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posted by
mattie_p
on Thursday February 27 2014, @10:31AM
from the I-bet-that's-all-of-them-now dept.
from the I-bet-that's-all-of-them-now dept.
kef writes:
"NASA's Kepler mission has doubled the number of known planets outside of our solar system. In what can only be described as a "bonanza", 715 new planets have been reported thanks to the Kepler space telescope's planet-hunting mission. Using a new method for verifying potential planets led to the volume of new discoveries from Kepler, which aims to help humans search for other worlds that may be like Earth."
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NASA Kepler Telescope Discovers 715 New Planets
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by indou on Thursday February 27 2014, @11:34AM
The sooner we pick several of these systems and start sending probes out, the better. Why wait?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by melikamp on Thursday February 27 2014, @11:51AM
Oh no, waiting is what you will be doing if you send the probes now. Better to send them later, because they will probably go much faster, either because we have more resources, or because we've discovered more physics.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @10:36AM
"More physics". Excellent.
Look over there! Some physics laying in that bush!
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday February 27 2014, @12:24PM
The sooner we pick several of these systems and start sending probes out, the better. Why wait?
If we wait, we can take the time to develop faster probes, that's why.
The fastest probes we've been able to make so far go at about 17 km/s, which means that they'll take over 80,000 years to get anywhere. If, 50 years from now, we can make an engine that goes 34 km/s, they'll get somewhere in half the time, and would pass that first probe within a few decades. If 1000 years from now, we've managed to create something that goes 0.1c, then both those first two probes are now completely pointless, since they'll get passed long before they're anywhere close to their destination.
That's the problem with intersteller travel: As it currently stands, we have no good way of doing it within a reasonable amount of time.
Every task is easy if somebody else is doing it.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Covalent on Thursday February 27 2014, @01:38PM
This is absolutely correct. What we should be doing is investing in two things:
1. Large, hi-resolution telescopes (probably in space) to examine these planets and give us a much better picture of what conditions are really like there.
2. Advanced propulsion - ion drives, solar sails, nuclear propulsion, etc. Our current propulsion technology is so primitive that there is no way we could build a probe that would last long enough to actually arrive at its destination (i.e. longer than the written history of our species). But a solar sail might be fast enough to make a probe at least possible.
2b. OK, we're going to need a way to communicate with that probe over light year distances. I'm sure there's more...
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 1) by CowboyTeal on Friday February 28 2014, @12:20AM
I think that we're only about 500 years away from a feasible deadline for light-speed travel (if not faster). But if we can manage to do this before then, that would be nuts. In the Star Ocean series it happened around 2073 or so. So instead of aiming for 500 years down the road, let's make it happen tomorrow ;)
Speaking of which, "warp drive" is being researched by NASA as we speak. As it turns out it's actually feasible to do so and we may have the technology to develop such a system. Who knows? Maybe warp drive engines will be made a reality in just 20 or so years for the first prototype. But at the end of the day, sending probes across the galaxy first is probably going to be ideal, at least until we can figure out a shielding mechanism.
Getting siggy with it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by isostatic on Thursday February 27 2014, @12:31PM
OK, so there's an exoplanet around Alpha Centauri, but unlikely to harbour life as we know it. The Tau Ceti system seems a better target at 12 light years.
At Voyager 1 speed, we could fire something out of the solar system at 17km/second. That will take about 200,000 years to get there. Obviously we can't build a probe that can last 200,000 years.
Lets assume we want to get a probe there in 200 years, which might still be working when we get there. We'd have to fling it from our solar system at over 10,000 miles per second. 36 million miles per hour.
The fastest manmade object ever was the Helios 1 space probe, using the Sun's gravity to accelerate it. That reached 150,000 mph. We'd have to build something that went 240 times faster than that. And somehow send it in the opposite direction.