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Everything's chrome in the future!

It is… Valhalla. I SHALL RIDE ETERNAL. SHINY, AND CHROME!

“Fuuuut*uuuuuuuurrreeee*”

Once you get far enough away from earth, the chrome becomes mandatory.

Imagine how many tabs you'd have to open for this to happen

The glitter's all wet

You have to admit, that is metal.

West coast customs approves

Imagine the ram you need...

Has it been observed turning into a spikey robot devil man voiced by Orsen Welles?

The men cry out, the girls cry out. Ooh no.

Pave the Earth! CHROME THE MOON!

SB-129. "Everything's chrome in the future!"

It'd probably take hundreds of years to get there and then 81 years to transmit the images back.

For reference, the closest star to us, Proxima Centauri, is 4 light years away. So traveling at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, would still take four years.

The fastest ship we’ve ever created is the Parker Solar Probe, which travels 430,000 miles per hour, which moves at a speed of “just” 119 miles per second.

So even just visiting Proxima Centauri would take hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Either we find a way to make almost all interstellar distances into basically nothing with wormholes or folding space or something crazy like that, or no.

Space is big.

It's about 81 light years from our solar system, assuming that I've read the exoplanet.eu article on it correctly.

I want to know what these clouds look like! The ones on earth are so magnificent!

It'd be amazing if we just got a mirror selfie of our ship

Would it not be on the cooler side if it reflected, rather than absorbed, most of the light thrown at it?

Prolly lookin like a bearing ball

We need to launch a sidewalk and some ants out to juuuuust the right orbit

add it as a dlc to starfield

Not trying to challenge logic or anything rude like that, just pondering the idea. If it reflects back 80% of the light from the star, in theory wouldn’t that make our current means of observation difficult/ineffective? Photo observation is probably a no-go, but I’m curious if other analytical techniques would also struggle

Transit Spectroscopy. They observe the light from the star passing through the atmosphere and use the spectrum of light observed to determine the composition of the atmosphere

Quick initial disclaimer that I’m not an astronomer, so I may be off on some of these points.

There’s more to it than just looking at dots/brightness—we also can look at what the specific light is. Different elements absorb/reflect different spectra of light. If you look at the “colors” of light you get back, you can match it up against combinations of elements to try to back calculate which elements comprise the planet. We can also do a similar method on stars to figure out what elements they’re comprised of, which helps inform their age, size, etc.

Edit: here’s a link to a description with some images

We can also look at the timing of the light—if it’s a planet orbiting a star, the star’s light should dim at a specific amount on regular intervals as the planet passes in front of the star. Those intervals, the timing, and how much it dims let us calculate how long the orbit is, and also possibly how far from the star the planet is or how big the planet is.

There’s also ways to calculate distances to the system itself (and possibly within) using parallax, I’m not completely sure on the method but there’s tons of articles online.

Once you know how big the planet is, what it’s made of, how fast it orbits, how big the star is, etc etc, you can basically mock up the system in a computer model and figure out how it works. In something like this, scientists probably concluded that it wouldn’t be possible for the planet to be just a solid titanium ball, and instead silica/titanium clouds are more likely. There’s probably also differences in how the light is reflected between clouds and solids, which they can analyze.

And again this is just my understanding as a scientist that reads astronomy papers; my research is not at all in this so I’d love for corrections/additional insight from real astronomers

The James Webb and other telescopes have a lot of different lenses and scientists can use that data to interpret a lotta cool stuff

Humans truly are capable of fantastic feats!

They make an estimated guess based on the light they reflect. Materials reflect light differently, and we assume the planet isn't made of metal, so the clouds are. It's not an accurate conclusion and we can certainly be wrong and it's actually a ball of metal, but it's a decent enough estimate based on what we know.

We’re already seeing the past.

Perfect, practically magical scenarios would need to happen to do that. A giant telescope, a supermassive reflective mirror, and no interference that scatters photons.

In this case, it's safe to say no because it's a cloud which dissipates light and scatters reflections. Think shining a light at a mist in front of you and that mist was made of up tiny floating mirror bits pointing in countless directions.

Are planets not that reflective though for the light to reach that planet with sufficiently high res

From my understanding it isn't a sheet of metal or a solid mirror. It is a gas giant with metal liquid clouds. It should not have an ocean in the sky but rather droplets floating about. It is far to close to the sun to reflect all the heat out absorbing it.

I wonder if interstellar travel will be possible in 1000 years. Assuming we jump over our great filters, anyone think it'd be possible by then?

It naturally occurs as an oxide on Earth and is processed through reactions with chlorine and magnesium to a pure metal form.

That could be earth specific.

Clouds of vaporized titanium...

A Dyson Sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that encompasses a star, not a planet.

Spectroscopy.

Mmm... croissants...