SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the international-calls-take-on-a-new-meaning dept.
Twenty years ago today, an invisible object circling an obscure star in the constellation Pegasus overturned everything astronomers knew about planets around other stars. No, the fallout was even bigger than that. The indirect detection of 51 Pegasi b—the first planet ever found around a star similar to the sun—revealed that they had never really known anything to begin with.
At the time, even the most adventurous minds blithely assumed that our solar system was more or less typical, a template for all the others. 51 Peg b threw a big splash of reality in their faces. The newfound world was bizarre, a Jupiter-size world skimming the surface of its star in a blistering-fast "year" that lasted just 4.2 days. Its existence ran counter to the standard theories of how planets form and evolve. It answered one big question: Yes, other planetary systems really do exist. But it raised a thousand others.
How long before we discover signals from one of those planets, and what will it mean for our civilization?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Saturday October 31 2015, @11:39PM
FTL is a chimera. It may not be possible, probably isn't, and more importantly, what does anyone really need it for? Because colonization of the galaxy is unbearably slow without FTL? Yet colonization is still conceivable. We are really very young, and extremely impatient. Civilization has existed for a mere 10,000 years or so. Assuming we don't stupidly kill ourselves off, in a lot of ways, we are still in the very beginning of humanity's potential. What might things be like 100,000 years from now? And we have far more time than that, perhaps a billion years before the sun becomes too hot. So what's the big rush? Colonizing nearby solar systems will take millenia without FTL, but on geologic time scales, that's nothing. FTL is thrown into more than half of SF stories seemingly only to appease readers who like heroic dashing about from star system to star system in a matter of hours rather than years, and as a crutch for authors.
Star Trek is a great SF show, with, yes, FTL. But I find much to criticize. They do a lot of really stupid stuff to make the show more dramatic and palatable. Crew members are constantly beaming down into dangerous situations, and why? Because audiences want people to handle it, not robots or drones? And we love the drama of a red shirt losing his life? Self destruct has of course been most righteously pilloried. Then there's the problem of the implications of transporter and food replicator technology, in which these devices are somehow just not used at anything close to their full potential. For instance, if it is possible to teleport people, beam them from orbit down to a planet's surface, it is also possible and likely actually easier, to copy people. Beam down and assemble a copy of the crew member, and let the original stay safely on board. That possibility is ignored, and I suspect it is because audiences would not like it, would find it disturbing, feel that it makes an individual life rather cheap, as if dead red shirts didn't already do that. What does it mean if a person can be copied? That no one is such special snowflake after all? Our souls, whatever those are exactly, are also copied, and this is a threat to religious dogma? In short, Star Trek timidly does not go lots of places where audiences really don't want to.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Sunday November 01 2015, @12:02AM
I do remember an episode where a transporter couldn't verify the occupant successfully transported so it rematerialized them back on the ship. There was now two of the same person. One was no more of a copy than the other. Both had a right to live. Think about it with yourself. If the other version of you withdrew all your money to go buy a house you would certainly object. But both are you and both have the same rights. You can't just kill one either.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @12:36AM
I thought they ensured that couldn't happen by using the energy from the destruction of the person to power the formation of the new transported person.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @01:03AM
They still had an episode about it.
Thomas Riker [wikia.com]
(Score: 2, Disagree) by edIII on Sunday November 01 2015, @12:13AM
Two comments:
1) We're in a rush to get off the planet, because we aren't going to survive for more than a tiny insignificant fraction of that geological time scale. We need to get off this planet in the next 150 years max, and we probably have 250 before life can no longer be sustained. These are our death throes, not the beginnings of a 100,000 year culture going to the stars. You have a point, but it totally ignores our nature :)
2) The transporter kills people. Every time. Every single time. It *literally* breaks them down into energy (the killing part), "beams" the energy down, and *reassembles* the energy into a brand new copy sync'd at the quantum level. With the way the buffers work, there really is no technical reason (just a social one) preventing copies from being made. There was even a show about it.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday November 01 2015, @06:59AM
What do you think is gong to happen in the next 150-250 years to make life unsustainable? I can see civilization ending but not life or even mankind.
Besides the idea that we could have a self sustaining population off this planet in 150-250 years is pretty questionable.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday November 02 2015, @09:49PM
You may be technically correct. Even if there are only a couple hundred humans left, mankind still exists. IIRC, scientists believe we may have even been pushed that far once in our evolution. So civilization will be ending, but not life.
Maybe... I still believe we are only scratching the surface in our models. To me the environment is a huge system with momentum. There is speculation that what we've done already will take thousands of years to stabilize, if and only if, we were to stop now. There very well may be delicate components of our environment, that once pushed too hard, chain react with how they affect other systems. If we lost all the bees and frogs for instance, some scientists say that is a invitation to a runway disaster model.
Kill all life? Yeah, that's pretty doubtful. Causing a mass planetary extinction of 98% of all life? No so doubtful. It's happened in the past, we have ideas on why it did, and it's not impossible for us to replicate those conditions. What's happening with the oceans is pretty concerning with the rate of change being heavily influenced by mankind. If alter the pH too dramatically, or even the temperature, we risk mass die offs of critical components of the planetary food chains.
Remember... we're currently involved in the 6th mass extinction of this planet [biologicaldiversity.org], and we're entirely responsible for it. Maybe we can save ourselves with a near life-less dystopia where the only life is what we are actively farming and keeping on "life support". In other words, Mother Nature is not around anymore to ensure proper nutrition for plants, light, pollination, etc. All environmental systems will become man made and operated.
I'm pretty sure we are going to sorely suffer for the lack of biodiversity. Perhaps I should have said we will wish we are all dead.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday November 05 2015, @12:59AM
A big, big problem we have yet to solve is how to govern ourselves so that a generational ship can reach another star system with capable people. The problem I see is that a 1000 year journey is an awfully long time for a society to exist without corruption gradually getting worse until a revolution breaks out. The passengers can't afford an all out war, unless it is possible to build the ship tough enough to take it, and I can't see how that could be possible. At some point in that long journey, some small group would probably try to blackmail the rest of the passengers by threatening to wreck the ship. Solving the problem of building a self sustaining ecology seems simpler. It may be possible to avoid the problem by a de facto truce imposed by having everyone travel in a cold sleep. But the technology needed to undertake such a journey would certainly be able to trash a world, and so cold sleep would only defer the political problems.
We have that problem here and now on Earth of course, since the invention of the nuclear bomb. So far, we've found the will and discipline to eschew their use. And now, as you point out, we have the environment to think about. We must also find the will to restrain our consumption so that the environment we all depend upon is not wrecked.
Maybe a reason we have not found intelligent aliens is that destructive competition is too attractive, despite its obvious threat to the very survival of intelligent life.