KIC 12557548 History of detection[edit] The existence of the planet was first evidenced in data collected by the Kepler spacecraft. However, the light curve of the star, a graph of its stellar flux versus time, showed that while there were regular drops in stellar flux approximately every 15 hours, the amount of light being blocked covered a wide range, from 0.2% to 1.3% of the starlight being blocked.[2] Rappaport et al. (2012) proposed various possible phenomena which may have caused the anomalies in the light curve, including two planets orbiting each other,[6] and an eclipsing binary orbiting the star in a larger triple-star system.[2] However, the authors found the hypothetical binary planet system to be unstable[2] and the latter scenario to be poorly supported by the data collected by Kepler.[2] Planetary system[edit] References[edit] ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f "Basic data: 2MASS J19235189+5130170 -- Infra-Red source". Brogi, M.; Keller, C. Notes[edit] External links[edit]
Future - Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? Great civilisations are not murdered. Instead, they take their own lives. This article is part of a new BBC Future series about the long view of humanity, which aims to stand back from the daily news cycle and widen the lens of our current place in time. Modern society is suffering from “temporal exhaustion”, the sociologist Elise Boulding once said. “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future,” she wrote. That’s why the Deep Civilisation season will explore what really matters in the broader arc of human history and what it means for us and our descendants. So concluded the historian Arnold Toynbee in his 12-volume magnum opus A Study of History. He was right in some respects: civilisations are often responsible for their own decline. The Roman Empire, for example, was the victim of many ills including overexpansion, climatic change, environmental degradation and poor leadership. You might also like:
History of the Earth The history of the Earth concerns the development of the planet Earth from its formation to the present day.[1][2] Nearly all branches of natural science have contributed to the understanding of the main events of the Earth's past. The age of Earth is approximately one-third of the age of the universe. An immense amount of biological and geological change has occurred in that time span. The first life forms appeared between 3.8 and 3.5 billion years ago. Geological change has been constantly occurring on our planet since the time of its formation and biological change since the first appearance of life. Geological time, condensed in a diagram displaying the relative lengths of the eons of Earth's history Geologic time scale[edit] The history of the Earth is organized chronologically in a table known as the geologic time scale, which is split into intervals based on stratigraphic analysis.[2][6] A full-time scale can be found at the main article. Millions of Years Formation of the Moon[edit]
How to Think Like a Futurist: DevLearn 2017 Closing Keynote DevLearn 2017 wrapped up with a thought-provoking closing keynote, “How to Think Like a Futurist,” by Jane McGonigal, PhD, director of games research and development at the Institute for the Future. She helped us level up our powers of creativity and imagination for thinking about the future. First-person thinking McGonigal compared two ways to imagine the future: using impersonal facts or thinking in the first person. One example of possible future facts: “In the future, there will be a climate change. By 2050, sea levels may rise by as much as 9 feet and 750 million people may be displaced.” First-person thinking connects you to your future self because the brain fires up faster, with more flexibility, making more connections (Figure 1). Don’t be a stranger to your future self Something else to keep in mind is that when we try to imagine ourselves far into the future, we are likely to see a stranger. Questions to ask about possible futures Creative foresight and recognizing signals
Future of the Earth Conjectured illustration of the scorched Earth after the Sun has entered the red giant phase, 7 billion years from now.[1] During the next four billion years, the luminosity of the Sun will steadily increase, resulting in a rise in the solar radiation reaching the Earth. This will cause a higher rate of weathering of silicate minerals, which will cause a decrease in the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In about 600 million years, the level of CO 2 will fall below the level needed to sustain C3 carbon fixation photosynthesis used by trees. In about 1.1 billion years, the solar luminosity will be 10% higher than at present. Human influence[edit] There are multiple scenarios for known risks that can have a global impact on the planet. Should the human race become extinct, then the various features assembled by humanity will begin to decay. Random events[edit] A supernova is a cataclysmic explosion of a star. Orbit and rotation[edit] Glaciation[edit] Obliquity[edit]
the shock of the anthropocene In 2003 the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia to mean a “form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change”. Albrecht was studying the effects of long-term drought and large-scale mining activity on communities in New South Wales, when he realised that no word existed to describe the unhappiness of people whose landscapes were being transformed about them by forces beyond their control. He proposed his new term to describe this distinctive kind of homesickness. Where the pain of nostalgia arises from moving away, the pain of solastalgia arises from staying put. Where the pain of nostalgia can be mitigated by return, the pain of solastalgia tends to be irreversible. Solastalgia is not a malady specific to the present – we might think of John Clare as a solastalgic poet, witnessing his native Northamptonshire countryside disrupted by enclosure in the 1810s – but it has flourished recently. The group’s report is due within months.
Holocene extinction The dodo, a flightless bird of Mauritius, became extinct during the mid-late seventeenth century after humans destroyed the forests where the birds made their homes and introduced mammals that ate their eggs. The Holocene extinction includes the disappearance of large mammals known as megafauna, starting between 9,000 and 13,000 years ago, the end of the last Ice Age. This may have been due to the extinction of the mammoth that had maintained grasslands that became birch forests without the mammoths.[3] The new forest and the resulting forest fires may have induced climate change.[3] Such disappearances might be the result of the proliferation of modern humans which led to climate change. These extinctions, occurring near the Pleistocene–Holocene boundary, are sometimes referred to as the Quaternary extinction event. The Holocene extinction continues into the 21st century. Prehistoric extinctions[edit] North and South America[edit] New Zealand[edit] Pacific, including Hawaii[edit]
(29) Where will humans live if Earth becomes uninhabitable? Where might humans live in space? Life in a distant future as imagined by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will be, in many ways, like life today. People will socialise, commute to work and have weekends to rest. The only difference is that we will be living in huge spinning cylinders that closely mimic our planet, but are actually in orbit around it. The world’s richest man, according to Forbes, is one of several prominent people who are thinking seriously about what humans might do if they ever have to develop habitats beyond Earth. Mr Bezos’s vision is based on ideas first put forward in the 1970s by the Princeton scientist Gerard O’Neill. At a recent event for his space company Blue Origin, Mr Bezos suggested that a series of these colonies could be designed for specific uses: some residential, others for industry and leisure. The weather, he said, will be “like Maui on its best day, all year round”, referring to the picturesque Hawaiian island. Where might humans live in space?
Ross 248 This star has about 12% of the Sun's mass and 16% of the Sun's radius, but only 0.2% of the Sun's luminosity. It has a stellar classification of M6 V,[3] which indicates it is a type of main sequence star known as a red dwarf. This is a flare star that occasionally increases in luminosity.[13] With high probability there appears to be a long-term cycle of variability with a period of 4.2 years. This variability causes the star to range in visual magnitude from 12.23 to 12.34.[14] In 1950, this became the first star to have a small variation in magnitude attributed to spots on its photosphere.[15] Distances of the nearest stars from 20,000 years ago until 80,000 years in the future Field star[edit] This star is located nearly along the line of sight to Ross 248, but it is not physically associated. See also[edit] List of nearest stars References[edit] External links[edit]
Oxford Future of Cities Scenarios Last year I participated in a large scenario planning effort as part of the University of Oxford’s “Future of Cities” programme. The project interviewed a range of business leaders, property developers, environmentalists, community activists, political scientists, engineers, architects and designers from around the world. It then extracted a variety of themes and drivers in using a traditional STEEP framework and synthesised these into three scenarios through several workshops. Although the scenario process was inductive, the final scenarios were presented on a 2×2 deductive grid to help explain their dominant logics to the stake-holder group. Key themes and implications The three scenarios for the future of cities were: Looking across the scenarios we can see several interesting themes emerge. You can also view a list of the key themes and challenges from each scenario in more detail here. Reactions to the scenarios Graphic representation of the three Future of Cities scenarios. Conclusion