What's exciting to me is that the existence of such a planet provides fuel for more research into the field.

This also goes for aliens visiting Earth. Interstellar travel is just so impractical that I don’t think anyone has come on safari to Earth.

(No punchline; I just think that's cool. I understand that the real problem is the rare dust grain, not the ubiquitous gas.)

I still hold on to the idea that very long term we might make strides in our own solar system, but it is a depressingly-longer timescale than I always used to believe.

Unless we have some magic-level shift in our understanding of physics, we're never getting anything beyond Von Neumann probes to other stars, and even then we're talking thousands of years.

But even at 0.12c, we are looking at 400 years to get there. And we'd be zooming by at 12% the speed of light. If we want to slow down a bit that'd add hundreds of billions to the cost.

It might be worth waiting another century to see if we can come up with a faster design in that time. Not like closer targets like Alpha Centauri, where the thing stopping us is mostly just the absurd cost

Those 190km/s of the Parker solar probe were, crucially, periapsis speed.

This is a bit like bouncing a rubber ball from a building, measuring its speed at ground level and then going: "Given our fastest achieved speed, we expect to hit the cloud level in <10s".

~200km/s sustained speed is already insanely optimistic for anything we could realistically build in the next half century, so your position is even more ironclad than it looks at first glance.

Clearly, right now we cannot. This is one of the worst obstacles to progress in these areas that I see, and I don't see any obvious way to fix it.

The situation we're currently in would've been utterly unfathomable to me 30 years ago. I have lost a great deal of the hope and optimism I held in the past. Interstellar exploration is but one of many fields where we are suffering due to short term thinking.

When you consider the scale of space it becomes pretty understandable why the Milky Way isn't teeming with civilizations sending large amounts of mass all over the galaxy. A realization one comes to despite the facts that it has taken humans a blink of an eye (on a galactic timescale) to go from tools to rockets and the Milky way is billions of years older than the entire history of the Earth.

I can’t prescribe this theoretical technology to the problem. But I also think it’s unreasonable to set the limit using known technology and then discount the idea altogether. We have no idea what will be possible in 300 years.

  Lay me on the ground
  And fly me in the sky
  Show me where to look
  Tell me, what will I find?
  What will I find?

So the question becomes: How much of that atmosphere is helium?

Nitrogen being replaced by helium would actually be fine but for the niggling issue that we need nitrates. There are no heliates (?) to compensate. The name doesn’t even make sense… helium is the sole gas to have an ium end like metals- chemically it’s that meaningless what you call it as an ion…it shines elsewhere though.

For biology, it’s a necessary condition that the environment react with it and it reacts to the environment. Over time the two become deeply intertwined through the process of evolution.

It’s hard to see how that kind of evolution will occur if a lot of the environment is nonreactive.

Survival may be plausible though. There’s been some research showing some bacteria can survive in high helium environments. That’s a far cry from proving something like a bacterium can evolve in a helium environment that’s non-reactive though.

Turning off the labels, aliens would probably assume that the world is naturally full of green stuff that is dealing with some strange grey infestation.

…would you? The lensing would occur right at the apparent surface of the sun.

Surely it has happened. They must have all spotted our planet millions of years ago and must be watching us with a continuous high-resolution feed. They've seen our dinosaurs. Their interest will really be piqued when they finally see us invent electricity, though that might be some time in the future for them.

Perhaps even gravitational lensing is primitive to them. Perhaps they're able to break and manipulate physics and peer directly into our light cone, breaking the speed of light. Perhaps through direct wormholes they're already here - computronium in the very oxygen atoms that surround us. In rock silicates, in the air you breathe, in your hemes, in your brain. Calculating.

But perhaps we're the only intelligent species in the entire universe. That is also a possibility. Some big names in astrophysics, such as David Kipping, suggest strongly that we should not rule out that hypothesis. I find his suggestions haunting and beautiful at the same time. You need to watch his videos, and this is a good start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqEmYU8Y_rI

And finally, it may be that we're all just a historical simulation. Or maybe that's ascribing too much importance to ourselves. Maybe we're just a slop simulation on some AI's plaything, existing for no reason at all. Background NPCs with self-importance, ephemeral existences. But procedural generation at scale isn't really all too different from the laws of the physical universe itself.

The scale of the universe fills me with awe. Every time I think about it, my worries about random algo-rage and clickbait fades away to nothing. It deeply contextualizes our short time here.

Of course, getting the telescope into place, steering it, etc. - that's the hard part.

I hope they did that eons ago so that I have a chance to see those images in my lifetime!

and blaming Canada.

I don't think I've ever sounded so cynical in my life, but something about the way sci-fi fandom bleeds into real science really makes me deeply uncomfortable.