Age Of Innocence: How Discovering Planets Is Like Losing Your Virginity

NPR Cosmos And Culture 'blog ^ | October 5, 2010 | Adam Frank

[SunkenCiv]

These questions have been with us since our earliest forays into thinking about the sky, the stars and the wandering planets. The atomists of ancient Greece were convinced that the Universe was infinite and must therefore have an infinity of infinite worlds. In 1277 Bishop Tempier of Paris claimed that God could have created other worlds. Many scholars were unconvinced and argued that even if He could, He would choose not too. In 1600 Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for various heresies and it is likely that his advocacy of a plurality of inhabited worlds did not win friends with the Inqusition. In 1686 Bernard Fontanelle's "Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds" explored the possibility of extraterrestrial life, turning it into something of an intellectual seduction with the philosopher making his arguments in a late night garden stroll under the stars with a beautiful and intelligent noble woman. In the modern era of 20th century astronomy, the discovery of even one extra-solar planet was a kind of holy grail and focused the efforts of many a scientist's career... In 1995, just a mere 15 years ago, millennia of wondering ended with the discovery of the planet 51 Pegasi. Suddenly, and after so many generations of not knowning, we knew: There are other worlds orbiting other stars.

[SunkenCiv]

National Science Foundation artist, Lynette Cook's drawing shows the inner four planets orbiting Gliese 581, a red dwarf star just 20 light-years from Earth. The newly discovered planet, in the foreground, has a 37-day orbit and, like Earth, is distant enough from the star for liquid water to exist.

Zina Deretsky/National Science Foundation

[SunkenCiv]

Obviously the author needs to get out more, even moreso than do I.

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[JRandomFreeper]

Much less breathless fumbling in the back seat, and much more computer crunching on numbers.

/johnny

[DManA]

We have discovered nothing. This is all pure speculation.

[dr_lew]

Thus we see how in the ancient land of Shinar a theoretically highly developed astronomy came into being in the course of a thousand years. It is true that our knowledge of this astronomy is as fragmentary as the few damaged sherds from which it was derived; the meaning of many numbers we can only guess and of their origin we know practically nothing.

Pannekoek, A History of Astronomy

You see the irony?

[dr_lew]

We have discovered nothing. This is all pure speculation.

Not so. Pale shadows, perhaps, but they are there.

[Ciexyz]

Hoping that our grandchildren will see the Star Trek dream come true.

[DManA]

What do you mean?

[dr_lew]

I mean that these claims are based on objective measurements, however subtle and refined they might be.

[SunkenCiv]

You have discovered nothing; the extrasolar planets that have been found are indeed there, and are not speculation.

An Angstrom is .1 nanometer, which is approximately 1/250 millionth of an inch; Intel’s current path widths in their currently most dense chips are 32 nm; they collaborated with Micron to make NAND memory with paths 25 nm wide. Atoms are usually one to three Angstroms wide, so a 25 nm path is 83 to 250 atoms wide. But that’s just speculation too.

[DManA]

There COULD be liquid water there. We don’t know. There have been times when Earth was frozen from pole to pole. Position relative to a sun is one of about 100 things (that we know of ) necessary for life.

Does the planet in question have a iron core so so there is a magnetic field? Does it have a moon to stabilize it’s spin?

We know nothing.

Don’t get me wrong. Speculation is fun. But it’s called science fiction, not science.

[DManA]

I would speculate that it’s late and that you are not always a total ass.

[dr_lew]

We know nothing.

We know there are planets there, and this seems to me the central point. I remember back in the sixties watching a whole TV show about an astronomer, at Swarthmore IIRC, who devoted his whole life and career to the astrometry of a single star, in the belief that his measurements proved that it had a planet. I believe that in the end, after his death even, it all came to naught. Yet, others following his example were able to produce the results that he only dreamed of.

Here we are:

During the 1950s and 1960s, Peter van de Kamp of Swarthmore College made another prominent series of detection claims, this time for planets orbiting Barnard's Star.[14] Astronomers now generally regard all the early reports of detection as erroneous.

[DManA]

I agree. I just get impatient with what passes for science reporting in Big Media. It’s not enough for them that we’ve discovered a new fact about the contents of the universe. They couldn’t care less. To them it is merely and excuse to expand their life in the universe narrative - Life exists everywhere and we are about to discover it any day.

My world view encompasses the possibility that life is sprinkled uniformly across the universe. It also encompasses the possibility that life is so wildly improbable that the only place it exists is right here.

The odds, with what we know right now, are enormous that we will never know one way or the other.

[SunkenCiv]

Regarding the troll DManA — “This account has been banned or suspended.”