Which Tyler Posted February 23, 2017 Share Posted February 23, 2017 15 hours ago, felice said: A generation ship is more feasible in the near future. Though we'll probably have warp drive before it arrives at Trappist-1. I've always wanted to write a sci-fi quadrilogy where something like that happens... Humanity sends out a generation ship (named RAMA of course) to colonise the stars - Journey time measured in millenia. Civilisation on Earth falls (me being me, probably a climate change scenario), and rebuilds; the first expedition passes through legend and out the other side; to be forgotten about. We send out a super-fast ship (say 0.2c) to the same planet / system - Journey time measured in centuries. Civilisation continues to develop; and we send out a worm-hole ship to the same planet / system; which arrives a few decades before the super-fast ship and has more-or-less finished terriforming a planet. Ship C greets Ship B as known heroes; and they collonise the world together. Ship A arrives another century or so later; to find a bustling human world already at play; are welcomed as some sort of museum curiosities (I'd even go with a degree of evolutionary change between Ship A and Ships B&C) - whilst Ship A basically wipes out the later/earlier colonisers with a disease that had been erradicated since their ancestors left earth (probably an STD of some description - more realistically influenza). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. Chatywin et al. Posted February 23, 2017 Share Posted February 23, 2017 On 2/22/2017 at 4:37 PM, Dr. Pepper said: Ditto. News like this takes my breath away and makes me wish I'd become a scientist instead. It's never too late to try. I have a buddy who didn't start college until he was 27 and he just got into a PhD program for psychology. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SpaceChampion Posted February 23, 2017 Share Posted February 23, 2017 You guys know 39 light years is just 12 parsecs, right? That's one Kessel Run! We should name the system Kessel. If life is discovered on one of those planets, it should be on most of them, due to meteors throwing up bacteria-covered rocks that would seed life on all the rest. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maarsen Posted February 23, 2017 Share Posted February 23, 2017 8 hours ago, Which Tyler said: I've always wanted to write a sci-fi quadrilogy where something like that happens... Humanity sends out a generation ship (named RAMA of course) to colonise the stars - Journey time measured in millenia. Civilisation on Earth falls (me being me, probably a climate change scenario), and rebuilds; the first expedition passes through legend and out the other side; to be forgotten about. We send out a super-fast ship (say 0.2c) to the same planet / system - Journey time measured in centuries. Civilisation continues to develop; and we send out a worm-hole ship to the same planet / system; which arrives a few decades before the super-fast ship and has more-or-less finished terriforming a planet. Ship C greets Ship B as known heroes; and they collonise the world together. Ship A arrives another century or so later; to find a bustling human world already at play; are welcomed as some sort of museum curiosities (I'd even go with a degree of evolutionary change between Ship A and Ships B&C) - whilst Ship A basically wipes out the later/earlier colonisers with a disease that had been erradicated since their ancestors left earth (probably an STD of some description - more realistically influenza). I think this has been done before. Dirty telephone handsets were the culprit then. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Free Northman Reborn Posted February 24, 2017 Share Posted February 24, 2017 12 hours ago, SpaceChampion said: You guys know 39 light years is just 12 parsecs, right? That's one Kessel Run! We should name the system Kessel. If life is discovered on one of those planets, it should be on most of them, due to meteors throwing up bacteria-covered rocks that would seed life on all the rest. However, as the one lady in the presentation said, if an alien civilization was looking at us through their telescopes they would say that we have 3 rocky planets in our habitable zone, so if there is life on Earth, there should also be life on Mars and Venus. As it turns out, conditions are quite hostile on two of our three Goldilocks planets. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JGP Posted February 24, 2017 Share Posted February 24, 2017 14 hours ago, SpaceChampion said: If life is discovered on one of those planets, it should be on most of them, due to meteors throwing up bacteria-covered rocks that would seed life on all the rest. Maybe, but even so it would only propagate on the three in the habitable zone, if at all. Don't quote me on this, but I recall reading that the system itself is well under a billion years old. One account put it around 500 million, even. Earth was around 800 million or more years old when life was estimated to have arisen due to various factors, but paramount among those was an atmosphere conducive to it. 2020 isn't too far away, and will either further or end any speculation about possible life thereon once we have some reads on atmospheric content and surface temperatures. Still, exciting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ice Queen Posted February 24, 2017 Author Share Posted February 24, 2017 3 hours ago, Free Northman Reborn said: However, as the one lady in the presentation said, if an alien civilization was looking at us through their telescopes they would say that we have 3 rocky planets in our habitable zone, so if there is life on Earth, there should also be life on Mars and Venus. As it turns out, conditions are quite hostile on two of our three Goldilocks planets. Venus and Mars were both habitable once and probably before Earth was, so the aliens wouldn't be wrong. Even now it's not impossible that life exists on either. On Mars it could exist in the permafrost, and on Venus in the cloud tops in the upper atmosphere although the lack of water vapor in Venus' atmosphere makes it unlikely. Even on Earth, organisms can survive in places humans can't. They've found some weird stuff in the deep oceans, even in the Marianas Trench. Pretty much anywhere life can exist, it does. My favorite is just from a couple of weeks ago. Algae (Spaerocystis) and cyanobacteria (Nostoc), both of which are cryophilic (cold loving), survived for over a year on the outside of the ISS as part of the BIOMEX experiment. Both are aquatic organisms so make of that what you will. You can add lichens and tardigrades to the list of organisms that can and do survive space as well. The thing about the cyanobacteria is that its extinct ancestor invented photosynthesis in the first place. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toth Posted February 24, 2017 Share Posted February 24, 2017 Why do I have the sudden urge to play Stellaris after seeing the artworks made for these planets? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/PIA21422_-_TRAPPIST-1_Planet_Lineup%2C_Figure_1.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Artist’s_impression_of_the_ultracool_dwarf_star_TRAPPIST-1_from_the_surface_of_one_of_its_planets.jpg http://i1.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/022/294/TRAPPIST-1.jpg Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James Arryn Posted February 24, 2017 Share Posted February 24, 2017 Wow am I ignorant about this subject. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Corvinus85 Posted February 26, 2017 Share Posted February 26, 2017 A fun bit of news related to this: It appears the game Elite: Dangerous had already simulated a system very much like this one, and even got the distance to our system, 39 LY, right. http://www.polygon.com/2017/2/25/14737940/elite-dangerous-trappist-1-system-predicted?yptr=yahoo I might have to give that game another try. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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