Sara Seager and the search for habitable exoplanets

Sara Seager and the search for habitable exoplanets(nytimes.com)

25 points by jacobheric 9 years ago | 6 comments

gkya 9 years ago |

Is there any concrete possibility of colonising another planet? Here in the comments for similar stories I see lots of scifi talk about the topic but little concrete arguments other than some amateur maths and physics. I know me some astronomy and even colonised Mars seems pipe dreams to me. Am I wrong?

sdfin 9 years ago |

Throwing money at searching habitable planets that are light years away is what I'd call a terrible sense of what's a priority. We have immediate problems on Earth right now, like getting enough energy, contamination, millions of people living in poverty, and various illnesses that don't have a satisfactory treatment. Directing money and efforts to analyze objects that are light years away is complete madness, according to my subjective opinion.

sdfin 9 years ago | |

I'd like to read the downvoters arguments agains what I wrote. I love sci-fi, I think that eventually humanity could colonize other planets, do terraforming, build an intergalactic civilizations, etcetera... I just said that that's not a priority now. Right now we are polluting and depleting the planet, and we have to fix that before thinking about expanding to other planets. If we destroy the Earth we won't be able to do that.

dogma1138 9 years ago | | |

You need to feed the imagination and inspiration otherwise you don't have anything to strive for.

Same can be said about the vast majority of space related exploration.

But that argument doesn't hold water space exploration isn't even a rounding error in the budget of most nations including the US, not to mention their GDP.

And the technology developed for it is then used to improve life here on earth for a lot of people.

The ROI on NASA and other similar agencies world wide is pretty huge.

And even if it wasn't the 250m for a new space telescope won't improve the life of that many people.

Before you talk about cutting space travel maybe it's worth talking about not making another iPhone yet alone buying 2-3 fewer fighter jets.

One stealth bomber that will be (and is already) obsolete before the US would have to fight a war in which it might actually provide some advantage costs as much as sending an SUV sized rover to mars. And unlike a B2 bomber or its replacement the technology for Curiosity isn't classified for the next 10000 years.

whatshisface 9 years ago | | |

We find astronomical information very useful in learning about our own part of the universe. Space is home to lots of plasma physics, all planetary geology beyond sample size one, and high energy events we might find it difficult to re-create, like the big bang.

Even if in the end it's just pretty pictures (maybe you think every part of physics potentially relevant to engineers has been discovered), why don't space critics put the same heat on Hollwood? The real question here is why we spend billions on imaginary planets, but I've never heard it asked.

lamacase 9 years ago | | |

You present a very crude opinion on a very nuanced issue, which is only tangentially related to the content of the article. It would be an effort just to elucidate what your precise position even is before anyone could seriously engage the topic.

Why don't you write up your ideas for constructing and enacting a well-prioritized research plan/budget, and submit it to hn so people can address your position in detail? That way you could have a focused discussion without distracting the people who are actually interested in articles like this one.