There’s no way in hell we have the resolution to see continents in another star system.
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.
These are always illustrations based on whatever data we could gather. We almost never “see” the planets themselves.
Soon, though, using gravitational lensing of the sun. Sometime around 2035 maybe.
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.
You know that picture we have of the milky way?
They chose “randomize” in the New Game options
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 a 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.
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.
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.
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”.
i love the Himalaya doing a cute smile
looks like a baby elephant
Another earth, but it is all australia
The Vegemite must flow.
Dibs
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
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?
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.
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!
Yeah, very geo-centric view. It just looks different than literally the only planet humanity has ever known
Thats how I feel too
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?
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.
As someone who used mapmaking software for decades I agree they all look randomly generated.
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.
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 LOTHROK … IN SPAAAAAAACE”
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?
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 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?
* slaps sphere *
“You can fit so much Perlin noise on this baby.”
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.
