over 800 exoplanets!?

[CallMeBronco]

  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrasolar_planet

they now have discovered over 800 planets around other stars with the Kepler space program. I was shocked to hear this the other day on TV.

So what do you guys think? What are the chances of alien existing now?  suddenly it doesn't seem so far out. They're even finding earth like planets.  Even the scientists are admitting that. Who wants to go to one for a little vacation? 

One said they're finding about 1 each week which means they estimate there are twice as many planets as stars in our galaxy... there over a billion stars... 

[metalboss44]

That is wild...How grounding is it, also that contrary to wild hollywood movie inspired belief we can't actually pinpoint a spacerock about to plunge into our atmosphere, either. 

[jackulator]

how exciting is that??? 

that's probably only a fraction of what's really there

I feel like I was born about 75 years too late... 

if in 50 years we're still dicking around with oil and fascism and gay marriage and and whether or not people have the right to see a doctor and all that then I'll most likely die before any serious space exploration begins. talk about a MAJOR fucking bummer. I was told in sixth grade that we'd have a colony on mars by 2020... I seriously doubt that's going to happen... unless Neil deGrasse Tyson runs for president. 

[stoneeh]

arent there like 4 billion stars in our galaxy and a couple of billion galaxies that we know of? dont care how many potentially inhabitable planets they find, we already know there are lots of them and basically there is a lot of life our there.. probably very far away but potentially already very close

[marleycake]

DNA or the first self replicating cells may not have evolved on earth, check this little guy out

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/7W194GQ6fHI&rel=0" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/7W194GQ6fHI&rel=0</a>

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/SUC0_HjNFBs&rel=0" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/SUC0_HjNFBs&rel=0</a>

I've also heard spores can survive in vacuum of space

makes you think 

[CallMeBronco]

if in 50 years we're still dicking around with oil and fascism and gay marriage and and whether or not people have the right to see a doctor and all that then I'll most likely die before any serious space exploration begins. talk about a MAJOR fucking bummer. I was told in sixth grade that we'd have a colony on mars by 2020... I seriously doubt that's going to happen... unless Neil deGrasse Tyson runs for president. 

yeah, I'm often reminded of all these dumb "promises" we got when we were kids. They all turned out bullshit. Maybe that's part of the reason for my lack of respect for older people   

That tardigrade is a crazy creature!    it's close up picture is so weird it almost looks fake. That's pretty impressive it can survive so much, enviroments that we die instantly in.

Truthfully, they already found amino acids on asteroids and other paraphernalia years ago. So isn't the verdict kind of already in?  I actually don't mind (in some way) if it's a while until we discover actual intelligent life. I mean, imo, we aren't so intelligent our selves. 

[marleycake]

believe it or not......sigh....i still got a little hope for humanity left over  that's rare at 24 i think, a little goes a long way

[jackulator]

this could be a pretty fun place if so many people weren't crazy assholes 

[CallMeBronco]

ah yeah, I shouldn't be so pessimistic 

the thing is though.... if/when we encounter life or just find habitabal planets. It'll have to be once we get pretty further on in way of technology. It takes hundreds, thousands, and millions of years to go around our galaxy, AT LIGHT SPEED 

So basically we need to invent warp drive first. Or find aliens that already have warp drive 

[marleycake]

ah yeah, I shouldn't be so pessimistic 

the thing is though.... if/when we encounter life or just find habitabal planets. It'll have to be once we get pretty further on in way of technology. It takes hundreds, thousands, and millions of years to go around our galaxy, AT LIGHT SPEED 

So basically we need to invent warp drive first. Or find aliens that already have warp drive 

Going near the speed of light is extremely dangerous

 the velocity would be so detrimental all your cells would burst and you'd be a puddle of human flesh. moving at a constant velocity would have to be what would make it possible, you'd have to have an instant constant value; this means no acceleration. so you need to be at rest relative to the spaceship going at constant value (in it's inertia frame of reference)

now even if we achieve a spaceship that could suddenly change it's value to C (speed of light) then a new problem has risen - relativistic mass - our own body weight would crush our selves into our constituent elements lol this is probably our biggest problem with traveling at such high speeds because our mass increases, and plus let us not forget about length contraction 

and the final bummer is Time  you just might get lost not only in space but time 
warp drive/teleport  sounds extremely unlikely to my intuition, but it's most likely that it is possible ...fuck anything is possible ..we just need bigger brains to figure it out

i know that sounds cynical as fuck but it's more counterintuitive to ignore the problems of how unlikely it is to benefit from traveling at the speed of light

my brain is full of fuck just by thinking of all this shit     ...the real question for humanity is will we find another planet before our sun goes boom

these are questions that will make your hair turn grey

 

[jackulator]

that asian physicist who's always on TV invented a kind of warp drive -- where you can create a bubble where the rules of spacetime don't exist or something --- immediately in front of the ship, and that would pull you (some kind of pressure gradient?) through space. I was pretty intrigued.

when you think of how little of our makeup is actual mass I think in the future we could do some neat things with antigravity and warp drive. just need an insane source of power...

but the thing I can't get my head wrapped around is how if you traveled at warp 10 for an hour everyone back where you started would be older... 

[marleycake]

that asian physicist who's always on TV invented a kind of warp drive -- where you can create a bubble where the rules of spacetime don't exist or something --- immediately in front of the ship, and that would pull you (some kind of pressure gradient?) through space. I was pretty intrigued.

when you think of how little of our makeup is actual mass I think in the future we could do some neat things with antigravity and warp drive. just need an insane source of power...

but the thing I can't get my head wrapped around is how if you traveled at warp 10 for an hour everyone back where you started would be older... 

I can't explain that aspect  just thinking about that...i feel tired.  Michio Kaku is who i think you mean, he's a fucking genius 

now that i think about it, an infinite amount of energy for a short period of time is possible if we somehow harvest stars or catch a super nova as it happens

[CallMeBronco]

Michio Kaku was on TV today; I was watching a show about Aliens. He said if we encounter a hostile alien civilization that wants to attack us, this learning to use their weapons against them is a load of baloney. "I'd be like Kermit the frog verses a T-Rex." 


What I really can't get my head around it time travel. and the whole granfather paradox.  If it's possible; which they're saying it most-likely is (or will be in the far future anyway).

[marleycake]

Michio Kaku was on TV today; I was watching a show about Aliens. He said if we encounter a hostile alien civilization that wants to attack us, this learning to use their weapons against them is a load of baloney. "I'd be like Kermit the frog verses a T-Rex." 


What I really can't get my head around it time travel. and the whole granfather paradox.  If it's possible; which they're saying it most-likely is (or will be in the far future anyway).

 if i kill my grandfather it would create a new timeline, so both senarios exist, according to string theory if you subscribe to it, though personally i don't 

 this thread got pretty deep 

[CallMeBronco]

Michio Kaku was on TV today; I was watching a show about Aliens. He said if we encounter a hostile alien civilization that wants to attack us, this learning to use their weapons against them is a load of baloney. "I'd be like Kermit the frog verses a T-Rex." 


What I really can't get my head around it time travel. and the whole grandfather paradox.  If it's possible; which they're saying it most-likely is (or will be in the far future anyway).

 if i kill my grandfather it would create a new timeline, so both senarios exist, according to string theory if you subscribe to it, though personally i don't 

 this thread got pretty deep 

personally I like that theory the best. The other one being; some kind of karma or something prevents you from killing your grandfather-- that just doesn't sit with me at all. Sounds too science fiction/religious...

The other weird thing, however, about string theory is that there's supposed to be 11 dimensions or something like that. Idk, that just sounds odd to me, 10 or 11 dimensions just seems like an arbitrary number, if we think they may be more dimensions why not infinite dimensions.
Then some scientists believe there are no dimensions at all--that it's all an illusion.    

[marleycake]

Brian Greene gives good lectures on YouTube regarding string theory if you want to hurt your mind 

yes yes the 11 dimensions  i think I'll stick with 4  unless it's proven obviously, most of string theory is hypothetical mess with 9 versions and a sad attempt to unite all the versions (m theory) which states that our universe is a bubble inside an even bigger universe called the omneverse/multiverse, and when 2 universes touch that creates a big bang creating another bubble (universe)

what a mess

does anyone watch Nova still?

i think it's funny how we started out talking about discovering planets to universes inside universes with infinite time slot scenarios with endless amounts of universes with all possible differentiated laws of physics

[jackulator]

that's pretty incredible -- I really wish we had warp drive already. 

I watch way too much star trek though. "that was his problem"

[CallMeBronco]

holy crap, from what I've been reading now, it seems there is some debate about what we're seeing when we look at the hubble deep field. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field

basically the galaxies in these deep field pictures are so far away that it takes the light 12 billion years to reach us. So we're looking back in time when we look at them. But then some believe space is curved so that, like the earth, if you kept sailing forward you'd eventually come back to where you started.  So.... what if when we look at these deep field pictures we're actually looking at ourselves, our own Milky way galaxy, but 12 billion years in the past. 

wtf... just image that for a minute, if it's true. We can look at a distance past version of ourselves, just by looking farther away.  my brain hurts.

------
maybe I should change the name of this thread to astronomy  if you couldn't tell; I love astronomy.

[marleycake]

dude you just blew up the internet 

that's a mind blowing thought 

every time we talk about this i hear this song in my head [no, not literally]

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/ef7_H4VGuIw&rel=0" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/ef7_H4VGuIw&rel=0</a>

one thing is for sure, we have a lot to think about, which is always a good thing 

[jackulator]

...what if when we look at these deep field pictures we're actually looking at ourselves, our own Milky way galaxy, but 12 billion years in the past...

"This is just the kind of pretentious bullshit that Americans always say to French girls so they can sleep with them." Francoise from 'The Beach'

I'm moist with anticipation and I'm not even a French girl. but then, I too love astronomy.