Quote:
Originally Posted by
ForNever 
Very interesting, but the most important factor IMO, after water of course, is that it needs to be geologically active so there's some kind of magnetic field for radiation protection. This is why Mars will never, EVER be habitable. The only way to make it so would be an incredibly large collision with another object to reheat the core and jump-start the magnetic field. Admittedly, I skimmed. It's late and I'm tired as hell.
Water itself is pretty damn good radiation shielding, and an ocean hundreds or thousands of miles deep would provide a great deal of protection, even on a geologically dead world, probably quite a bit more protection than we have right now.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Despair
I don't understand why they are so fixated on finding planets that are earth like...they should be looking for moons since moons have a much higher probably of being more suitable for life than planets, simply because most of the 'earth like' planets we find are way bigger. Even if the planet had .5x the gravity of earth, it would not be suitable as a replacement and or suitable for colonization because it'd take years to train to be able to constant withstand that amount of gravity on your organs...and even with training, life span would probably be severely reduced.
It's like being severely overweight, except there's an even amount of pull on EVERYTHING not just certain and specific areas. Even though a severely overweight person would look like it's everywhere, it's not. Imagine having all that extra weight put on your heart alone. You would not live very long, even with years of training.
We are finding more super-earths than Earth sized planets because we still have difficulty finding things below a certain mass at extreme distances. Thus moons in other solar systems are nearly impossible to find, and we will be able to find earth-sized planets long before we can detect most moons.
Also, many super-earths wouldn't have anywhere near 5Gs of gravity.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
DiNet
Or how about they do something useful for our current planet instead of searching for something that is impossible to reach?
You don't think the two are related?
Every advance made in the pursuit of knowledge about these places will spawn a dozen more advances with applications practical to life on Earth.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
-Apocalypse-
That's nice. The problem is there is NOT an atmosphere on this planet. We need to
create one, and to do so we'd need to start it spinning to prevent it from burning off faster than it can be created. Also, for radiation... this planet is closer to its star than Mercury is to ours, it has a 17 hour day/orbit.
Spinning the planet faster would not allow it to retain an atmosphere any better. Not that it "needs" an atmosphere for anything.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
_02
I thought lower pressures (or no atmospheric pressure at all) caused water to boil at lower temperatures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_fluid
