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Researchers confirm an exoplanet potentially capable of sustaining life

11 comments

  • Ugh.

    Okay, tangent. When I was in grad school for planetary science, literally every grant application had "search for water" in it because that was how you made your grant sexy to PHBs at granting agencies. Later, when water became so common everywhere in the solar system, it switched to things like methane. The treadmill continues.

    This is the version of that for exoplanets. And it screams of junk science marketing to appeal to granting agencies and bad click-bait reposting. It drives me nuts.

    You could say this about just about any exoplanet out there if you stretch the definition of life wide enough.

    • Too true. I don't know how many articles like this I've read over the last few years. The title suggests with weasel-words that an Earth-like paradise planet capable to supporting carbon/water based life has been found.

      But then when you dig into the details there's always one or more catches that complicate things. Things like:

      • It's a super Earth several times the mass of our Earth (as is the case here).
      • It doesn't have tectonic activity and/or a magnetosphere.
      • There are actually zero signs of water.
      • It's barely inside the habitable zone, so it'll either be very hot or very cold.
      • The atmosphere turns out to be very toxic to life as we know it.
      • The star it orbits is highly volatile.
      • The star it orbits is a red dwarf (which while isn't necessarily a deal-breaker it does present other challenges).
      • Its parent star system is very volatile and print to heavy colliding of other hazards.

      I've wondered why the habitable world spin is picked up so much. That makes a lot of sense that it's being promoted to help get funding for post-graduate studies.

    • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

      You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

      In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

  • Great for research to try and figure out if we're typical or unique. And frankly amazing what they can glean from such a minuscule amount of data. But it's totally out of reach for anything practical, even our own solar system is mostly beyond our ability to visit.

    I do hope one day something will occur where people can point at my post and say, "you were completely wrong". Not seeing it.

11 comments