Alpha Centauri B may have "superhabitable" worlds

SSSHHH! Don't tell Halliburrton, those evil bastards'll try to FRACK IT!

reply to post by weirdguy


Bieber will get us there and some, but who will slow us down? Maybe Van Damme or we can always rely on chuck norris.

HIdden from sight and sound of the outside world, we already have interstellar drives, heck we've been there, we've been to the other side of the galaxy even. We almost have an intergalactic drive. ... I don't know if anyone question why, or even where most of the money is going to?!!

If you think about it, the tptb really would like to spread their influence farther than this small backwater planet... (that has so much potential. Both negative and positive), that The closest planet that would be habitable would be the first logical destination... After all Earth is/was just like Australia was to UK as the Earth is to the stars


Silly, humans, don't you know this?

eoyn
reply to post by conundrummer

 

Didn't they already find sulphur based life forms, all we know is carbon based, imagine the posibilities!!

No sulfur based life forms have been found. In fact no life has been found not based on carbon and all life needs liquid water, even extremophiles.

eoyn
reply to post by weirdguy

 

Bieber will get us there and some, but who will slow us down? Maybe Van Damme or we can always rely on chuck norris.

No, no, that's all backwards! Chuck would roundhouse kick us there is 30 seconds flat, they'd just put Bieber there on the receiving end to slow us to a stop. His ego is big enough to accomplish that.

OP, very cool article, but I do have to wonder about the tidal forces & surface conditions. On the other hand, if the surface conditions aren't peachy enough, perhaps it might hint at a subterranean dominant ecosystem rather than a surface dwelling one? If that's possible, it might not matter much what the UV strength is, or the day/night cycles, or the tidal forces.

Mamatus
I found this article while browsing Gizmag. Not sure how it got missed on ATS.

It didn't get missed on ATS. In fact the Gizmag article used almost identical language as the beginning of this thread I posted:

See: ATS: Could Some Alien Worlds Be More Habitable Than Earth?

Me on ATS like 11 days ago in the above thread:

People often think of the Earth as the epitome of habitability. For good reason, we're here and everywhere we look there is life. However there are other planets out there which may be even more habitable than the Earth.

Gizmag:

Since Earth is the only known inhabited planet and we happen to live here, it’s only natural to regard it as the ideal place for life to exist, and to assume that another life-bearing planet would be fairly similar. However, that is not the opinion of scientists René Heller and John Armstrong who contend that there might be a planet even more suitable for life than Earth 4.3 light years away orbiting the star Alpha Centauri B.

Maybe GIzmag reads ATS? Lol!

For what it's worth this is not a new discovery. The Alpha Centauri planet was announced in 2012.


See: Reflections on Centauri B b

What is new and notable is the speculation the planet bay be "Super Habitable" based upon research I posted in this thread:


Also here is the habitable zone of Alpha Centuari A & B:



Other things of note:

"King of the Planets" American Planet Hunter extraordinaire Geoffrey Marcy wants to launch an interstellar probe to Alpha Centauri sometime in this century. (Which is completely within our technical ability by the way. Even the US Naval Academy had a study on the possibility back in the 1980s called Project Longshot.)

Here is a good article that puts the recent planet story in perspective:

What Makes a Planet ‘Superhabitable’?

If you are interested in the planets and potential life around our nearest stellar neighbors check out this very cool science/sci-fi blog Centauri Dreams

Sovaka
4.2 LY is nothing... As long as we can get up to Light Speed without pulling ourselves apart.

If we can accomplish that, then I am up for a 4.2 year journey.

due to time dilatation the actual crew of the ship would only experience a few weeks of elapsed time. that means (i think) that they need less food water and air. but we don't need light speed to actually get there though any things above ten percent will do for manned exploration and for unmanned it can take as long as it wants.

using a conventional rocket theory to get there it is not easy to get that fast though. you run out of fuel before you have accelerated long enough to get a good head of steam up.

intermittent fusion technology is right around the corner though. at least one team is ready for building prototype engines based on successful tests of the individual components that have already been accomplished. they are looking for crowd funding. and though it wont be that much faster when it first comes out (about three times as fast as voyager,) the top end speed for such propulsion is estimated to be about .35 c with steady state fusion and an optimized magnetic nozzle. at first fusion won't get us out of the solar system but will make rapid solar system travel practical. eventually though fusion will be practical enough for expeditions to about 7 of the near by stars. such journeys will not be frequent because it is years enroute, and dangerous. at that speed time dilatation is too insignificant to shorten the perceived trip time for the crew.

HUMBLEONE
SSSHHH! Don't tell Halliburrton, those evil bastards'll try to FRACK IT!

Where we're going we don't need petrochemicals

additional thoughts: actually there is no problem physiologically with humans going at any speed. you only experience g forces when accelerating. when your speed is not changing even if it is very fast you feel no G forces.

so long as you do not change speed to quickly you are good to go. and fortunately you can accelerate at one G (the equivalent of earth's normal gravity) for a few months and reach (just below) light speed if your fuel held up and your engine had the power for it. i think it is about 4 months at 1 g to get to (just below) light speed none the worse for wear. on top of that you get free artificial gravity during the acceleration phase of the trip and the deacceleration phase as well. in fact if you wanted gravity the whole way and could take extra time to get there (it's going to add a lot of time to the trip) you would want to time it so you accelerate to the halfway point and flip over and deaccelerating for the second half of the trip.

A habitable world around Centauri B?

This guy says "Sure -- why not"

stormbringer1701
additional thoughts: actually there is no problem physiologically with humans going at any speed. you only experience g forces when accelerating. when your speed is not changing even if it is very fast you feel no G forces.

so long as you do not change speed to quickly you are good to go. and fortunately you can accelerate at one G (the equivalent of earth's normal gravity) for a few months and reach (just below) light speed if your fuel held up and your engine had the power for it. i think it is about 4 months at 1 g to get to (just below) light speed none the worse for wear. on top of that you get free artificial gravity during the acceleration phase of the trip and the deacceleration phase as well. in fact if you wanted gravity the whole way and could take extra time to get there (it's going to add a lot of time to the trip) you would want to time it so you accelerate to the halfway point and flip over and deaccelerating for the second half of the trip.

This is the kind of thinking we need to get places, and that's why I love to read Stephen Baxter, who IMO is the master of ideas like that.

the speed of the ship does present one nearly showstopping hazard though. a dust mote packs the punch or a rifle bullet. you can expect one impact per square meter of the front facing part of the ship per day. anything bigger than a dust speck rapidly ramps up the destructive force of the impact. grains are like sticks of dynamite. BB sized objects hit like artillery shells and bigger ones pack the punch of atomic bombs. mitigation or avoidance technologies need to be developed prior to man taking any relativistic journey.

grains have impacted shielding on the ISS and burrowed through 24 centimeters (if i recall the figure correctly) of hardened steel superstructure. and thats just at orbital speeds.

here is one such fusion propulsion experiment nearing readiness.

nextbigfuture.com...

there are several others.

if you google fusion crowd funding or crowdfunding fusion you will see lots of projects including some for actual propulsion.

stormbringer1701
additional thoughts: actually there is no problem physiologically with humans going at any speed. you only experience g forces when accelerating. when your speed is not changing even if it is very fast you feel no G forces.

so long as you do not change speed to quickly you are good to go. and fortunately you can accelerate at one G (the equivalent of earth's normal gravity) for a few months and reach (just below) light speed if your fuel held up and your engine had the power for it.

Problem is that once you get up to any significant fraction of the speed of light the energy needed to go even faster goes up because you have relativistic effects which effect the apparent mass of an object. This is why an object, even tiny particles can not get up to the speed of light. They can only get close (in particle accelerators).

The energy necessary to reach the speed of light becomes infinite.

Math rears its ugly head again (sorry!)


See Relativistic Mass

That said, there is no reason why a ship couldn't be built to travel at 10% of the speed of light. You'd still get there in 45 years. Enough time to have kids to and retire on a new world.

JadeStar

stormbringer1701
additional thoughts: actually there is no problem physiologically with humans going at any speed. you only experience g forces when accelerating. when your speed is not changing even if it is very fast you feel no G forces.

so long as you do not change speed to quickly you are good to go. and fortunately you can accelerate at one G (the equivalent of earth's normal gravity) for a few months and reach (just below) light speed if your fuel held up and your engine had the power for it.

Problem is that once you get up to any significant fraction of the speed of light the energy needed to go even faster goes up because you have relativistic effects which effect the apparent mass of an object. This is why an object, even tiny particles can not get up to the speed of light. They can only get close (in particle accelerators).

The energy necessary to reach the speed of light becomes infinite.

Math rears its ugly head again (sorry!)

See Relativistic Mass

That said, there is no reason why a ship couldn't be built to travel at 10% of the speed of light. You'd still get there in 45 years. Enough time to have kids to and retire on a new world.

edit on 29-1-2014 by JadeStar because: (no reason given)

i am familiar with the math. thanks for posting it so people who aren't can be made aware of it. fortunately we don't need light speed for near by stars. ten percent or greater. particularly if you are talking about probes.

and a probe or expedition can do science all the way there. it's not just about the destination. planetary science on the way out of the solar system, characterizing our technological signature from deep space as you go, characterize and survey the Oort cloud. look for rogues and dwarves, James Webbing the stars all the way. hit proxima, AC a and AC b with a fleet of drop off probes. those three are basically in line and roughly .1 ly from each other.

Really, the only way we're going to get there is with the warp drive. Space isn't completely empty, and hitting space dust at even a small fraction of the speed of light would be catastrophic. Basically, there would be a lot more space dust, lol. What's more, at that speed, you'd have no way of spotting the obstacle, and even if you did, you'd have no chance of getting out of the way without MASSIVE amounts of G forces. With the warp drive, the space moves, not you. I don't understand the physics of it 100%, obviously, but I believe it means you wouldn't have to worry much about hitting anything on the way. Plus, it allows for much faster than light travel. It would only take a few days or weeks at warp 10 to reach Alpha Centari.

I know warp drives sound like science fiction, and for now it still is, but I'm sure most of you know they're actually working on it as we speak. They believe it is theoretically possible, and at our current rate of technological advancement we should most likely have a working warp drive in the next couple decades. I know that sounds quite soon, but think in terms of exponential growth instead of linear growth. Remember, Ray Kurzweil and other well known futurists predict the technological singularity will occur sometime around 2030-2045. The mean is around 2040.

Here's a few charts to explain my point.



Here's basically the same thing charted differently to better illustrate the curve. Notice it's accelerating.



Here's the predicted future of computational power. Also, notice it's accelerating.



And finally, another chart that shows the exponential growth of computing, and the predicted future.



Basically what this means is, within the next few decades, computers will be so smart that they start to invent better versions of themselves on their own, and at a MUCH faster rate than we ever could imagine. They'll have the warp drive sorted in no time, if we already haven't by then.

If you want to know more, here's the wiki on the Technological Singularity.

en.wikipedia.org...

also though we are nowhere near being able to do anything practical with it the theoretic groundwork has been laid to get us out of that icky inertial mass build up problem if The Equivalence Principle holds true WRT gravity and inertia. Theoretically at least we have a handle on gravity now. Zvi Bern, Dixon and the rest of his crew have mathematically linked the strong force with gravity. They won the sakurai prize in theoretical physics for doing so. so the math works. it remains to be seen if a practical use for it will emerge.

and if inertial mass is the only traffic cop preventing FTL then well there mathematically it's butt has been kicked.

More:

JohnnySasaki
Really, the only way we're going to get there is with the warp drive. Space isn't completely empty, and hitting space dust at even a small fraction of the speed of light would be catastrophic. Basically, there would be a lot more space dust, lol. What's more, at that speed, you'd have no way of spotting the obstacle, and even if you did, you'd have no chance of getting out of the way without MASSIVE amounts of G forces. With the warp drive, the space moves, not you. I don't understand the physics of it 100%, obviously, but I believe it means you wouldn't have to worry much about hitting anything on the way. Plus, it allows for much faster than light travel. It would only take a few days or weeks at warp 10 to reach Alpha Centari.

I know warp drives sound like science fiction, and for now it still is, but I'm sure most of you know they're actually working on it as we speak. They believe it is theoretically possible, and at our current rate of technological advancement we should most likely have a working warp drive in the next couple decades. I know that sounds quite soon, but think in terms of exponential growth instead of linear growth. Remember, Ray Kurzweil and other well known futurists predict the technological singularity will occur sometime around 2030-2045. The mean is around 2040.

actually think about it dust motes at relativistic speed are the equivalent of a rifle bullet. dust motes make 99.999999999 percent of all objects in space other than molecules and atoms or ions. a relativistic ship can expect 1 impact per square meter of the front facing portion of the ship per day. 30 meter cross section equals 30 impacts per day. rifle bullets against flesh is pretty catastrophic. but against either a wiffle shield or a block of tungsten or whatever it's no big deal. a wiffle shield is well understood. it is already used to protect the ISS and other space missions.

really the things we need better protective technology for are the much rarer but more problematic larger impactors. actually even grain sized ones can be stopped by the above methods. then you get into trouble. you need more active protection. ablatives like an km long ice column. shear thickening fluid (similar to corn starch) tanks, optronically steered lasers, electrostatic fields, plasma clouds, or just put your molten spray type radiator on the front end of the ship. and for bigger ones you can see coming faster you can divert by pitting them with a laser or making a micro course adjustment. it doesn't take much to avoid something several hundred kilometers away.

and though it has a high giggle factor NASA is actually doing some preliminary grunt work on Warp drive with Dr Harold White.