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#399547 - 02/15/09 07:05 AM
Billions of earth-like planets
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Porn Jesus
Registered: 09/23/04
Posts: 10321
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#399548 - 02/15/09 08:44 AM
Re: Billions of earth-like planets
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Porn Fucking Master
Registered: 11/04/05
Posts: 3509
Loc: Pit of Despair
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They are just trying to gradually get people to accept that life elsewhere exists. They are starting out with "simple life forms" to keep the religious nutbars from going berserk from facing the truth that human beings aren't the end all be all of life and their silly little fairytale religious texts are just bullshit made up by greedy power hungry men.
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#399550 - 02/15/09 06:18 PM
Re: Billions of earth-like planets
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Porn Fucking Master
Registered: 11/04/05
Posts: 3509
Loc: Pit of Despair
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Not to mention if there were aliens that had technology that would allow them to bridge those distances then why the fuck would they want to associate with us. I'm not even smart and I hate everyone on this planet.
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#399554 - 02/15/09 10:09 PM
Re: Billions of earth-like planets
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Internet Tough Guy
Registered: 12/25/08
Posts: 843
Loc: Sydney Australia
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Quote:
i doubt 'religious nutbars' would stop believing in their recycled mythology even if aliens came to visit- they'd simply spin it and adapt, as they always have.
They'd just say god made the Aliens too.
I'd like to know what the nutters would make of interdimensional beings.
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#399555 - 02/15/09 10:31 PM
Re: Billions of earth-like planets
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Human Garbage
Registered: 03/14/08
Posts: 1613
Loc: Liqour Hole, Kentucky
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Quote:
i doubt 'religious nutbars' would stop believing in their recycled mythology even if aliens came to visit- they'd simply spin it and adapt, as they always have.
spend any amount of time studying astronomy, and you quickly get one sinking feeling: distance, and the impossible distances between things in space. it's also one of many reasons why alien visitation is make-believe.
imagine being shipwrecked on an island, and the nearest island you see in a telescope is billions of trillions of miles away. to get there you need a boat that travels the speed of light, and it will take hundreds of millions of years to get there, plus there's constant debris in the travel path which would destroy the boat at the speed being travelled, and then once you got to the distant island it's either moved or no longer exists.
it sounds a bit depressing at first but can also be empowering to grow more aware of the grandness of it all.
Einstein's theories (never mind that they have checked out in reality) are incredible and can explain how space travel is actually very possible: space is curved; the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line; the universe is finite but unbounded; parallel lines eventually meet; light rays are curved; time is relative and cannot be measured in exactly the same way everywhere; measurements of length vary with speed; the universe is cylindrical instead of spherical in shape; a body in motion will contract in size but increase in mass; and a fourth dimension - time - is added to the familiar three of height, length, and width.I don't think we have come very far from the days of Christopher Columbus when they thought you could sail off the edge of the earth.End of rant, thank you.
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#399556 - 02/16/09 12:42 AM
Re: Billions of earth-like planets
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Pervert
Registered: 10/02/08
Posts: 2058
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I'm with you on the rant, but you may have mixed up a few things. Light itself is not curved, it can -be- curved when passing through a gravitational field, according to einstein's equivalence principle & special relativity.
If you place a bowling ball on a trampoline, then roll a marble in a straight line toward the bowling ball so that it passes by it to the left or right without hitting it, the marble ends up traveling an arc rather than straight line, due to the curvature of the dent in the trampoline caused by the "mass" (bowling ball). Same thing happens with light rays when passing through a gravitational field, they follow the curvature of the "dent" in space caused by a mass (example, the moon), except in space, the fabric of the "trampoline" is all around- and its called "spacetime" because space and time are understood to form a "fabric."
As for Einstein, most of his stuff still stands, some of it has been dis proven, and there's no consensus on the shape the universe (which would also assume it had one), so bottom line, light emitted by distant stars had to travel a certain distance to reach earth (measured by red shift), and didn't have the luxury of shortcuts or tricks along the way - the distance is the distance.
Whether or not we discover shortcuts in space travel some day is another question. One scary thing about astronomy and cosmology - the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know anything. It's no accident astronomers you see on TV have wiry hair, don't bathe and wear the same clothes every day- the study is all-consuming.
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#399557 - 02/16/09 02:36 AM
Re: Billions of earth-like planets
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Human Garbage
Registered: 03/14/08
Posts: 1613
Loc: Liqour Hole, Kentucky
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#399558 - 02/16/09 03:58 AM
Re: Billions of earth-like planets
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Porn Jesus
Registered: 08/03/03
Posts: 5849
Loc: TX, USA
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Quote:
Light itself is not curved, it can -be- curved when passing through a gravitational field, according to einstein's equivalence principle & special relativity.
I like to say, "Light always travels in a straight line, but not every observer agrees which way is 'straight'".
Quote:
As for Einstein, most of his stuff still stands, some of it has been dis proven, and there's no consensus on the shape the universe (which would also assume it had one),
The SR and GR equations essentially still stand: it's the interpretation of what it means that has been less successful over time. If you assume a constant in the equations has one value you get a 4-D concave universe; a different value gets 4-D convex.
As for wormholes there are lots of people who hope they *don't* exist. Any FTL scheme can be used to build a time machine, which would not only lead to effect preceding cause but would be a violation of quantum randomness (well-tested at this point). Not to mention wormholes having serious conservation-of-energy issues with respect to anything passing through one.
(I like Greg Egan's solution in the SF novel Disapora. The protagonist goes to tremendous effort creating a wormhole pair, only to discover ... that the inside path between the mouths is as long as the "outside" distance.  so much for an easy way out!)
As for the "Billions of Earths" - that's ignoring an important point. Many, perhaps most, or the planets discovered so far aren't just big Jupiter-class planets, they're big planets that have spiraled in towards the star over time. Even if an Earth formed it would be unstable and long gone in such a system.
Since you have to have a Jupiter for life (in order to sweep the system clean of meteors and other debris) the question is how many systems have an Earth *and* have a Jupiter *and* that Jupiter isn't spiraling inwards.
Not to mention that most of the stars we see are actually binary systems and won't have planet systems like ours (because the angular momentum would have been completely different).
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