It doesn't matter not how far away it is
The Germans will have already put their towels on all the best deck chairs.
Astroboffins have found another super-Earth planet orbiting a star just 42 light years away from home, but this one could support life as we know it. Super-Earth HD40307g with its host star Super-Earth HD40307g alongside its host star. Credit: J. Pinfield, RoPACS, Uni of Hertfordshire Star HD40307 has been checked out …
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The Valerian colonists were huge and powerful ...
Showing an inability to understand basic physics (and Darwinian evolution). The larger a structure, the less able it is to resist gravity. A flea can survive hundreds (thousands? ) of self-inflicted gravities every time it jumps. A mouse can fall off a cliff and run away at the bottom, unharmed. A human being over seven foot tall is freakish, and at a clear evolutionary disadvantage. (Much more likely to break bones when he falls over, for starters).
Inhabitants of high-G worlds will be small by Earth standards. Rugged and powerfully muscled for their size, certainly, but above all sufficiently small as to be able to resist gravity.
Also unlikely to be bipedal, unless their nerves and reactions are much faster than ours. The consequences of falling over in high-G are greater, and the time available to avoid doing so is much less. Think small thick-set centaurs or wallabies.
Same thing. OK, EE was before genetic engineering was on the horizon, so no new body plan. But if you were picking human colonists for a high-G world, you'd select the shortest and most heavily muscled humans you could find. I confidently predict that if the colony survived, the fifth-generation children would be shorter still, more heavily muscled, with denser bone structure, and bigger feet for stability. Think Hobbit weightlifters in this case.
An elephant is about the largest land animal (mammoths and dinosaurs were somewhat bigger). But that's on Earth, at 1G.
Consider stumbling and falling. Impact kinetic energy after a fall of any stated distance at 2G is the same as that for a fall of twice the distance at 1G. For a human, a pratfall at 2G would be like falling over the edge of a drop of his own height at 1G. A twelve-foot fall won't always kill you, but it will sooner or later. Big terrestrial animals (horses or larger) often die if they fall while running, but 4-leg stability means such falls are rare enough for the species to survive. Surviving a broken leg is also difficult to impossible for a large animal, and at 2G the load on the legs is doubled for any particular body weight.
Now consider 5G rather than 2G. 5G means the impact from falling over is the same as falling five times your own height on Earth. And consider that with a multiplied G force, you'd have to react many times faster to correct a postural instability before it becomes uncorrectable and results in a fall.
The elephant in the room on a 2G planet will be at most the size of a small pony. Which is good, not least because the maximum possible unsupported roof span will be a lot smaller than on Earth.
> Consider stumbling and falling. Impact kinetic energy after a fall of any stated blah blah blah
Nigel the Fish: There is no point in leaving the ocean. Consider that you will have to support your entire body weight. There will be no ocean protecting you and providing you with buoyancy. If you fall you will hit the ground causing serious injury. All you will ever be able to do is slide around because if you try and stand you will fall and thus be more likely to die and Darwin the Fish says this means standing will be an evolutionary dead end.
AC the fish ignored Nigel and left the ocean. His descendants ended up as giraffes.
Gravity on the planet would only be one contributing factor to evolution. Since the people there will be intelligent (how else will they have got there) factors which may kill off or force a non-intelligent species down one path or another will not have as much (if any) impact on an intelligent species. A broken arm or leg in a human does not result in death. It usually does for an animal.
Having contributed in the comments sections about scientifiction, I disagree. The younger members of the readership should be reminded about the Golden Age of Science fiction, up to and including the 1970s and 80s popular writers when it was at its most popular (IMHO).
I remember first reading the Skylark series back in the 1960s when recovering from being run over. Very enjoyable, at least to a 7 year old. It is was what started me reading Science Fiction and I quickly progressed to the Lensman series, Asimov, Niven, Heinlein, Silverburg, Bradbury and many many others. I even bought the Lensman series again when I was in my twenties just to see if they were as I remember them. They were even better!! I still have the books tucked away in the loft somewhere.
"But if we could see their TV broadcasts, they'd be 42 years out of date"
Stop being so negative, they could be thousands of years more advanced than us so we might be receiving a broadcast from our equivalent year of 3979, just before they annihilate us with their advanced weaponry for breaching their copyright law.
> Any chance of putting together an interstellar probe to take a look at this a bit closer up?
A more realistic idea is to start to implementing the plans for a really huge telescope in space. That is the only change to peek at it and other exoplanets during our lifetime without breaking any laws of physics.
Seven times the mass means seven times the gravity only if the plannet is the same radius as Earth. That would be impossible because even osmium - the densest element - is only about four times the density of the Earth. If we pretend the density is the same as Earth then the radius is ³√7 times that of Earth. Gravity decreases with the square of the radius. 7 / (³√7²) = ³√7 ≈ 2.
Chronic exposure (23 generations) to high gravity (2.5g) has been tested on chickens. See: "Great Mambo Chicken & the Transhuman Experience" by Ed Regis.
Given those assumptions the velocity for low orbit will be about 14.5 km/sec and escape velocity about 20.5 km/sec.
For Earth these are 7.8 and 11.kps respectively,
That's going to make getting into space from the surface a bit difficult.
@Flocke Kroes - Epic Fail, I'm afraid.
Newton's law of universal gravitation says that the gravitational force between two massive bodies is = G*m1*m2/(r*r) where G is the Gravitational Constant, m1 and m2 are the masses of the two bodies and r is the distance between their centres of mass. The r does not refer to the radius of one the bodies (what if it was not spherical?)
Density does not appear anywhere in Newton's equation.
Density does not affect the the total gravitational force exerted by the body but it does affect how large the body is which, in turn, affects how close you are to the centre of gravity of the body when you're stood on it. Less dense planet = larger radius = planet's surface further from planet's centre of gravity = lower surface gravity. More dense planet = smaller radius = planet's surface closer to planet's centre of gravity = higher surface gravity.
AC at 8:10: The r does not refer to the radius of one the bodies...
First: If you're standing on the surface of a planet, then the distance between your center of mass, and that of the planet, is very close to ... wait for it ... the radius of the planet.
True, planets are generally not perfectly spherical, and a planet's center of mass may not be exactly at its geometrical center, and you may be very very tall. But in most cases, the radius of the planet will be a good first approximation for the r in the law of universal gravitation.
Second: Flocke Kroes never said that density "appear[ed] in Newton's equation". He made the - I thought fairly obvious - implication that given the mass of a planet, its density will tell you its volume, and (again assuming a roughly spherical planet) that gives you its radius. Then see point one.
But points for beginning by labeling someone else's post an "Epic Fail". If you're going to go down, you might as well go down fighting, eh?
would be a better example. The planet that Edward Elmer Smiths "Family D'Alembert" came from. They are all short and stocky and very strong. Not EE's best works but fun nonetheless. His best works are probably "The Galaxy Primes" and the later "Lensman" books.
@Cowslayer, cheer up mate. They might invent warp-drive next week. Then again the Aztec Calendar Doom Merchants may be right and we may all be dead come the 21st December. I'm having a party on the 22nd to celebrate that we didn't all die and that they were all wrong,... AGAIN!
470 years + a couple of months.
No human could stand the acceleration up to 10% the speed of light in a short time frame. If we want some sort of comfort then 1G acceleration would be ideal (roughly 10m/s/s) , meaning it would take 3,000,000 seconds (34 days) to accelerate up to 10% speed of light (forgetting any power issues). We would then have the deceleration month at the other end. Admittedly we would have covered some distance during those 68 days so I just rounded to 470 years + 2 months (which will also then allow for finding a parking space).
Lower acceleration for a longer time would work as well.. Would be worth the shot anyways as it would be the first *macroscopic* item we'd get up to speeds like that, and in and of itself a nice set of experiments. Even if it would arrive well without our lifetime, the thing would reach relativistic speeds within ours, and certainly during that of the current young generation..
Hold up - 10% light speed is around 67 million MPH, right? I think the fastest man made object yet, the Helios probes, achieved roughly 150,000 MPH by virtue of a "slingshot" from the sun (the fiery ball of gas, not the "newspaper"). Accelerating from 150,000 to 67,000,000? >420 years to get there?
Send me a postcard
In a high gravity world, it would seem that water based creatures would be better equipped to survive. Assuming water exists of course. Human colonists on such a world may find growing gills and living underwater to be better; assuming they can deal with the higher pressures present in these oceans.
As for living on the ground, the high gravity will probably tend to mean less height & size for most vegetation and animal life. Though I can envisage large gas filled organisms (hydrogen perhaps) that can overcome the heavy gravity. For humans it will also probably mean a shorter life span, unless internal organs change to compensate.
Can we send a probe there once NASA figures out how to make a practical warp bubble?
http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/phase.html
There's no reason you can't have liquid water in a high-G or high-pressure environment. It doesn't squash into a solid phase at all easily. Indeed, for everyday ice rather than one of the other high-pressure forms, squashing it converts ice to water rather than vice versa).
It's even possible to concieve of liquid planets - ones made of H2O all the way through. (At high pressure just about anything has high solubility in water, so that's where any small rocky or iron core would disappear to).
Maybe even a beer planet? (Microbial life in liquid suspension? Check. Excreting ethyl alcohol? Check.)
We keep looking at habitability from the wrong end. We need to suss out what makes us what we are, and implant that in a body that has fewer stringent requirements for survival and doesn't age, something that can use anything as fuel, has a long sleep/hibernation mode. Once that is done, the universe is our playground. The way we think now is like going camping with raw eggs instead of hard boiled, and working around that rather than exploring. Mammal bodies are ridiculously susceptible to allergies, viral and bacteriological attacks, and maundering behavior from chemical imbalances. Time to move on.
We need to suss out what makes us what we are, and implant that in a body that has fewer stringent requirements for survival and doesn't age, something that can use anything as fuel, has a long sleep/hibernation mode.
Silicon chips optimised for energy efficiency, clocked very slowly during the long boring bit in interstellar space? Can't beat the speed of light, but can crank up subjective speed by any desired factor just as long as the hardware in the real world lasts the voyage.
Uploading a human being into a virtual reality is the hard part of the problem we haven't addressed yet. Indeed, we don't yet know for sure whether consciousness is a wholly classical phenomenon. If it's quantum in nature, a personality (soul?) is not uploadable to any conventional computer, and is not uploadable at all without destruction of its original. This is where physics meets theology via IT.
I think you are all being pointlessly pessimistic. At an acceleration of only 1G (which even a decent car can briefly manage) for a year, you'll be doing the speed of light. In 10yrs you're up to 10x light speed and it's time to start thinking of truning round to slow down. When you arrive at your heavy destination you'll be stronger since you will be many years younger than when you started. S'easy, let's get on with it.
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In _Mission of Gravity_, Hal Clement created Mesklin, a heavy-gravity, rapidly-rotating planet home to some intelligent and very strong millipedes. One of the interesting points is that he spent much more time working the physics of such a situation into his plots, and in very natural ways. Much better than the heavy planet = strong (humanoid) inhabitants (and nothing more) of Smith and Niven.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesklin
"1.9g. With a few workouts, it could be done. Kinda."
That falls within one sigma of the American population's body mass distribution. If my countrymen can survive, I don't see why the settlers couldn't adapt.
Perhaps a trip involving a gradual increase to 1.9G acceleration (and then a 1.9G deceleration) would condition the settlers to their new habitat.
A reference to "To Serve Man"? Respect, good sir.