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.
FOCAL would be able to observe only objects that are right behind the Sun from its point of view, which means that for every observed object a new telescope would have to be made.[3]: 33 [5]
Thinking about it this isn’t necessarily true in that moving the FOCAL relatively little could yield new things to observe (even microarcseconds). So you wouldn’t need a new FOCAL to measure each new thing. However each FOCAL would be measuring a miniscule bit of space over its lifetime. Which means for each distinct object that isn’t basically a neighbour in angular terms to a FOCAL sent you’d need a new FOCAL probably. Unless our long term energy generation/harvesting and propulsion in deep space significantly improves technology wise.
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.
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.
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".
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".
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’m sure most of the mods I use would be either available or obsolete, but I’m not interested in doing all the work it would take to upgrade everything, and I don’t really feel like I’m missing out.
Maybe someday I’ll make a whole separate setup for 1.6 and have both, but no time soon.
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.
No but seriously, why DO continents/landmasses on other planets give a sense of unease/uncanny valley (at least to me)? Is it just the lack of familiarity?
We almost certainly got no idea what its continents look like at that distance.
I understand this, but I also get unease from RNG maps from games like Age of Empires or Anno, and I've talked to a couple of other people who also have experienced this, so I was wondering if there was an underlying psychology to it. However, it's not an easily Googleable query, and I refuse to ask an AI chatbot about it.
Abnormalities from "normal" were a critical self defence feature, for our ancestors. E.g. a lack, or change, of bird song might indicate a predator in ambush. Unusual lighting might indicate a storm coming in.
Our brains are wired to learn normal patterns. When those patterns change completely, we are fine with it. When they change subtly we don't like it.
The threshold for this is different for different people. Personally, I'm fine with completely different maps, but off put by modified real maps. I also cannot watch soap operas, they are too close to "real" and trip alarms at their mismatches. Conversely, sci-fi and fantasy are fine, they are different enough to not set off my alarms. I know others who are set off by sci-fi, but soaps are within their norms.
I think a lot of it is humans are used to maps formed by tectonic plates shifting, glaciers forming and melting, storms and other weather, etc... When it's just an RNG heightmap it's missing all those familiar features like rivers, mountains, and dry lakebeds
Beyond what's been said already, we 100% do not have any way to take a picture of a planet outside our solar system that shows any detail of the planet's surface, and no plans to make a telescope that can do that. What we do right now to even tell if there are planets around other starts is look at the star's light and see if it gets slightly darker on regular intervals, indicating that a planet is crossing between us and the star in a regular orbit. Right now we can barely take a decent picture of Pluto, which is in our solar system. And checking the light brightness is really only good for looking for large planets the size of Jupiter and Saturn.
It's like seeing a car at night on a mountainside 4 miles away with its headlights on. It's just sitting there and you are wondering if it's a car or something else. It's hard to even tell it's 2 lights, it just looks like one light from that distance. But what would we see if someone walked in front of the car with the headlights on? The light get dim on one side and bright again, then dim and bright again on the other side. Sort of the same thing.
As for the uncanny valley part, it's because whoever came up with the graphic just did a random splash of water and land. The planet could be orange and magenta-colored, we have no idea. They used colors familiar to us looking at images of Earth because the intent is to make you think "it's like Earth, but different."
You've only ever seen photographs of one planet with oceans and landmasses, and that's Earth. The only other celestial body that has a solid surface with liquid on it that we've taken pictures of is Saturn's moon Titan. Titan has a thick opaque atmosphere so we don't have true-to-life pictures of the surface from space. We've got images constructed from radar scans, and this amazing image taken from the surface by the Huygens probe that hitched a ride with Cassini. The hydrocarbon lakes of Titan look like...blobs on a circle.
Every other planetary surface you've seen is rocky dirt, icy dirt, straight-up ice, cratery dirt, or opaque gas clouds. Any "earth-like" planet you've ever seen is a fictional artist's conception. And ain't no human artist who knows shit about plate tectonics compared to the Earth herself, so they draw weird shit that ain't quite right somehow.
Every other planetary surface you’ve seen is rocky dirt, icy dirt, straight-up ice, cratery dirt, or opaque gas clouds
Wait this is so true, and I've never even thought about it. Space photography has a lot of pictures from the Moon, Mars, and Venus (I've never seen those Titan photos, so thank you for the link), but there are no "real" photos of a planet with oceans. That might be where the "uncanny valley" kicks in, with my brain going "this doesn't look quite right". I do get a similar feeling when I see AIgen videos, so you might be onto something!
Venus is difficult to photograph for the same reason as Titan, thick opaque atmosphere. We've got radar imagery of Venus, plus the Soviets landed some probes and took a few pictures of the actual hell that surface level Venus is.
We can actually get a pretty good look at Mars from here; This is a picture of Mars taken with Hubble. We have active missions in orbit and on the surface of Mars as well so we can look at it as close as we want.
Meanwhile, this is the best Hubble could do with Pluto. And that's still inside our own solar system, we're not getting any photos of the surface of Earth mass planets around other stars.
On one hand I want to explore everything but at the same time I know it's impossible to grasp.
Our own Earth has fixing points from man made stuff, so I sort of know what's where, but then I zoom in on the archipelagos in south Chile or the lakes in Lapland and I get confused again because it seems soo randomly generated.
I think in part because speculating what the land looks like on an alien planet is actually really hard to do, and the vast majority of artists just wing it. With sufficient planning and rigor, alien planets should look normal.
For instance, I think the landmass of Tira-292b looks pretty natural. It's a hypothetical planet created for the Alien Biospheres project, a YouTube series that tries to build up an alien ecosystem as accurately to science as reasonably possible
It's a seriously underrated series, I highly recommend everyone check it out
I just googled Tira-292b and you know what, it doesn't set off that uneasy feeling for me. It just...kind of looks like Westeros? Which is based on parts of Earth so I guess that makes sense.
Alien Biospheres project
Also, thank you for the recommendation, I WILL be checking this out, if only to test my uncanny valley triggers to this a bit more. Time to experiment on myself 😭
It looks so shit cause they've already nuked themselves to planetary death. And because of climate change and rising sea level. Also ecosystem degradation and subsequent soil erosion. I've heard you need to prevent these to keep Earth beautiful. Just for the aesthetics. Think about the astronauts, what if they had to look at an ugly Earth?
Because one of them (Earth) is based on reality, and the other is a poorly done conceptual render because no human actually knows the shape of the landmasses on that planet on account of having never been there.
I know you're probably joking but even the best telescopes can only directly image a planet that's like 10 times the mass of Jupiter and even then it's only like two pixels.
Makes me wonder what a telescope the size of a solar system could see. How large of the telescope do you think it would take to be able to get a clear image of this planet?
Honestly I'm not even sure it's possible at that distance. Planets reflect very little light compared to stars, and that already minuscule amount of light gets scattered across an insanely huge area due to the inverse square law. So that tiny amount of light gets spread over an insanely huge area (light years in size).
I feel like to get a clear picture your telescope would have to be light years across in size to get a clear image with fine details in it. The light is just too spread out to get a clear picture of it with anything you can build at a human scale.
The hard part is that the stars create so much glare and planets are so small and faint that it's really REALLY hard to zoom in on them. Even with very powerful telescopes. It's probably straight up impossible actually. Like you can see them and get an idea of what they're made of (light spectrum analysis) but you're not going to be able to make out fine details like what the landmasses look like.
I wonder if it has plate tectonics. A big part of why our continents look like this is them. That said, yeah that's a lot of mid continent seas/great lakes
If you didn't have plate tectonics, you'd have a lot of problems with the atmosphere, and there's a decent chance that life wouldn't evolve, as the energy differentials generated by tectonic activity are those which life hangs onto, from nutrients, to oxidation, to geothermal heat.
Will you enjoy anything our universe shows you? Are there things that bring you joy in life? Will you touch grass? What about filling the void in your heart with wonder instead of worry?
Honestky it could be because of the amount of mooms they have. The exact tidal force on earth will have had a hand in shaping what the coastline became.
I do however, understand the statistical argument that it's highly likely (though what form that life would take is another question. I don't think it would be in any way humanoid. Possibly bacteria.
Why do you have to know for sure to counter your claim? I am not 100% certain but I think it is likely givern the circumstances for life and the vastness of our universe. But I don't claim to know for sure. I don't think just because we want to feel special does this have to mean we're the only planet with life in the universe
Yeah, that was kind of my point. You don't know for sure and I don't know for sure. You're guessing there is other life because you guestimate that the probability of life emerging is high enough for it. We don't know what that probability is. I'm guessing it's actually so low it happened only once. We've seen huge portion of the universe already but no signs of life. For now most people prefer your theory but as time passes my theory becomes more and more likely.
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.
Ah….
Thinking about it this isn’t necessarily true in that moving the FOCAL relatively little could yield new things to observe (even microarcseconds). So you wouldn’t need a new FOCAL to measure each new thing. However each FOCAL would be measuring a miniscule bit of space over its lifetime. Which means for each distinct object that isn’t basically a neighbour in angular terms to a FOCAL sent you’d need a new FOCAL probably. Unless our long term energy generation/harvesting and propulsion in deep space significantly improves technology wise.
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.
Does modem mode work for you? It just froze firefox for me.
Yeah the website freezes with firefox but works fine in a chromium browser
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 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?
i love the Himalaya doing a cute smile
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".
looks like a baby elephant
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.
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
bro... that's earth man. That's where I live buddy
Maps are optimized for people who live on land
The water between Asia, Australia, North and South America, and Antarctica.
They dodged a bullet!
Lazy Aliens.
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?
...because Slartibartfast didn't hand design them like he did for earth?
There are not enough fidly-bits on this new planet
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?
Thats how I feel too
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!
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
So would the breathable atmosphere.
As someone who used mapmaking software for decades I agree they all look randomly generated.
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.
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”
Sounds like you enjoyed the show a lot, I'll look it up, thanks.
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.
Did you not need to update your mods for 1.6 anyway?
The new DLC is fucking awesome. I think most mods at this point are compatible (or made redundant).
I don't have 1.6, so no.
I’m sure most of the mods I use would be either available or obsolete, but I’m not interested in doing all the work it would take to upgrade everything, and I don’t really feel like I’m missing out.
Maybe someday I’ll make a whole separate setup for 1.6 and have both, but no time soon.
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.
1800 light years away.
Just a few generations nbd
Barely noticeable at the speed of light.
No but seriously, why DO continents/landmasses on other planets give a sense of unease/uncanny valley (at least to me)? Is it just the lack of familiarity?
It's an artist's impression. We almost certainly got no idea what its continents look like at that distance.
I understand this, but I also get unease from RNG maps from games like Age of Empires or Anno, and I've talked to a couple of other people who also have experienced this, so I was wondering if there was an underlying psychology to it. However, it's not an easily Googleable query, and I refuse to ask an AI chatbot about it.
Abnormalities from "normal" were a critical self defence feature, for our ancestors. E.g. a lack, or change, of bird song might indicate a predator in ambush. Unusual lighting might indicate a storm coming in.
Our brains are wired to learn normal patterns. When those patterns change completely, we are fine with it. When they change subtly we don't like it.
The threshold for this is different for different people. Personally, I'm fine with completely different maps, but off put by modified real maps. I also cannot watch soap operas, they are too close to "real" and trip alarms at their mismatches. Conversely, sci-fi and fantasy are fine, they are different enough to not set off my alarms. I know others who are set off by sci-fi, but soaps are within their norms.
I think a lot of it is humans are used to maps formed by tectonic plates shifting, glaciers forming and melting, storms and other weather, etc... When it's just an RNG heightmap it's missing all those familiar features like rivers, mountains, and dry lakebeds
Why not, all you have to do is take a blurry photo of it and just keep saying enhance, right?
Beyond what's been said already, we 100% do not have any way to take a picture of a planet outside our solar system that shows any detail of the planet's surface, and no plans to make a telescope that can do that. What we do right now to even tell if there are planets around other starts is look at the star's light and see if it gets slightly darker on regular intervals, indicating that a planet is crossing between us and the star in a regular orbit. Right now we can barely take a decent picture of Pluto, which is in our solar system. And checking the light brightness is really only good for looking for large planets the size of Jupiter and Saturn.
It's like seeing a car at night on a mountainside 4 miles away with its headlights on. It's just sitting there and you are wondering if it's a car or something else. It's hard to even tell it's 2 lights, it just looks like one light from that distance. But what would we see if someone walked in front of the car with the headlights on? The light get dim on one side and bright again, then dim and bright again on the other side. Sort of the same thing.
As for the uncanny valley part, it's because whoever came up with the graphic just did a random splash of water and land. The planet could be orange and magenta-colored, we have no idea. They used colors familiar to us looking at images of Earth because the intent is to make you think "it's like Earth, but different."
You've only ever seen photographs of one planet with oceans and landmasses, and that's Earth. The only other celestial body that has a solid surface with liquid on it that we've taken pictures of is Saturn's moon Titan. Titan has a thick opaque atmosphere so we don't have true-to-life pictures of the surface from space. We've got images constructed from radar scans, and this amazing image taken from the surface by the Huygens probe that hitched a ride with Cassini. The hydrocarbon lakes of Titan look like...blobs on a circle.
Every other planetary surface you've seen is rocky dirt, icy dirt, straight-up ice, cratery dirt, or opaque gas clouds. Any "earth-like" planet you've ever seen is a fictional artist's conception. And ain't no human artist who knows shit about plate tectonics compared to the Earth herself, so they draw weird shit that ain't quite right somehow.
Wait this is so true, and I've never even thought about it. Space photography has a lot of pictures from the Moon, Mars, and Venus (I've never seen those Titan photos, so thank you for the link), but there are no "real" photos of a planet with oceans. That might be where the "uncanny valley" kicks in, with my brain going "this doesn't look quite right". I do get a similar feeling when I see AIgen videos, so you might be onto something!
Venus is difficult to photograph for the same reason as Titan, thick opaque atmosphere. We've got radar imagery of Venus, plus the Soviets landed some probes and took a few pictures of the actual hell that surface level Venus is.
We can actually get a pretty good look at Mars from here; This is a picture of Mars taken with Hubble. We have active missions in orbit and on the surface of Mars as well so we can look at it as close as we want.
Meanwhile, this is the best Hubble could do with Pluto. And that's still inside our own solar system, we're not getting any photos of the surface of Earth mass planets around other stars.
I get the same feeling when looking at fractals.
On one hand I want to explore everything but at the same time I know it's impossible to grasp.
Our own Earth has fixing points from man made stuff, so I sort of know what's where, but then I zoom in on the archipelagos in south Chile or the lakes in Lapland and I get confused again because it seems soo randomly generated.
I think in part because speculating what the land looks like on an alien planet is actually really hard to do, and the vast majority of artists just wing it. With sufficient planning and rigor, alien planets should look normal.
For instance, I think the landmass of Tira-292b looks pretty natural. It's a hypothetical planet created for the Alien Biospheres project, a YouTube series that tries to build up an alien ecosystem as accurately to science as reasonably possible
It's a seriously underrated series, I highly recommend everyone check it out
I just googled Tira-292b and you know what, it doesn't set off that uneasy feeling for me. It just...kind of looks like Westeros? Which is based on parts of Earth so I guess that makes sense.
Also, thank you for the recommendation, I WILL be checking this out, if only to test my uncanny valley triggers to this a bit more. Time to experiment on myself 😭
Oh, the spider-squids definitely will trigger your disgust response. At least they evolve into something nicer after a while
It looks so shit cause they've already nuked themselves to planetary death. And because of climate change and rising sea level. Also ecosystem degradation and subsequent soil erosion. I've heard you need to prevent these to keep Earth beautiful. Just for the aesthetics. Think about the astronauts, what if they had to look at an ugly Earth?
So you're saying the worst is over, and it's all downhill from here? Let's Gooooo!
Since it's just perlin noise anyway... They should use gag landmasses for fun. See if anyone recognises Middle Earth or the Seven Kingdoms.
Isn't the 7 Kingdoms just England? With Scotland being north of the wall (which...LMAO at the implications on that one George)
Pretty much, Essos is just Europe as well.
Because one of them (Earth) is based on reality, and the other is a poorly done conceptual render because no human actually knows the shape of the landmasses on that planet on account of having never been there.
Have they considered zooming their telescope in enough until they can see for themselves firsthand?
I know you're probably joking but even the best telescopes can only directly image a planet that's like 10 times the mass of Jupiter and even then it's only like two pixels.
Makes me wonder what a telescope the size of a solar system could see. How large of the telescope do you think it would take to be able to get a clear image of this planet?
Honestly I'm not even sure it's possible at that distance. Planets reflect very little light compared to stars, and that already minuscule amount of light gets scattered across an insanely huge area due to the inverse square law. So that tiny amount of light gets spread over an insanely huge area (light years in size).
I feel like to get a clear picture your telescope would have to be light years across in size to get a clear image with fine details in it. The light is just too spread out to get a clear picture of it with anything you can build at a human scale.
The hard part is that the stars create so much glare and planets are so small and faint that it's really REALLY hard to zoom in on them. Even with very powerful telescopes. It's probably straight up impossible actually. Like you can see them and get an idea of what they're made of (light spectrum analysis) but you're not going to be able to make out fine details like what the landmasses look like.
Another earth, but it is all australia
The Vegemite must flow.
Bro that's a PRIME sailing planet if I've ever seen on.
Earths oceans shores are largely extremely boring linear beaches. Especially along the Atlantic.
This plant would be prime for small cheap hobby costal sailing
I wonder if it has plate tectonics. A big part of why our continents look like this is them. That said, yeah that's a lot of mid continent seas/great lakes
If you didn't have plate tectonics, you'd have a lot of problems with the atmosphere, and there's a decent chance that life wouldn't evolve, as the energy differentials generated by tectonic activity are those which life hangs onto, from nutrients, to oxidation, to geothermal heat.
Anybody by chance know if there’s a Kepler-452b map for Civ V?
We cant get a new planet if we cant take care of the one we got.
Kinda looks like Eurasia but with more holes
Will housing be cheaper there? Will taxes be lower? Will Trump be there? What about groceries?
Will you enjoy anything our universe shows you? Are there things that bring you joy in life? Will you touch grass? What about filling the void in your heart with wonder instead of worry?
is this the planet from the Bigger Luke theory?
It also bigger, what means stronger gravity. And stronger creatures.
But it also means it's harder to reach orbit, and the effects of microgravity would be even more damaging to health.
mogged
Honestky it could be because of the amount of mooms they have. The exact tidal force on earth will have had a hand in shaping what the coastline became.
There's no other life in the entire universe. It's just us. We're actually very unique and special. We are, in fact, the center of the universe.
Did a intangible but omnipotent entity tell you that, after you enjoyed some substances?
What entity told you otherwise?
Some of us don't rely on unseen entities to describe reality to us
So how do you know there is other life in the universe? If you have some proof share it. Scientific community will be amazed by it.
Where did I say I knew that? I certainly do not.
I do however, understand the statistical argument that it's highly likely (though what form that life would take is another question. I don't think it would be in any way humanoid. Possibly bacteria.
So when you guess based on data we don't have that it's highly likely it's science but when I guess it's highly unlikely I'm high. Got it.
Buddy, you're lost in the sauce. I think you need to scroll up and remind yourself what you actually said
Why do you have to know for sure to counter your claim? I am not 100% certain but I think it is likely givern the circumstances for life and the vastness of our universe. But I don't claim to know for sure. I don't think just because we want to feel special does this have to mean we're the only planet with life in the universe
Yeah, that was kind of my point. You don't know for sure and I don't know for sure. You're guessing there is other life because you guestimate that the probability of life emerging is high enough for it. We don't know what that probability is. I'm guessing it's actually so low it happened only once. We've seen huge portion of the universe already but no signs of life. For now most people prefer your theory but as time passes my theory becomes more and more likely.