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Related: About this forumAstronomers discover three habitable planets just 40 light years away
Astronomers discover three habitable planets just 40 light years away [View all]
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/227385-trappist-1-a-star-with-three-very-habitable-planets-just-40-light-years-away
By Graham Templeton on May 2, 2016 at 11:00 am
Scientists from MIT, University of Liege, and elsewhere, have found not one, not two, but three planets orbiting a single star, all of which seem to be habitable by a variety of measures. The team is calling them the best candidates yet found for life outside our solar system, and since theyre only 40 light years from Earth, they ought to be perfectly positioned for detailed further investigation. If youre betting on which system out there is most likely to produce evidence of alien life, this one might be a good one to remember: 2MASS J23062928-0502285, also known as TRAPPIST-1.
The star is a so-called brown dwarf star, or a star that isnt massive enough to exert the level of gravity needed to jump-start hydrogen fusion at its core. This means two things: Its very cold (sometimes referred to as an ultra-cool dwarf star) and it doesnt put out very much visible light. A regular star is, of course, a big lightbulb in the dark, meaning that when you stare right into it with a telescope, it tends to blind you; this is one of the main reasons it took so long to actually see exoplanets. Eventually, astronomers built customized planet-hunters meant specifically to stare into suns, and quickly found hundreds, then thousands of exoplanets. These sightings are known as transits, where the orbiting planet moves between the target star and the telescope, dimming the star for as long as the planet remains in the way.
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Ichingcarpenter
(36,988 posts)Snowden talking with Tyson
He added that encryption would render communication indistinguishable from cosmic microwave background radiation.
If you look at encrypted communication, if they are properly encrypted, there is no real way to tell that they are encrypted, Snowden said. You cant distinguish a properly encrypted communication from random behavior.
https://www.rt.com/news/315976-snowden-encryption-alien-messages/
Undetectable Extraterrestrial Signals --"Advanced Civilizations Could Be Using Ghostly Neutrinos or Gravitational Waves"
Several of the world's leading astronomers -- including Great Britain's former astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees -- believe advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, rather than using different radio waves or visible light to signal, may be using an entirely different communication medium such as ghostly neutrinos or with gravitational waves (ripples in the fabric of space-time) or using communication mechanisms we cannot begin to fathom.
The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life -- much less intelligence -- beyond this Earth," said Arthur C. Clarke, "does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime."
Lord Rees, a leading cosmologist and astrophysicist who is the president of Britains Royal Society and astronomer to the Queen of England believes the existence of extraterrestrial life may be beyond human understanding.
They could be staring us in the face and we just dont recognize them. The problem is that were looking for something very much like us, assuming that they at least have something like the same mathematics and technology. I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we cant conceive. Just as a chimpanzee cant understand quantum theory, it could be there as aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.
In fact, Davies writes in his book, The Eerie Silence, that advanced technology might not even be made of matter. That it might have no fixed size or shape; have no well-defined boundaries. Is dynamical on all scales of space and time. Or, conversely, does not appear to do anything at all that we can discern. Does not consist of discrete, separate things; but rather it is a system,or a subtle higher-level correlation of things.
Are matter and information, Davies asks, all there is? Five hundred years ago, Davies writes, " the very concept of a device manipulating information, or software, would have been incomprehensible. Might there be a still higher level, as yet outside all human experience, that organizes electrons? If so, this "third level" would never be manifest through observations made at the informational level, still less at the matter level.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2014/05/undectable-extraterrestrial-signals-advanced-civilizations-could-be-using-ghostly-neutrinos-or-gravi.html
100 years is a blink in the eye and in fact now since we have gone digital our noise is much less.
Scientists may have an extra challenge when it comes to detecting alien civilizations: a time limit.
A new study suggests that intelligent aliens, if their technological progression is similar to that of humanity's, are likely to have moved away from noisy radio transmissions to harder-to-hear digital signals within a 100-year time frame. That offers Earth just a narrow window in which to pick up any signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.?
"Based on the results that we looked at, if we assume that the civilizations are humanlike with similar technological progress to us, we calculate the probability of making contact is roughly one in 10 million," the study's lead author, Duncan Forgan, told SPACE.com.????
The time it takes a planet to go "radio quiet" dramatically restricts the types of signal it sends into space and our chances for eavesdropping on them, said Forgan, a postgraduate researcher at the University of Edinborough in Scotland. [Poll - Is Earth Ready to Meet an Alien Civilization?]
Forgan and his team applied their technology-development time scale to a simulation of the galaxy, based on the assumption that the pace of an alien civilization's technological progress would be similar to that on Earth. Based on this simulation, the researchers determined the 1-in-10 million odds of humans accidentally stumbling across a transmission from aliens.
The researchers, whose study will appear in an upcoming edition of the International Journal of Astrobiology, focused their work on the expected eavesdropping capabilities of the Square-Kilometer Telescope, a radio telescope slated to be completed by 2023.
- See more at: http://www.space.com/9206-finding-harder-aliens-digital.html#sthash.zB2q8SnA.dpuf
goldent
(1,582 posts)civilization that is trying to communicate with us using encrypted signals. Do they only want the NSA to know?
northernsouthern
(1,511 posts)Sorry, planet is mine now. I am off to explore, good luck with the election and global warming.
Peace Patriot
(24,010 posts)I was thinking: Good thing they've finding habitable planets now, cuz if Trump or Clinton are s/elected, we're gonna need an extra one.
northernsouthern
(1,511 posts)It may be a bit of a long travel, but if I recall correctly time slows down the closer to the speed of light you get? So we would not age as much I think?
Peace Patriot
(24,010 posts)...right in the middle of 2MASS J23062928-0502285 (aka TRAPPIST-1)'s booming New Deal! I'm ready! When do we go?
northernsouthern
(1,511 posts)I am sure they still have tons of funding and are competitive on a world market. There is no way that we could have USPSed the space program right? I am off to ask them to borrow one of their ships...I am sure they have a couple extra ones not in use.
greiner3
(5,214 posts)northernsouthern
(1,511 posts)So we are looking at a 400 year trip providing all goes well.
NickB79
(19,297 posts)The two closest planets are apparently tidally locked due to their close orbit, so that would make one side hot, and the other ice cold.
If water is constantly evaporating off the sunward side, and being precipitated out on the cold side, wouldn't the water eventually end up almost entirely in ice caps far from where it's warm enough to support life?
Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)An atmosphere like that of Venus would keep the entire planet hot I suspect, yeah the side toward the star would be somewhat hotter but a really dense atmosphere would distribute it fairly well.