1000th exoplanet discovered, including the most Earth-like world so far
65 replies, posted
That's great and all but it doesn't matter for shit if we can see thousands of planets and 'earth like' ones when we haven't even traveled to a single other planet that in the grand scheme of things so close to us.
I'm hoping there's some coalition of governments building some giant secret rocket underground that'll take us to one of these planets. Well not "us" but the rich ones. I mean at least humankind will have made it I'm not too fussed whether I'm on the ship.
[QUOTE=Melnek;46881431]"humanity fuck yeah" stories are almost always either inaccurate or outright false and are so cringeworthy to read through it's like reading really really bad fanfiction.
please stop.[/QUOTE]
Honestly whenever I read those kind of stories it doesn't read like something uplifting or good but rather like the rantings of someone insecure with a propagandist slant.
Also most of the times when I see those kind of tales the diction is as if someone took a thesaurus and used that as a writing guide.
i hear they have oil
let's invade
I don't really like the argument that because there's a whole fucking lot of space, life [I]must[/I] exist and be plentiful. We have exactly one data-point for life coming into existence, and we don't even know how that happened. We can find all sorts of planets with the ability to sustain life, but that doesn't tell us jack shit about if they have the conditions necessary to [I]begin[/I] life, since we don't actually know how that happened, or possibly could happen elsewhere.
[QUOTE=Canuhearme?;46881287]Bro you're starting to sound a lot like those HFY folk who talk about how Humanity is actually the most badass race around because "we breath rocket fuel and piss explosions" or "we nailed our god to a stick."
Odds are every other alien species out there experienced history similar to ours, even if vaguely; everything from ambition to religion are natural byproducts of sapience and sooner or later someone's going to start throwing rocks, spears, rockets and eventually nukes at one another to prove they're right.
If you want my personal opinion, Humanity won't be unique in some grandiose way, but rather little quirks and abilities that are rare or uncommon in the galaxy. Less "we're crazy ultra-warriors" and more "we're one of the few races actually able to burp, which is related to our marvelous ability to actually utilize caffeine without frying our brains."[/QUOTE]
Fun fact: chocolate is poisonous to most animals here, but to us, it is delicious.
[QUOTE=TurboSax;46877488].
[B][I]Simply put, we're unstoppable badasses from a planet that thrives on death and planned obsolescence, who are so badass that we rose above the cycle of life and turned to each other for the only worthy enemies we could find. [/I][/B]We're built to struggle and persevere, be it against the surrounding environment or against kin with similar ambitions, be they human or otherwise. As soon as we have something to aim our guns at that's inhuman and strong enough to pose a threat, we'll have the perfect reason to band together as a species permanently.
Hell, our nature and environment is probably why no life has visited if it's even found us out here in the middle of nowhere. Who in their right mind wants to rouse the killing machines aiming their guns at each other in boredom, waiting for something bigger and more interesting they can fight to cross their sights? If any life has come across us, it's probably waiting and praying to its deity that we keep up this whole "diplomacy over war" cultural trend going long enough to become highly-peaceful diplomatic race, otherwise all hell will break loose as soon as we have good reason to unload on some poor bastard.[/QUOTE]
Fuck being nice I'm in the mood for some intergalactic domination
TBH I just hope I can cybernetically augment my brain within my lifetime so I can die when I want to, not because old age tells me.
I never understood the fear or even the idea of war with aliens; the logistical issues with sending enough soldiers and ships AND land AND air vehicles who likely operate completely differently than the native species biologically while being limited by speed of light travel seems like it would be enough to make any race with the mental fortitude to actually even reach us just say fuck it and give up. You'd have to feed troops with food imported from your own planet, make sure they can even survive in the atmosphere there, find ways to combat entirely alien bacteria/viruses/parasites and get together enough equipment and soldiers to take over an ENTIRE PLANET filled to the brim with people fighting for the survival of their entire species. Oh, and all of this is with a minimum ~5 year delay time for both supply lines and information/orders from back home.
For what gain? Land? We'd glass it before the first colony ships got here, and there's probably plenty just lying around in space uninhabited. Resources? We've already mined most of the easy-to-access stuff. Slave labor? Why not just use robots, who will never ever use guerrilla tactics against you?
Any extraterrestrial species dumb enough to try and conquer ANY civilized world either is stuck banging rocks together or would come back for round two just to find that we reverse engineered all their shit.
Of course humans are interesting and all but I often imagined how we would look like to some alien race which discovers our planet. First thing they see is this: We keep fighting in wars against each other, hurt and kill each other over nothing, rob each other... They'd expect us to stick together and help each other to be more powerful in general like you'd expect it from some extra terrestial race too. Instead we're pretty much doing the opposite. It would be really embarassing to be honest.
[QUOTE=Melnek;46881431]"humanity fuck yeah" stories are almost always either inaccurate or outright false and are so cringeworthy to read through it's like reading really really bad fanfiction.
please stop.[/QUOTE]
it's even funnier since there is a good possibility that humanity isn't all that hot on the grand scale of things, we basically evolved from scavengers, we were a bunch of opportunistic fucks(and still kinda are) that managed to somehow to rise to the top of the food chain despite murdering each other incessantly for most of history due to stupidity.
and let's not get into the fact that many animals in our planet can tear one of us apart/poison/generally make your life shitty easily, i don't consider that very encouraging really.
[QUOTE=Wizards Court;46882477]it's even funnier since there is a good possibility that humanity isn't all that hot on the grand scale of things, we basically evolved from scavengers, we were a bunch of opportunistic fucks(and still kinda are) that managed to somehow to rise to the top of the food chain despite murdering each other incessantly for most of history due to stupidity.
and let's not get into the fact that many animals in our planet can tear one of us apart/poison/generally make your life shitty easily, i don't consider that very encouraging really.[/QUOTE]
I feel as though we are not naturally strong but we make ourselves strong through our techniques, intuition, and reasonings, a rather direct example being plate armor. Sorry for the uninspired example but if you put a person at top physique in a suit of armor and chainmail, the amount of things on this planet that are able to kill that person drops a significant percentage. Our potential for growth and self-improvement is really what "inspires" me more than all this "HUMANITY FUCK YEAH" talk. We (basically) stress ourselves enough to where our body is like "oh shit I need to be able to handle that stress" and adapts to fit it. Something about that ability to adapt amazes me. But our actual skill of adaptation is kinda shit... If the percentage of oxygen or nitrogen in the air were to drop drastically enough to where we could not adapt to it over time, would we even be able to survive? Would a change as little as 0.1% kill off the entire human race? What about 1%? I assume with the rapid deforestation of recent times that the oxygen percentage has changed at least somewhat, so I'm honestly not sure. All in all, the fragility of the human race scares me, we're not badasses or killing machines, our body fights itself more than we fight each other and with all our self-deemed sapience, we've finally left this planet within 100 years of starting work on leaving it, yet we've spent the other 6000 something years we've been "civilized" fighting over what concepts our sapience has created. Thankfully, we're a multi-tasking race who can both kill ignorantly and discover vehemently.
[QUOTE=LoganIsAwesome;46874102]There's literally so many of these that it'd be stupid to rule out life on another planet. Bacteria or intelligent species.[/QUOTE]
The curious thing is, it theoretically would only take about 5 million years for a species to colonize the entire galaxy with equipment that could potentially become available in less than probably 200 years for us, so where are the other intelligent, space-capable species? Considering the age of the galaxy and universe, it either should have happened much earlier than now or there is some underlying problem that causes intelligence to hit a wall (possibly one that humans surpassed with the Great Leap Forward, but might be extraordinarily rare as a whole).
For sure, there is highly likely analogs to bacteria, plants and intelligent animals out there, but it is also a possibility that we are the only race at this current time in this galaxy with the ability to leave one's home planet or the desire to leave the solar system, as it would only take a few thousand years for an alien with the intelligence of a Late Stone Age human to develop interstellar flight, assuming that they had the resources or desire to do so. Thus, unless they had perfected being able to stop any single spacecraft from approaching the solar system, at least a rogue individual of such a race should have ended up on Earth with visible remnants of their activity.
tl;dr: I believe that life may be out there in this region of the galaxy, but there are some notable issues observable right here with assuming that there are aliens surpassing or rivalling humans in intelligence without a visible influence on us, as the odds of sentient life starting at the same time or having the same exact pace for intelligence on multiple planets is rather . . . . . . . . extremely low.
Here's some interesting read regarding the "Humanity fuck yeah" thing
[IMG]http://img.4plebs.org/boards/pol/image/1386/04/1386043905230.png[/IMG]
[editline]8th January 2015[/editline]
So yeah lets FUCK THEM UP before they do
That's the only logical course of action.
Can we at first get to the damn red planet before we get caught up sightseeing on exoplanets.
The prospect of having creatures sexier/prettier than humans kind of made me look forward to meeting them :v:
[QUOTE=Tools;46876810]I'd pay any price in my life to live long enough to witness one of these being visited.
Kepler-62f looks like something right out of a sci-fi.[/QUOTE]
Shit I'd give up my life to go travel space if it meant I couldn't come back.
It sounds stupid but I want to go give smallpox infected blankets to native aliens on other planets and all sorts of cool shit.
[QUOTE=TurboSax;46877488]HFY.[/QUOTE]
Don't forget we're also a species that see it's fastest technological progress in times when we're afraid the other side will one up us.
Wars and cold wars see us utilise an incredibly application of technology. While we then require peacetime for pure nonapplication research, the speed of application can be potentially considered insane by some species.
Imagine this more peaceful species, who is far more slower in their technological progress, which suddenly learns humanity went from first powered flight to to an extra solar probe in less than aa century. Let alone probes on nearby planets.
That 4chan set of posts is a little scary, but not really looking at the big picture. Any species with the capability to engage in FTL travel regularly enough to militarize in space is likely going to be so far advanced that we won't pose any threat to them, stumbling through the first stages of our interstellar journeys as we may be. The chances that one of our ships will accidentally blunder into and destroy their planet or planets are so miniscule as to be a virtual zero, given the vastness of space. They'll be curious, certainly wary, but perhaps willing to make contact and establish some sort of alliance, rather than allowing for the chance of first contact being accidental and resulting in hostilities. No matter how badass you are, it's cheaper to be friendly than to spend money on bullets or bombs.
[QUOTE=Wizards Court;46882477]it's even funnier since there is a good possibility that humanity isn't all that hot on the grand scale of things, we basically evolved from scavengers, we were a bunch of opportunistic fucks(and still kinda are) that managed to somehow to rise to the top of the food chain despite murdering each other incessantly for most of history due to stupidity.
and let's not get into the fact that many animals in our planet can tear one of us apart/poison/generally make your life shitty easily, i don't consider that very encouraging really.[/QUOTE]
[img]http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/files/2012/11/buffalo-Global-hunting-resources-950x632.jpg[/img]
Are you forgetting the fact that we developed [b]firearms[/b] that could also make many animal lives on the planet shitty easily?
[QUOTE=proch;46884653]Here's some interesting read regarding the "Humanity fuck yeah" thing
[editline]8th January 2015[/editline]
So yeah lets FUCK THEM UP before they do
That's the only logical course of action.[/QUOTE]
Isn't that last post a quote by Stephen Hawking?
[QUOTE=Eeshton;46883983]I feel as though we are not naturally strong but we make ourselves strong through our techniques, intuition, and reasonings, a rather direct example being plate armor. Sorry for the uninspired example but if you put a person at top physique in a suit of armor and chainmail, the amount of things on this planet that are able to kill that person drops a significant percentage. Our potential for growth and self-improvement is really what "inspires" me more than all this "HUMANITY FUCK YEAH" talk. We (basically) stress ourselves enough to where our body is like "oh shit I need to be able to handle that stress" and adapts to fit it. Something about that ability to adapt amazes me. But our actual skill of adaptation is kinda shit... If the percentage of oxygen or nitrogen in the air were to drop drastically enough to where we could not adapt to it over time, would we even be able to survive? Would a change as little as 0.1% kill off the entire human race? What about 1%? I assume with the rapid deforestation of recent times that the oxygen percentage has changed at least somewhat, so I'm honestly not sure. All in all, the fragility of the human race scares me, we're not badasses or killing machines, our body fights itself more than we fight each other and with all our self-deemed sapience, we've finally left this planet within 100 years of starting work on leaving it, yet we've spent the other 6000 something years we've been "civilized" fighting over what concepts our sapience has created. Thankfully, we're a multi-tasking race who can both kill ignorantly and discover vehemently.[/QUOTE]
There is one important point about our natural ability as predators, though. No, we don't have teeth, we don't have claws, we don't have armored hides. But endurance counts for a lot. In peak physical condition, we can run for days, go for a very long time without food or water. We can track our prey because of our intellect and run them down - They'll exhaust themselves to the edge of death trying to escape us, because while they may be faster, we'll always be there when they turn around. It's how some tribesmen in Africa still hunt.
[QUOTE=EuSKalduna;46874427]The exoplanet is so similar to Earth it is in fact identical. Our telescopes have been pointed at a mirror all this time[/QUOTE]
Launch a mirror facing earth into space, after 10 years send coordinates to NASA. Watch as scientists go crazy.
[QUOTE=MatheusMCardoso;46912504]Launch a mirror facing earth into space, after 10 years send coordinates to NASA. Watch as scientists go crazy.[/QUOTE]
They'll be like "Wow, that guy's an idiot, it's just a mirror."
Problem is that even though we encounter another race, but if they have similar principles like we do and for some reason we are actually able to create a peace treaty or cease-fire. There is still the issue of xenon-viruses and our viruses would probably be lethal to them as well.
[QUOTE=proch;46874275]I bet we're 20 times more badass than they are.[/QUOTE]
i bet those lame fuckers dont even have skateboards and shit
haha dumbasses
[QUOTE=Deathtrooper2;46913037]Problem is that even though we encounter another race, but if they have similar principles like we do and for some reason we are actually able to create a peace treaty or cease-fire. There is still the issue of xenon-viruses and our viruses would probably be lethal to them as well.[/QUOTE]
Alien viruses would probably not be able to harm us as they would need to adapt to our immune system.
[QUOTE=Deathtrooper2;46913037]Problem is that even though we encounter another race, but if they have similar principles like we do and for some reason we are actually able to create a peace treaty or cease-fire. There is still the issue of xenon-viruses and our viruses would probably be lethal to them as well.[/QUOTE]
What makes you think that their form of life would even be remotely compatible enough to ours to be able to infect us?
[QUOTE=kaine123;46914829]What makes you think that their form of life would even be remotely compatible enough to ours to be able to infect us?[/QUOTE]
It's impossible to assume we'll be immune to alien diseases simply by virtue of being from another planet; for one we don't know if a disease might interact with us in ways we've never quite seen before (silicon-based lifeforms might have an otherwise benign disease that does funky things to the calcium in our bones, for example) or we get another case of "Cat-Scratch Disease: Alien Edition", where a bacteria that's otherwise harmless to them is dangerous to us (and vice versa for our bacteria to them.)
Bacteria/viruses are the least of our troubles, what we [I]should[/I] worry about are parasites and prions.
[sp]I am not a clever man and this is all wild speculation.[/sp]
[QUOTE=Fourm Shark;46932409]Alien bacteria might be pretty scary, given that they didn't evolve with our immune system's adapting to new strains.[/QUOTE]
Chances are it wouldn't be adapted to our biological structure. A lot of animal diseases on Earth are harmless to us, so I'd expect the same thing of an entirely alien organism.
[QUOTE=hakimhakim;46910565]The prospect of having creatures sexier/prettier than humans kind of made me look forward to meeting them :v:[/QUOTE]
And that's why they'll never let you back in the petting zoo.
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