Habitable planet found 20 lights years away

Hey Psyche. LOL... deflection. Gidday Mate Not far deflected that one was a cheek-seeker (tongue in) Right. They we're just checking to make sure the engineers hadn't missed any good concepts. I wouldn't play the "p" card so fast. The article say's they were just making sure some worthwhile ideas were'nt passed up. But the engineers gave them the concepts "Several science fiction authors have taken modern technology and concepts of their own time and anticipated with some accuracy how new technologies would change our lives, well before these technologies were actually possible," it said. It's... [More]

Just like the "NASA invented that!" lists we see all the time, most of these things already existed in one form or another already. Star Trek just refined existing devices in the usual manner of science fiction, often to accommodate the show's budget. 10. The personal computer. The computers on Star Trek were not personal. In fact there was one "mainframe" computer of 60's vintage that controlled everything. As we saw in "Mirror Mirror" the use of this mainframe computer could be monitored. 9. The tablet. What did these things do in Star Trek? You just saw Kirk sign something on them, not tap ... [More]

I tend to think that military necessity is often the mother of invention in modern times. Think of all the scientific and technological ideas that once just existed on paper and were then put in to practice by the military: tanks, airplanes, machine guns, poison gas, computers, code machines, radio, radar, sonar, missiles, jet engines, submarines, nuclear weapons. In all these cases, the military was in a position to put big money behind all these ideas--far more than lone inventors working in the basement could ever have hoped to see--and Big Science was born, along with the universities, res... [More]

Hey ol pal, I looked into it a bit further just make sure I wasn't talking out my you know what. It's true: The ITSF Project The European Space Agency (ESA) requested the Maison d'Ailleurs and the OURS project to conduct a study on technologies and concepts found in Science Fiction, in order to obtain imaginative and innovative ideas potentially viable for long-term development by the European space sector. The study was concluded in late 2001, but identification of enabling technologies as well as advanced technological concepts is still ongoing. The Innovative Technologies from Science Ficti... [More]

Hey Mate Nah, I did not think for a second that you were just blowing hot air. gooday! shew... I'm relieved, I was beginning to think you doubted everything. (jk) But you made me doubt myself enough to look into further. And that's a good thing. I just think it sounds like a bit of a toy project? Some people tend to see Science Fiction as pure imagination with no serious scientific background. The ITSF study is an opportunity to see not only if SF does indeed express ideas that are ahead of their time (in the field of space technologies), but also whether these ideas could actually be exploite... [More]

Catching up on the original topic, planet hunting around other stars has actually made extraterrestrial life look less likely. We're finding a lot of solar systems that aren't anything like ours. Many astronomers and astrophysicists assumed that by some physical law, all solar systems would naturally develop just like ours with the habitable rocky planets in the Goldilocks area around the sun and the useless ornamental gas giants out in the cold fringes where they wouldn't disturb the inner planets. Instead we've discovered many gas giants larger than Jupiter very close to their suns (in some ... [More]

Catching up on the original topic, planet hunting around other stars has actually made extraterrestrial life look less likely. We're finding a lot of solar systems that aren't anything like ours. Many astronomers and astrophysicists assumed that by some physical law, all solar systems would naturally develop just like ours with the habitable rocky planets in the Goldilocks area around the sun and the useless ornamental gas giants out in the cold fringes where they wouldn't disturb the inner planets. Instead we've discovered many gas giants larger than Jupiter very close to their suns (in some ... [More]

One factor behind this might be that it's only with the giant stars and giant planets that we've been able to see the gravitational effects that suggest that there might be planets there, of course. In other words, the reason we've spotted so many giant planets around giant stars is precisely because they're the most conspicuous. Smaller and less conspicuous ones would be harder to see. Stands to reason. That's absolutely true, but doesn't change the fact that we found gas giants many times larger than Jupiter much closer to their suns than anyone had theorized. We now know that solar systems ... [More]

That's absolutely true, but doesn't change the fact that we found gas giants many times larger than Jupiter much closer to their suns than anyone had theorized. We now know that solar systems can be much more chaotic than ours and it's likely that most are. When they started looking for extrasolar planets, they naturally expected to find Jupiter-sized gas giants a great distance from their suns. Why? Because that's how our orderly solar system developed. Everyone assumed that every solar system would have developed that way, that somehow planets would all have circular orbits and the larger pl... [More]

Granted that many solar systems so far detected seem less favorable for Earth-like planets than our own. You mean most if not all, don't you? I don't see any basis in the data so far, bearing in mind its limitations and biases toward finding large, eccentrically orbiting planets, for saying *most* solar systems are likely to be more chaotic than ours. How does our techniques favor planets with eccentric orbits? Circular orbits are easier to detect since they have a regular effect on their sun. Eccentric orbits do have a larger effect on their sun but we're still able to detect bodies with circ... [More]