Re: Not sure I want to go there.

Downbelow was nice enough as long as you remembered your breather mask.

Re: Not sure I want to go there.

Housing could be a problem sometimes though if a lot of visitors turned up.

I've also never been entirely happy with station environment facilities being maintained by creatures who don't breath the same atmosphere and have a tendency to wander off and spend several weeks doing nothing but thinking of sex :)

Unhappiness with station environment facility staff

It's always the way, isn't it? The younger generation misunderstood by the old.

Re: Ping Time

"Just talk and don't worry about a two way conversation"

That sums up my general attempts at being social (in hindsight)

Re: Ping Time

I would say that it is within the scope of our current tech to get an autonomous probe there which could at least gently crash and send back a squawk of data about surface, atmosphere etc. before being smashed by the indiginous chimpanzee analogues...

Not sure how long it would take to get there (certainly much more than 12 years), and we'd have to wait another 12 years for the reply, but that's not a problem, is it? Voyager and Pioneer have been out there for decades and are still going. We'd need to kick our probe a bit harder than those to get it to Tau Ceti in anyone's lifetime, but they were tasked with looking at stuff on the way out, whereas this probe would be more single-minded.

Maybe send half-a-dozen: how about the next X Prize?

Re: Ping Time

"24 years latency" - so, not quite as bad as Talk Talk boradband then?

Re: Ping Time

"...intergalactic faux pas..."? No, merely an interstellar faux pas.

Re: Ping Time

The fastest probes would be about 70Km/s, a light year is about 9500000000000 Km, which would take about 4,300 years (@70Km/s), so obviously it would take over 50,000 years to get there.

I don't think our "current tech" is up to the job!

There really is absolutely no point in sending anything physical there yet, because even if it takes 400 years to build something 1% faster we could send it in 400 years from now and it would overtake the first one (and get there 100 years earlier), build something twice as fast and it saves 25,000 years, really you'd need to build something capable of 10% the speed of light to be approaching practical speeds, which of course you'd need to accelerate to, decelerate from, have fuel onboard for both, even ION drives have fuel, most of the mass of the craft would have to be fuel (capturing fuel would slow it down more than it would gain), and of course it gets hideously complex as the mass changes (down as you burn fuel, up as you approach the speed of light, down more as you burn fuel to slow down, and decreases faster as you slow down) - and don't forget to steer, there's no way you could see let alone predict everything that could be in the way, and an ION drive may not be ale to turn the craft fast enough, conventional fuel? I don't thnk so!

We need completely new technology (some kind of space compression warp drive, so the physical distance becomes less) to travel that sort of distance, or we need to solve many, many other problems.

Re: Ping Time

To get ridiculously technical for a minute, the warp solutions of relativity can be guaranteed not to work for basically one reason: the universe is not Minkowski -- that is, it doesn't, at large distances from the centre of the coordinate system you're employing -- tend towards 'flatness', or zero gravitational force. In a way, this is equivalent to stating that this is a pure *vacuum* solution. And for these purposes the universe isn't a vacuum.

The problem is that due to the presence of matter, spacetime is neither asymptotically flat, nor locally flat, and it's absolutely riddled with strong gravitational fields and, worse, black holes. When we're talking about this kind of structure, even a single hydrogen atom could be problematic, since in the vicinity of the hydrogen atom the nature of the spacetime changes... and due to the nonlinear effects of gravity (or an inversion of Mach's principle, if you prefer) it poses the risk of mucking up the warp itself.

We're a lot better off hoping that some clever aliens have found a clever way of exploiting quantum mechanics; classical warp solutions are absolutely fascinating (genuinely, very much so) but probably, ultimately and regrettably, unphysical. Also, even assuming the classical solutions are basically accurate at a quantum level (which they may well be, regardless of what I've written above) you do tend to need some exotic matter to keep the warp up, which raises two issues to my mind. We don't *have* exotic matter and since we don't even pretend to begin to know what dark energy could possibly be have no idea if dark energy could be harnessed for these purposes or not; and second, if we can generate large enough quantities of exotic matter we can, in principle, punch whacking great wormholes through spacetime. Granted, that involves astronauts being happy to jump into black holes, which may not be on their list of to-do tasks for the day, but it's hella fast.

Re: Ping Time

Death by snoo snoo

Planet size....

"The potentially life-supporting world has a mass around five times the size of Earth, making it the smallest planet found in the habitable zone of any Sun-like star. "

/pedant mode

Erm..... Aren't we on an earth like planet in the habitable zone of a sun like star, which makes this one the smallest planet?

/off

Re: It does make sense

Are you deliberately trolling, AC?

The article *clearly* says:

Tau Ceti, which is just 12 light years away and can be seen with the naked eye in the night sky, has five planets in orbit around it, with one lying in the habitable zone.

and:

The potentially life-supporting world has a mass around five times the size of Earth, making it the smallest planet found in the habitable zone of *any* Sun-like star.

Mass 5 times that of earth

I'm not up to the maths involved right now, but with similair density to Earth that's at least 2-3G surface gravity. But then again... if Earth's survival is in peril, any port in a storm

Re: Habitable zone != actually habitable

But it is harder to actually study all that from all the way back here. So all they can really say is there is a planet there that "might" be habitable if the other 10 squillion things that need to all meet in one place and dance have actually turned up.

And then it is only for "life as we know it, Jim" and not all the other possibilities that we have not thought of.

Time for this planet to draw up it's "prime directive" before we get to the stage of interactions I think.

Re: Habitable zone != actually habitable

Habitable zone for life but not for us as we would be something like five times heavier on that planet. I would not like to try that.

Re: Habitable zone != actually habitable

Also assumes it's just one planet and not a planet with a moon or multiple moons.

The wobble technique wouldn't be able to distinguish moons if they were there.