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“Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

(www.skyatnightmagazine.com)
417 points fuidani | 2 comments | 17 Apr 25 08:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.573s | source
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londons_explore ◴[17 Apr 25 09:24 UTC] No.43714580[source]▶
This is happening 124 light years away from earth.

That means if we develop a way to make a space ship accelerate at 1g for a long period of time, you could go there in just 10 relativistic years.

Unfortunately, whilst science allows such a rocket, our engineering skills are far from being able to build one.

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mr_mitm ◴[17 Apr 25 10:01 UTC] No.43714808[source]▶
Calling it simply an engineering issue is not properly conveying the ridiculousness of such a journey. For a small space ship of 1000 tons, this would take ten thousand times the current yearly energy consumption of mankind. So we'd need to figure out how to generate the energy and then store it on a space ship before even thinking about the engineering.

And that's ignoring the mass of the fuel. The classical rocket equation has the mass going exponentially with the velocity, which makes this endeavor even more mind bogglingly ridiculous. We'd actually need 2 million years worth of our current yearly energy consumption.

It's fun to think about, but being clear about the challenges puts quite the damper on it.

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1. Imustaskforhelp ◴[17 Apr 25 10:59 UTC] No.43715117[source]▶
Seriously, most if not all of humanity's issue is our current energy wall. I truly wish we can invest more in energy as compared to AI because I truly believe that most AI agents are roughly the same and now are benchmark maxxing and even google's gemini is really really cool. Maybe now training it even further has less reward for the cost?

I truly wish energy could be a solved issue. I think clean energy can be great of two types, solar and nuclear, though nuclear can require a lot of expertise to build it once and operation costs, (I am not talking about the risk of nuclear reactor exploding since its just a fraction of current risks)

I personally prefer solar as its way more flexible though I am okay with nuclear as well

Mainly the issue in solar is of battery, if I understand it correctly. So We just need to really focus as a civilization to the humble battery.

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2. londons_explore ◴[17 Apr 25 11:41 UTC] No.43715360[source]▶
I don't think there will ever be a time when energy is a 'solved' problem.

The more energy you have access to, the more uses you'll find for energy, and therefore the more energy you'll want to have access to.