Habitable planet discussion

[PB666]

We've having a hefty discussion as to why aliens are invisible to us. This thread is going to make the assumption that if alien life exists and we could reach them that we coukd eventually uncover them and know whether they existed or are in the process of evolving to that state.

I want to state in advanced that any interstellar worthy sentient can be around any star that obviously is stable, so it does not mean aliens can't exist. The sceptor here is whether they might have evolved in that system. I also want to state that we can only see transects around stars in which the planet corsses the stars light, This is not a majority of stars which is why we are caring about planets hundred to thousand light years from us, the drive to discover versus statistics.

And now you see my POV.

The basic problem here is that we are trying to identify a mythical dragons liar using a childs tricycle.

I can't force NASA to create the telescope he describes, but I have mentioned it several times. If you truely want to know whether we are alone, you actually need something that can generate semi-steroscopic vision of intragalactic space, and you really can't do this and filter starlight from orbiting celestial light from earth.

The hubble device itself is crippled because of its mirror. The telescope does not have to be a football pitch in size, it could be a triangle with three different mirrors, offset mirrors, each about the size of JWST and it might suffice. In addition you may want to filter light according to polarization and spectrum, this is a problem because of uncertainty, which means you need alot of light and you need to be able to eliminate alot of wavelength scattered light at undesired frequency, you also need to see the frequency shift that results from the planets rotation.

This may be decent for detecting close planets but for seeing far off planets we would need a larger scope, the greater the distance the larger apart the mirrors would need to be. The hubble view of Pluto shows us just how badly the problem is, the space weather arguments shows how little we gleamed from hubble and may reflect errors and assumptions about its perspective. Hubble is not the fie here, its retrofitting is designed for Universe studies like the view of some deep see creature, but we need the view of an eagle of a cheetah. Something that can ltach on to a view with both eyes, and gather and characterize it over a broad range of soectra and light qualities. The telescope mission I think is of equal priority to any manned mission.

[MajorLeaugeRocketScience]

Not to bust your bubble, but there are a few problems. Like, we'd need a rocket that's literally a asparagus staged Saturn V. And we'd bankrupt the government. Take that away, I totally agree

[PB666]

Not to bust your bubble, but there are a few problems. Like, we'd need a rocket that's literally a asparagus staged Saturn V. And we'd bankrupt the government. Take that away, I totally agree

I don't mean to burst your bubble but its ...League..., lol, sry, hmmph.

Of course it would have to be assembled in space, which is why instead of having far fetched manned landing, lets have a manned space venture at L2, complete with centripedal station capable of say 0.1 g. So that we can see how to obtain better long term survival in space, build things in space and have a world finder to boot. JWST is really designed to look in the infrared, if you want to look for the best evidence of chlorophyll, its in the visible spectrum.

[MajorLeaugeRocketScience]

That actually is a pretty cool idea, I wanna try that in KSP now

[PB666]

That actually is a pretty cool idea, I wanna try that in KSP now

No lagrangian points in KSP, :^( . The SoI are black/white. Yeah, I am here trying get an idea interesting enough to build it in blender and execute it in Unity/KSP. They are not going to have N-body dynamics in KSP, apparently, because they can't deal with crash and collision issues in low craft orbit for celestial satellites. The other issue is decimal points and processing power. After having solved the deep space high velocity Kraken I don't think they wnat to mess with it.

KSP can think about gravity in a newtonian sense, however if you want to have n body physics, there is no choice but to move to spacetime which means you would need at least one inertial hopefully CoM, reference frame for all super surface craft trajectory, and consider the curvature of spacetime. Kepler/Newton did not have to deal with lagragian points, nor did they have to deal with dilation, even though dilation was evident in mercuries orbit.

[Pixel of Life]

This may be decent for detecting close planets but for seeing far off planets we would need a larger scope, the greater the distance the larger apart the mirrors would need to be.

Can't you just use a group of multiple smaller spacecraft that only carry mirrors and whatever optics they need to reflect that light to yet another spacecraft that carries the actual camera? We can hit a mirror on the moon with a laser beam (sure, it's over 6km wide when it hits, but still - it's nearly 400k km away) so surely it would be possible to reflect an image to a target a few dozen or hundred kilometers away...? Upgrading it would be a matter of launching more mirror craft or swapping the camera craft for one with better equipment. For stereoscopic images, you'd just launch more than one of these groups and position each one at a lagrange point.

[PB666]

Can't you just use a group of multiple smaller spacecraft that only carry mirrors and whatever optics they need to reflect that light to yet another spacecraft that carries the actual camera? We can hit a mirror on the moon with a laser beam (sure, it's over 6km wide when it hits, but still - it's nearly 400k km away) so surely it would be possible to reflect an image to a target a few dozen or hundred kilometers away...? Upgrading it would be a matter of launching more mirror craft or swapping the camera craft for one with better equipment. For stereoscopic images, you'd just launch more than one of these groups and position each one at a lagrange point.

That is a possibility you don't actually have to do that they can each have their own mirrors. The manuevering thrusters unfortunately are not that accurate that they would separted systems used the same focal pts. The problem, IIRC, is the polarization and phasing; visible light is in the sub micron range, so it means you kind of want various detectors to be the same distance to the target. Even a scope set up on girders has a dampening problem that would require some vibration dampening even in space. Its not an easy problem, but given that hubble will go bye-bye in a few years we need an idea for a next generation visible light telescope.