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Super-Earth discovered orbiting 40 Eridani A, Vulcan's sun
starswordc
Member Posts: 10,963 Arc User
This news is almost a year old, but the Dharma Planet Survey discovered a rocky planet massing two Earth masses orbiting Keid, a.k.a. 40 Eridani A, a.k.a. Vulcan's canonical sun.
https://www.universetoday.com/140045/astronomers-find-planet-vulcan-40-eridani-a-right-where-star-trek-predicted-it/
artist's impression
Despite the fact Keid is a K-class star, dimmer than Sol, the planet is probably too close to it to support life. Still pretty damn cool, though.
https://www.universetoday.com/140045/astronomers-find-planet-vulcan-40-eridani-a-right-where-star-trek-predicted-it/
artist's impression
Despite the fact Keid is a K-class star, dimmer than Sol, the planet is probably too close to it to support life. Still pretty damn cool, though.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
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Comments
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Very true. And it wouldn't be very difficult for a highly advanced civilization to hide themselves from our quite honestly primal and crude equipment.
Just think about how.. Horrible Earth really is, we are still very primal. We have mass shootings, our planet is heavily divided.. I can pretty much imagine people from the universe look at us like described by Q in the first TNG episode.. Why would anyone from outer space visit us? What does humanity have to offer? Some weird artwork? Crude nuclear weapons? Frozzen fish sticks?
Yeah.. We're violent, primal and have quite litteraly nothing to offer. So for an alien society it would be best to remain hidden from us.
You just have to look back at human history to see how well we fair when we encounter a new set of people in a different place.
There are a lot of steps humans need to take before any advanced civilization would even consider saying hello to us. lol.
That never stopped advanced alien races from 'saying hello' to the Kazon, Klingons, or Kzinti. Only if we are a protectorate under a Galactic Federation or have absolutely no benefit would advanced alien civilizations not 'say hello' to us.
My character Tsin'xing
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Because the Wikipedia article says otherwise, as does Nature. "The planet has an orbit of 42 days, and lies considerably interior to the habitable zone, receiving 9 times more stellar flux than Earth, which is an even greater stellar flux amount than Mercury, the innermost planet in our solar system, on average receives from our Sun."
The basic problem is, the laws of physics are universal and dictate how chemistry works. No other atom forms the kinds of complex molecules that carbon does, not even its heavier period-mates like silicon: the most silicon can do is long chains, not the benzene rings that are a regular part of organic chemistry. Similarly, there isn't any chemical that's as good a solvent as liquid water. And unless this thing has a really powerful magnetic field, it's going to end up with all the surface water blasted off by the star like Mars and Ceres did. Both of which are much further from Sol than Unofficially Vulcan is from Keid.
So no, we can't say what extraterrestrial life is going to look like, but we can pretty well predict what basic chemistry it's going to use, and therefore what conditions it's going to need: liquid water, oxygen, carbon, and a source of energy. I would not be surprised if we do in fact discover life on Europa or Enceladus, from the moon being heated by tidal friction from the gas giant and shielded by its magnetic field. But I think the ship has sailed for most of the rest of the Sol system.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Which explains why he said such a silly thing. Any SF writer worth their ink already knows that the odds that terrestrial chemistry would be sufficiently compatible with alien chemistry as to make us a food source are much more slim than the odds of, say, all the aliens dying of head colds.
No, he's a professor of theoretical physics at NYU and a science writer. He also isn't mentioned anywhere on either of the two articles I posted, so I don't know why you're bringing him up.
Heck, that isn't even true on Earth. The only reason humans can eat hot peppers is because we're too big for the capsaicin to outright kill us, like it does small mammals and fungus. They produce capsaicin because they're adapted to have their seeds spread by birds, who don't react to capsaicin and whose digestive tract won't destroy the seeds unlike mammals'.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Maybe for the vast majority of humans. I am currently reading a superhero webcomic where one of the main protagonist's superhero abilities is shove a ton of multi-million scoville peppers down their gullet.
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
But if we don't find an Earth-sized world anywhere in the system, I still wouldn't want to see this planet named Vulcan. I'd rather have them call it T'khut.
> I am kind of hoping that there's a better-located planet in the 40 Eridani system somewhere (maybe orbiting B or C?), because otherwise I'm left with trying to imagine how a large moon of this world could possibly orbit its primary in such a fashion that it's largely protected from the worst effects of A.
>
> But if we don't find an Earth-sized world anywhere in the system, I still wouldn't want to see this planet named Vulcan. I'd rather have them call it T'khut.
B and C probably can't support life-bearing planets according to my research. Anything orbiting B would have been sterilized when it turned into a white dwarf, and C is a flare star, prone to giving off massive radiation bursts at random times.
No, if there's anything life-bearing at 40 Eri, it's probably orbiting A.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
It is far more likely that life is orbiting around A, but if there is life orbiting around B or C, then it will change our understanding of life. We only have an extremely limited perspective about what types of life can occur. Then there is the possibility of aliens using their technology to survive around inhospitable stars. So until we go there or receive communication from Vulcans, then there is no way to know if there is life or what type of life is around those stars.
Doesn't that amount to the same as us being alone? If we are alone, then we would end up being like the aliens shown in The Chase from TNG. The only difference between being the only race and an Elder Race is if we are the only race, then our distant descendants would have to seed the universe with life so we are not alone.
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Welp, that's the universe completely doomed then. Doomed. Doomed!
Or, as the late Leonard Nimoy put it:
"I predict the future of this lowly human race,
That having made a mess of Earth they'll move to outer space!
Well, there goes the neighbourhood.
Trials of Blood and Fire
Moving On Parts 1-3 - Part 4
In Cold Blood
Maybe aliens taught us to kill others based on outward appearance, sexual preference, religion, etc. There is the Pandora' Box myth where there was no evil in the world until Pandora opened up the box. So it all depends on if you believe that myths having some truth to them or they are just fictional stories to make the world easier to understand.
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Now you've got me reminiscing about sci-fi novels, though newer than your usual fare. In M.D. Cooper's The World at the Edge of Space (part of the Aeon 14 universe), former professional terraformer Finaeus Tomlinson remarks that terraforming SOP is to wipe out any native life just in case any native pathogens manage to cross the species barrier to humans. Though he also says they haven't found anything more intelligent than a cat in the six-plus thousand years they've been at it; they do apparently have an actual first-contact protocol on the books.
This is what Tanya Huff's Confederation of Valor series postulates: most species that become spacefarers are pacifist, at least to the extent of giving up war if not necessarily small-scale violence, because the ones that don't tend to wipe themselves out first.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
I want to alter their genetic makeup or brain chemistry so that they always see us some kind of angels if I we're not in a space suite, and speak mysterious wisdoms to them.