Rambling about Proxima b and Unsportsmanlike Conduct on #Blaugust Day 25
Unsportsmanlike Conduct
There’s a lot of toxicity in League of Legends and every once in a while everyone on BOTH teams recognize this. This morning, I experienced this from a Tristana run by someone determined to feed.
Fortunately, everyone reported her and I got this during the champion select of my next game…
While it doesn’t seem to happen as often as people ruin matches, it is nice to see that every once in a while Riot actually acts on the reports we send in.
Proxima b
With Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, and No Man’s Sky we’re being bombarded with space based sandbox games, but this is the real thing. According to New Scientist and many other places, scientists have found that the nearest star, 4.25 light years away, has a rocky planet similar to Earth. Proxima b sits in the habitable range of it’s star, but most likely has at least one of a number of issues that could prevent life from being found there. That of course doesn’t mean it’s not an important find. I think it’s great and means we’re one step closer to being motivated to spread out to the stars for real, rather than just in a video game. And I think that’s just huge for humanity.
From what I’ve read, there’s a plan that could send an unmanned ship to a place like this – it would only take 20 years or so to get there – so we could feasibly get “in person” images from a planet in 25 years…Wow!
Considering that I keep seeing all these articles saying we couldn’t detect our own civilization if it was at Proxima due to our phenomenally weak signal strength, I have a hard time believing we would be able to equip a powerful enough transmitter to a probe to be able to “hear” it at those distances. I would love it if it were actually feasible, though.
Additionally, even if we could get something going .2c to get there in only 20 years, I’m not sure it would be able to get a whole lot of pictures to send to us if traveling at that speed. New Horizons was travelling only a small fraction of that speed when it went by Pluto and only got about 16 hours worth of “good shots” (though obviously a lot more than just that is of interest to astronomers). Anyway… even if we knew we could get data back from a 4ly distance, it would really need to be able to slow down so that it could actually do some science while there. A flyby at .2c would probably not have time for more than a picture or 2 of any object, and how would the probe detect and lock on to it, rotate itself to avoid motion blur, and do it all autonomously since we can’t really control it with a 4-5 year lag time between commands……
Yeah, lotta technical issues to work out just yet.
Certainly a lot of questions to be answered, but that’s what science and technology are all about. I’d much rather governments spend money on that than trying to figure out a better way to kill each other. There are some pretty smart people I’m sure could brainstorm some interesting solutions to all the issues you put forth and many that haven’t even been thought of yet.
I hadn’t heard that we would not be able to pick up our own signs of life though – that’s interesting.