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Comment on Potentially habitable planet TRAPPIST-1b may have a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, The innermost Earth-like planet in the famous TRAPPIST-1 system might be capable of supporting a thick atmosphere

PumpkinSkink@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

I always like when people talk about potentially habitable exoplanets. It’s like “this planet is not literally on fire or frozen solid, and it’s atmosphere is 80% carbon dioxide with a measly 20% hydrochloric acid”. Like we’ve got a planet here that we’re struggling to not kill ourselves on from doubling the Co2 from 250 ppm to 500 ppm. We’re never getting to that other planet, bro. If we were gonna, solving climate change would be trivial by comparison.

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very_well_lost@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Nobody is seriously looking for ‘habitable’ planets because they expect humanity will someday inhabit them — this is all about the hunt for other life out there in the universe.

To astronomers, “habitable” just means that the planet gets to correct amount of energy from its star that liquid water could potentially exist on its surface. Liquid water may not actually be a requirement for life, but since we only have a single data point to work from, it makes sense to look for the preconditions of the kind of life we’re familiar with on earth, of which liquid water is a big one. (Another is carbon chemistry, so finding lots of atmospheric carbon isn’t necessarily a bad thing when searching for other life out there.)

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