There’s no way in hell we have the resolution to see continents in another star system.
These are always illustrations based on whatever data we could gather. We almost never “see” the planets themselves.
Considering we only know it’s there because it slightly dims the light from its star as it crosses during its orbit, you would be correct. At that distance, we would never see light bouncing off the actual planet. Even the star is basically a single pixel. We can estimate its size and orbit based on how quickly it crosses in front of the star and how much the light dims, and using those two numbers we can estimate its distance from Kepler 452.
I thought they could also see atmospheric composition as it passes in front of the star, no? Having that info and the data you’ve just mentioned they postulate if it’s habitable or not. Obviously not seeing any detail at all about land mass shapes, but perhaps composition? I’m not a spaceologist, so I’m only musing.
Yeah, but it’s still just a single pixel of light from the star. It just changes color slightly when the planet passes in front of it and the atmosphere gases absorb certain characteristic wavelengths.
lol. All those flyby probes we’ve sent to other planets in the system and we could’ve just pointed our interstellar telescope instead and looked for puddles.
Soon, though, using gravitational lensing of the sun. Sometime around 2035 maybe.
You know that picture we have of the milky way?
It’s called Project Hail Mary you ding dong! We sent someone there in a last ditch effort to save the Earth!
How did they get it to pose next to earth for this photo?
Kepler-452b was having a private conversation with Australia when the photographer snuck up and got the candid photo.
Unfortunately Kepler-452b was embarrassed by having the intimate moment interrupted and left in a hurry.
Though their conversation was pleasant, the photographer ruined the mood and numbers were not exchanged.
Yeah, figured it was something like that.
Asking the real questions
I know, they’re usually so uncooperative, like posing cats.
Either a classified SCP phenomenon/entity or a Doctor Who plot.
* slaps sphere *
“You can fit so much Perlin noise on this baby.”
Earth 2 exists, except it’s twice the size of Earth and could be a scorched wasteland for all we know.
Whenever I see an update on these sort of articles, the planet always ends up being a tide-locked hell-scape full of toxic chemicals.
https://xkcd.com/2202/ moment
Slightly unrelated but I got a solid chuckle out of the different modes they added in the drop down on the XKCD website under teh comic, Space Opera mode is my favorite.
So basically what billionaires are trying to turn the world into? /s
You may not like it, but that’s what’s what peak habitability looks like
spoiler
for lizard people
Maybe, just maybe, billionaires have been there before?
Because the computer-generated images that symbolize said other planets are generally done with some shitty-shit stupid noise algorithm to generate the surface rather than anything decent (well, at least it’s not uniform noise), whilst the ones for planet Earth just use existing map data for the Earth surface.
As it so happens I’ve been working on a game that has planets, so here’s an example generated with better algorithms:
PS: also note that for game purposes, the athmosphere is unrealistically thick as a proportion of planetary radius, purelly because it looks better. A lot of choices in game making are mainly artistic freedom which at first people with a Science or Engineering background tend to shy away from “because it’s not how things are”.
I think it’s also that we choose the most photogenic angle for earth, if you pick a random angle of earth it sometimes doesn’t look as good.
e.g.
do you have an algorithm for picking a photogenic angle for your game?
do you have an algorithm for picking a photogenic angle for your game?
Nah, the planets are just shown as 3D objects in the game.
The little icons as the one I linked were made by a special game mode for development which I call the PlanetPhotoStudio that just lets me manually rotate the planet 3D object and take a snapshot. Since the planet surfaces are pre-generated using an external program (“Grand Designer”, highly recommended) and only some results are chosen, it’s fine to also make those icons during development time.
It’s actually less hassle to create a “photo studio” (especially since most of the work for it is also used in the main game) and do it manually for each planet like that than to try and come up with an algorithm for “how photogenic a 2D view of a planet looks”.
i love the Himalaya doing a cute smile
looks like a baby elephant
A lot of choices in game making are mainly artistic freedom which at first people with a Science or Engineering background tend to shy away from “because it’s not how things are”.
This is a chorus I like to repeat: Entertainment doesn’t need to be realistic to be fun, and I wish publishers / marketers / reviewers / players would acknowledge that more often and stop slapping the label “realistic” and the like on things that aren’t.
There are sims that are grounded in careful study and attempt to model some part of reality as accurately as possible, but even they need to compromise, both to run on contemporary hardware and to balance it against playability. But they’re often complex, by virtue of modeling a complex reality, and not everyone’s cup of tea.
But then you have things like Assassin’s Creed that regularly and heavily fudge history, not always in a bad way, but convey an impression of past societies that seems accurate, but glosses over things like the Spartan inequality and slavery or Viking brutality, painting a more “noble” and “heroic” picture than they each deserve.
Again, there’s nothing wrong with making up interesting stuff, but people should be honest about it (as you are). Pointing out those artistic choices is an opportunity for learning things. Though the scale of an atmosphere is probably less significant than the scale of Viking slave trade, I still find it curious just how thin it actually is.
…because Slartibartfast didn’t hand design them like he did for earth?
There are not enough fidly-bits on this new planet
Here, go nuts:
https://calandiel.itch.io/gleba
Best freely available, scientifically based planet generator I’ve been able to find.
Supports linux yay :3
Its also built in Godot and thus thanks to the power of Godot not really having any decompilation protection, is effectively open source, lol.
Weird. And cool.
Wow this app stinks. Did it spoil or something?
Fermi paradox solution: aliens approach from a direction where the first part they see is the Philippines and Indonesia, and just say “nah I’m not learning all those names of islands”, and leave.
Or they just approach from this angle and go “Ah, nothing here” and move on
Where is that?
Pacific Ocean is mad large
Maps are optimized for people who live on land
bro… that’s earth man. That’s where I live buddy
The water between Asia, Australia, North and South America, and Antarctica.
Lazy Aliens.
They dodged a bullet!
Are we landmass shaming now?
We’ve always done that. Everybody knows our hemisphere is prettier and sexier than theirs. We’ve got the hottest hemisphere on the planet, and that includes whether you break it up North/South, or East/West. We own it, baby.
Am I the only one around here who doesn’t think it looks like shit?
Geoscentific and ecological implications aside, they have a huge ass continent with multiple giant lakes and small peninsulas all around. With a comparable vegetation to earth, this would look amazing in person, I believe.
Yeah, very geo-centric view. It just looks different than literally the only planet humanity has ever known
What I’d actually like to know is how it was chosen. At that distance, we can’t see anything from position and luminosity, and even the luminosity is rough to bake out of other bias. We’re better at telling that there’s a moon. Is this an artists rendition? It is a reasonable calculation due to age and plate tectonics?
I don’t hate it, but if it’s just art for the sake of art, why not go earth-like?
Well, if Americans settled on that planet, travel would suck to get around. But if a modern country developed it, it would be great - high speed rail all around!
Thats how I feel too
Don’t worry. If us humans showed up on Kepler-452b tomorrow and it had a breathable atmosphere, those lakes would probably be gone in a few hundred years.
So would the breathable atmosphere.
They’d probably like to come colonize our planet, but with 2x the gravity of Earth, I bet it’s hard to build a rocket that can actually get them into space, much less travel 1800 light years.
Artists rendering
Documentaries and science communication in general has always been waaaay too fucking lax on properly disclosing artists’ renderings. Every field suffers from it, but I have to say astrophysics and astronomy are the absolute worst about it.
They got a lot more land on that planet. The people who live there don’t appreciate what they’ve got like we will, so we deserve it more. Let’s go kill them and take it from them.
They seem really peaceful and content just living off the land. This will be so easy.
It will be over in hours, and they welcome us as liberators.
That’s where they land in Raised By Wolves, right?
That show had so much potential as true high sci-fi and it was completely wasted
That show was legit incredible, and cancelling it was a massive fuckup.
I liked it but I also had to stop going “RAGNAR LOTHBROK … IN SPAAAAAAACE”
high
wasted
Sounds like you enjoyed the show a lot, I’ll look it up, thanks.
