A New World

Holy Crap!

Anyone who would have posited this even half-seriously just a few hundred years ago would have been witch-stake bait.

Hell, in memory yet green it was once the height of haughty lumpen wisdom to look down one’s nose at rocket club dorks who suggested that men would one day walk on the Moon.

And now?

We have a potentially habitable fucking planet found outside our little neighborhood, and yet this news is not incised in 146-point Times New Roman font on the front page of every paper on Earth.

Sure it’s not exactly a weekend buggy ride from here, but it’s not even the lead story anywhere but YahooNews. Which is kinda sad, but also kinda cool I suppose, because like cell phones or laptops or a dozen other revolutions that have rocketed from startling and “gee whiz”, to ubiquitous and “yeah, so?” right before our eyes, maybe (with the exception of the Christopath army of darkness) the age and size and complexity of the Universe have become an accepted thing.

Big Bang? Evolution? C’mon Herbert, get with it. I mean all the kids are doing it.

Here’s the tale.

Potentially habitable planet found
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer 7 minutes ago
For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for "life in the universe."

The planet is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away. But the star it closely orbits, known as a "red dwarf," is much smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun.
There's still a lot that is unknown about the new planet, which could be deemed inhospitable to life once more is known about it. And it's worth noting that scientists' requirements for habitability count Mars in that category: a size relatively similar to Earth's with temperatures that would permit liquid water.

However, this is the first outside our solar system that meets those standards.

"It's a significant step on the way to finding possible life in the universe," said University of Geneva astronomer Michel Mayor, one of 11 European scientists on the team that found the planet. "It's a nice discovery. We still have a lot of questions."

The results of the discovery have not been published but have been submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Alan Boss, who works at the Carnegie Institution of Washington where a U.S. team of astronomers competed in the hunt for an Earth-like planet, called it "a major milestone in this business."

The planet was discovered by the European Southern Observatory's telescope in La Silla, Chile, which has a special instrument that splits light to find wobbles in different wave lengths. Those wobbles can reveal the existence of other worlds.

What they revealed is a planet circling the red dwarf star, Gliese 581. Red dwarfs are low-energy, tiny stars that give off dim red light and last longer than stars like our sun. Until a few years ago, astronomers didn't consider these stars as possible hosts of planets that might sustain life.

The discovery of the new planet, named 581 c, is sure to fuel studies of planets circling similar dim stars. About 80 percent of the stars near Earth are red dwarfs.

The new planet is about five times heavier than Earth. Its discoverers aren't certain if it is rocky like Earth or if its a frozen ice ball with liquid water on the surface. If it is rocky like Earth, which is what the prevailing theory proposes, it has a diameter about 1 1/2 times bigger than our planet. If it is an iceball, as Mayor suggests, it would be even bigger.

Based on theory, 581 c should have an atmosphere, but what's in that atmosphere is still a mystery and if it's too thick that could make the planet's surface temperature too hot, Mayor said.

However, the research team believes the average temperature to be somewhere between 32 and 104 degrees and that set off celebrations among astronomers.
Until now, all 220 planets astronomers have found outside our solar system have had the "Goldilocks problem." They've been too hot, too cold or just plain too big and gaseous, like uninhabitable Jupiter.

The new planet seems just right — or at least that's what scientists think.
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So is it "The Gold at the Starbow's End"?

· Synopsis: The purpose of an eight-man mission to the Alpha Centauri system may not be to find the Alpha-Aleph planet after all.

· Review: Very good story with a few surprises and some cool exposition. The astronauts, four couples sent with the purpose of populating the planet, bide their huge amounts of free time with learning the intricacies of science to a point that surpasses common human knowledge. Meanwhile, the scientist who organized the trip is grilled over the true purpose of the mission. The narrative remains engrossing as it swaps between reports from the spaceship and the latest happenings in Washington.

Or "JEM"?

Sometime in the near future, the twin forces of overpopulation and environmental depletion have led the nations of the world to form three major economic blocs, each named after the resources they still possess in enough abundance to supply the rest of the world.

Kept at peace by runaway nuclear proliferation, which has given even some of the smaller nations the bomb, the Food Bloc (which feeds the world), the Energy Bloc (which still produces fossil fuels) and the People Bloc (which exports cheap labor) all exist in an uneasy truce, fueled by their mutual economic need. But the resentments simmering beneath the surface are so strong that the stalemate cannot exist for long.

Possible hope arrives when astronomers discover a habitable planet circling a distant sun.
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Escapism my ass.

Anyone tells you that science fiction is escapist, you tell them to jam an allotropic iron torpedo up their bikini area and then turn off its inertialess drive.