Nope. Further from the host star than Venus from Sol, and that star is far less luminous to begin with. (Source)
The amount of CO2 or any other plausible greenhouse gas you'd need to pump a place like that up to lead-melting temperatures means you'd need, what, two planets' worth of available volatiles? You'd probably also need a seriously disturbed spin for that, like Venus does. I think we can safely start with the assumption that this place (if we can confirm it's real) is pretty cold.
Well. This is quite a pearl.
I don't have time to read a 16-page paper in detail, but I did want to know how the host star compares to everyone's favourite local solitary K-type dwarf, Epsilon Eridani. It's slightly less massive (~0.7 solar mass versus 0.8 for ε Eri) and quite a bit less bright (difference of about 0.1 solar luminosity), but I especially wanted to know about the age of the star. ε Eri is quite young and frothy, but the investigators here infer from the star's motion that it belongs to the thin disk, up to a whopping 10 billion years old.
So we are definitely not talking about an ε Eri-type system. So that should be mean no dust disks, no crazy activity from the star, and no newish planets still carving out their places through the system.
You've really got to wonder about such an old planet, however cold and quiescent it may be. The potential paths for climatic evolution on such a world boggle the mind, however cold it is. You could get an episodically or formerly active world like Mars, a beautifully unstable oscillatory world like Earth, or something completely different. Assuming any atmosphere, of course (safe assumption?). And that's without considering whether there are any other planets in the system.
I really wouldn't spend too much time thinking about this candidate detection, as we have literally seen just the one transit, and we will need to observe this fellow for a while to confirm the discovery, learn about other planets in the system, and so on. The investigators themselves note that the transit was shallow (meaning difficult to detect), but the good news is that the host star is fairly bright, well within reach of amateur equipment. I wonder if citizen scientists will be able to follow the transits.
Exciting times.
photos of people getting arrested and harassed, possibly the worst moments of their life sold for profit
I was in full agreement with your entire comment until I read this.
Tell us - how is the photographer supposed to support himself in this work if not via his images? Do you suppose this person is making vast wealth from this? You yourself acknowledge the danger of documenting what is going on in Minneapolis. Shouldn't we be encouraging people in this - or at the least, not work to discourage it? By this logic, filmmakers who make documentaries about the victims of war shouldn't be able to make a wage from their work, either. How about whistleblowers who expose abuse from within, are they allowed to make money from writing books about their experience? If you can provide me with evidence that this kind of photojournalism is leading to vast and exploitative profit-making schemes, I'll reconsider your argument, but short of that...
If you want to talk about the worst moments of a subject's life, consider Phan Thi Kim Phúc. At the age of 9, her village was hit by freaking napalm, and she was severely burned - her clothes literally burned away, and she was photographed running naked from the smoking ruins of her village. This image won the Pulitzer Prize, which undoubtedly aided the photographer in his career... and the victim herself hated the photo at first. I strongly urge you to read the article, however, because it shows how her thinking on this subject evolved.
The important thing is that these images are being broadly disseminated. And you don't even have to pay to see them, or form your own opinion on them. What more can we ask for?
The person you’re thinking of is Regan
Leave her out of this, please. Blame Captain Howdy, not the girl.
I guess we can see where the old captain is right now...
Everyone in this thread is approaching the question from the perspective of the passive resident role, and not the traveling science minstrel role.
Given that I am definitely more inclined toward the latter - which apparently makes me a tiny minority, even in this thread - I feel confident saying that I would have far more to fear from all of you than the reverse.
You may all point and laugh now.
knock, knock
I'm not a serial killer or a vampire, and I will happily discuss Venus with you. We can even do it at a nice, safe distance! I'll apologize now if that doesn't advance your fiction, or any erotic fantasies of frustrated vampires you may have.
I really want to build a set-up that can properly observe the planet deep into twilight. I've read that twilight is the time when you can observe the almost-legendary "ashen light". Given recent discoveries around a very narrow atmospheric window that lets you just sort of see the surface, in a super-blurry way, I'm wondering if these two phenomena are related. Given the Trump antipathy to planetary science, and Venus exploration in particular, I would find this pretty satisfying.
... unless you were referring to Aphrodite, and not the planet.
There are several grave environmental and civil problems with Starlink and other proposed massive constellations:
I could go on, but I trust you get the point. I don't object to temporary small-scale deployments of satellite groups during catastrophes, but we simply don't need the permanent deployment of tens of thousands of satellites that the US, Europe and China intend to launch for global internet coverage - that can be almost entirely achieved from the ground.
Politics reply:
What good did the moon landing do for the average man?
Directly, immediately? In the 1960s? Aside from the people employed working directly or indirectly on space efforts? Almost none. Is that really the answer you're looking for, though? Scientific knowledge can take decades or even centuries before it improves our lives tangibly. But I think you know that, so I won't argue with you about it.
Concerning the waste of time, money and attention - LOL there was the Vietnam war, too. I'd argue was less beneficial to humanity than Apollo. I am only raising this point because I think it's unfair to place blame for lack of social progress at the feet of scientists, or a sub-set of scientists. We're collectively responsible.
Otherwise, I generally agree with you. The Apollo program was not conceived or executed to benefit science. But Apollo did mobilize science irrevocably. "Planetary science" as a discipline, community and way of thinking didn't exist before Apollo. Very few people, even in the science community, were comparing planets and learning something from that before about 1970. Ditto for environmental science - and that community, too, barely existed before Apollo. Even though that field got a headstart due to people like Rachel Carson.
Would you have improved social conditions for anyone by cancelling Apollo/Gemini in, say, 1964? I'm not so sure about that. 1968 certainly implies otherwise. I'm here to tell you that exploring neighboring worlds is a social good because you learn the parameters of your own environment, parameters you MUST keep an eye on to keep Earth habitable. But that social good is a joke if people can't walk down the street without worrying about ICE raids. So yeah, you're right, racial hatred obviates this beautiful and essential realization that we're connected to a bigger universe. Would you have the scientists of the world hide their knowledge away because we live surrounded by ugliness? All I can say to you is that we live here too, and this fight is ours as much as yours.
Science reply:
We learned the origin of the earth and moon and NASA invented a few good gadgets ... But I don’t see how those outweigh the cons of the Apollo program.
It's a lot broader and more subtle than just the origin of the Earth and Moon. Apollo rewrote your geology textbook. Not the lunar geology text - the one for Earth. And not just the chapter about origins. This tends to get obscured because there was another revolution going on in Earth science at the very same time - a little thing called plate tectonics.
Direct results from Apollo, corroborated by old Soviet and modern Chinese automated landers:
Indirect result from Apollo:
Of the three direct results, two sound obvious. Naturally Earth is hot inside; where does lava come from? Of course space rocks can bang into us; what would stop them? None of this, however, was evident certain to a huge number of geologists, physicists, or chemists in the 1960s (or '70s, or even '80s... some people never change their minds. They just die). And when most workers in a given field are against you, progress tends to be rather slow. Walter and Luis Alvarez had a hell of a time convincing people that an asteroid strike could have ended the Cretaceous, not to mention the dinosaurs - I mean, there isn't even a crater in the Yucatan, it's flat down there! (LOL That debate still isn't over, even today...)
As far as I can see, direct result #3 (about planetary evolution) hasn't entered the zeitgeist yet. Yes, people are (wisely) alerted to climate change, but that's just a little tweak compared to the immense environmental changes that we know took place on Venus, Mars and Earth - and I'm just talking about the ones that have occurred since complex life emerged here, not the ones from billions of years ago.
And that indirect result? I still know a number of scientists who hem and haw and won't quite agree that Earth's environment doesn't suddenly end 100 km up. The Voyager probes show us how bad the radiation is when you get far enough away from the Sun, and I don't know if you even do Voyager without Apollo. But Apollo, uniquely, shows you something else - the Sun hasn't always protected us from that bigger dose of cosmic radiation that the Voyagers see. Sometimes that heliospheric shield shrinks, and the planets get a lot more radiation than we do today. And that's just one of the synergistic results, there are more.
IMO the primary lesson we learn from geology is that environments change in time. Please note my use of the PRESENT TENSE in this reply, because none of what I am discussing is forever confined to a remote past - all of the planetary evolution processes I'm talking about can still occur today, and are certain to recur in the future. Geology left the silo to become a much more interconnected science partly because of Apollo - and the thing is, it became a science about THE FUTURE as well as the past.
Apologies for the overly long reply. Apologies to my science people for oversimplifying here.
In the USA we wasted time, money, and media resources going to the moon while black people were treated as less than citizens and millions were living in abject poverty. Not much has changed on that front for the countries entire history. What good did the moon landing do for the average man?
I'm sincerely wondering if you'd like an answer to your question. I can provide you the science perspective, if you like, not to mention a political one. Not interested in an emotional debate here, you're entitled to your point of view and your polemic, if that's all you prefer.
And destroyers.
Just a few months into its reign, the US regime intends to ruin decades of progress in science and space exploration:
On May 30, 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget announced a plan to cancel no less than 41 space missions — including spacecraft already paid for, launched, and making discoveries — as part of a devastating 47% cut to the agency’s science program. If enacted, this plan would decimate NASA. It would fire a third of the agency’s staff, waste billions of taxpayer dollars, and turn off spacecraft that have been journeying through the Solar System for decades.
Shutting down a working, completely functional mission like New Horizons, in particular, that may just be on the cusp of a huge discovery - it has seen signs of a new, second "ring" to the Kuiper Belt - is the ultimate repudiation of the American self-image as explorers of the frontier. And all of this at a time when the Chinese are just about catching up to "the West" in space science prowess.
As a kid, I never understood what the Romans were trying to say with their Janus myth. Turns out that Orange Janus is simply the god of endings.
Would this... proposed legislation... mean that SpaceX will now be prohibited from flooding LEO with Starlink comsats?
Loading the upper atmosphere with ozone-destroying aluminum and other heavy metals as those things fall out of orbit, not to mention rapidly increasing light and RF pollution, definitely qualify as an uncontrolled geoengineering experiment, albeit one whose effects were known before launch. I could go on about the deleterious effects of these orbiting swarms, but - the ball's in your court, Congresswoman Greene.
It wasn't even a trip into orbit. Their rather short voyage was a sub-orbital hop. A low orbit of Earth requires a speed on the order of 8 km per second - Blue Origin can make about Mach 3, from what I read, which is circa 1 km per second. You go up, you go down. That's it. They don't even go particularly high (~100 km), and the apogee doesn't keep you "above the atmosphere" (LOL) for long. Given the risks, I'm not sure it's worth it, personally.
If we really want to inspire people by pointing out women's accomplishments in spaceflight and space exploration, maybe we should be talking about people like Eileen Collins (astronaut on key shuttle/station missions), Lindy Elkin-Stanton (science lead for Psyche, the first to a metallic asteroid), Maria Zuber (lead the GRAIL mission to the Moon, co-discovered the rifts in the Ocean of Storms), or Mimi Aung (lead engineer for the Ingenuity 'copter on Mars 2020). And I've only mentioned a few Americans with recent work here; the rest of the world has plenty of enterprising female space scientists and aerospace engineers.
I share the general distaste in this thread and on Lemmy generally for this sort of celebrity stunt, and I'm glad to see the criticism. I do sometimes think, however, that for a certain kind of person, Bezos and Musk are becoming associated or even synonymous with spaceflight/exploration generally, which is a dangerous association to make. People have many, diverse and very legitimate reasons for going to space - there's a lot more going on than joyrides and ego trips.
laughing in Martian
Yup, that's Earth alright. Rookie numbers, as usual.