#super-earth

In Helldivers 2, armor sets and capes get some interesting official lore. But the descriptions for all the weapons is very utilitarian. So I'm going to make up some stuff up about the secondary weapons:

P-2 PEACEMAKER

Everyone respects the humble peacemaker, but it's never a good sign to see someone carrying one. In the hands of a SEAF trooper, it typically means they lost their reliable Liberator due to clumsiness. In the hands of a Helldiver, it means they are a recruit fresh out of training. In the hands of a civilian in a non-warzone, it suggests that the local SEAF armory isn't as secured as the quartermaster claims it is.

Despite it's alarming nature, this pistol has been featured in many heroic murals depicting honorable last stands by patriotic citizens resisting the forces of tyranny.

P-92 WARRANT

During a hostage crisis, the P-92 is a reassuring sight. It's smart-targeting guided bullets are incapable of locking onto any human with a citizenship letter grade lower than D. Thus hostages can trust their rescuers to kill their captors in record time and with 90% accuracy guaranteed.

Every time the Warrant is fired in Guided mode, it automatically collects data on it's own usage. When the gun is plugged in for recharging, it will attempt to connect to the galactic wide web. Upon connection, it will submit the data to Morgunson Arms secure servers for use in improving algorithmic targeting.

P-4 SENATOR

Gold plated variants of this revolver-cannon are a traditional inaugural gift to politicians of the federation. The date they are sworn into office will be engraved onto the plate, but not the date they are supposed to leave their elected position. Given the possibility of assassination and re-election, it would be presumptive to have such a date listed.

It is said that the confidence a politician has in their security can be measured by how quickly they can draw their P-4. The warden of a dissident prison colony will have theirs in a quickdraw harness. Whereas the mayor of a highly compliant utopian metropolis will leave theirs on a mantel piece over a cozy fireplace.

SG-22 BUSHWHACKER

Shooting this gun is like getting hit in the wrist with a mallet. Thus it's assumed it's owner is either some kind of masochist or they don't shoot it very often. Ministry of Unity reports that the most common legal usage of this weapon is to kill livestock humanely. The most common illegal usage of this weapon is waving it around during a robbery.

Non-military users tend to swap out the standard buckshot rounds for more situationally appropriate ordinance. The Bushwhacker has proven to be able fire solid slug, incendiary, and stun rounds without issue. But at the time of writing, the Ministry of Defense still doesn't have the logistical capacity to give Helldivers these different kinds of shells. Rest assured, a committee is working on it.

LAS-7 DAGGER

A more destructive variant on a much more common civilian multitool known as the LasKnife-1. The LK-1 has the following functions: long range spectrographic scanning, Infrared data transmission/reception/storage, range-finding, and close range organic x-ray scanning.

The LAS-7 can't do any of that but it does have other uses. According to survival guides, it can be used to start a fire, signal ones position to a search party, and of course kill and cook planetary fauna. In more civilized settings, it can be used for both spot welding, metal cutting, and killing space pirates.

P-11 STIM PISTOL

A common side-arm/tool for officials of the Ministries of Humanity and Expansion. The P-11 is used by MoH workers to deliver medicine quickly and conveniently to those too busy to roll up a sleeve for an injection. MoE workers load theirs with sedatives for non-lethal capture of newly encountered alien specimens.

Commission for @foxgirlchorix of two of her sonas: Meissa the Mechanecological Angel Robot Doll, and Pulcherrima the icy super-earth with oxygen lakes.

Image ID:

Digital art drawing. An angel-like robotic figure in front of a brown and white icy planet with rings. The figure, Meissa, is a mechanical girl with doll-like joints, four arms, two CANADARM-like grapplers, and large angel-like wings which are glowing red as radiator panels. She is smiling broadly with conical teeth. Her head is styled with a sculpted mohawk and headset with three Radio Plasma Wave Science antenna coming out of the right ear and an Apollo LM communications disk on the left ear. She is wearing a gold and silver foil dress made of the stuff used to insulate the Apollo LM. Her feet-shoes are small ion engines, with blue glow. Her eyes are glowing purple. The planet is off-white with a thin blue atmosphere and dark red-brown landforms, with a few scarce impact craters, most of which are multi-ring basins. There are some gray striations and splotches--oxygen lakes, with thin rivers running into them. The planet has rings and two pluto-like moons.

This Is Why You Must Never Try And Colonize A Super-Earth Planet

“Although it’s fascinating to know that rocky planets — and hence, possibly life — existed so long ago, it would be absolutely foolhardy to go looking for life on the worlds that we call “super-Earths.” Once you get to be about twice as massive as Earth, or just about 25-30% larger in radius than our planet, you’re no longer rocky with only a thin atmosphere, but are overwhelmingly likely to be Neptune-like, with a full fledged large envelope of hydrogen, helium, and other light gases.

Unless you’re close enough to a star to boil your entire atmosphere away, leaving only an exposed planetary core, these worlds that we’ve called “super-Earths” for years are more like mini-Neptunes, or as astronomer Jessie Christiansen poetically calls them, “Neptinis.” If you want to colonize another planet, look for one with a surface you can land on. That means, unless you’ve got your sights set on a boiled-off planetary core, to steer clear of the super-Earths. Even if you make it down to the surface, you won’t last long under those crushing atmospheric conditions!”

Discovering signs of extraterrestrial life in the universe has been a highly sought-after field of inquiry throughout much of scientific history. Finding other life forms, whether they’re microscopic or similar to us, would undoubtedly revolutionize many areas of science and how we understand our place in the cosmos. While no real evidence has been found supporting the existence of extraterrestrial life, there are quite a few institutions dedicated to the search—and that search is continuing to get bigger.

Potentially habitable 'super-Earth' discovered just 31 light-years away

Astronomers announced Wednesday that they had discovered the nearest potentially habitable planet outside our solar system.

The newfound exoplanet — a so-called super-Earth named GJ 357 d — lies 31 light-years away from our solar system. It’s about six times more massive than our planet and orbits in its host star’s habitable zone, where water could exist in liquid form on the surface.

Great Objects

GJ 357 d

GJ 357 d is an exoplanet, considered to be a “Super-Earth” within the circumstellar habitable zone of it’s parent star. The planet orbits GJ 357, 31 light-years from our Solar System, The system is part of the Hydra constellation.

The planet was discovered by the TESS team and announced in July 2019.

Michael Hippke has made a paper available on the Arxiv, “Super-Earths in need for Extremly Big Rockets” in which he discusses the possibility of launching rockets from worlds larger than Earth -- which have come to be called “super-Earths” -- which means launching rockets from planets with higher surface gravity than Earth. Hippke treats the entire matter in a jocular fashion, insisting on the silliness of the project represented by the paper, but I see these matters quite differently. Indeed, I take this question very seriously.

If there are other peer intelligent species in the universe, they would evolve in peer biospheres, and peer biospheres would supervene on peer planets. But these “peer” worlds would not be identical to earth, only roughly similar. If there are multiple worlds in the universe with life and we could survey them, they would probably describe a bell curve, with Earth being a little to one side or the other of the bump of the bell curve, but close enough to the bump in the curve that we would consider it to be mediocre (thus instantiating the principle of mediocrity).

Worlds with lower gravity than Earth’s would mean that any intelligent species evolving there upon would have a slightly easier time slipping the surly bonds of their homeworld and thus becoming a spacefaring species. Worlds with higher gravity than Earth -- and the Kepler telescope data points to an abundance of super-Earths in the galaxy -- would have a more difficult time becoming a spacefaring species than the challenge human beings face.

We can posit that there is some gravitational threshold beyond which spacefaring becomes so impracticable that it constitutes an insuperable barrier for a species to become spacefaring. The availability of key resources and the level of technological development of the civilization would also bear upon the ability of an intelligent species to overcome high homeworld gravity in order to become a spacefaring species. Although Hippke in the paper suggests that chemical rockets might be practical on planets with surface gravities up to ten times greater than Earth, I suspect that the practical threshold for spacefaring is considerably lower.

Surface gravity, then, presents a unique challenge to which a technological civilization responds if it would be a spacefaring civilization, exemplifying Toynbee’s challenge and response model for civilizational development -- thought in this case it is specifically a question of spacefaring civilizational development. Some species might evolve on worlds that are simply too great a challenge for the civilization to mount a creditable response, while other species would have an easier time of it. Toynbee called those civilizations faced with challenges too severe to be overcome “arrested civilizations.” Just so, too high a gravity of a homeworld would result in a civilization being an arrested homeworld civilization. 

This would be a bit of a reach, but if it turns out the there are many worlds in the universe with biospheres, but that the vast majority of them were large super-Earths, and our Earth was a rare low gravity exception of a planet with a biosphere, then this would introduce a severe limitation on spacefaring civilizations. However, this can’t quite be a solution to the Fermi paradox, because it would not prevent the inhabitants of high gravity homeworlds from building radio telescopes and transmitters (admittedly, the engineering would be difficult on a high gravity world, but not too difficult to overcome) and so from engaging in SETI and METI.

On the contrary, it could be argued that the inhabitants of high gravity homeworlds would be especially incentivized to engage in SETI and METI given the impracticality of a space program. They might better exemplify what I have called the “SETI paradigm” than they would species like our own, resident on homeworlds that do not prevent the possibility of spacefaring. However, it could still be argued that Earth’s gravity, while not impossible to overcome, is enough of a challenge to spacefaring that it will ultimately  result in a terrestrial arrested spacefaring civilization. 

Discovery of a super-Earth near to the habitable zone of a cool star

An international team led by researchers from the IAC, using the radial velocity method, have discovered a possibly rocky planet at the edge of the habitable zone of a red dwarf star. Only a few dozen planets of this kind are known and its detection was made possible with the HARPS-N spectrograph on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) at the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory, La Palma.

This planet is particularly interesting because of its proximity. It is only 21 light years away, in our cosmic neighbourhood, it is one of the least massive of the known "Super-Earths", which in addition is situated in the habitability zone of the star GJ625 (Gliese 625), a red dwarf. Even those these are the most common stars in the universe and they can host planets, we know only a few hundred of them. The majority have been discovered orbiting much more distant stars, using the transit method, in which the planet causes a minor "eclipse" when it passes in front of the star. In contrast, only a few done rocky planets have been discovered around nearby stars with the radial velocity technique, and very few have been found in their habitability zones.