The big news from the ESO is the discovery of three planets around a red-dwarf star, Gliese 581, just 20.5 light years away – and one of the planets, Gl 581c, is “in” the star’s habitable zone and small enough to be (roughly) Earth-like.
Maybe not so habitable. According to this article by Barrie Jones, Nick Sleep and David Underwood, the habitable zone of Gl 581 is from 0.113 AU to 0.224 AU – BUT the new planet in the news is at a radius of just 0.073 AU i.e. it’s more like Venus and less like Earth. Albeit a probably wet Venus – a scaldingly hot ocean under a massive atmosphere of water vapour. Not nice real estate until improved by a reflective soletta sending some heat back at the star. Call it an ETP… Easily Terraformable Planet.
It’s fellow star system mate, Gl 581 d, is at 0.25 AU and somewhat more likely to be habitable, but it masses about 8 Earths, so it’s a bit big. And, of course, from my cursory survey of comments pages at different fora… well the usual crap is being bandied around e.g.
- So many stars, so many planets, there must be ETIs
- Let’s not go and “pollute” this new world with our “impure” earthliness
- Why use the money here on earth to help the poor before we go looking for new planets?
The usual truisms, humanity-hating, future-cringing and hopelessly idealistic BS.
(a) ETIs might exist, or they might not. But if they do/did then why no visible signs? Astrophysical engineering is conspicuously absent in our Galaxy, plus many other Galaxies.
(b) Life propagates Life wherever it goes. The “pollution” of human-life is in no way alien when you look at the behaviour of all large animal species – we change our environments. We might be so stupid as to foul our own nests BUT personally I see signs we’re getting better at cleaning up after ourselves. City-dwelling modern humans have a SMALLER ecological foot-print than their predecessors, a fact that Luddites and Tree-Huggers blithely ignore.
(c) The last thing the poor of the world need is our money because they’re poor. They need us to buy stuff from them, not tie another pelican around their necks like so much foreign “aid” has been in the past. Community development is fantastically important, but it only helps if it builds up people to trade and compete with the rest of us. Mere hand-outs kill. And in the end they want to be like us – and part of being us is looking beyond this horizon. That’s why astronomy and space is so damned important. A “simple life” impoverishes all.
My $0.02 worth.
