2 "Water-World" Planets Found

reply to post by JadeStar

Interesting so does that mean with all of our current production we could have it effectively heated for life in 80 tears?

inquisitive1977
reply to post by JadeStar

 

Interesting so does that mean with all of our current production we could have it effectively heated for life in 80 tears?

About that, yes. around 80-95 years.

Of course it would be impractical to move all of that industry to Mars but it doesn't hurt to imagine moving some of it there.

Think about the manufacture of plastics for example...

In my perfect world we would repurpose what is left of the ISS after 2020 to be used as an assembly facility or orbital shipyard to construct two massive ships called "Aldrin Cyclers" which would constantly move cargo and people between Earth and Mars every 2 years.

These would be something about the size of a really small town. Perhaps a half mile wide.

They would never land. You'd have shuttle craft/landers meet them as they flew around the Earth and Mars to load and unload people and material every 2 years.

Once you launch the first you never need to refuel it because gravity and celestial mechanics (Kepler's Laws) do all the work for you. Nature is what keeps it moving between the planets.



When the first one arrives at Mars for the second or third time (depending on how long it takes to build a 2nd cycler) we would launch the second ship so that there would always be one ship returning and one ship going out.

We could add two more at some point. Now you can begin to think about moving 20% of that industry to Mars in a generation.

JadeStar

winofiend

Treespeaker
Hey, thats a really interesting article.

Thanks for showing that to me....if we survive long enough tera forming should be one of our largest goals.

If we can learn how to shape a viable atmoshere elsewhere we may learn how to heal ours....and have a place to start to dump the stuff thats bad for us and good for plants....

Great post to get rhe grey stuff musing..

Cheers, merry holiday

We're pretty good at terraforming as it is. We're the masters of it, actually.

We took a beautiful blue oasis that was covered in lush green forests and have turned it into a sterile rather barren concrete machine.

You can't get better than that!!!

Well the ironic thing is if we moved about 20% of the industry responsible for all of that on Earth to Mars we'd have another warm, wet oasis on the Red Planet in about 400 years, thus giving us two habitable worlds in our solar system.

edit on 23-12-2013 by JadeStar because: (no reason given)

Are you sure about that. From what I understand Mars will never be able to keep an atmosphere such as ours because its core is no longer molten so it no longer has the capability to generate magnetic field like our magnetosphere all the lighter gases of Mars escape into space.

ATM we do not have the technology to even try to restart the core so terraforming Mars is simply science fiction.

Anyway check out this paper about the Magnetosphere of Mars.

reply to post by CosmicDude


Yay! we can continue using our over the top lifestyles with 2 new planets!!! WooHOOOO! Can't wait to extract ALL the fossil fuels from that planet and fill up my Oldsmobile 442 (1971). Hmmm twinkies.

Grimpachi

JadeStar

winofiend

Treespeaker
Hey, thats a really interesting article.

Thanks for showing that to me....if we survive long enough tera forming should be one of our largest goals.

If we can learn how to shape a viable atmoshere elsewhere we may learn how to heal ours....and have a place to start to dump the stuff thats bad for us and good for plants....

Great post to get rhe grey stuff musing..

Cheers, merry holiday

We're pretty good at terraforming as it is. We're the masters of it, actually.

We took a beautiful blue oasis that was covered in lush green forests and have turned it into a sterile rather barren concrete machine.

You can't get better than that!!!

Well the ironic thing is if we moved about 20% of the industry responsible for all of that on Earth to Mars we'd have another warm, wet oasis on the Red Planet in about 400 years, thus giving us two habitable worlds in our solar system.

edit on 23-12-2013 by JadeStar because: (no reason given)

Are you sure about that. From what I understand Mars will never be able to keep an atmosphere such as ours because its core is no longer molten so it no longer has the capability to generate magnetic field like our magnetosphere all the lighter gases of Mars escape into space.

Only part of that is correct.

The correct part is that Mars's magnetic field is far weaker than the earths due to it's core no longer acting as a dynamo due to it being solid.

However, there is good evidence that liquid water ran on the surface as recently as a million years ago. This was long after Mars lost its magnetic field.

The reason that Mars does not have a thick atmosphere is because there is nothing replenishing it frequently like on earth (ie volcanos, life).

If you move us there with our carbon producing factories we become that which replenishes it.

Read "The Case for Mars" and "How to Live on Mars" by Robert Zubrin and "The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps" by Marshall Savage. Both authors go into terraforming.

Note: The Zubrin books are more current.

ATM we do not have the technology to even try to restart the core so terraforming Mars is simply science fiction.

We don't need to restart the core to have a viable, breathable atmosphere which would last for hundreds thousands of years before evaporating.

Anyway check out this paper about the Magnetosphere of Mars.

Cool. I will.

Check out this one on Terraforming Mars: How to Terraform Mars: An Analysis of Ecopoiesis and Terraforming Research

And this report on 26 recent papers on terraforming Mars:
Terraforming Mars. Scientists discuss the feasibility of making Mars habitable

Serious science

Over the past 30 years the concept of planetary engineering - more popularly known as terraforming - has moved from the arena of science fiction towards serious scientific attempts to determine its future practicality. The word terraforming was first coined by the science fiction writer Jack Williamson and can be definedas a process by which a barren extraterrestrial planetary environment can be altered to one that is suited for life. Any argument that such an idea remains fantasy is countered by our emerging appreciation of the fact that mankind already has the ability to alter the Earth's global parameters...

As you can see, there's plenty of research going on on this question which elevates it above science fiction. And yesterday's sci-fi is today's sci-fact. Space travel, pocket communicators, video phone conversations, holograms, space tourism, catalogs of planetary systems around other stars and so on...

Mars's weak magnetic field is a challenge but not an insurmountable one. All it means is that we would never have atmospheric equilibrium on a billion year scale but if it's worth having a couple hundred thousand years on the planet, I say why not.

There are moons in our solar system, at least one, that has an entire ocean underneath a layer of ice - the ice is made of water, as well - and in addition to that, on this moon, there is underwater volcanic activity that provides warmth.

Jupiter has 67 known moons and Saturn has 62!! In the year 2000 alone, around 30 moons were discovered in our solar system.

Wikipedia: List of Natural Satellites (Moons)

The apparent youth and smoothness of the surface have led to the hypothesis that a water ocean exists beneath it, which could conceivably serve as an abode for extraterrestrial life.[11] This hypothesis proposes that heat from tidal flexing causes the ocean to remain liquid and drives geological activity similar to plate tectonics.[12]

Wikipedia: Europa

JadeStar
we would never have atmospheric equilibrium on a billion year scale but if it's worth having a couple hundred thousand years on the planet, I say why not.

Sounds like a bad plan. I can think of lots of reasons why not.

First, you can only melt the polar ice cap once, if it is then subsequently lost into space. So let's say they melt it, live there a while until it's lost...then there's no polar ice cap to melt again to restore it.

Now let's say in a million years a technology is discovered that could have reached some kind of equilibrium. If you still have the polar ice cap, then you can possibly have a planet for a over a billion years instead of 100,000. Isn't that much better?

Secondly, I think it's a bad idea for the same reason it's a bad idea to build a city on the side of a volcano that erupts every 2000 years, except when the volcano erupts you only lose that one city, but when the atmosphere of Mars vanishes the whole planet suffocates, which sounds like a really, really bad plan. We need a better plan than that before we do it.

I say we just splash some water on Mars and see what sprouts up from the ground.

reply to post by CosmicDude


Earth's original planet Tiamat was known as a "watery giant" and was orbiting where the asteroid belt is now. Guess where the asteroid belt came from????

If liquid H20 is as rare in the universe as scientists claim, I think it's pretty dangerous to go poking around a planet made up of liquid water... especially if there is technologically advanced life somewhere. If we've found it, you can bet someone else has too.

All extraterrestrials have to do is poke around Earth and look at the current state of Earth's eco-system. Someone might decide we're to great of a threat to the 'water world'. Or we might be invading the territory of a territorially dominate species.

My personal opinion is that we don't have the right to poke around on other planets. We can barely manage the resources of our own planet, we can't get along, we have hard time looking out for one another, and we're just not evolved as a society to the point it makes sense.

Maybe one day we'll get there, but I don't see it happening for a few more centuries.

reply to post by CosmicDude


G,day mate. OK. surfs up blokes.
Grab your boards, beer, barbie, some meat, the sheila's and lets go.
NO.
wait one.
grab more beer and leave the sheila's (girls) LOL
Hang on a sec. Mate its Christmas. who gives a fig newton about a couple of water worlds. can we fly there.
NO
do we know what the surf is like
NO.
ARE THERE ANY BLOODY NOAH'S er SHARKS there.
BUGGA
Dont sweat it mate. I'm just razzing you up.
HAVE A SAFE CHRISTMAS.

Sremmos80
Musta been an ET from one of those planets that came down and gave the director the idea for waterworld

I was thinking Star Trek IV - Save the Whales...

Only human arrogance would assume the message is meant for them....

I wonder what algorhythm they used to conclude that those planets are fully covered in water.

Can't they detect water spectroscopically?

reply to post by EternalSolace


Liquid water may be rare but non liquid water in the form of ice is virtually everywhere. A technologically advanced space faring race that needs water would have most likely perfected harvesting it from asteroids first as they could come close to their planet.

If they could harvest from asteroids then they would probably be able to get all the water they need.

reply to post by JadeStar


Back in like 2006 I made two predictions for the next 25 years...that wwe will discover some kind of live even if bacteria or just a cell outside our planet and that a nuke will detonate in a lethal way somewhere on earth. Really isnt that deep of a prediction but I believe itll happen! Exciting planet for sure.

reply to post by CosmicDude


Absolutely astounding news.

There was a thread I saw earlier about whether the space faring nations of the world should unite in the common goal of expanding space exploration. The more stories like this I read the more I wish that could be true. But there just aren't enough governments taking space exploration seriously enough to really fund it and there are enough private sector space agencies like SpaceX to really make a dent.

Maybe one day, in my lifetime, we will figure out how to get to these water worlds, and those like them.

Makes me want to go fishing.... I love fishing.... To bad this season is over and my arse doesn't get on ice.... Oh well, Great find S&F

TommyD1966
reply to post by CosmicDude

 

Pretty cool.

It looks the the water wasn't detected in any way, but instead is suggested by 'modeling.'

According to Wikipedia:
Kepler-62e is a super-Earth exoplanet (extrasolar planet) discovered in orbit around the star Kepler-62, the second outermost of five such planets discovered by NASA's Kepler spacecraft. Kepler-62e is located about 1,200 ly (370 pc) from Earth in the constellation of Lyra. The exoplanet was found using the transit method, in which the dimming effect that a planet causes as it crosses in front of its star is measured. Kepler-62e is most likely a terrestrial planet in the inner part of its host star's habitable zone[2] and has an Earth Similarity Index of 0.83.

Given the planet's age (7 ± 4 billion years), stellar flux (1.2 ± 0.2 times Earth's) and radius (1.61 ± 0.05 times Earth's), a rocky (silicate-iron) composition with the addition of a possibly substantial amount of water is considered plausible.[2] A modeling study accepted in The Astrophysical Journal suggests it is likely that a great majority of planets in Kepler-62e's size range are completely covered by ocean.[3][4]


Wiki link to Kepler 62e

I agree, they are speculating. I wonder would Venus and Mars be "modelled" similarly. Till we can detect composition of said planets, I wouldn't go out on a limb with the predictions.

TommyD1966
reply to post by JadeStar

 

Thanks JadeStar,

Where did you get the radii and mass numbers?

Edit - duh, #'s are in the link I put above.

What I think I really mean is how is the mass calculated -- specifically that is?

Transit I guess gives you the diameter/radius.

edit on 12/23/2013 by TommyD1966 because: More info added

I'm not sure exactly how they determined the masses of these planets mentioned here, but in general doppler measurements of the radial velocity of the planet's parent star are used -- i.e., measuring the amount of "wobble" in a star. A measure of the amount of "wobble" the planet exerts on its star can help determine the planet's mass.

However, as the article below explains, scientists are coming yup with new ways to measure exoplanet mass, because the doppler/radial velocity method works best on only large massive planets (which are often gas giants), and less well with small rocky planets (such as Earth). One way uses the spectral data we can receive from the planet's transit in front of its sun.

Spectral data has already been used to help determine the atmosphere of those planets by reading the spectrum of the light from the planet as the starlight shines through it during transit, but now they think they can also gauge its mass from transit spectral analysis due to the way the mass of the planet can affect certain atmospheric characteristics.

Article:
New Technique Measures Mass of Exoplanets

reply to post by CosmicDude


Sure they havn't hidden the land withe clouds?

Looks like it to me.