What if Alpha Centauri has no planets?

[NintendoTogepi]

Then they orbit the suns in a space habitat!

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

I already like to picture they do this in my OCC Space Race games.

As for the "other life" things, I say there might be other life, but very little. Maybe another intelligent species on the other side of the universe, a small planet filled with alien animals who are non sentient, and maybe a moon with microbes on it but I'd be more inclined to believe we're the only life rather then in a universe brimming full of life.

 

[brades]

r_rolo1,

Don't take this the wrong way, but you're a only proving me point that we humans are SO wanting to not be alone in our immediate space that we fathom all sorts of strange ideas to believe that there is life nearby. The fact is, Earth is anomaly. Comparing other star systems and planets (or moons) to our star system or Earth isn't useful because of how different Earth is. Just like trying to study space from inside our solar system isn't useful, because solar systems are atypcial space. Typical space is...well, imagine all the molecules in a sugar cube. Now expand them to the point where they fill an object the size of Jupiter. That's typical space.

We are just anomolies.

How can you really say we are anomolies when our sample size is so small? We only know what is on about 8 planets and one plutoid , and even then we haven't come close to exploring our own solar system. The universe is a large space and more than likely life isn't that unique, intelligent life may be a little more sparse, but to think that we are alone in the universe is far more disillusioned than thinking there might be bacterial remnants buried on mars. We are just now getting to the point where we can detect planets that aren't of the Jupiter type, traveling to them will be next to impossible with current technology but if we find a planet with both water and an atmosphere and given billions of years of chance there will most certainly be some form of life on that planet.

A single person is not very intelligent our brains were made to throw rocks at big animals and live in caves, what makes us unique to our planet is we have the collective knowledge of 300,000 years of human existence, our desire to discover the unknown is what makes us special and should not be marginalized.

 

[Kesshi]

but if we find a planet with both water and an atmosphere and given billions of years of chance there will most certainly be some form of life on that planet.

brades,

Two things are required for an atmosphere. Oxygen and lightning. Oxygen (in quantities large enough to form an atmosphere) is not "naturally" produced without life. As we know it, complex life forms required either oxygen or an atmosphere. It's a delicate balance of the right creature evolving at the right time to help support the other creatures. Regardless, if we find an atmosphere, we'll find life. There's no way that atmosphere could be there without life. (Of course I say this all tongue-in-cheek. I I am basing all my assumptions on the way life formed on this tiny little marble.)

 

[r_rolo1]

Kesshi, I suppose that by "atmosphere" you mean breathable atmosphere ( otherwise your post is incompreensible ). And technically you don't need oxygen for complex life: just check some of the deep water geothermal ecosystems, where sulfur substitutes oxygen as oxidizing agent

 

[Kesshi]

Kesshi, I suppose that by "atmosphere" you mean breathable atmosphere ( otherwise your post is incompreensible ). And technically you don't need oxygen for complex life: just check some of the deep water geothermal ecosystems, where sulfur substitutes oxygen as oxidizing agent

r_rolo1,

Yeah, everywhere I say "atmosphere" I mean O3.

 

[Chinese American]

Of course, space missions have their positive sides and lots of good has come from them. However, I feel that space gets a disproportionate amount of the budget for scientific research because it's shiny and glamorous, and that lots of extremely expensive missions have failed to produce enough return, comparatively speaking. I'd much rather see that cash invested in more reliable and higher yielding projects.

Everyday research can return zero gains. That's the risk for any type of scientific research let alone something as complicated and sophisticated as rocket science and space travel.

And I'd rather the money go to space research than say supporting useless fashion and pop idols. Talk about glamor.

In the highly unlikely event of an Earth-ending catastrophe then possibly the trillions of dollars spent in the vague hope of perhaps finding an inhabitable planet AND developing sustainable accommodation for millions of people AND researching, developing and mass producing the transport to get them there would be worthwhile.

Or that money could be invested in the CERTAIN FACT that millions of people starve to death and die of horrible diseases RIGHT NOW, here on Earth. We shouldn't run before we can walk.

This is more politics than science. Unless we invade another country against their will, it's up to their own governments to provide a better standard of life. But in fact, we are spending billions on medical research. That shouldn't stop us from doing other types of research. This isn't a game where we can only research one thing at a time.

Incidentally, I agree that warfare is a horrible waste of resources, but that doesn't legitimise the amount of spending on space. Furthermore, spending on space equals ~2.5% of the world's military budget, 25 times your estimate.

NASA for example do more than just research space. They also study environmental and ecological systems.

 

[Charlie_B]

I'm well aware that all kinds of research can fail, but you actually back up my point. Space travel is complicated and sophisticated (and more importantly, often very speculative) and hence doesn't perform as well comparatively. Certainly, I can't think of any multi-billion dollar projects in other fields which have blown up a few hours after they were initialised.
As far as pop culture goes, it has little appeal for me but on matter how facile it is there can be no argument that lots of people find it a source of entertainment, so it does serve some purpose. That may seem rather spurious when compared to scientific advancement but as Civ shows it's still pretty essential.

Again, you miss my point regarding other fields of research. I'm well aware that we can have fingers in many pies, but at the same time the more we spend on space, the less is spent in other areas. We can spread resources across many areas but they are still finite.
I'd wholeheartedly disagree that this is a question of 'politics'. It's a question of ethics, morality - humanity is more important than artificial state boundaries. Condemning someone to death when they could be saved simply because they were born one side of a line rather than the other is unnecessary and cruel. In a globalised economy, such negative isolationism is no longer relevant - if it ever was.

As far as NASA etc goes... I did look at figures from a few years back to give some leeway, but you still make a valid point.

 

[Magma_Dragoon]

r_rolo1,

Don't take this the wrong way, but you're a only proving me point that we humans are SO wanting to not be alone in our immediate space that we fathom all sorts of strange ideas to believe that there is life nearby. The fact is, Earth is anomaly. Comparing other star systems and planets (or moons) to our star system or Earth isn't useful because of how different Earth is. Just like trying to study space from inside our solar system isn't useful, because solar systems are atypcial space. Typical space is...well, imagine all the molecules in a sugar cube. Now expand them to the point where they fill an object the size of Jupiter. That's typical space.

We are just anomolies.

Of the 8 planets in our system, 3 (Venus, Earth, Mars) were at one time habitable. Of those, only Earth is habitable now.

You don't need an atmosphere for life, you need liquid water and a source of energy. Deep sea vents have already been pointed out. Even a moon like Europa could conceivably be a haven for life. Life does not need oxygen, there are many organisms that live anaerobically. (like bochilinum bacteria, they cause bochilism (sp))

Ideally, we would like to find planets like our own so we can colonize them. I can't really offer and explaination as to WHY we should colonize them, but it seems like the right thing to do. Many native creature would need to be exterminated. Luckily, those alien bacteria have never encountered penicilin. If its not possible to seal out native life, we could always direct a massive asteroid into the planet. One large enough to cause a total evaporation event. (That is, all the water on the planet would boil into steam and the planet's surface would be steralized to a depth of about 3 kilometers.)

The reason we have found so many hot jupiters is because the method used to find extrasolar planets is biased toward finding massive planets orbiting close to their parent star. Stars are tugged by the gravity of the planets orbiting them, so, naturally, the easiest planets to see are very massive ones in very close orbits. Finding smaller, rocky planets is very challenging with current obersvatories. Once TPF comes on line we will find many many planets, and hopefully a few Earth-like planets to which we can send a probe.

Colonists should be Scots, since we are the best at everything, we survive well in hostile terrain, and also we could name the planet Caladan.

Of human suffering on Earth, we can just drop some kind of chemical that causes infertility all over the places where all this bad . .. .. .. . happens. Looking at you, Africa, Russia, North Korea, and Burma. No more people, no more suffering.

Distance to palace expense: 560,000,000

 

[Elkad]

Robert A Heinlein gave us the reason for space exploration - "Earth is too small a basket for mankind to keep all its eggs in."

Asteroid collisions, massive solar flares, alien invasions, nuclear war, a virulent unsurvivable disease, or whatever other horror you can imagine. All extremely unlikely, all potentially fatal to the human race. All survivable if humans have a second home, especially one in a new solar system. Yes, the cost is high. But the penalty for failure to gain control of space may be infinitely high.

 

[GeoModder]

As far as pop culture goes, it has little appeal for me but on matter how facile it is there can be no argument that lots of people find it a source of entertainment, so it does serve some purpose. That may seem rather spurious when compared to scientific advancement but as Civ shows it's still pretty essential.

Well, if you agree that some sense of purpose is sufficient grounds to give it some kind of funding, the same counts for space stuff. There's a fair amount of people, from backyard stargazers to techno geeks, spread all over the globe, for who space research is their type of entertainment.[/QUOTE]

Or that money could be invested in the CERTAIN FACT that millions of people starve to death and die of horrible diseases RIGHT NOW, here on Earth. We shouldn't run before we can walk.

Then I suggest you clamor your local political representative to stop funding the military right now. If this is done all over the world most if not all of the hungry/sick people can be helped.

 

[Circuit]

They did find a planet with Earth-like conditions recently. Don't remember how many light-years away it was, but it had conditions suitable for life (at least in one hemisphere, the other was a different story).

We should think about colonizing other planets should things move south on Earth. Some space domes on Mars are all I ask.

 

[Willem]

Negator_UK,
Another great example is Mars. We've all been speculating that there might be life on mars. Well we sent many devices up there only to find out that there is no life. How? Many of these devices had/have some sort of scanning device that can scan for life in one way or another.

You're mistaken there. They have sent very few devices that specifically look for life. It simply hasn't been a big priority with NASA yet, they're more concerned with the overall composition of Mars. They haven't even been sending their probes to areas where life be more likely to occur. So the verdict on whether there's anything there or not is still inconclusive.

 

[Onagan]

Of the 8 planets in our system, 3 (Venus, Earth, Mars) were at one time habitable. Of those, only Earth is habitable now.

You don't need an atmosphere for life, you need liquid water and a source of energy. Deep sea vents have already been pointed out. Even a moon like Europa could conceivably be a haven for life. Life does not need oxygen, there are many organisms that live anaerobically. (like bochilinum bacteria, they cause bochilism (sp))

…

Colonists should be Scots, since we are the best at everything, we survive well in hostile terrain, and also we could name the planet Caladan.

Why should there be liquid water on a planet to inhabited life? Yes we earthlings are in need of water, but on other planets?

And Scots best at everything?????
It sounds Polish. And I didn't see any team from that island on EURO 2008. Even the Swedish team plays better football then the Scots, and don't mention the Dutch

 

[Magma_Dragoon]

They did find a planet with Earth-like conditions recently. Don't remember how many light-years away it was, but it had conditions suitable for life (at least in one hemisphere, the other was a different story).

We should think about colonizing other planets should things move south on Earth. Some space domes on Mars are all I ask.

Gliese 581c is a planet with a mass 5 times that of Earth orbiting within the habitable zone of its star. That much gravity would make human settlement impossible. Everyone would weigh 600 to 1000 lb. Still, it is a very good candidate for life of some kind.

 

[Wolfshanze]

Don't forget, the Earth WILL BE CONSUMED by the Sun when it turns red-giant... so all of humanity is living on borrowed time no matter how you look at it... if the human race is to survive, at some point we're going to need the ability to reach other planets on a larger/more practical scale... or all humanity will cease to exist.

End of Line.

 

[r_rolo1]

^^I seriously doubt that mankind as it is today ( even in biological terms ) will last that long... c'mon, we should have roughly 4,5 thousands of millions years until that happens, almost the today's Earth age. There is absolutely no way of a specie to froze evolutionarily for that long.

 

[Willem]

There is absolutely no way of a specie to froze evolutionarily for that long.

Why do you presume we're not evolving? Or are you trying to say that we'll evolve into another species altogether at some point?

 

[Willem]

They did find a planet with Earth-like conditions recently.

They don't know for sure, there's only the possibility since it's in the right orbital plane and it's not a gas giant. But as mentioned, it's still far to large to be considered as a second home for us.

 

[r_rolo1]

Why do you presume we're not evolving? Or are you trying to say that we'll evolve into another species altogether at some point?

One or more than one ( or maybe even none ). The average lenght of time that a typical mammal species last is of 8 million years... before it evolves on something else or gets extinct. Unless humans try to stop it ( X -men style ), we're doomed as a species....

 

[NintendoTogepi]

Don't forget, the Earth WILL BE CONSUMED by the Sun when it turns red-giant... so all of humanity is living on borrowed time no matter how you look at it... if the human race is to survive, at some point we're going to need the ability to reach other planets on a larger/more practical scale... or all humanity will cease to exist.

End of Line.

Oh come, if humanity is still around in 3 billion years, we'll have the technology to fly the Earth around as a spaceship thinking ultra longtime like that is stupid. Space colonization is more important for the next 10000 years or so.