I was going to ask why this mission is called Plato, but then I realized - we're trying to learn the truth of an object by looking at the shadow it casts. Perfect.
Really interesting interview. As I am 63 years old, I hope I get to stick around long enough to see some of these projects come to fruition. We can always hope, am I right?
It’s truly bittersweet that life is short, and the unknowns and gateways that humanity is opening towards understanding existence might leave us behind.
I'm 27, and I feel that way, too. My grandma was big into science, and she said the same thing. I remember telling her that, even if I lived to be 1,000 years old, I would want to live a little longer because I would have unanswered questions. Let's hope we both live long enough to get some answers!
I'm 43, and feel the same, my mother's parent's were 102 and 97 when they died, so I might have some potential genetic luck! :D Moonbase by 2040 maybe*, Mars by 2060? * * hope unless some of Isaac Arthur's futurism life extension possibilities have become possible, we might all be good; probably not, but such things will be helpful for prolonged space travel and lots of fields overlap. If Demolition Man's Cryo-prison was a thing, I could see myself taking advantage of the time-travel; with years of learning programmed in at the same time; would be kind of silly not to! :D
Just found your channel for the first time this morning, and im loving every minute of your videos! Thanks for the HUGE info dump, compelling interviews, and amazing amount of research, dude! Keep up the great work!!
I loved the interview, but I must say, Fraser Cain's enthusiasm really stood out for me! His passion for discussing the PLATO project and the universe is truly infectious. It's always exciting to see someone so eager to share knowledge and explore the mysteries of space. Looking forward to more engaging discussions like this.
PLEASE - more Astroseismology and Stellar Science stories! 100% agree with Dr Brown, exoplanets get all the limelight, but understanding the stars themselves is much more important (we still don't even know everything about our own star)!
I arranged a lecture by someone working on the computer for the mission sometime pre-pandemic. Maybe time for a repeat now that it is getting closer, the computer must be delivered if it launches in 2 years. Hope everything goes well and it delivers!
I was thinking more that not bio, but confirmed techno-signatures, and multiple of them, would actually take the pressure off. We may be early to the party. Can you imagine us trying to guide a maturing galaxy? Oh my!
It introduces new pressures, though. To KNOW that other life is out there and that we need to be very careful about how we interact with it for the sake of everyone involved, will change everything about how we approach space exploration.
Not really. Abundant life is the expected result. The most likely great filter is rare carboniferous (-> rare kerogen -> rare cheap,plentiful,reliable energy). But scientists don't consider that one at all because they culturally _can't_ - they're all middle-class prosperity-for-granted progressives-to-socialists whose level of thought in political economy is you can change something and everybody just gets this one extra thing (or one bad thing taken away) with no unintended consequences, costs, or second-order effects. Fossil fuels actually being good just isn't part of the milieu. They really think hydrocarbons being 80% of our energy is just a coincidence or something. (And it's really 100% if you count the bootstrapping.)
Sometimes I wonder what the namesakes of these space probes and telescopes would have said if they knew what the missions were all about. Some of them might scarcely believe it. 🙂
All right, good interview. Plato wasn't on my radar, but it certainly is now. One more thing to wait for and watch, hoping something cool happens in a few years.
A burning question I have had whilst watching this video, over several days I must admit: What of the planets which don't transit at all from our point of view? How many stars in the galaxy might have planetary systems whose plane is not in line with our viewing angle? Or is that just extremely rare like Uranus being tipped on its side? Do all solar systems in general follow the same plane of the galaxy?
Awesome interview so far! Just wanted to leave a comment after watching the bit about seismology and TESS increasing the precision of stellar age measurements. I hadn't heard about this before but that's fascinating. Do you have any videos covering it in more detail?
Why would they be switching fields at regular intervals? Would it not be better to switch at more "irregular" times (like 3 then 5 then 4 years) to decrease the likelihood of a 2-year transit falling through the gaps? Or to perhaps catch a third transit of a 1-year cycle?
I remember hearing about this around like 2012, but wasn't there a canceled project to make a lander for Pluto? It was going to take like 100 years to actually get there and land. Has a professor complain about it when it was cancelled.
How will PLATO help to detect potentially habitable exo-moons? And once enough stars are able to be categorized over time, might their intrinsic brightness variation over time be able to allow us to understand more fully the 3D density variation of the interstellar medium? Also, how would free floating planets between the stars appear in the PLATO data?
I hope to live long enough to see some science results from it. But don't hold your breath finding any twins of Earth any time soon. Our planet's formation was extremely unusual and the odds are...astronomical?....that another one like Earth will be relatively close to us.
At least if we can get the orbit and mass, we can follow up with other observations on other platforms. I'm not expecting a sudden announcement from Plato "Hey, here's a 1 Earth mass planet with an Oxygen-Nitrogen-CO2 atmosphere."
Have you done a video onpast/current/future near term looking at what say Carl Sagan and his peers speculated to what we know know and how that may change in another generation?
Looking forward to Plato. Thanks! HOWEVER, How much of Kepler's original mission was kicked to the curb to go sideways? Lesson Learned, Fair Enough. In the meantime, do we have another X-Ray Observatory in the works that will stay on target with it's mission?
When? yes, I believe so too, but it might also be "If". 12 is a good number though. Also if Plato finds something really interesting, would they then go to JWST and point it at it?
Hey Fraser, You've been my go to space news guy for 5 years now. I blame you completely for my ignorance concerning Astroseismology. This is the first time I've heard of this technology. Could you please step up your game and interview an expert in Astrosiesmology. 😂
Am I the only one who first thought the title said Pluto. I then thought he misspelled it before realizing it said Plato. This was all before I started the video.
the WASP and Super WASP thing with lots of small telescopes to make a big one and it being cheaper reminds me of when in the mid 2000s a nerd in the US Air Force figured out they could make a cheaper supercomputer by buying 1760 PS3s linking them together and running custom firmware on them than buying an actual supercomputer. so that what they did
it uh, wasn't custom firmware for the PS3's, and that was thier second attempt. The PS2 super cluster that really wasnt stable had the custom firmware and I think only a few hundred units where installed. I think they where inspired by the massily multiplayer online games that where coming out at the time. And I dont know why they picked the PS2 when Sony's nearest competitor at the time (not sure if it was the Sega Dreamcast or Microsoft Xbox when they built it) had a built in modem but hey whatever its still the same cool idea.
What do you think Google/Amazon/Azure clouds are? They started as literally huge numbers of consumer-grade machines, with no hardware customizations. Just rows of shelves with many, many network and power-connected motherboards with processors and RAM, not even enclosed in cases (better cooling, easy access, less cost). They discovered that since you can't have absolute 100.00% reliability even with very expensive "server-grade" machines, you have to write datacenter code so that failed machine is tolerated, so why bother buying very expensive "server-grade" machines?
And we probably never will find a "Class "M" Planet". If we did what would we do about it? We don't have the technology to journey to it. If we did what would we fined? a civilization that would invite mankind to dinner. Remember the old Twilight Zone episode when earth was visited by extra-terrestrials and found a book they translated and found it was a cook book for humans !
So what if we find one what then? It will be light years away. Lets say that is is 100 percent fact there is a perfect earth replica 50 light years away. So what now ? What does it matter or do for anything?
I thought Kepler was just barely capable of finding an Earth sized planet around a sun-like star. Even if Kepler remained fully operational, finding Earth 2.0 was very unlikely do to it's undersized mirror. Same thing with TESS.
Not "very unlikely". It'd be not easy, but well within the capability of the craft. Kepler found planets even more then twice as small as Earth. Example for ~Earth-sized planet around ~Sun-sized star: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-20e To detect these small planets, the more transits the better (for stacking, to remove noise and detect the weak transit). Fully-operational Kepler would mean many more transits for a planet with the period close to 1 earth year (which is a requirement for "Earth-2" rather than "hot Earth" much closer to the star, like Kepler-20e). Real mission only had less than 3.5 years of operation, which is not even enough to guarantee 4 transits for such planet.
David Kipping is really pushing the transit method to the absolute edge. Looking for exomoons requires many more transits because the moon could be anywhere in its orbit during the transit. If the moon is eclipsed by the planet or is eclipsing the planet, there's no difference in the signal. Plus, moons block such a tiny amount of light that their transit's could just as well be noise. He has time booked on JWST to observe a candidate exomoon. I remember reading that Kepler's reaction wheels failed in conjunction with solar flares. I'm pretty sure it was Kepler. It might have been Spitzer.
A star that burns twice as bright lives half as long. E=mc where c is the absolute acceleration of the mass or lifespan. Once you determine the composition of the star (mass) and the amount of energy its producing (E) you can somewhat determine its age (c).
No point making comments like that, it totally ignores the hard work of millions of people doing good things, it pretends that all of humanity are just dossers making a mess. It isn't an intelligent opinion, sorry.
Aren't you curious to know if there are stars out there with planets in the habitable zone? Wouldn't you like to know if the signal of life has been detected around any of them? We can multitask. Be concerned about the state of our planet and curious about the Universe at the same time.
The point is, that to learn how to things, you got to have to do things and they are better not that important. Remember your time in preschool. Had the pages full of big A's written any use, beyond you learning how to hold a pencil?
I agree. It's really disappointing. We could be spending millions of dollars, finding billions of dollars worth of local resources. Astronomers are way too focused on writing papers. They always want to do the next thing instead of finishing the thing that they are doing now.
@@jtjames79what is it with this assumption that "all humans" are useless, and "they" need told how to spend every penny? How about do some research into the positive things that millions are doing to improve the lives of acual people, better still, be one of them. We don't need to hear you complain, fix things instead.
But of course we will find another earth 2.0. The only question will be. How many millions of years will it take humanity to get there? Even if we freeze people. How long are we supposed to freeze people for? 1000 years? Or 10 million years? And how would you feel after waking up, 10 million years later? And just dying for a McDonald's hamburger. Then what are you supposed to do? There is no more Ronald. There are no more, Golden Arches. There aren't even, human beings. And you will be in a pickle... brine. Likely. In an alien critter's, Museum. Mars Attacks! ACK... ACK! RemyRAD
