take Apollo 10 approximately 5.6408154e+12 seconds to make it to TRAPPIST-1. That's nearly 178,846 years. Rocket technology hasn't changed too much since then. Our national debt is nearly 20 trillion dollars. China has massive internal debt as well. India still has massive poverty. Russia doesn't have a large enough economy. Even if the entire world turned all of their defense spending towards producing a generational ship to reach TRAPPIST-1, we are still talking many tens of thousands of years at best, ignoring all threats to human life such as radiation, collision with stray objects, etc. It just won't happen with our current technology and there are no foreseeable advancements that would make this happen any sooner.

Science fiction has sparked our imagination of traveling to the stars but the cold reality is that while there is probably a lot of life off Earth in this Universe, everybody is trapped in their own solar systems by relativity and the vast distances between stars. Also, Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and we have about another 5 billion years until our sun eats its inner planets. So who knows what can happen in those five billion years. But just keep in mind that human-level intelligence is probably very rare in any case. Some scientist have proposed that at one point about 75,000 years ago the human species was once reduced to 3,000 - 10,000 individuals due to climate catastrophes. We were so close to extinction we could probably taste it. Earth was very close to losing its human population, in which case today it would be a wild planet whose greatest intelligence might be the non-human apes that survive today. Not only must a planet have the right conditions for life, it must also have the right conditions for complex life, and even then, its going to take some luck to get to a human-like species.

So we are probably not alone but we are also probably very, very rare, and we likely won't meet any alien intelligence before we go extinct. Sorry bout it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 11:06 AM, Paul Walker <pjwalker76@gmail.com> wrote:

I wonder what the relative motion of this newly identified system and our solar system is. Are the systems moving towards or away from each other, or will they maintain the same relative distance over the next several hundred years?

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 1:11 AM, Rich Mingin (PLUG) <plug@frags.us> wrote:
None of those obstacle are insurmountable.

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 12:08 AM, Joe Rosato <rosatoj@gmail.com> wrote:
Rich,
Travel time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Travel_time)
An interstellar ship would face manifold hazards found in interplanetary travel, including vacuum, radiation, weightlessness, and micrometeoroids. Even the minimum multi-year travel times to the nearest stars are beyond current manned space mission design experience.

Joe

On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 6:37 PM Rich Mingin (PLUG) <plug@frags.us> wrote:
Respectfully, you're wrong, Joe. We could leave NOW (well, minus construction time) if we really wanted to. We've had the technology to make a 40ly trip for decades. It's just so expensive as to *seem* impossible.

The limiters are the inefficiency of our recycling, and the lack of collective will.

On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 5:13 PM, Joe Rosato <rosatoj@gmail.com> wrote:
Considering "2001 a space odyssey" had us going on a manned Jupiter flight with HAL (missed by 16 years at this point), and BladeRunner with flying cars that park on top and inside buildings in 2019 (hurry up!!) - I think our Sci-Fi to reality gauge needs to be re-tuned.

I pretty sure that we will be waiting a long time before we can travel 40 light years.

On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 4:07 PM Ronald P Guilmet <ronpguilmet@gmail.com> wrote:
Given that the sun's lifespan is half over where do you think space exploration is headed? Are we, humans, looking for a place to colonize before it all goes black? I always wonder that.

On Feb 22, 2017 3:46 PM, "jeff" <jeffv@op.net> wrote:
Kelly Johnson - Skunkworks
"We have the technology to send ET home."
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Joe

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Joe

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