581 c. - The First Earth-Like Planet

[Pilika]

I saw it, and I must say it is very interesting and of course it raises many questions. Hopefully we might live long enough to see any actual photos from the planet itself.
Considering the planets gravity and such, what can we expect to see there?
Interesting, really interesting.

And I am not worried by planets names until they name one Spam or something like that. You know considering planet naming, how long is it going to take until cooperations start buying planet names. Imagine saying I am going to planet McDonald tomorrow.
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[RedCydranth]

I agree, this planet should be named. Since nobody else wants to do it, I'll do it. From this day forth, 581 c. Shall be called Cydranth. Yes, I like that very much.

Now onto more important matters. I'm with Yvl. I beleive the best way to colonize this planet is to send a multi-generational starship. Once we can find the technology to harvest oxygen and create a homeostasis on a star craft, we'll be in good shape.

The crew would all be healthy, pre-chosen people. You can't go sending people with Ebola or HIV on board. We want this new colony to start out as disease free as possible. Also, there will be a set schedule of how things run. I know most of us live in a highly democratic mindset, however a ship must be run with strict rules. No unplanned breeding, no excessive usage of resources and other such rules would have to be enforced.

In order for the new generations to learn the neccessary things to live on this new planet, they'll be schooled from a young age how to do so. Farming, agriculture, history and all sorts of important basics will be taught to these kids. Everything crucial to life on this new planet will be passed down.

I'm not going to jump into the astrophysical debate of time vs. light. My mind melts just trying to grasp that, let alone when it goes that fast. I'm going to side with, thats too dangerous to play around with, let's just take the easier route.

Another idea, if you believe in it, would be to make contact with an alien specias who visits here and see what they did to travel all the way here. If there are other beings in the universe (and I beleive there are, its too big of a space for us to be the only ones) find them and seek their aid. IF they were hostile, they'd have killed us off long ago and harvested our planet for whatever they needed.

So, I'm for populating the planet of Cydranth. I'd hop aboard that ship with you Yvl, but I'd be breaking one of my rules for traveling there, I'm too sickly to go. So, be a valiant representative of the Human race and more importantly, the Suikox Fandom.
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[Vextor]

Well, there are rules for naming planets and whatnot, and Xena was never an official name for that Keiper Belt Object they tried to make into a planet. Extra-solar planets (exoplanets) are currently given names based on the rule that they are called by the name of their patron star followed with a lower case latin alphabet starting from "b" based on the order of discovery. This means c581 is the second planet discovered for the star 581 (actually the correct name for the star is Gliese 581, and the correct planet name would be "Glieese 581 c). The same star actually has two other known planets orbiting around it as far as we know.

Red Dwarves are pretty tough to live around though. Especially with how close that planet is and how it's tidally locked (meaning it can not rotate due to being too close to the star--the gravity is too great) makes the synthesis of any kind of life unlikely.

[Yvl]

Well upon futher thought, it's not going to happen in our lifetime after all. They would never authorize sending people to a planet that may or may not be inhabitable by humans. They'll need to send a unmanned probe or something like that first, and even then it'll be hard to get that far without running into some sort of obstacle.

Also, I said that cyrogenics was the way to go, not multi-generation travel, Moon Knight.
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[Parallax]

It's impossible for us to tell whether or not it's actually, technically suitable for human life. Although we can see the planet, and make a lot of speculation based on what we know about how planets form - a lot of our knowledge about what occurs in the universe is pretty speculative.

Vextor is correct; in the past it was thought that Red Dwarf stars would not house habitable planets. The tidally locked nature of this particular planet would mean that only one side would be possible to live on in any case.

From our location here on earth, we can't tell exactly what the atmosphere is made of, or the composition of the oceans, or a variety of other factors. However, this planet is still the most significant find we've made so far in terms of planets that have any possibility of being habitable by humans. Now, whether it's inhabited by other life already is another question. It could be, obviously, but we've seen no evidence so far, and as Vextor said...it's unlikely. 581 c could perhaps be made habitable with the application of technology, but it very well might not be as it stands, and there's no evidence of such adaptation already in existence.
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[Rune of Corruption]

If this planet is found to be similar to Earth in composition then, no matter whether we can reach this planet or not, it is still significant find as it would prove that there are planets that are similar to Earth out there.
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[Gil-galad]

Just by the sheer number of other planets out there, it seems kind of ridiculous to presume that there are no other planets similar to Earth out there. A find such as this, this close to our own solar system is quite a find, though. I often wonder how we can think of ourselves as so unique when there are trillions of other stars in space, and several million times more planets orbiting those stars. I find it very difficult to believe, myself, that there is not a single other place in that vast space that doesn't contain life. I wonder just how much we can deduce from satellite data taken of the planet, though. It seems difficult to say what exactly the make up of the planet is without sending a probe to examine it. However, we haven't sent a successful probe to Pluto yet, let alone a planet outside of our solar system.

As I said though-- finding such a planet within such close proximity to ourselves is a nice find. However, I don't think we're going to be able to do to much confirming on this planet for quite a while, perhaps not even in our life time. It's something to store away for later generations once our ability to travel even deeper into space comes about (which I have no doubt it will).

This is the kind of science I'm really interested in. Good stuff. ^^
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[Luceit]

Firstly, if humans were even to think of travelling there: they would need the following:
a) A self-sustaining spacecraft. There's no way you'd be able to carry everything with you.
b) The spacecraft would also need measures to counter the lack of gravity. The reason for this is because people who stay in space too long lose bone mass and also muscle, and exercising is simply not enough. (Now you know why you need to be in tip-top shape before launching off eh?)
c) It would need to travel very fast.

Now, about cyrogenics, I don't think that's a suitable solution. As far as current technology goes, organs haven't been found to thaw properly yet without some damage to it. As another person here said, it'sa currently only used to store dead people, and there's no telling if the whole thing isn't a scam in the first place. Even if you revived them, there's no telling how functional they would be, and you can expect a lot of detoriation.

Now, back to the topic on hand, I find this discovery very interesting, but of course, other factors remain to be seen. If it really can support life, I guess the probes will be going off very soon. It's only too bad that most of us will never hear of them again.
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[Failure_Urn]

What would be the most interesting is if the planet was found to not be JUST like earth, but we found life there anyway. For the most part all we know are the things that are possible on Earth, we may at some point find something on a planet that just throws everything off. There are even things on Earth that still make people scratch their heads. But who knows. Still pretty exciting stuff.

For a basic bit of info on the speed of light topic. The speed of light is constent, always, like was said before. That means that even if a star emitting light was traveling away from you at the speed of light the light would still reach you at the same speed as if the star was staying still or even moving towards you at the speed of light. Thats pretty crazy. And the speed of light is incredibly (understatement) fast. We have not even gotten near that speed so worrying about going faster is out of the question any time soon. Just goes to show you how increadibly far away these things really are if LIGHT takes years to get to Earth.
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[Tonberry]

Movement to a planet that far away will never happen. We couldn't make a ship that would sustain life sufficiently for such a period of time. Something would be forgotten, an error would be made, or someone would intentionally screw it up for the rest of the crew. It would take too much energy, anyway. I could see an attempt being made to try to send some bacteria that way to land on the planet and start the evolutionary process over there, but even that seems far fetched. The bottom line is that there would be too much that could go wrong to make space travel workable. It would be smarter to try to make mars habitable, and even more practical just to start taking care of the planet we already live on. :roll:

That said, it still is pretty interesting. I certainly wouldn't mind a dimmer light in the sky. The sun is a bit too bright for my taste. =P

[Failure_Urn]

Well it is never going to happen with that attitude =O

What is pretty amaizing though is that there is so very little possibility of us ever getting to this place. But with our techknology we can still see it. Sure says a lot for our telescopes and such.
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[Vertius]

I can't believe I slept through this. This is astounding.

My only hope regarding this planet is that we discover that life does indeed live on it, be they single-cell organisms, or a society so advanced, that they already knew our existence.

As to sending humans there, it's pretty much an impossibility at the current time, and will probably remain the same for a few centuries. I hope that this enormously important discovery heralds greater funding for space exploration programs in the future, since this has to be one of the most important finds in the history of, not only space exploration programs, but of mankind.
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[St. Ajora]

Eh, I think you're all getting a bit too excited. I was reading that c is about 20 light years away from earth....and I compared that to a figure of Centurai being 4 light years away, and how with our fastest technology at this time, it would take us 17 000 years to reach it. Now quadruple that and add a little, and then see how long it'll take us to reach 581 c :P It's fun to be optimistic but really, this is definitely out of our territory. It won't be happening in our lifetime.

I also encountered this on wikipedia, for those who are speaking out about self-sustainable ships (or otherwise):

[Omerta]

Wow. That is pretty great that a planet out in space have the same qualities that of earth. As for the generation ships that is also pretty cool. Sounds almost like a bad idea to do it huh?
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[Admiral Ackbar]

Locked rotations aren't so strange Geddoe...our moon never rotates, after all. No matter if it's a full moon or a dark moon, the same side is always facing us. We've only ever seen the other side thanks to sattelite photography.

Another problem I remember reading abour freezing people is that when water freezes, its expands, which ends up destroying a lot of small and sensitive things in biological creatures, like cell walls and such. Human eyes, for instance, are mostly just balls of liquid...imagine the difficulties involved with unfreezing them, not to mention the damage that would be done from the freezing (expanding) process itself.

I remember seeing a documentary about a kind of insect in Greenland or somewhere, that survives in glaciers or other frozen environments. During the night, it's body completely freezes over, ice and all, and the insect is technically dead. Yet when the temperature rises enough, the insect thaws out and returns to life. I think it can stay frozen indefinetly, but I can't remember that much. I wouldn't know where to go looking for the video again, since most of the good stuff at YouTube has been yanked off.
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