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.
We can build a telescope to see this by the way. The lens being the gravitational warping of spacetime by the sun. We go waaaay past the orbit of Pluto (I forgot the exact distance) and send probes there. We can have quite nice pictures of planets up to pretty nice distances.
Easy trip to make; it took the voyagers only about 40 years to pass Pluto?
Depends on your definition of “easy”. Here’s the wiki article about it.
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?
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.
* 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 do make a “photo studio” (especially since most of the work 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”.
Good luck with the game! Sounds like it’ll be interesting
Thanks!
It definitelly looks nice, though the game play is IMHO what makes it fun or not.
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
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.
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
Weird. And cool.
Wow this app stinks. Did it spoil or something?
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?
Thats how I feel too
As someone who used mapmaking software for decades I agree they all look randomly generated.
They chose “randomize” in the New Game options
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.
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.
Yeah. Those astronauts would be super thirsty after that trip
…because Slartibartfast didn’t hand design them like he did for earth?
There are not enough fidly-bits on this new planet
So thats where rimworld got the shitty planet generation from. Seriously, I want big contiguous oceans. Not like I can use the vast majority of the planet anyway.
How dare you shit talk Pangea like that
Maybe if they make a seafaring DLC (though that is kind of a step back after doing literal space ships).
Unless I’m mistaken, you can really do anything in the water tiles in Rimworld
Yeah, I want it purely for aesthetics. I like generating 100% of the planet, and sending colonies to far-flung places via dev mode instant travel to settle in isolation, so I spend a decent amount of time looking at the world map. It just bothers me when it’s mostly land. It’s ugly, imo, and you get fewer interesting land/climate combos, even with expanded biomes. Also one of my mods adds things washing up on the beach, like organs, so I’m a big fan of ocean-adjacent tiles.
Honestly I haven’t gotten the new DLC, and probably wont, so I don’t really know anything about the space stuff. I have way too much time and energy invested in my collection of mods and don’t have any interest in doing it again (I manage them manually because I don’t use steam, so updating/replacing a thousand mods is a big project)
I’ve been playing whiskerwood on and off, its in early access and runs for shit on my crap windows computer, but it’s all islands and it seems they’ll be adding more to water navigation (last patch I installed added ferries and boat docks, and that was a few months ago). I enjoy that sort of thing too, but I don’t think rimworld really needs it.
I think the point is that they aren’t assuming the planet in question is tectonically activie, as that’s one of the unlikely steps needed for life as we know it.
