Real Space News
Posted on Fri 2nd Aug, 2019 @ 1:35am by
Hey, gang.
Sorry to be slow responding the last few days -- health issues. I'm sure you're tired of hearing that; I'm tired of living it.
Anyway, on to the good news! NASA is doing SETI studies on a newly discovered world!.
You may be aware that the Kepler mission detected some two and a half thousand exoplanets[1] during its' lifetime. Tess is a follow-on satellite that has received a fraction of the publicity. She's designed specifically to detect Earth-like planets, and the one referenced above looks promising -- it's orbiting a dim little star at the right distance to have liquid water. NASA is going to be doing studies to determine if it has an atmosphere, and if so, if there's life there.
One of the great mysteries of the universe in which we live is Fermi's Paradox, which, simply stated, says "Where is everybody?" In the universe in which we write, we stumble across sentient life everywhere we look, but in our own? Not so much. One of the explanations for that lack is that there's some sort of "great filter," which stops species from filling their home galaxies and eventually beyond. Knowledge that life of any kind exists on another world would give us data about what and when that "great filter" might be. Is it the rise of multi-cellular life? The rise of intelligence? Agriculture? Metalworking? If one of those is especially difficult to master, than Humanity has already passed the filter successfully.
On the other hand, if the filter is something else -- the ability to avoid or survive environmental collapse, for instance, or the ability to avoid or survive nuclear war -- the filter could still be ahead of us. Of course, there's no reason to believe that there might only be one filter. There could be a whole series, of which we have passed some, but not all.
At any rate, I found the article of interest, and hope that you will, as well!
1) That is, planets not orbiting our own Sun.
Category: Out of Character
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by on Fri 2nd Aug, 2019 @ 10:21pm
Thanks for pointing this out. I found the article interesting, and it gives me some things to speculate on when I have speculation time. =) Thanks for the explanation after the link, too. The universe is an amazing place, and somewhere in it, there are others. Perhaps we'll find each other in some timeline.